La Petite Folie---Hyde Park

Had a birthday here dinner last night—our first visit despite having lived 2 blocks away for 7 years now. Had always meant to try it, but the price point makes it not a spur-of-the-moment choice, and when we splurge we tend to go out of the neighborhood. And, frankly, multiple perusals of the menu over the years just never made my heart beat faster.
I would love to report a gem discovered so close to home, but with the best will in the world, I can’t. For what they’re attempting, and what they’re charging in the attempt, they’re just not where they need to be—particularly on the service end.
The room is very pleasant. Tables are a bit close together, but the acoustics are good, and the sound is nicely subdued for easy conversation. The general vibe is also very nice. People actually dress up a bit, despite the location in a strip of stores with a post-office sub-station and a bike shop. Large family parties with beautifully behaved small children were obviously enjoying a nice night out.
The wine list is all French and nicely chosen, though without anything off the beaten track. Nothing is a bargain, but there are bottles in the low-to-mid $30s, which seems quite reasonable for the sort of place it is (or wants to be). A bottle of Saint Cosme, Cotes du Rhone was very tasty and food friendly at $36.
The meal begins with a basket of nice, chewy baguette slices and good butter.
My app, rabbit pate with brandy and prunes, was mild and good enough. I can’t say the presence of either brandy or prunes really made itself felt. It was served with standard accompaniments—onion confit, pickles, mustard. The brioche toasts that came with it shattered into crumbs under pressure, and tasted like nothing at all, so I switched over to the much better baguette. Mine was the only app I tasted. There was an order of casolette of shellfish with lobster, that looked pretty and generous.
My entrée was the Napoleon of sole (fish layered with mushroom duxelle, on pasta al nero with French green beans) and was very good. The fish was perfectly cooked and fresh and sweet. The sauce Bretonne did not overwhelm (although until I added a pinch of salt, it definitely underwhelmed), and the noodles and green beans were perfectly cooked. The mushrooms were so mild as to contribute very little in the way of flavor.
Mrs. B. had the roasted half chicken with morels and, I believe, a cognac sauce. This was a generous portion, but only so-so execution. Breast a bit dry, and, most distressingly, morels that appeared not to have been cleaned at all. I’m fine with a bit of grit here and there in return for the delight of morels, but these were simply inedible. The one I tried was literally filled with gravel and I nearly broke a tooth. And, overall, just not a lot of flavor for all the ingredients involved.
Other entrees included rack of lamb and duck breast, but I neither tried them nor heard any comments about them.
Now the service issues: none, individually, would sink a meal. But the persistence of them throughout dinner finally became something of distraction. One might charitably call the young staff innocent, or guileless, but in the end they veered closer to simply clueless.
After ordering, I handed our server the menu and wine list. Three sheets of paper, all told. He immediately dropped them over my shoulder back onto my lap. No big deal. However, when it came time to pour wine, he was unable to fill a glass without dripping on the table cloth. One of the party, when ordering, gave her app order, then a main, and said, just parenthetically, “I won’t have any salad.” Somehow the waiter took this to mean that she wanted her main dish without the vegetable components that it came with. So, she received this sadly stripped down plate. He also, after carefully going clockwise around the table when taking the orders, came and put down all the mains in front of the wrong people, followed by a nearly Fawlty Towers-esque shifting of plates back and forth amongst us. We finished our first bottle of wine with the apps, and so ordered another to go with the mains. It never appeared. Then, when they came to clear the plates, the waiter asked if we still wanted that second bottle! Well, no, not at this point. (Obviously, one could have reminded them, but everyone was talking and everyone but me had just a bit left in their glass. So, I suppose I was the only one feeling the lack. Still, we had ordered it.)
In the end, it seemed exactly like the sort of restaurant one might find depicted in a gentle satire of academia taking place in a small college town with one “fancy” restaurant where the dean treats important donors and woos star teachers she wants to hire. Not a disaster or a farce, but a gently comedy of overreaching and missing.

773.493.1394
1504 E. 55th St. Chicago, IL, 60615
contact@lapetitefolie.com

executive chef/proprietor
Mary B. Mastricola
1995 Grand Diplome de L’Ecole Cordon Bleu Paris
1979 Bachelor of Arts, The University of Chicago