With recent Dish items on openings for P.M. Prime and STK, it seems like OMGLOL-speak has seeped its way into restaurant naming. Another case in point, the soon-to-open MFK (432 W. Diversey Parkway, 773-857-2540), which is not a profanely enthusiastic sister restaurant to MK but a 28-seat subterranean “seaside cafe” at the edge of Lake View.
Named for the foundational food writer M.F.K. Fisher, the restaurant serves dishes ranging from little bites such as deep-fried prawn heads with the Catalan sauce salbitxada or suzuki seviche with a squid-ink tostada and poblano guacamole, up to the “hope you’re hungry” category for sharing, including the seafood stew cataplana, with cobia collar, striped bass, and clams, or a chicken ballotine. Nick Lacasse, the longtime Drawing Room chef, heads the kitchen. “Nick is our secret weapon,” says Sari Zernich Worsham, who owns MFK with her husband, Scott Worsham.
Plancha-grilled seafood garners its own menu category. A half-pound of razor clams with chervil butter runs $19. A half-pound of never-frozen shrimp, $22. A single gargantuan sea scallop, at least a tenth of a pound, on corn milk grits with pickled Fresno peppers costs $10.
The white- and rosé-heavy Old World wine list offers glasses for one-quarter the price of a bottle, shunning the usual by-the-glass markup (although light Googling suggests the standard bottle markup is in effect).
Our love of punnery being well-known, we also feel compelled to point out that this seaward-looking restaurant is named for a writer named Fisher. Didn’t see that one coming down the pike.