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| - Our second visit to One Red Door proved that this is by far one of the finest restaurants in the area. While the experience wasn't quite as flawless as our first visit -- in which everything we put into our mouths was absolutely fantastic -- it was enormously satisfying, and well worth the (surprisingly reasonable) price.
We started out with glasses from the extensive wine list. Not being familiar with any of the vintners featured (a good thing, in my estimation), we embarked on a self-guided evening of tasting. The wines went from interesting-but-not-great (a Grenache-Carignane that was one of the cheapest glasses on the menu at $8) to really excellent (the $12 Cain Cuvee). The list features wines at an wide range of price points, with a handful in the $30 range.
Dinner began with a selection of "bites" -- basically, ORD's version of tapas. Warm olives were surprisingly flavorful in a wine sauce, and the bacon-wrapped, cheese-stuffed dates were excellent. (Pricey at $3.50 apiece, and not quite as good as our previous visit, but still outstanding.) The real standout from the bites was the fried manchego cheese with a honey glaze: we could have eaten this all night and not regretted missing anything else.
The bites, however, were where the dinner's one big misstep appeared: grilled shishito peppers ranged from a pleasant heat to a mouth-searing scorch. We caught on quickly and made sure to scrape the seeds out of the peppers, but even so the heat was simply too overpowering for anything else we tried on the menu.
For an entree, we split an item from the "small plates" section: a pumpkin risotto with baby onions, pork shank, and bacon. In a word: perfect. The risotto was perfectly al dente, the sauce was creamy without being overpowering, and both meats were cooked expertly, conveying pure pork essence without overpowering the delicate pumpkin flavor.
Dessert was an orange-chocolate cheesecake, which was quite good though both a bit heavy and a bit overly orangey to my tastes.
Service throughout the night was exceptional, attentive without being the slightest bit intrusive (something I'm very sensitive to). Our server even brought dessert on a plate with "Happy Anniversary" spelled out in chocolate sauce. (I had mentioned that it was our anniversary when making reservations through OpenTable.)
We left full and happy, leaving a bill behind that was about 75 percent the size we were expecting given the quality of the food and wine.
One caveat, though, for anyone else looking to share a special occasion here. As I'd requested in the reservation, we were initially seated at the one private booth in the back of the restaurant. This seems like a lovely little hideaway, a private room with glimpses of the open kitchen from one seat and a view down the restaurant from the other (assuming you don't close the gauzy curtains).
Unfortunately, we asked to be moved almost immediately due to two serious flaws in the table's location. First, a blazingly bright fluorescent light in the kitchen is situated in exactly the worst place for the diner facing the kitchen, destroying any sense of ambience and intimacy. And second, the kitchen door is right next to the booth, which means that not only is there the most constant stream of servers to be found anywhere in the restaurant, but the entire booth thumps and shakes every single time that (apparently quite heavy) door closes.
If the management would replace the door with something not quite as heavy (or put it on a hydraulic or something) that would help considerably. And that fluorescent light has got to go. Until these are rectified, I'd recommend anyone looking for intimacy request the table around the corner from the entrance. It looked like the most private space in the restaurant, by far.
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