Name: Aboyer
Address: 64 Green Bay Road, Winnetka, 60093, US
Price range: $$$

The Restaurant

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.

The menu is classical brasserie with the precision that Aboyer's bigger sibling earns: French onion soup gratinated to a benchmark standard, escargots in classical persillade butter, a steak frites with house-cured pommes pailles, a Sonoma chicken roasted whole and carved tableside, a beef bourguignon that the kitchen runs as a Tuesday special when the dining room is closed and the kitchen tests through the week's specials, and a profiterole tower that has become the room's standing dessert signature. Plates are priced as a contemporary North Shore brasserie should be, the steak frites at $52, the duck confit at $42, the foie gras starter at $32, and the kitchen runs a daily prix-fixe at $65 that has become the village's standing weekday booking.

The wine list runs about a hundred and eighty references with deliberate Loire and Languedoc depth, a small but very serious old-vine California selection, and a by-the-glass programme that the bar treats as the room's working credential. Cocktails follow the same classical line, a precise martini, a French 75, a vieux carré, and the cured-meat-and-cheese board (sourced through the kitchen's Paris-based importer) reads as the bar's standing late-evening order. Aboyer is the room the village uses for the evenings that George Trois would over-program: a Friday-night first date, a birthday for six, a closing drink after a long client day at one of the law offices on Spruce Street. For a North Shore French-American kitchen run by a Bocuse d'Or alumnus at brasserie pricing, this is the address.

Primary Occasion

Why This Is Winnetka’s First Date Pick

Aboyer is the Winnetka first-date room because the format does the early-evening work the conversation cannot. The zinc-topped bar gives a first arrival a comfortable solo seat without table commitment, and the move from the bar to a booth, typically forty-five minutes into the evening, gives the room its natural turn into intimacy. The classical brasserie menu means no negotiation over what to order: the steak frites and a glass of Chinon are an unambiguous opening sequence, and the kitchen's pacing lets the conversation set the table's tempo. The Indian Hill Metra location, fifteen minutes from Chicago, makes a late-evening return easy for a city-based first date. And the Lachowicz credential, evident in every plate without ever being declared, gives the host a quiet substance the room never has to announce.