Review: Daisies feels brand-new, but its biggest change isn’t on the plate
Daisies, the Midwestern pasta restaurant in Logan Square, didn’t just move. Nor has it simply expanded with daytime pastries — it has reinvented itself and become one of the best new restaurants in Chicago.
It’s thoughtfully provocative, in both its cuisine and core beliefs. (More on a 25% service charge later.)
Yes, we can still get the pappardelle pasta with mushroom ragout, but the restaurant’s identity has expanded beyond the initial guiding question posed by chef and owner Joe Frillman: If the Midwest was a region in Italy, what would the food look like?
We can go to Italy and find wonderful things. But we can’t go anywhere except Daisies to find its particular and sometimes peculiar collection of dishes — beef tongue, salmon collars and parsnip gelato, for a start.
I was thrilled to sample the jumbo ramp raviolo, the must-order dish of the moment, taming wild ramps with a hidden heart of ricotta and a golden egg yolk.
“We usually almost run out every day, no matter what,” Frillman said.
Ramps are so seasonal, the dish only graces the menu for about three weeks. It’s inspired by the uovo in raviolo at the Michelin-starred San Domenico restaurant in Italy, but Frillman first fired it up at The Bristol some 14 years ago.
He gets ramps from Mick Klug Farm in Michigan, a Chicago farmers market favorite.
“We blanch and purée the tops, then fold that into the actual dough so it’s this nice, vibrant green,” Frillman said.
Cradling the yolk, pressed ricotta and more cooked ramp leaves comprise the filling with soft pungency. After it’s cooked, they finish the dish with SarVecchio Parmesan from Wisconsin and brown butter sauce.
“We throw in pickled ramps, some of the pickled ramp liquid and just a little bit of lemon juice,” the chef said of the sauce, “because it’s quite a bit of fat that you have to cut through with acid to balance it out.”
It’s a beautiful balance of the fattiness from the yolk, cheeses and brown butter, against the bright, bare sweetness of the pickling elixir.
“It’s so simple, even though it takes two days to make the whole process,” he added. “And you get it on the plate and the presentation doesn’t look like there’s anything to it.”
Meanwhile, we might think new award-winning executive pastry chef and partner Leigh Omilinsky is all about the sweets. But that’s not what sells out during the daytime counter service cafe.
Anything savory goes first, Omilinsky told me. “Ham and cheese croissants, no matter how many we make, we sell,” she said.
They were long gone when I visited one recent afternoon, but a lone asparagus and burrata brioche cream bun remained. Roasted seasonal spears over the distinctly milky cheese topped beautiful buttery bread. It’s some of the best brioche I’ve had.
The pastry case held transportive French treasures, from a buttery kouign-amann to flaky croissants, as well as a fragrantly fruity olive oil orange cake and strawberry glazed cream scones.
Longtime Daisies fans will find familiarity in the former Radler beer hall: potted carrots cooked silky with duck fat made the move from the old Daisies space up Milwaukee Avenue, along with colorful pickled carrot ribbons. But the Publican Quality Bread crackers have been replaced by housemade gnocco fritto. The little fried puffs skyrocket the dish from starter to stellar.
Pierogi, unlike any other in the city or perhaps the physical world, also made the move. They remain so light they may have floated, but the crustaceans and sauce have changed. Now the impossibly delicate potato-stuffed pockets swim among plump, shelled mussels in a pool made with the Champagne of beers.
Beef tongue, smoky medallions hidden in a cloud of charred cabbage, dressed with clam vinaigrette and fresh dill fronds, rekindled memories of summer grill outs in my bungalow backyard.
But the butcher’s cut of pork, tenderloin on my visit, is the only truly meaty dish on the vegetable-forward menu. And it’s boldly so, with thick yet transcendently tender grill-marked slices over radiant carrots, sauteed sauerkraut and rustic dumplings.
Salmon collars with horseradish gremolata hit my table with promise. When I’ve had the seafood delicacy in Japan, or Japanese restaurants anywhere, they’re precious and priced accordingly. Even when I worked as the chef at a fishing lodge in Alaska, they were an occasional treat.
Here, it was a shimmering and abundant plate. My first bite seemed off, though, confirmed with a few more nibbles of the same piece that gave off a sulfurous note. So I let my server know, but I took the leftovers home to taste again with a fresh palate. They did not charge me for the dish, my server said, because I didn’t love it.
But Mom and Pop Chu, my Chinese parents who first taught me to appreciate whole fish, loved it — so much so that it was all gone, and I never got another taste.
I asked Frillman how he intended the collars to be.
“We grill it so you get a little bit of smoky flavor char on the inside, and then on the top side, we’ll finish it in the broiler so it’s medium-ish, hopefully,” the chef said. “Collars should be cooked a little bit more — because of the amount of fat that’s on there, you want to get that to the point where it renders out a little bit.”
