From Eater article by Ashok Selvam Photography by Barry Brecheisen published March 8, 2024
DineAmic Group opens their sixth restaurant in the West Loop and Fulton Market area. La Serre is a French-Mediterranean restaurant from DineAmic Hospitality Group with a unique all-season ledge room and guillotine windows overlooking Fulton Market.
La Serre will break away from heavier brasserie fare and focus on the south of France, Saint-Tropez, and Provence in particular. Rekhson calls the “the Napa Valley of France” where a bounty of quality ingredients exists. Of course, being DineAmic, Rekhson and fellow DineAmic co-founder Lucas Stoioff blend all these ideas to create a restaurant that they think will appeal to local Chicago customers.
“Ours is a distinctly coastal French brand and fare, as opposed to a lot of the more inland Parisian classic brasseries that have opened up in the last couple of years,” Stoioff says.
Stoioff and Rehkson mention several tableside preparations and opportunities to splurge. A 44-ounce, double-cut beef ribeye cote du boeuf is cooked over hardwood charcoal before being trotted out on a tray outfitted with a satellite burner. The steak is sliced tableside while the sauce is prepared and finished Au Poivre or truffle Diane style (Stoioff is a big fan of the latter). An Old Fashioned uses truffle-washed bourbon and served with black truffles shaved tableside. A drink called the Caspian uses dill olive oil and is paired with a bronze bunny statue holding a small bowl of caviar. There are a few others that the duo wants customers to discover at the restaurant and be surprised. A raw bar and a menu of one-bite starters are also served in the French amuse-bouche tradition.
Located on the second floor of a new building on the corner of Green and Fulton Market, the space is light and airy with the kitchen in the back and a large bar greeting visitors at the front. The terrace, a ledge that flows along Fulton Market, features overhead heaters and the aforementioned windows which open vertically. DineAmic wants diners to feel like they’re in southern France, even when temperatures dip. Stoioff says the space looks like “an old provincial greenhouse that’s been here for 100 years.” The greenhouse design and the resources invested in the HVAC system will allow the restaurant to keep its windows open even on cold fall nights.
“When you come inside, it feels like it’s summertime in the south of France, and you’re overlooking Fulton market, and our heating, engineering, and capabilities give us the ability to have the windows open a lot longer than we would normally have because of all of our heat we’ve installed,” Stoioff says.