![]() ![]() Willis Group Holdings won the naming rights after negotiating to lease several floors of the 110-story black tower which dominates the Windy City's skyline. CHICAGO - Chicago's iconic Sears Tower - the tallest building in the United States - will be getting a new name after a British insurance company made a deal with the building management. Franklin Street, lunch service starts on Tuesday, January 24 and dinner follows in February, reservations via OpenTable. Kindling Downtown Cookout and Cocktails, at the Willis Tower, 202 S. Lunch service officially starts next week and dinner should start in February. An outdoor terrace will debut after winter and whenever spring feels right. A zone on the second floor with shuffleboard and other games feels like Fifty/50’s Utopian Tailgate in Old Town. Seating around the kitchen is akin to a chef’s table. While Malmann’s cooking had a more South American feel, the menu at Kindling’s more a mix of American. The menu is stacked with steak, raw seafood, pasta, and happy hour bites. Sawyer draws inspiration from famous chef Francis Malmann, a master of cooking with flames, using fire in a variety of ways with different setups and contraptions. Kindling is part of a $500 million renovation for Willis Tower. But will Sawyer and the restaurant’s kitchen - Sawyer described it as “13 and a ½ feet of live fire” transform local dining perceptions? Sawyer injects credibility into the project, and perhaps that will draw some culinary tourists curious to check up on what the 2015 Beard winner for Best Chef: Great Lakes is doing. Fifty/50 brought on Jonathon Sawyer, a chef who earned success in Cleveland with a James Beard Award before moving to Chicago. They considered a hibachi-style restaurant as the key element was some sort of live-fire cooking that gives diners a visual while injecting a little theatrics into the experience. A second-floor food court, from Urbanscape, has been delayed.īut Kindling is a big ticket for the skyscraper, a concept that has evolved since Fifty/50 took over the space. Willis Tower had already gone through part of a $500 million transformation with the addition of several first-floor casual restaurants. The group, born from their namesake bar in Wicker Park, has taken on larger projects of late including a partnership with Second City (they’re also handling food at the comedy club’s New York expansion) and they’ve dived into the world of cannabis. Chris Peters/Eater ChicagoĮQ Office partnered with Fifty/50 Restaurant Group, the operators of restaurants including Roots Handmade Pizza and Utopian Tailgate. The restaurant opens Tuesday, January 24 for lunch, and dinner service should start in February. But with the arrival of Kindling, the tower’s owners - EQ Office, a division of New York-based Blackstone group - hope to ignite interest and attract more business to Downtown Chicago, an area that continues to recover from the pandemic. The food situation was a roll of the dice with the smart money on eating at home or before arriving at the downtown skyscraper where finding parking is a fool’s errand. Long lines of tourists routinely gather and wait for the elevators to take them upstairs for those gorgeous views of the city. Chicagoans don’t consider the Willis Tower, the former headquarters of Sears with its famous Skydeck, a culinary destination.
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