A Michelin-Starred Chef Opens a Seafood-Focused Bistro with Midwestern Touches

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Jenner Tomaska and Katrina Bravo have had a breathless year. The married restaurateurs have seen the premiere of Knife Edge, an Apple TV+ show featuring their artistic fine dining restaurant Esmé as it pursues a second Michelin star. Soon after filming wrapped, they opened the Southern-inspired French bistro Byrdie’s in Louisville, Kentucky in December. The Alston, an enormous, unabashed steakhouse where they manage the food, debuted in the spring. And now there’s Petite Edith, a seafood-focused French bistro at 868 N. Wells St. in a new tower on the edge of River North, which opens November 20.

“In the span of under 365 days,” says Bravo, “We’ve now opened all three of the projects. But Petite Edith was always the original plan.”

The new restaurant has been in development for a couple years. After noting the unmeetable demand for a lower-price point menu at Esmé during Chicago Restaurant Week, they realized there was a desire for food by Michelin-starred chefs outside of cost-prohibitive tasting menus, especially in a persistent environment of economic uncertainty.

“Jenner and I looked at each other and were like, ‘You can’t ignore what the consumer is asking for,’” Bravo says.

But they also didn’t ignore their own predilections while conceptualizing a more casual restaurant. Tomaska adores French food and fish, so they centered on those, trying to create a coastal feel in both the food and the space – which features megawatts of natural light and garage doors that open to a garden patio – for Chicagoans and our often gray weather: “that feeling of, ‘It’s a dreary winter day, but when I’m in this space I am sitting along the water enjoying some French fare,” Bravo says of the “brighter, lighter” food and atmosphere.

Monk fish is served on the bone and mussels on a skewer, the latter with the Mediterranean flavors of olive, Meyer lemon, fennel, chickpea, and anise hyssop. Sea bream appears both utterly fresh – raw with endive, quince and Cara Cara oranges – and rich, as a fried piece still attached to the tail alongside “chips” of smoked potatoes with onion butter and citrus.

As the fried fish shows, there’s an element of Midwestern-ness to Petite Edith. There’s a baguette on the menu – but it’s hollowed out and stuffed with three cheeses and topped with pomegranate molasses. As with every elevated restaurant opening anywhere near downtown, there’s also a steak, in this case a dry-aged ribeye with grilled onions and smoked mushrooms.

The approach shares some similarities with The Alston, where Tomaska’s goal is to imbue familiar dishes with more adventurous touches. “I have a huge passion for French cooking,” he told WTTW about The Alston before it opened. “That will translate to this space, but there will be a beautiful marriage between this Midwest hospitality and flavors that people are unfamiliar with.”

Petite Edith has clams casino, but it combines the broiled butter, sausage, and bread crumbs with razor clams – an example of “that hybrid, something new, something a little more innovative,” as Tomaska said of some dishes at The Alston.

“You can take the chef out of Alinea, but you can’t take Alinea out of the chef,” Bravo says of Tomaska, who worked with Alinea’s boundary-pushing Grant Achatz at several of his restaurants for nearly a decade. Tomaska “knows how to be ‘avant-garde’ but approachable.”

The same might be said of Stevan Miller’s beverage program, which continues the sunshine-and-sea-air theme with coastal French and island-based wines. Named best bartender at the local Jean Banchet Awards for his work at now-shuttered Claudia, Miller has also created cocktails like a namesake Edith, a martini featuring chartreuse mist and mezcal in addition to the classic gin and vermouth. There are also non-alcoholic drinks like a combination of oolong and orgeat or cherries and guajillo chiles.

“We have lots of big dreams for the bar,” Bravo says, given the “gigantic, showstopping bar” in the space.

Bravo and Tomaska are not the first couple this year to open a Midwestern-ish bistro after making their name with a fine dining restaurant – Elske’s David and Anna Posey debuted Creepies in August after an even longer gestational period. “It’s essentially the same idea: fine dining, and then doing something that really sits within the heart of a Chicagoan or Midwesterner,” says Bravo.

But Petite Edith pays tribute to a different restaurant, one that closed in 2017: the respected mk, which stood a block away at the same address, 868 N. Franklin to Petite Edith’s 868 N. Wells. Bravo and Tomaska met while working together at mk; the restaurant’s executive chef Erick Williams, who has gone on to open acclaimed restaurants of his own, officiated their wedding.

“To be able to open a space that is a stone’s throw away…is just deeply personal to us,” says Bravo, who says she and Tomaska have tried to emulate mk’s Michael and Lisa Kornick in their approach to their own staff. So they’re serving mk’s popular fries and cake and shake at Petite Edith, “to honor Michael and Lisa and Erick as well.”

The restaurant also homages Bravo’s mother; Edith is her middle name. “She’s a tiny human with a really gigantic personality,” says Bravo. She “grew up with nothing and dirt floors and no indoor plumbing” in Honduras, and now has a restaurant within sight of Chicago’s 875 N. Michigan (the John Hancock). “To be able to do this in her name I don’t think is something she would have thought in her lifetime would occur,” says Bravo.

“She feels really grateful – and we’re doing this because we’re grateful for her.”