A Saturday evening spent tooling around and looking for a place to get a decent steak at the last minute is usually destined to end with a stop at the nearest Whole Foods and a session over a hot cast-iron pan. Unless, of course, you’re downtown.
Case in point: a smoked-trout Caesar salad made of finely chopped endive, with roasted grapes as a garnish. It’s crunchy, creamy, and tasty, but so far from being an actual Caesar that it practically amounts to false advertising. The wedge salad is a bit of a surprise, too, arriving as a whole head of lettuce, in defiance of the dictionary definition of a wedge. Splitting it open reveals a hidden core of romaine, bacon, tomato, buttermilk dressing, and cheddar cheese. Steak-house classics like creamed spinach are given oddly contrarian treatments—in this case, the spinach is barely cooked and swims in a liquid akin to a cream soup. Beef tartare with smoked creme fraiche is so laden with chopped capers it could be beef-flavored tapenade. A serving of tagliatelle tossed with beef-cheek stroganoff is a richly sauced dish with a hit of baking spice so potent it tastes like a Maurice Lenell cookie. A crab and avocado salad bears so much horseradish that it tastes like a California roll with too much wasabi. I’m not going to say that these dishes weren’t delicious, but their surprises are unsettling.
Community Tavern can probably succeed in Portage Park, though its eccentricities might not fly in a more restaurant-rich neighborhood. But Quay Tao has taken a relatively formulaic concept and planted it where it can stand out and serve the inhabitants of a steak desert. v
4038 N. Milwaukee 773-283-6080communitytavern.com
