When my wife reminded me that she would be out of town for a few days, including a weekend, I reached out to several friends to see if anyone wanted to hang. Everyone was busy — traveling, entertaining out-of-towners, having to “go to a thing.” After a while I stopped looking, lest the whole bad timing of it all made me feel like more of a friendless loser than I actually am. So I decided to do something I love but don’t indulge in as often as I’d like: eat dinner alone at a bar. Three bars, in fact, at three restaurants I’ve liked but wanted to know better. 

The first stop was Void, the Avondale spot that feels both like a Wisconsin supper club and the Italian red sauce joint your grandparents took you to. With nearly two dozen seats at the long bar, it wasn’t a problem walking in on a Thursday. The lights were kind of low and the mood inside blessedly unsceney. As I sipped a small can of Choom Lite, Hopewell Brewing Co.’s alcohol-free but THC-infused lemon-lime beverage, I studied the menu and decided for this post-workout meal I wanted something hearty, rich, full of carbs but not enormous. I found it. The witty potato gnocchi — a spot-on mashup of all the flavors you expect from a baked potato and the soft meltaway texture of beautifully crafted gnocchi — really pushed my yum button. I loved the gussied-upness of it all: the crème fraîche, the aged cheddar, the flecks of crisp potato skin and fresh chives that took the familiarity of a cheap, foil-wrapped chain steakhouse potato to a refined place. 

“Another plate? A dessert?” asked the barkeep. Yes, I was still hungry and starting to feel a little loopy from the Choom, so I ordered an appetizer of roasted rainbow carrots with creamy ricotta, endives, turnips, pistachios, and chile crisp. I kind of saw what the kitchen was going for flavor-wise, and it made taste sense when I managed to get a little bit of everything on my fork, though the components were all oppositional and combative. Mostly, though, I liked the way the carrots were cooked just to the fork-cutting point and the way it all filled the rest of the space in my stomach with more volume than density. Satiety is a beautiful thing. 

The next night I knew the move. Go work out late, build up an appetite and then let the spirit move me when I order. I ended up at Bar Parisette, a restaurant I’ve been to a couple of times and always liked but also always wanted to like more. The place was bumping, and I walked in right after a couple who stood immobile at the host stand as they struggled to grasp the bad news about the wait time. Lucky me, though. I espied one lone seat at the bar and sidled into it. 

I looked at the regular menu, and then at the restaurant week menu featuring many of the same dishes. The items I wanted to order seemed to glow and lift up off the page like the way math equations did for John Nash in “A Beautiful Mind.” Celery salad with walnuts, comté cheese, and cherries, steak frites, and a salted vanilla-orange soft serve swirl. This meal was a three-peat, though: I still like Bar Parisette and still wish I liked it more. 

I did love a cocktail called “Oh Sheila,” which I assumed was named for the Ready for the World track, though it could have been the bar manager’s mom; I didn’t ask. This concoction of tequila, cognac, cassis, and citrus was russet colored and arrived in a coupe. It hit that Last Word spot precisely but tasted totally novel. And the food was fine. The salad was super chilled and had many pieces of bias-cut, de-stringed celery and all the other business in a mild, creamy dressing. The steak frites seemed like what a French diner might call “correct,” i.e., it hit all the right notes with its sliced rectangle of meat under a bit of green peppercorn sauce. Some evidently housemade twice-fried frites — dark, irregular, crispy — sat alongside next to a puckering-with-vinegar salad, just as it should. Maybe I wanted a bit more flavor from the meat, or more oomph from the sauce, or a steak frites that would remind me of the one I’d get in a no-great-shakes restaurant in Paris, where I’d be served a misshapen knob of tough meat and have to saw into it myself, but then be rewarded with a luscious pan sauce. That soft serve, though. I’m always available for soft serve. 

My last night of friendless loserdom required some planning because it was a splurge. While scrolling through Resy, I found that a single seat had opened at the sushi counter at Kyoten Next Door — the relatively ($159) cheaper option to Kyoten, Chicago’s top sushi omakase. I sat between two couples on dates (hey, y’all!) in front of one of the restaurant’s two chefs, Jorge Villa. 

The thing I love about having a proper edomae sushi experience — sitting at the counter and having pieces of nigiri passed across — is that you get to know the hand of the chef. It’s all the slight, ineffable things, like the draping of the fish and the compactness of the rice. You begin to recognize it like you’d know your mom’s cupcakes at a school bake sale, even if she uses Duncan Hines. (Icing never lies.) 

So it was a pleasure to get a sense of Villa as he passed us sea bream, horse mackerel, and yellowtail, first the younger hamachi yellowtail we all know and then the glassier, more mature buri yellowtail. He chatted a bit and gave a much-deserved shoutout to Nomonomo Sushi just up the street, which is that rare under-the-radar neighborhood spot that buys seasonal fish from Tokyo’s Toyosu Market and serves it à la carte. 

Winter is an excellent time for wild fish, and the star of the evening was a bluefin tuna fished from waters near Boston. We all marveled when Jorge showed us a section of the tuna’s tail with its layers of fatty toro between thick stripes of sinew. Then he presented us with pieces he had cut using the hagashi method, peeling back the layers of tissue until he could extract a ridged accordion of a piece. Gorgeous. The lean, crimson akami from this same tuna tasted mineral and iron-rich, though I did find the house soy sauce, which was so good on fattier cuts, came off a bit salty against this angular flavor. 

We had several more pieces, including the now de rigueur slice of torched Wagyu beef, a crowd pleaser to be sure but something I’d skip in a heartbeat for more fish. At some point in an edomae counter meal you usually get a piece of fish that’s classified as hikarimono, or “shiny,” i.e., an oilier species that needs a bit of a cure to be at its most palatable. Here it was sawara, or Spanish mackerel, the mildest of the bunch. It was lovely, with a flavor that lingered sweetly, though I was personally pining for something punchier, such as my fave kohada, or gizzard shad. I can’t wait until someone opens an omakase sushi bar that lets the guest make a few choices to customize the meal to their personal tastes. Even without, though, this was the kind of sushi meal I wish I had more of in my life. Maybe we need to go back when my wife isn’t out of town.