Ordinarily, I’d start this review by telling you about an out-of-the-way gem serving up Asian flavors born of the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, where proprietress Lona Luo was born.
Lona’s Lil Eats, however, is anything but hidden, having been voted last year’s Best New Restaurant by this magazine’s readers. That means an occasional line snaking out the front door. Ordering is slightly convoluted. You pick a conveyance—flour wrap, rice paper wrap, or plate—and then one of four animal proteins or tofu. Next you pick a “staple”: rice, noodles, or a garden vegetable mix. Finally, you select a sauce as lyrical as the names for the area from which the menu derives: Xishuangbanna in Chinese and Sipsongpanna in Thai—the equivalent of onomatopoeia in terms of flavors.
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Oh, and then you have a choice of seven side dishes. If there’s much of a line, you can’t help but feel like an obstacle while calculating the various permutations. (Hint: Just go for the 5 Star Sampler Platter, which obviates the need to pick a protein by giving you all five.)
The giant rice paper wrap is a signature dish, so we felt compelled to try it. B. Kliban’s famous cartoon “Never Eat Anything Larger Than Your Head” came to mind. We had the wrap stuffed with turkey and stir-fried whole-grain rice. The lime-ginger peanut sauce seemed like a worthy complement, and the ginger added an effervescent note to the citrus and roasted nuttiness.
Simple plates are somewhat of a copout, but the spicy sesame sauce again made the fixins light up with fire, the nutty flavor of sesame, and a variety of unusual flavors from herbs and spices that Luo imports from her ancestral village. Unusual vinegar-and-spice combos complement various pickled items, including the bamboo shoots that enliven the stewed greens in the village bamboo stew side dish.
The pungency extends to the dipping sauces offered with the starter plates. The dumplings could probably do with no sauce at all, owing to the smokiness and another dose of pickles. But the tangy dipping sauce is topped with slicks of chili oil, adding another dimension to an already multilayered flavor.
We kept seeing fresh salmon on Lona’s Twitter feed. It’s offered as a catch-as-catch-can, alternative protein. Alas, our visits didn’t intersect with that availability. Smoked ribs are also an occasional special.
And to drink, consider ordering one of a half-dozen fountain sodas from cane sugar brewer Excel of Breese, Illinois.
Maybe Lona’s isn’t a li’l secret anymore—but if you haven’t yet discovered it for yourself, it’s time to make your taste buds say Xishuangbanna and Sipsongpanna.
