Sixty Dollars for This Tasting Menu Feels Like a Mistake.

Chef Sujan Sarkar runs Indienne, Chicago's only Michelin-starred Indian restaurant. Nadu is what he wanted to build when he wanted something more vibey, less stuffy, and closer to the feeling of eating at home. It recently picked up a Michelin Bib Gourmand. This surprised no one who has eaten there.

The room is modern, minimal, and clean. The bar anchors one side of the space and the cocktails coming off it are worth your attention. The centerpiece of the room is an eleven-by-ten-foot original oil painting called "The Chicago Durbar" by Abhay Sehgal. Classical Indian imagery filtered through a modern Chicago lens. It is genuinely beautiful and the kind of thing you find yourself looking at between bites without fully realizing you've done it.

There is an à la carte menu, but the $60 prix fixe tasting menu is the move and it borders on unreasonable value for what you get. Everyone at the table has to commit to it if you go that route, which is not a difficult sell once you've seen what's coming. It starts with papad and chutneys — Indian chips and salsa is the shorthand and it is accurate — and rasam, a lentil soup that is peppery and deep and wakes your palate up in a way that makes everything that follows land harder. The rasam alone was one of my favorite things I ate that night.