Crying Tiger

I was gearing up to write an extremely boring piece about Crying Tiger where I give another restaurant three stars, mostly to talk about how the food is good despite the fact that the vibe, location, and other aesthetics are for the see and be seen crowd. But I remembered that Michael Nagrant, a Chicago food critic, recently posted an article to his Substack about whether someone should eat at "Lettuce Entertain You's Crying Tiger."

I was a free subscriber, and I hadn't paid before this because I just don't care that much about one person's assessment of any given restaurant, in the same way you probably shouldn't care about mine. I spent the $6.99 for one month's subscription anyway because Crying Tiger is the type of balancing act that probably could make for an interesting piece. A complete waste of money, as he didn't do anything interesting at all, which I suppose I should have known from the title referring to it as "Lettuce Entertain You's" Crying Tiger, rather than just, I don't know, Crying Tiger.

I went with a group of 6, including myself. Different palates, different tolerances, different preferences. We ordered broadly: sugarcane beef in betel leaves, a pork belly special, the bird's eye chili hamachi crudo, green papaya som tum, Burmese cumin lamb, shaking beef with cottage fries, rolled rice noodles with maitake and Chinese broccoli, wagyu short rib khao soi, and the chili crisp barbecue chicken gai yang.

The shaking beef was the table's best dish. The wok heat was right; the beef had real sear without being overworked, and the sauce had the kind of caramelized, vinegar-bright depth that only comes from proper technique and good product. The cumin lamb was the other standout, genuinely aromatic, with the cumin carrying through cleanly rather than just sitting on the surface.

The hamachi crudo was a good bite. Bird's eye chili with raw fish is not trying to be Thai food, and it doesn't pretend to be. It's a composed cold plate that borrows Southeast Asian aromatics to dress excellent fish.

The papaya salad was good but not spicy enough. I'd have liked it turned up considerably. But I also know that at least three other people at my table would not have.

Not everything was a revelation. The rolled rice noodles were pleasant but not particularly memorable. The barbecue chicken was solid without being a dish I'd specifically return for. Fine. That's a fair outcome across nine dishes at a large-format restaurant on a Saturday night.

For whatever it is worth, I did not pay because my friend Joe sucks at Fantasy Football and was responsible for the dinner bill as a consequence.

Now, the review.

I went back and read the full commentary afterward, which was not much of a commentary at all. He posted an image that listed why you should go to Crying Tiger on the left side and where you should go instead on the right side, depending on what you were after. A perfectly fine idea in theory that was just social commentary in practice.

I also searched Nagrant's Substack for other references to Crying Tiger and found a separate piece he wrote recently about Chicago Magazine's best new restaurants list. This was mostly to better understand where he might be coming from and why.

Back to the shitty flow chart. The left side - the "yes, eat here if" side - lists roughly thirty reasons, and almost every one is a demographic or aesthetic jab. You're white. You're rich. You're an influencer. You live in Naperville. You have a TikTok addiction. You like servers dressed like hospital scrub nurses. All observations about the crowd, the neighborhood, and the scene.

There are exactly two items that touch the cooking. One is a joke about fish sauce, which I'll get to. The other is a crack about bananas foster in a dessert Nagrant later admits he enjoyed.

That is the entirety of the food criticism on the negative side.

The right side - the "no, eat here instead" side - compares Crying Tiger dish-by-dish against the single best specialist restaurant for each cuisine represented on the menu. Best crispy rice salad? Go to Lao Der. Best pad si ew? Aroy Thai. Best khao soi? Mahanakhon or Zaab E Lee. Best Vietnamese? HaiSous, which is the chef's own restaurant.

It is a structurally dishonest comparison. Crying Tiger is a pan-Southeast Asian concept. It is not trying to be the best Lao restaurant, the best Thai restaurant, and the best Vietnamese restaurant simultaneously. Judging it against the single best specialist in each lane and declaring it wanting is like walking into Avec, comparing the flatbread to Spacca Napoli's pizza and the hummus to Galit's, then concluding it isn't good enough at anything. The comparison is designed to produce a negative result.

