Avli Winnetka

The Restaurant

Avli Winnetka opened at 566 Chestnut Street in 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.

The kitchen serves a working modern Greek menu with deliberate technique and Aegean-coast sourcing: a benchmark Greek salad, a working selection of cold mezedes (taramosalata, melitzanosalata, tzatziki, htipiti, kolokithokeftedes), a warm-mezedes programme that the kitchen treats as the room's standing credential (saganaki, dolmades, spanakopita), a grilled-meats programme run off the charcoal-fired grill (lamb kleftiko, chicken souvlaki, marinated beef and pork souvlaki, lamb chops paidakia), grilled whole branzino, octopus that the kitchen marinates and chars to order, and a working pasta-and-rice section (a saffron orzo with lobster, a working pastitsio, a moussaka the kitchen runs in cold months). Brunch on Saturday and Sunday adds a working Greek-omelette and avocado-toast programme alongside a small lamb-gyro plate that the village treats as the weekend's most reliable standing order.

The wine programme runs deliberately Greek with about a hundred Greek labels — serious Assyrtiko from Santorini, Xinomavro from Naoussa, working Agiorgitiko from Nemea, the Cretan Vidiano and the Peloponnese Roditis that the sommelier treats as the room's working price-point gateway — and a small but very serious selection of Aegean spirits (Metaxa, Skinos mastiha, Greek ouzo) that the bar treats as the room's after-dinner closing programme. The cocktail list runs Mediterranean — a working ouzo-and-citrus, a basil-and-honey sour, a working spritz programme — and the room's pace reads as the village's standing group-dinner format. For a downtown Winnetka evening that needs the room to be open enough for twelve at a single table and intimate enough for two at the front bar, Avli is the village's working answer.