Winnetka’s Greatest Tables
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The Top 5 Winnetka Restaurants
George Trois
George Trois sits on the upper floor of a small building at 64 Green Bay Road in Winnetka's Indian Hill quarter, directly across the platform from the Indian Hill Metra stop, and reads from the outside as one might expect of a serious chef-driven restaurant in a quiet suburb: a single discreet wood door, no street signage to speak of, and a flight of stairs that opens into an eighteen-seat dining room of pale linen, dim sconces, and a stunning bone-china setting at every cover. Chef-proprietor Michael Lachowicz, a Bocuse d'Or USA alumnus and a working veteran of Paris's classical kitchens, runs the room himself, there is no front-of-house manager, no hierarchy between the kitchen pass and the dining floor, and the menu is described table-by-table by Lachowicz at the start of each service.
Aboyer
Aboyer occupies the ground floor of the same Indian Hill building that houses George Trois upstairs, and the name, pronounced ab-wah-yay, meaning 'to bark' in French kitchen slang for the expediter who calls the orders, sets the kitchen's intentional disposition. The room is lively, lit warmer than the tasting-menu floor above, and built around a long zinc-topped bar that runs the length of the front wall, with a mix of booth seating and small four-top tables across the dining area. A pavement terrace opens to Green Bay Road in the warmer months and looks across the platform of the Indian Hill Metra stop. The format is a working French-American brasserie: deliberately casual, deliberately legible, and built for the diner who wants the Lachowicz kitchen without the tasting-menu commitment of the room upstairs.
Pomeroy
Pomeroy sits a half-block off the Winnetka Metra plaza on Spruce Street, directly across from the village green, and reads as one of the more deliberate set-pieces of a Paris bistro in North America: tin ceiling, hexagonal floor tile, a long zinc bar, banquettes in cream leather, a sidewalk-cafe sliding-door front that opens to the street in warm weather, and a back garden courtyard set behind wisteria-trained walls that holds twelve covers under a string of cafe lights. Owner-operated since opening in 2022, the room was built as the village's working everyday French address, the place a downtown Winnetka local would book for a casual Tuesday dinner and a Saturday brunch on the same week.
Mino's Italian
Mino's Italian occupies a converted auto-repair garage at 985 Green Bay Road just north of Tower Road in Winnetka's Hubbard Woods quarter, and the architectural conversion, pivot windows where the garage bays opened, exposed steel trusses overhead, Carrara-marble tabletops, and a long wood-and-brass bar that runs across the front of the building, is one of the more deliberate room conversions on the North Shore. Co-owners Eric Fosse and Glenn Deutsch (the Fosse-Deutsch partnership behind several successful North Shore independents) opened Mino's as their flagship: a working upscale Italian ristorante that the village would book as a serious closing-dinner room without needing the city of Chicago. The dining room is laid out across three connected spaces, a front bar room with twelve cover-tops, a main dining hall, and a back private-dining alcove with a single fourteen-cover table, and a small patio off the side opens in warmer months.
Avli Winnetka
Avli Winnetka opened at 566 Chestnut Street in central downtown Winnetka under the Avli restaurant group, the Chicago hospitality team behind the well-regarded Avli locations in Lincoln Park, the Loop, and Old Town, and the room reads as the group's most architecturally polished outpost. White-washed Aegean-style walls, light-wood floors, exposed beam ceilings with a glass-and-iron pendant chandelier above the main hall, and a long open kitchen with a charcoal-fired grill at the back of the room. The dining floor is laid out across roughly seventy covers, a main hall, a small wine-and-cocktail front bar, and a fourteen-cover communal table at the centre of the room, with a glassed-off small private dining annex available for groups of up to twenty. The format is a working modern Greek estiatorio: deliberately shareable, grill-forward, and built around the kind of long-table evening that no other downtown Winnetka room is designed to host.