The Restaurant
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.
The format is a single nine-to-twelve course tasting menu that rewrites itself every two to three weeks across the seasons. Cooking is contemporary French in the most precise sense of that label: technique-forward, classically grounded, and avant-garde without theatrical posturing. Recent courses have included a hand-rolled chestnut agnolotti with consommé of Bresse hen and shaved white Alba truffle, a Maine diver scallop crudo dressed with elderflower-and-Champagne foam, a turbot roasted on the bone with a Riesling beurre blanc and a quenelle of caviar, a Sonoma duck cooked à la presse and finished tableside, and a textbook Grand Marnier soufflé that the kitchen still serves under glass cloches. The wine programme runs to about four hundred references with deliberate depth in Burgundy and the Loire, and the sommelier-led pairing flight has been the principal reason regional food critics consistently rate the restaurant ahead of any other suburban-Chicago address.
The room operates as a single seating per evening — Wednesday through Saturday — and the eighteen-cover ceiling means service is conducted at near-private-dining pace: water captains visible every six minutes, no plate cleared without a guest's confirmation, no course paced shorter than seventeen minutes. Lachowicz earned the 2019 Jean Banchet Restaurant of the Year for precisely this discipline, and the room has held the same operating standard through two ownership iterations. George Trois is not a Chicago restaurant that happens to be in Winnetka — it is the avant-garde French address that earns Winnetka's reputation as a serious dining village, and it is the table the North Shore books for the evenings that need the city to be left behind entirely.
Why This Is Winnetka’s Impress Clients Pick
George Trois is the Winnetka impress-clients address because the eighteen-cover ceiling does the credential the menu cannot. The single-seating-per-evening discipline means no rotating dining-room churn at any point in the meal — the client sees the host's care reflected in the room's stillness, and the tasting-menu structure removes all ordering negotiation. Lachowicz's tableside narration of each course converts a transactional dinner into a documented evening, and the by-name producer relationships that he describes (the Sonoma duck farmer, the Alba truffle dealer, the single Sancerre vigneron whose Chenin Blanc opens the pairing flight) read as the kind of taste that is impossible to manufacture in a downtown Chicago hotel room. The Indian Hill Metra address — fifteen minutes from Chicago Union Station — makes the post-meeting return trip frictionless. And the Jean Banchet credential, quietly displayed on the menu rather than promoted from the door, reads as exactly the kind of taste a senior client will notice without the host needing to declare it.
Leave a Review
Registered members get published by default; guest reviews are moderated first.