At Patti Ann's, the Kids' Menu Is the Only Menu

Pigs in a blanket and chicken-fried pork chops just like Mom never used to make.

- By Adam Platt. Photograph by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet

With every new spike in infections, it's clear the COVID era will be with us a little while longer, but you can already tell that chefs and restaurateurs have formed strong opinions about what their customers seem to want (or not to want) after subsisting on pantry recipes and packets of ramen in their darkened apartments. Modestly priced, comfort-oriented home cooking is most obviously in fashion (unless you're a member of the increasingly furtive underground thousand-dollar omakase sushi-bro set), and if you happen to have a beloved family cook to name your new venture after, that's even better. The talented Cantonese American chef Calvin Eng named his excellent new Williamsburg brasserie for his mother (Bonnie's), and Victoria Blamey, at her excellent new downtown restaurant, gave the honor to her Chilean great-aunt (Mena).

Now comes Patti Ann's, Greg Baxtrom's wacky, somewhat stilted homage to his down-home midwestern childhood (Patti Ann is his mom, and he grew up outside Chicago), which opened a couple of months ago on Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights, not far from the other popular Baxtrom restaurants, Olmsted and Maison Yaki. The room is decorated with all sorts of antic schoolhouse touches (crayon-colored menus, chalkboards and maps on the walls, water-filled milk jugs at every table). The sturdy, wood-topped tables are the kind you might see in a kindergarten classroom, the menu is filled with kids' favorites (pigs in a blanket, macaroni and cheese), and even the $15 cocktails have been named (Field Trip, Ditch Day, Parent-Teacher Conference) to evoke the kind of Ferris Bueller reveries we all remember (though possibly never actually experienced) back in high school.

Patti Ann's