Review: Vermilion transforms with one woman’s fiery Indian Chinese flavors and convictions
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The new Indian Chinese transformation of Vermilion brings it back from the brink of everything, everywhere, all at once, via Kolkata, the childhood hometown of Rohini Dey, a woman whose flavors are as fiery as her convictions.
“I started this 20 years ago with a melding of Indian and Latin,” said Dey, activist and owner of the River North neighborhood restaurant. “But more than anything else, I want our food to be provocative. Interesting. I mean, do you really need a 400th version of tuna tartare?”
It was also substantive. The original Indian and Latin menu tried to cover centuries of colonization and migration across continents through lobster Portuguese and tandoori steak. But it sometimes felt fractured to me. The new Indian Chinese incarnation is concise and much more personal.
“I grew up in India,” Dey said. “And I also go back every year. It’s where my parents are. And where I get my Indian Chinese fixes.
The pandemic led her to a realization and readiness for a drastic change.
“It struck me that there’s a limit to tinkering around with an existing menu,” she said. “And that’s what was the inception.”
It’s Dey’s first menu with her chefs since she opened in 2003, two weeks after giving birth to her second daughter.
“Some of it is hardcore traditional that every Indian would want to see on the menu,” she said.
There are other restaurants in the Chicago area offering the food created by Chinese immigrants in India for Indian palates, with distinctive spellings, from chilli chicken to Schezwan noodles.
“It would be bad for me to not have chilli chicken,” Dey said. “But we agonized over the names.”
The Hakka Masterpiece, or chilli chicken, tosses deep-fried bites with onions and peppers stir-fried translucent in a spicy sweet-and-sour sauce that’s called a gravy.
The name honors the Hakka traders attributed to one of the origin stories of Indian Chinese cuisine as beginning in Kolkata.
The Kolkata Streets chaat, one of her favorites dishes, and definitely mine, whisks us both back to girlhoods on opposite sides of the world.
It’s a joyous jumble of crunchy noodles (similar to the chow mein we bought from noodle houses for my family’s chop suey restaurants) and jhal muri (a puffed rice snack laced with mustard oil), bejeweled with sweet mango, sharp onion and aromatic cilantro, held together with sticky chile sauce, finished by a whisper of tart lime.
“Jhal means hot in Bengali and muri is puffed rice,” Dey said. The melding of rice with noodle chaat is her Bengali touch. “I used to have this in Kolkata in the summer as a kid roaming around the streets. Wrapped up in newspaper, that’s how it was served. And different vendors make it differently, always sold from a bike or a pushcart hawker.”
Her rendition made me want to jump on a plane to India as soon as I possibly could, or better yet jump through the multiverse with a single tap.
One of the sillier noodle dish names hides a serious meaning, and asks What’s Your Beef?
It’s a stunning dish with traditional Indian Chinese Szechwan beef that’s delicately sweet and impeccably tender, with innovative and impressive tamarind noodles.
It’s also a protest against beef lynchings in India.
“Muslims have been lynched on the streets and are getting completely disenfranchised because of what’s going on with the Modi government,” Dey said. “India is 80% Hindu. And technically, the cow is sacred in Hinduism. But India is also secular.”
“I’m claiming back our secularity,” she added. “And here is the irony: India is one of the biggest exporters globally for beef.
“I wear my heart on my sleeve,” she said. “I do not believe in straddling the fence politically. And if my philosophy doesn’t appeal to everybody, I get it. It is not for everybody.”
Squid Games offers jet-black squid ink rice noodles, with a hint of warm sriracha and umami-rich oyster sauce. Indeed there’s squid, plus shrimp and wood ear mushrooms. It’s not Indian Chinese per se, but perhaps most representative of the new Vermilion and a flex of Dey’s newfound skills.
Wok of Life, available as shrimp or paneer toast, reimagines the dim sum dish. With paneer, it’s like a fantastic fried Indian Chinese pimento grilled cheese sandwich with green chile and fresh cilantro.
You Say Sichuan, deceptively simple jackfruit and vegetable fried spring rolls, can be counted as some of the best I’ve had anywhere, with shattering crisp wrappers around complex fillings.
The toasts and spring rolls are both what they consider their milder dishes, Dey said.
Not Your KFC chicken, billed ambitiously as Chinese Chongqing fried chicken-meets-Indian chicken 65, seems disappointingly closer to red chile flecked boneless wings.
A dessert called Sex is complicated. A scoop of vanilla ice cream gets rolled in pepitas, wrapped in a star anise- and cardamom-spiced crepe, then deep fried, served on a saffron coconut crumble with a honey rose sauce. This new dessert is spiritually lighthearted, but bodily, it’s sadly heavy and dull.
The Regal Shahi Tukra cake, however, is a rich and worthy holdover from the original menu.
“Shahi Tukra is just a very authentic regal Indian dessert,” Dey said. “There’s nothing tweaked about it. It’s true to what it is in India: rich bread pudding soaked in a reduced milk sauce. It’s almost like dulce de leche with saffron.”
The space shows its age, despite a refresh in 2020, but that’s OK. An open, airy dining room harks back to something of the old River North, when I lived in the neighborhood decades ago in a loft apartment and went on gallery walks every Friday night to see experimental art.
I was reminded of that outsider art with some of the plating, or lack thereof. A little metal car, a slate tile and even a tabletop bicycle also brought me back to my days as a server trying to balance searing sizzling platters.
My server, who also served as bartender, is to be commended for not only his ease with the precarious platings, but effortless hospitality that clearly comes from experience. Nothing wins you over more than someone asking if you’d like your regular table on just a second visit.
He suggested the Lychee Sparkle, a nonalcoholic drink with loads of muddled litchi balanced by lime, sugar and soda. It was a lovely complement to the Indian Chinese flavors.
Meanwhile, My Drink, My Choice could be a drinkable dessert. The cocktail is a cousin to horchata and milk tea — coconut milk spiked strong with house-infused saffron, cardamom and vanilla vodka.
It’s also been on the menu before, but renamed on June 24, 2022.
“I titled it My Drink, My Choice the moment Roe v. Wade was overturned,” Dey said.
It’s bold and delicious, but rooted in the familiar, as is much of the menu, a reincarnation with a promising new life.
Vermilion
10 W. Hubbard St.
312-527-4060
Open: Tuesday to Thursday 5:30 to 10 p.m., Friday and Saturday to 10:30 p.m. Closed Sunday and Monday.
Prices: Appetizers $12 to $28; entrees $22 to $40; desserts $12 to $15, drinks $8 to $14
Noise: Conversation-friendly
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on single level
Tribune rating: Excellent, 3 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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