What the experts recommend: Dining with Top Chef winners

Girl & the Goat Chicago

When Stephanie Izard won Bravo’s Top Chef competition in 2008, I joked that she should stay out of the restaurant business, said Phil Vettel in the Chicago Tribune. She’d been without a kitchen to call her own for more than a year. But having now eaten at her Girl & the Goat, the restaurant she opened last summer, I’m glad she didn’t heed my advice. As expected, the joint is “beyond hot”; reservations are hard to score. But Izard is “cooking up a storm, deftly balancing the savory, sweet, and tart flavors she brings to every single dish.” She has fun with the small-plates menu, offering such choices as Crispy Pig Face (a “very tasty” variation on head cheese) and Escargot and Goat Balls. The latter is not testicles—“thankfully”—but goat meatballs “bolstered with pieces of escargot and anchovy under romesco sauce.” All of Izard’s inventions are “delivered in a casual, converted-loft environment”: dangling lightbulbs, rough-hewn tables, and painted concrete floors. She calls the look “rustic with a bit of badass.” That’s an apt description for her food as well. 809 W. Randolph St., (312) 492-6262

Kin Shop New York

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Top Chef’s inaugural champ has just opened a small and charming restaurant whose Thai-based cuisine might have come from “a magical food stand somewhere in Phuket,” said Sam Sifton in The New York Times. Harold Dieterle had already met success with nearby Perilla, and this second Greenwich Village venture finds him dipping deep into “the Thai larder” to make creative use of the distinct flavors of that land. Kin Shop serves “a honking good salad” of fried pork and oysters, all kicked up by a dressing of mint, chili, lime, and peanuts. Duck seems to be a particular strong suit: Dieterle pairs a “ruby-red” breast with roti and a red-curry dipping sauce that does for duck meat what cheese does for a “transcendent” hamburger—“elevating the protein by its presence.” His new place isn’t fancy or all that ambitious, but it is a “neighborhood gem, serving heat and comfort alike, to great effect.” 469 Ave. of the Americas, (212) 675-4295

The Gorbals Los Angeles

“The Gorbals is a peculiar, very personal restaurant from a chef with a point of view,” said S. Irene Virbila in the Los Angeles Times. That chef is Ilan Hall, “best known as the kid who won the second season of Top Chef.” He’s named this “makeshift” space for the Glasgow neighborhood where his “Scottish and Israeli parents, both of Eastern European descent, grew up.” The food itself is “weird and fun and a little rough around the edges, but definitely from the heart.” Butternut-squash latkes arrive accompanied by a chestnut cream that you’re encouraged to slather on thickly. Among Hall’s signature items is the GLT, “basically a BLT with fried chicken skin, or gribenes (that’s the G), substituted for the bacon.” And, yes, the Gorbals serves haggis. “Here, it’s homemade and appears as a delicious stuffing” for chicken Balmoral—a perfect dish for “rainy weather.” Alexandria Hotel, 501 S. Spring St., (213) 488-3408