After last weekend's misfire with lunch at SoNo, I decided to try again for dinner. I found their hours posted on
Yelp, not sure why they can't do something with their website but that is another issue. Betty and I had decided on the day to go, and naturally I got stuck at work that day and was running late. When I finally made it home, we started the walk to the intersection of North and Clybourn aves.
We were greeted at the door by the hostess, who promptly sat us at a table near the front. The space is nicely designed, with lots of glass and wood. There are glass doors at the front that can be opened when the weather cooperates, and last night was beautiful. After several minutes our waitress came by to take our drink and appetizer orders. SoNo has a fairly extensive wine list and had 21 bottled beers available. It would be nice to have the beers on tap that their burger bar next door offers available, but the beers offered were well chosen micros. We ordered the pomodoro and London Fog bruschettas as appetizers, which arrived soon after our drinks. The pomodoro was good, lots of fresh, ripe tomatoes, shaved parmesan cheese and good olive oil on top of the toasted bread. The better of the two was the London Fog, it had a nice portion of the bleu cheese, caramelized cipollini onions and lavender honey. Both were good, but the portion size is a little small for the $3 price per bruschetta.
For pizzas, I chose the
Soppressata Diavola (spicy soppressata, bufala, tomatoes, charred onions & basil) and Betty ordered a
Funghi (wild mushrooms, fontina, crispy sage & toasted garlic). The pizzas arrived in about 15 minutes.
The Soppressata lived up to the spicy description, other than that I found this to be a little bland. Like my experience at Urban Burger Bar, the chef seems to under season his food in my opinion. The tomatoes were nice but there were too many of them on the pie which resulted in a pool of liquid on the plate. The bufala mozzarella was pretty good as were the charred onions. The crust had a very nice char on it, but didn't have much taste other than that. When I make this style of pizza at home I use a retarded dough formulation which allows for a long, slow, cold fermentation that produces a nice flavor in the finished product. This crust didn't have that flavor. Perhaps we were there on a night when their dough hadn't had a chance to age enough, I'll withhold judgement until I've eaten there at least once more.
I liked the funghi pizza better than the Soppressata one. This is a white pizza, so none of the tomato juice pooling on the bottom of the plate. The pie had a nice taste of roasted garlic to it and the mushrooms had some good caramelization to them. The flavor combination of mushrooms, fontina, roasted garlic and sage really worked well. Like the first pie I didn't think the crust had much flavor, it seemed to be acting as more of a platform than a component of the dish contributing flavor. As you can tell, I rally find crust to be an important part of a pizza. The cheese seemed almost creamy, which was very nice. Even with the crust issues, this is a pie I'd order again.
We didn't order any dessert, but the menu had about six flavors of gelato, chocolate cake, pana cotta and the like. All in all, I liked this place. I'm sure we'll go back at some point since there really isn't anything else like it within walking distance for us. Hopefully they will be able to improve their crust and get a little more aggressive in the seasoning as they mature.
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