The Best Lunch in Ogilvie Is Also One of the Best BBQ Spots in the West Loop
Soul and Smoke's counter inside Accenture Tower is a commuter lunch destination that happens to serve prime brisket and cornbread worth going out of your way for.
Chef D'Andre Carter grew up eating his grandmother's Sunday dinners on Chicago's South Side. He went on to work at Moto, one of the city's most technically ambitious fine-dining restaurants, where he met his business partner Heather Bublick. The combination of those two things, South Side comfort food and experimental fine-dining technique, is the clearest way to understand what Soul and Smoke is doing and why it works as well as it does.
Carter and Bublick started with pop-ups and catering in 2012, pivoted to takeout during the pandemic, and opened their Evanston flagship in 2020. That location is the center of the company's community work. Soul and Smoke has provided roughly 250,000 meals through partnerships including World Central Kitchen, and the Evanston space maintains a 24-hour community refrigerator. The West Loop counter came later, planted inside Accenture Tower at Ogilvie Transportation Center, and operates with a different purpose than the Avondale or Evanston locations. This one is built for the lunch hour.
The food is the same food. That matters because the food is very good. The brisket is prime, with a visible smoke ring and a tenderness that reflects the time it took to get there. The pulled pork runs just behind it and will not disappoint. Allen orders the smoked sausage every single time across every location and has not changed his position. The Kansas City-style house sauces are thick, not too sweet, and well made. One with more heat would not go unappreciated, but that preference is heavily influenced by having a Thai mother.
The sides hold up in a counter-service lunch context better than you might expect. The mac and cheese has real flavor. The collard greens are smoky and correct. The apple coleslaw brings sweetness and crunch that works particularly well in a sandwich. The cornbread is the thing to add regardless of what else you order. Sweet and moist, closer to corn cake than cornbread, with compound honey butter that makes it one of the better versions in the city. It travels well, which in a commuter lunch situation is a useful quality.
The West Loop counter is not a destination dining room. It is a very good lunch option in a building full of people who need one, and it is significantly better than what that description usually implies. If your office is nearby or you are passing through Ogilvie, this is the answer to the question of where to eat. Come hungry, grab a table if one opens up, and let the brisket remind you that counter service and quality are not mutually exclusive. For the full Soul and Smoke experience, the river views, the patio, the dining room, the Avondale location is the one to visit.
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