Virtue

Virtue Restaurant & Bar opened in 2018 at 1462 E 53rd Street in Hyde Park, chef Erick Williams's first solo restaurant after years running kitchens for other people, and it became one of the most decorated rooms in the city almost immediately. In 2022 Williams made history as the first Black chef to win Best Chef: Great Lakes from the James Beard Foundation, and the restaurant has held a Michelin Bib Gourmand. The cooking is Southern in the full sense — regional, specific, unhurried — running biscuits with pimento cheese and local honey at $12, fish and grits built on blackened red drum with Geechie stone-ground grits and crab étouffée at $35, short rib with creamed spinach and caramelised onion gravy at $42, and a bone-marrow-buttered New York strip at $69. Damarr Brown leads the kitchen as chef de cuisine and Becky Pendola runs pastry. The dining room seats up to seventy for private events and is ADA accessible, and service runs Tuesday to Sunday from 4pm, closed Mondays.

The bar keeps a section headed simply "zero-proof", and what makes it worth a non-drinker's attention is that the three drinks are drawn from the same cultural well as the food rather than being generic mocktails bolted on. The Sorrel Fizz ($9) is the clearest example: sorrel is the hibiscus drink of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic, traditionally spiced and served at Christmas, and here it is built with hibiscus, rosemary and vanilla over sparkling water. The Hummingbird ($9) is the lightest of the three, just basil, lemon and soda, and functions as the drink to order across a long meal without palate fatigue. Coconut Woman ($12) combines coconut cream, pineapple and lime into something richer and more dessert-adjacent, and shares its name with the Harry Belafonte calypso. At $9 for two of the three, they are priced well below the cocktails rather than at parity — unusual in a restaurant at this level, and it makes ordering a second one an easy decision.