Over the summer, Chicago restaurant critic Mike Sula reviewed Terrace 16, the 16th floor restaurant at the Trump International Hotel & Tower. Sula strikes me as an even-tempered critic: This review, for example; or this article. That said, Sula’s visits to Terrace 16 didn’t go well:
...a coconspirator and I ordered the whole fried chicken for $42 and a Caesar salad for $18. To the table came a plate holding seven pieces of hacked and battered boneless chicken breast. We asked our server, Alyssa, about this strange species of boneless seven-breasted bird. "Is that all you got?" she sympathized, nervously eyeing the pile of deep-fried skin that collected from each piece as it was handled. Then "Yeah, it's always just white meat," she admitted. "Even for us servers, we only ever get the white meat." Chef, she reported, was using the dark meat for stock.
This whole breastbird comes with a bowl of creamy al dente fingerling potato salad that—like the chicken, and the burger, and the pasta—has been denied the assistance of salt. The Caesar is a few dollars' worth of shredded food-service-quality romaine, grated Parmesan, and croutons in an $18 bowl.
Sula skewers the watery $18 cocktails that drove him to order a dry martini to compensate; he suspects that the bar menu is coded QAnon messages; he orders a $28 medium rare cheeseburger that arrives medium, with “a chiffonade of raw baby kale... the mortal enemy of melted cheese.” He does love the bread service, though he laments that all the salt in the kitchen is sprinkled on the focaccia and left off the rest of the food. And then there’s this:
I'm not so batty from Trump Derangement Syndrome that I can't objectively identify what a poor value the food is at Terrace 16. The only thing Chicagoans on the ground are missing is the spectacular view from occupied territory.
If you love a good dyspeptic restaurant review, give Sula a click. If a restaurant could be a metaphor for its owner, Terrace 16 just might suffice.