Winnetka’s Greatest Tables
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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 the heart of 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.