We’d each had a lumpy day, what with parking tickets and pushy colleagues, misplaced snapshots, bad news. By the time we settled into a sidewalk table at Cassis, we were ill prepared to savor the season’s first sultry evening. But some alchemy of olives and Bordeaux coaxed us into the giddy illusion that summer vacation had set in.
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Owners Roger Greenfield, Ted Kasemir, and Giovanni Garelli, united as the Restaurant Development Group, have been serving basic fare at Surf and Turf, Kinzie Street Chophouse, Bar Louie, and Saloon for some time. Lately they’ve ventured into the mildly ethnic with Mambo Grill, Nick & Tony’s, the promising new Grappa, newer Barcelona, and newest, Cassis.
Grand vegetable aioli: Sounded appealing, as anything doused with garlic will. But the waiter confided it’s merely crudites, so we abstained.
Hearts of romaine, shaved parmesan, tapenade crouton: Caesar by another name–a tasty, if somewhat heavy-handed one.
Specials included grilled swordfish paddling across a sticky pool of reduced port. We were tempted to lick the plate.
Caramelized banana tart, chocolate sorbetto: The distraught waiter sought to console us with this, which only disillusioned us further. Mushy fruit, sorbet (we are ostensibly in France here, right?) sullied by additional banana insult. Once we learned that pastry chef Kathryn Clapner had trained at Charlie Trotter’s, where the desserts are overwrought and undergood, we gave up feeling outraged.
