My family and I used to have an inside joke. We wanted to open a restaurant that would showcase my Israeli mother’s cooking, and we’d name all the dishes after her. There’d be the “Get Out of Bed” chicken soup, the “Please Pray for Parking” schnitzel, and of course, the “Water the Garden” salad. And we’d name the new establishment after the queen of our household, the Hebrew word for “mom”: ema.
The menu is divided up into various sections of small plates plus a couple of main courses. The spreads are the most consistently pleasurable, indicative of Ema’s potential. I tried plain hummus for my first dinner and it tasted like it came right from Trader Joe’s, but the “spicy hummus” I had the second time was much better, thick and creamy with a nice harif-style spice. The real standouts, however, were two dishes with no Israeli connection at all: a spring-onion tzatziki that tasted like French onion dip (I mean that as a compliment) and htipiti, a spread the server told me was Ethiopian (a quick online search reveals it’s Greek). Whatever, it was great, a cool red-pepper salad that paired nicely with the tzatziki. But the accompanying house bread was a letdown: smushed and lukewarm thin pita with a light za’atar coating, lacking the sumac tang essential to the spice.
74 W. Illinois 312-527-5586emachicago.com
