The Grand Lux Cafe: Convenient Culinary Tourism

Meredith Ashton

Restaurant Review Part III

3 November 2016

The Grand Lux Café: Convenient Culinary Tourism

I expected the Grand Lux Café to blow me away with decadence. The very name bespoke lavish luxury, and the familiar-yet-foreign menu items promised an exhilarating exercise in culinary tourism. The Lux met my expectations for grandeur. All that the menu boasted arrived in even larger portion sizes than the online pictures, and the vast majority of the dishes tasted as good as they looked.

I initially questioned whether the Grand Lux could pull off their international, globe-trotting theme. How could a restaurant offering quite literally everything have a personalized atmosphere? I was pleasantly surprised to discover that after being in the grand dining room and chiseling away at the mighty appetizers, the restaurant did have its own ambiance. It was a large and noisy venue and the menu items were a bit scattered. However, the large windows overlooking the cityscape and the diversity of interesting entrees made for a dining experience unique to the Lux.

While I found the Lux to have a specific ambiance, I would not describe it as global cuisine. At first, I was skeptical that a single restaurant could truly offer the flavors of the world. The Grand Lux is a shining example of Long’s “familiar to exotic continuum” in the work Culinary Tourism. The restaurant offers a true food tourism experience, and the most prominent national flavor of all, surprisingly, is that of “traditional” American cuisine. Guests can sample “exotic” ingredients and dishes such as miso and kogi-style marinated short rib under the familiar structure of more traditional American cuisine such as burgers and ribs and salmon. For example, the Lux took an “exotic” ingredient such as miso and, in the case of my dinner, used it as a glaze for a salmon, a fish that many Americans consider edible and delicious.

The restaurant presents a very convenient type of tourism, the kind where American tourists can casually consume the cuisine of other countries while traipsing about the Midwestern city of Chicago. By striving to present “seductive flavor profiles” from around the globe, as the menu suggests, the Grand Lux does not succeed in authentically presenting any culture, aside from that of American culinary tourism.

After this assignment, I have definitely become more aware of my tourist’s gaze and the role that it plays in how I interact with my world and my food. In fact, I realized  that while at the Lux, I chose my dishes in regards to what would be “the most different.” I wanted to consume a truly radical experience apart from the everyday.

This is also a reason why guests attend restaurants: an exotic escape. As escaping from culinary tourism is nearly impossible, I think it’s important that if I am engaging in it, I do it with full awareness and intentionality. I visited the Grand Lux with the understanding that I was undertaking a global taste-test, but also that this “test” was primarily an American construct. Coincidentally, this construct happened to make for a pretty delicious dinner.