The Restaurant
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.
The kitchen serves a classical bistro menu with North Shore-appropriate restraint: a French onion soup gratinated under a thick Gruyère cap, escargots in Pernod-and-garlic butter, a perfect croque madame at brunch, a steak au poivre with green peppercorn cream and frites, a beef bourguignon that the kitchen runs as a standing Tuesday-night special, a bouillabaisse with rouille and grilled baguette, a foie gras starter on toasted brioche, a filet mignon with sauce béarnaise, a trout amandine, and a profiterole-and-chocolate-sauce dessert that the room treats as its closing-act standard. Weekend brunch — eggs Benedict, omelette aux fines herbes, steak-and-eggs, a working pâtisserie selection of canelés and madeleines — fills the room's first wave of reservations and is the only Winnetka brunch room with a back-garden courtyard that the village's senior families consistently book for Mother's Day.
The wine list runs about one hundred and fifty references — heavily Old World French, with deliberate Loire, Beaujolais, and Côtes du Rhône depth and a small Pacific Northwest pinot section that the sommelier treats as a working price-point gateway — and the bar program runs the classical Parisian cocktails (Sazerac, French 75, Sidecar, Vieux Carré, Boulevardier) at a working pace. Service is warm, French-trained, and unhurried: the captains address regulars by name, the bread service is house-baked, and the courtyard becomes a small village in the summer evenings. For a downtown Winnetka French bistro that reads as a working room rather than a tourist set-piece, Pomeroy is the answer.
Why This Is Winnetka’s Birthday Pick
Pomeroy is the Winnetka birthday room because the back-garden courtyard does the celebratory work the menu cannot. The twelve-cover terrace, set behind the dining room and lit by overhead string lights, reads as both private (the dining room is invisible from the courtyard) and festive (the wisteria-trained walls and tile floor catch the light). The classical bistro menu means no group will struggle to order — steak frites, bouillabaisse, croque madame, and the standing profiterole tower at the end of the table cover every preference at a six-or-eight-person birthday. The Spruce Street location is walkable from the Winnetka Metra and most of the village's senior families' homes. And the room's working everyday register — not a destination set-piece but a real bistro the village uses on Tuesday nights as readily as Saturday — keeps the birthday from reading as an event the host overproduced.
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