Next time, I’ll ask for the collars well done, because I prefer the fins a bit more crisp. But the greater point is the staff handled the blip flawlessly.
My server also made my mushroom sour, an earthy yet tart nonalcoholic take on the mushroom margarita, which has been on the Daisies menu since 2019, after Frillman took a trip to dine at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York.
“The mushroom cocktail that I got was so mind-blowing,” Frillman said. “It still had citrus, it still had flavor, but the body and this umami is what inspired us to come here and ask, ‘What is a margarita in the Midwest?’”
At Daisies, they infuse tequila with mushrooms, then strain them out.
“We press and ferment that pulp, then dehydrate and turn it into a powder,” he said. “The saltiness from the fermented mushroom is what we use to rim the glass. You get the balance of the sweetness and the tartness from the citrus.”
The drink is purposefully there to push boundaries, he added, but it’s a radical decision of another sort that has stayed with me.
Daisies applies a 25% service charge to dine-in checks to benefit all of the staff, a change it began implementing in June 2020. Beyond the outstanding menu, airy space and skilled service, this practice perhaps impressed me the most. Having grown up in the restaurant industry, I experienced the racism and sexism of tipping long before I learned its disturbing history and effect on employees.
“A lot of people do not realize the difference in pay between front of house and back of house,” Omilinsky said. “Especially at places like a big steakhouse where servers can bring home six figures, and line cooks are not making that.”
A lot of people say we’ve got to do something about it, she added, until it’s their money.
“So here is a person who has the ability to make a change and educate,” she said of Frillman. “The more restaurants that do things like have a service charge, and make health insurance just part of your job, the better we are as a whole.”
I found the service charge seamless and clearly explained, but it’s still the occasional subject of online outrage.
“This is a giant experiment,” Frillman said. “I don’t think the general public understands the laws, and the legality of a lot of how things are set up to benefit, essentially, the business owners.”
The minimum wage in Chicago can be as low as $14.50 per hour for employers with four to 20 workers, which would amount to a full-time annual salary of just over $30,000 (poverty for a family of four in the U.S.).
But tipped workers, like restaurant servers, can have a minimum wage as low as $8.70 per hour. If a worker doesn’t make enough in tips, the employer is supposed to make up the difference. That doesn’t always happen, and the city, state and federal authorities have been historically negligent in enforcement.
So who gets the 25% service charge?
“This is different. I cannot emphasize this enough. This is a system we have found that works,” Frillman said. “Half stays with the service team. The other half is used to up the pay for the hourly employees in the kitchen, but it is also used to up the hourly employee pay of the service staff as well.”
They do not expect a tip on top of that, a message reiterated multiple times: online, by your server and in print with your check. But some people still tip.
“And that tip then is subjected to tip rules, which means that tip stays with that server and that service team,” Frillman said. If service gets overwhelmed, the restaurant will remove the service charge.
For all the people who say to just build it into the price, that rarely, if ever, works. Even as a professional diner, when I see a price that’s 20% more, I have to pause for a mental calculation.
Over an ethereal parsnip gelato, I heard no pushback from the tables around me on a busy Friday night.
Nor when my platter of one of each of the perfect “treat-sized” desserts arrived: raspberry kolaczki, turtle brownie, hazelnut crunch bar, chocolate chip cookie, oatmeal cream pie, raspberry pretzel pie and gooey butter cake. I’m calling them Midwestern mignardises; everywhere else they’re miniature sweets, except for here.
Omilinsky also offers fully plated desserts, including a curiously named “chocolate bumpy” cake.
Sanders Confectionery in Detroit originally created the Sanders devil’s food buttercream cake in the early 1900s. “It’s usually a chocolate sheet cake and has rows of buttercream piped on top, then frosting on top of that,” Omilinsky said. “So it kind of ends up looking like little speed bumps on top of your cake.”
By day, it’s a mini chocolate Bundt cake with lush dark chocolate ganache, but by night it’s a little different.
“I am not the biggest buttercream fan, so I changed it to a hazelnut mousse and made a fun little pattern on top, so you still get the idea of it being bumpy,” she added.
But both day and night, the cakes are topped with puppy chow, the sweet Midwest snack.
I can’t wait to go back. Or rather, return. Because at this new Daisies, there is no going back, deliberately and deliciously so.
Daisies
2375 N. Milwaukee Ave.
773-697-9443
Open: Cafe daily 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Dinner Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday 5 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday 5 to 11 p.m.
Prices: Starters $8-$17, proteins $19-$42; pastas $18-$45; desserts $3-$12. Service charge of 25% applied to all dine-in checks.
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on single level
Tribune rating: Outstanding to excellent, 3½ stars
Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.
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