4471 Lawn Avenue
Western Springs, IL 60558-1765   (map)
(708) 246-2082
www.vierestaurant.com
Closed Sundays
$$$

The best restaurant in Chicago may not be in Chicago, but in the sleepy bedroom community of Western Springs. About 35 minutes from the Loop by car, and about the same on Metra, it’s an easy, comfortable alternative to any famed restaurant in the city, and without a painful $12 valet tab to take the first bite out of your dinner bill. If the thought of fighting traffic on I-290 causes indigestion, or if you like more than a couple glasses of wine with your dinner, public transportation is even more attractive —the Metra stop is steps away from Vie’s front door.

Owner and Executive Chef Paul Virant followed a well-worn path before opening Vie in 2004 , passing through some of Chicago’s best kitchens — Trotter’s, Everest, and Blackbird, among others. While learning the ropes, Virant was also preparing to run his own restaurant – not in the city, but in a suburb that had not previously been known as a dining destination. And when Vie opened, it tore down whatever symbolic Berlin (or Berwyn) wall may have existed culinarily between city and suburb and brought gastronomic glasnost to the deprived masses west of Harlem Avenue hungry for a world-class restaurant.

Virant and his team have T-shirts proclaiming “The tastes of the season – preserved”. This isn’t just empty sloganeering, but the truth of what happens in the Vie kitchen. Virant grew up in rural Missouri and learned firsthand (at his grandmother’s knee if the Norman Rockwell portrayal on their web site is accurate) the connection between a farmer’s mindfulness and the quality of the food produced. Virant and his staff know that the (often overused) maxims of “local” and “seasonal” are true precisely because they’re the best way to ensure quality in the finished product. There’s very little that comes out of their kitchen, and substantial larder, that can’t be traced back to local farms within 150 miles or so of Vie’s back door. That back door is where you’ll see farm trucks and vans pull up most days of the week, unloading the freshest fruits, vegetables, meats, and eggs, which the Vie staff immediately begins prepping for dinner and “putting up” in pickles, preserves, syrups or jellies for future use.

Whole hogs, Green City Market vegetables, and 10 pound bags of fresh local chevre go in the back door, to turn up on the plate as braised bacon, house made tasso ham, and meltingly delicious goat cheese gnocchi browned with mushrooms and green garlic. The whole staff might as well be poster children for the Slow Food concept of “co-producers.” And via an intellectual and sensory osmosis that’s nearly unavoidable when eating here, Vie’s clientele become the second guard in supporting local farms. Mercifully, at Vie you’ll find no tall food, foam food, small food, loam food, or anything that smacks overtly of trendy or molecular. What’s paramount is honest, flavorful food, achieved through the persistent building of relationships with farmers and producers, and then reinforcing the connection through regular field trips to local farms—trips which include as much staff as possible.

Vie can certainly merit the “special occasion restaurant” moniker, but it’s hard to complain about the occasional three-figure tab when the place goes to such considerable, and considerate, lengths to make fine dining affordable, accessible, and meaningful, with its farm series dinners, tasting menus, half-price wine nights, and liberal (often free) corkage policy.

The dining room at Vie may be another beneficiary of not being in Chicago, with a luxuriousness of space framed by a stark high-ceilinged elegance. If you want to inadvertently know the life stories of the strangers dining on your right, left, and backside, go to Blackbird or Avec. If you want similarly great food in a calm and spacious dining room, with each table feeling like its own cocoon, you’ll feel at home in Vie – that is, if your home has a world class chef using world class, farm-fresh ingredients. Who needs a life in Provence, when you can have une Vie dans Illinois?