Crying Tiger: River North's Bold New Southeast Asian Star

The room and what came before it

Crying Tiger occupies the former Hub 51 space on Hubbard Street, a room that spent more than a decade as one of River North's highest-volume see-and-be-seen restaurants. That history matters, because the address comes with expectations: big parties, a loud bar, and a kitchen that has to fire hundreds of covers without losing its temper.

The redesign leans warm rather than clubby — wood, low light, and a bar that anchors the room instead of dominating it. It still seats a crowd. The difference is that the food is now the reason to be there.

Chef Thai Dang's case

Thai Dang built his Chicago reputation at HaiSous in Pilsen, where he cooked Vietnamese food with a precision that earned James Beard finalist recognition and a devoted following that drove across the city for it. The move to a Lettuce Entertain You partnership is a scale change, not a compromise — Dang is cooking his own food in a room with a much bigger engine behind it.

The menu reads across Southeast Asia rather than staying inside one national cuisine, which is a choice with risk. Done badly it becomes a greatest-hits pan-Asian menu. Done the way it is here, it reads as a chef with regional fluency pulling dishes he actually wants to cook.

What to order

Bo la lot — beef wrapped in wild betel leaf and grilled until the leaf chars — is the dish to start with, and the clearest expression of what the kitchen does well: smoke, fat, and herbs in balance.

The clay pot lobster pad Thai is the room's centerpiece order, built for a table of four and priced accordingly. The Thai-tea milk punch is the bar's calling card and worth ordering even if you are a beer drinker; clarified milk punch holds up over a long meal in a way a shaken cocktail does not.

• Bo la lot — grilled betel-leaf-wrapped beef, the best value on the menu
• Clay pot lobster pad Thai — the shareable centerpiece
• Thai-tea milk punch — the drink the bar is built around
• Grilled skewers — the fastest read on how the kitchen handles fire

Planning your visit

River North on a Friday is a logistics problem. Street parking is effectively nonexistent, garages near Hubbard and Clark run steep on weekend nights, and the Brown and Purple Line at Merchandise Mart plus the Red Line at Grand are both a short walk away. Take the train.

Reservations move quickly for prime weekend slots, but the bar takes walk-ins and is a legitimate place to eat a full meal rather than a holding pen. Early-week dinners are the best version of the room if you want to actually hear your table.

Groups of six or more should call rather than book online; the clay pot dishes and the whole-fish preparations are built for that table size and are worth planning around.

Where it fits in the Chicago dining year

Chicago has had a strong run of Southeast Asian openings, and the city's Vietnamese and Thai restaurant traditions — on Argyle Street, in Uptown, along Broadway — long predate any downtown version of them. Crying Tiger is not the origin of that cooking in Chicago and does not pretend to be.

What it does is put a serious version of it on a tourist-heavy corner at a price point that funds ambitious sourcing. For visitors, it is the rare River North big-room restaurant worth the trip. For locals, it is a reason to go back to a block most of us wrote off years ago — and a good excuse to also eat your way up Argyle the following weekend.