Posted by Michael Stern on May 27, 2000
When a sharp knife penetrates a sirloin’s crust and plunges into hot, pink beef, the Roadfood carnivore is rapt. Juices ooze and ruddy red-meat perfume fills the air with sure promise of satisfaction.
America has no better place to slice into prime aged steak than an old wood-frame house known as Gene & Georgetti just north of the Chicago Loop. In a city with many four-star steak houses, Gene & Georgetti wins our vote as the best.
It is a clubby restaurant with a manly mien. White-jacketed waiters with decades of experience take care of old friends and newcomers with efficiency in lieu of obsequiousness. Steaks are served without frills, unadorned and alone on an oval plate – ravishing sirloin strips, T-bones, and filets mignon with charred crust and juice-heavy insides. Thick cottage fried potato chips are the customary side dish, and the cornucopic tossed antipasto known as “garbage salad” (a local passion) is definitive: iceberg lettuce, celery, tomato, radish, slivers of cheese and salami, pepperoncini, and big pink shrimp lightly marinated in an Italian vinaigrette.
Also put Gene & Georgetti in your little black book as an opportunity to savor that curious Chicagoland specialty, shrimp de Jonghe. As prepared in this kitchen, it is a broad, deep plate that holds a golden pool of herbed garlic butter laced with bread crumbs so soft they have become supple threads of flavor. In this pool wade a spill of huge pink shrimp. You can cut the shrimp into bite-size pieces with a fork and knife, but you also need a spoon, or plenty of G&G’s stout Italian bread for mopping all that garlic butter. Also on the menu, at twice the price of a two-pound porterhouse steak, is lobster deJonghe, which is a veritable seascape of plump white hunks of sweet tail meat cosseted in the luminous pool of juice. For this dish, so rich it is dizzying, we call upon a food-writer adjective we have never once used in two decades of describing things to eat: sinful!
Overall: Worth driving from anyplace
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Reviewers "Must Eats" List
Garbage Salad
($12.00)
Chicken Vesuvio
($25.00)
Sirloin Steak
($30.00)
Shrimp de Jonghe
($35.00)
"Chicago's signature chicken dish: chicken Vesuvio."
Michael Stern
"Our favorite Chicago steak house"
Michael Stern
"This is a half-order of garbage salad, a brilliant appetizer that contains some of everything, from salami to shrimp."
Michael Stern
"Here's the boneless sirloin steak, with a single cottage fried potato. When the knife severs the steak's crust, juices flow."
Michael Stern
"Gene & Georgetti is an old-fashioned steak house that is never out of style."
Michael Stern
