Skift Take
Both independents and chains are looking for better ways to engage an audience with design. Fortunately, consumers are looking for something new from restaurants, too, and are receptive to fresh ideas.
Though its name might suggest that it's running behind, Pacific Standard Time, a new restaurant in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, is forward-thinking.
The eatery, opened in May, is a collaboration between the Chicago-based One Off and Underscore hospitality groups. It’s the latter’s first endeavor, for which partners Erling Wu-Bower and Joshua Tilden joined forces with One Off’s Donnie Madia, Terry Alexander, and Paul Kahan, the team behind such Chicago success stories as Big Star, Dove’s Luncheonette, The Publican, and Nico Osteria.
Wu-Bower was a James Beard finalist three years running as Nico’s Chef de Cuisine before deciding it was time to open his own place. He wanted to forego the precision (a.k.a sous vide) cooking he so often applied in the kitchen at Nico (and at Kahan's Avec and The Publican before that) in favor of a more rustic approach; this desire ultimately shaped the restaurant’s interior.
As Tilden explains, Wu-Bower “fell in love with the concept of fire” and hosted an original pop-up dinner series inspired by it at Chicago’s Experimental Station, a nonprofit incubator on the city’s South Side. Using the space as a test kitchen, he experimented with pizza dough that would later appear on the menu at Pacific Standard Time, where two lar
