Fried Green Tomatoes

The Restaurant

Fried Green Tomatoes occupies an 1840s brick-fronted commercial building at 213 North Main Street — the historic core of Galena's nineteenth-century lead-and-river boom and the oldest continuously trading commercial block in Jo Daviess County. The restaurant has held the seat since 1995 and has continuously carried a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence every year since 2003 — the longest-standing Wine Spectator credential in the entire Driftless region of Illinois, Wisconsin and Iowa. The dining room seats about a hundred across three connected first-floor parlors, each with the original brick walls, the period millwork preserved, and a window line that looks out onto Main Street's pedestrian stretch.

The kitchen serves a steaks-seafood-and-pasta menu deliberately weighted toward Italian-American technique — the room owes its name as much to the green-tomato appetizer on the opening menu as to the 1991 film. Signature plates include the bone-in dry-aged ribeye, the fresh-shucked sea scallops in a Marsala cream over angel hair, the homemade lasagna that has held its place on the menu since opening, the veal piccata with capers and lemon butter, and a daily fish-of-the-day board that the kitchen walks to each table. The pasta is made in-house, the bread is baked daily, and the dessert programme — the tiramisu in particular — closes a Main Street evening with proper Italian-American restraint.

The wine list is the room's other credential. Fried Green Tomatoes runs about three hundred labels with deliberate Italian, California and Pacific-Northwest depth — the Tuscan and Piedmont vertical runs are the strongest in town — and the captain-led service narrates the by-the-glass programme without overselling it. The historic Main Street geography is the room's standing setting: an evening at the window line, with the period-restored streetlamps lighting the brickwork and the slow weekend pedestrian traffic, is the photograph the room has carried since the mid-nineties. For a Galena evening that wants Main Street geography and serious wine at the same address, Fried Green Tomatoes is the room every local recommends to a visiting friend.