The fish sauce claim. Nagrant suggests, implicitly, that the food lacks fish sauce or uses it insufficiently. Fish sauce is a fermented condiment that provides glutamate and a specific background fermentation character. In well-built Southeast Asian food, you do not taste "fish sauce." You taste depth, salinity, and a particular umami structure that sits differently than soy or doenjang or miso. I am sure that experienced palates can detect the absence of that character, but more likely only if they know the dish's intended architecture and can isolate what is producing which layer of flavor. It is not something you taste in passing and announce. This is the kind of thing someone says because they know it is the right thing to say to signal expertise, not because they have actually isolated the variable.

Could the food benefit from more aggressive seasoning in some applications? Sure. But the leap from "this could be pushed further" to "they don't use fish sauce" is purely performative.

The piece criticizing "Best X Lists," which to be clear, deserve to be criticized. The argument in Nagrant's piece is that the magazine is compromised by advertiser relationships, that LEYE restaurants are systematically overrated, and that the critics are too friendly with the people they cover. Most of this has to be true. Obviously, food media has structural conflicts of interest.

But Nagrant uses this structural critique as an unfalsifiable shield for his own preferences. Crying Tiger is on the list? Proof of corruption. A BOKA restaurant is left off? Proof of corruption. He prefers Zarella's tavern-style pizza to Pizza Amici? That's supposed to mean something, but preferring one pizza over another is an opinion, not a data point in a corruption case. I could say the same about Pat's over both of them, and it would carry exactly as much analytical weight, which is none.

(Because I was certain I had him pegged at this point, for my own entertainment, I searched his Substack for "Alla Vita," a Chicago BOKA restaurant. Sure enough, I found him referring to it as "what might be one of the best Italian restaurants in Chicago." Kindly, pound sand. Alla Vita is exactly what he purports Crying Tiger to be.)

The primary line of interest for this piece is when Nagrant calls Crying Tiger "a slightly above average pan-fusion dilution of the purer art that has generally been purveyed by their head chef at his own spot Embeya." The argument is not about what they are cooking. It is about what Lettuce Entertain You represents to Nagrant culturally, but it is being dressed up as culinary criticism.

Embeya was an acclaimed restaurant that closed because the chef's business partner embezzled $300,000 and fled to Spain. Thai Dang rebuilt with HaiSous on the smallest SBA loan a bank would approve. He earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand, multiple James Beard nominations, and a reputation as one of the best chefs in the Great Lakes region. The idea that partnering with LEYE - and gaining the resources, infrastructure, and platform to execute a large-format concept - somehow diminishes what he puts on the plate is not serious. It is a purity argument, which says more about Nagrant than it does about the cooking.

Crying Tiger is a very good large-format restaurant doing something genuinely difficult: building dishes with real depth and technique across multiple Southeast Asian traditions, at high volume, for a diverse audience, without dumbing the food down to blandness. The shaking beef and cumin lamb at my table had the kind of flavor that only comes from a kitchen that knows what it is doing. The crudo was thoughtful. The curries were well-constructed.

It could push harder. The papaya salad should be spicier. Some dishes played it safe where they could have taken a sharper turn. But there is a meaningful difference between "this restaurant calibrates its intensity for broad appeal" and "this restaurant is not for people who appreciate Asian food." Nagrant does not seem interested in that distinction.

Gymkhana in Las Vegas is the comparison that keeps coming to mind. Two Michelin stars in London. Technically rigorous Indian cooking. In Vegas, at Aria, it serves a room full of people who are there for the spectacle of the Strip as much as for the food. The spice levels are calibrated for that audience. It is less aggressive than eating in Southall or Jackson Heights. It is still exceptional cooking. Though often the two are correlated, the room does not determine the quality of what comes out of the kitchen. Crying Tiger operates in the same space with a skilled chef cooking at a high level for a large, mixed audience, and it deserves to be evaluated on those terms, not dismissed because the clientele wears the wrong shoes.

Nagrant's motivations are his own, but they are visible enough. The review is totally unserious for a place that is certainly good enough to warrant more than a meme. I don't even care that much about Crying Tiger to defend it so strongly, but I felt attacked for enjoying it, and I would have appreciated a less disingenuous argument for why I shouldn't have. I hope Mike spends the $6.99 wisely.

In simple terms, if your critique of a restaurant spends more time on the demographics of its customers than the food on the plate, the critique is not about the restaurant. It's about you. Keep this in mind the next time I bitch about a place's popularity because it is a celebrity hot spot.