Review: The view from Miru is perfectly luxurious — and sometimes, so is the food

Much has been made about the view at Miru.

Perched on the 11th floor of the St. Regis hotel, Chicago’s newest undulating Jeanne Gang tower on the northern edge of the Loop, a pair of expansive terraces overlook the confluence of the river below and the lake beyond.

You might find it hard to focus on anything but the cinematic view.

Unless you turn within, where you’ll find a pale blue wall shimmering like a waterfall.

By day, the Tokyo breakfast will further center your focus. It’s simply stunning, and possibly my favorite plate of the year so far. It’s more of a platter, really, with a collection of small vessels, holding a perfectly charred piece of king salmon here, an onsen egg with salmon roe there, and a bowl of deeply infused ginger rice I coveted above all.

Miso soup and tiny pickles round out the traditional meal, which an interpreter in Japan once wistfully told me was a disappearing art form with her children’s generation. Paired with a pot of jasmine green tea, the breakfast felt even more precious, because it nearly didn’t exist at Miru — it was a later addition to the eggs Benedict and other American morning classics.

The price jumped from $32, a relative steal, to $44 the week after I visited. Even in a luxury hotel where rooms start around $1,000 a night, that’s a big jump. I had to ask why.

The king salmon price fluctuates quite a bit, said Kiran Pinto, managing partner at Miru, which is a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant. There was also feedback from diners, who wanted more salmon, so the portion doubled from 3 to 6 ounces.

I thought the original was a generous portion in balance with the meal. And having once worked as a chef at an Alaskan fishing lodge, I can confirm king salmon is an increasingly rare commodity.

Other elemental breakfast options ranged from a precisely sliced fruit and berries plate that was disappointingly less than ripe despite the season, and a generous pastry basket with viennoiserie that was less flaky and more bready. You might prefer a frosted cinnamon bun, with coffee brewed with beans roasted by Metropolis Coffee in the Avondale neighborhood.

The Tokyo lunch includes your choice of salmon, steak, chicken or eggplant, but swaps the egg with a salad. The lunch menu otherwise offers an edited version of the dinner menu.

By night, Miru has a completely different vibe. The serene space pulses with electronic dance music so bass-boosted that I expected fog or bubbles to start streaming from the ceiling at any moment. The service, however, remained remarkably composed throughout the restaurant, inside and out.

In the kitchen, chef and partner Hisanobu Osaka, previously executive chef at Japonais by Morimoto, oversees the savory side. Fellow chef and partner Naoki Nakashima, last at his namesake sushi restaurant Naoki with Lettuce, quietly commands the intimate sushi counter under the blue wall.

Pastry chef Juan Gutierrez, winner of the Netflix reality competition series “School of Chocolate,” leads the teams behind desserts and morning pastries. And beverage director Diane Corcoran, previously at Three Dots and a Dash, created the Japanese-inspired cocktail menu, along with classic and nonalcoholic drinks.

It’s a deep pool of talent, represented well by the front of the house. Yet my knowledgeable server, who had thoughtfully suggested the bluefin and shiso present on nearly every table, didn’t know the sourcing of the ethically complicated fish.

By the time she returned with an answer, which they believed was Spain, the dish had sold out. Clearly few others had questioned the provenance of the overfished — although technically not endangered — tuna. Pinto told me back in May when the restaurant opened that they would serve Atlantic bluefin from the Spanish company Balfegó, but things can change. She later confirmed it has remained the source.

That bluefin also tops crispy rice, but I opted for the king crab version instead, which crowns a glorious golden trio of chunky bites with the sweet crustacean, gochujang aioli and wasabi tobiko. Hamachi ponzu, a signature maki with eight slices of pretty pink fish draped over rice rolled around avocado and cucumber, gets a final finish of radiant yuzu ponzu jelly.

Duck yakisoba and wild mushroom sizzling rice are both served in searing hot pots, similar to Chinese claypot and Korean dolsot, resulting in crispy bits so irresistible I kept burning my mouth — with no one but myself to blame.

The Shiso Fancy cocktail provided relief, with refreshing Rihei ginger shochu, Roku gin and Lyre’s Classico, the latter a nonalcoholic sparkling drink that added complexity, but no more alcohol, to the fine Japanese spirits.

As such, the fully nonalcoholic variation of the cocktail, Shiso Fancy-ish, seemed so promising, but somehow turned out unbearably sweet.

On the savory side, a breathtaking spinach ohitashi with sesame aioli and elegant robata grilled shichimi eggplant were so salty that I wondered if they were better suited for a fancy izakaya as kawaii cute drinking food.

At the last table on the terrace on an idyllic summer night, the chocolate silk tarte arrived with a chocolate caramel sauce poured tableside, but the matcha ice cream had almost completely melted.

The service was welcoming and present, but the timing seemed surprisingly off in three visits for breakfast, lunch and dinner over two days, most evident in the puddle of ice cream.

There is no time limit imposed on tables though, as many restaurants do — a lingering practice from the pandemic. So was it perhaps an intentionally leisurely pace meant to mimic a billionaire St. Regis resident’s lifestyle?

“Definitely not,” Pinto said, when we spoke later.

“Our goal in any restaurant, whether it’s extraordinarily casual or ultra-fine dining, is how the guests feel when they leave,” Pinto said. “And if you’re questioning something that happens at the table and the service that you received and whether or not it was intentional, then the focus has been removed from the experience.”

Part of my experience came before I arrived, studying the long dinner menu like a uni student cramming for an exam. There are 13 sections on the dinner menu alone, currently 72 items total, and that’s not including the dessert and cocktail menus, or the wine and sake lists. It seems editing is needed — and a Tokyo dinner set, too!

But the exquisite black sesame mochi dessert has to stay, with its dramatic yet delicate black sesame praline and charcoal vanilla ice cream. Admittedly, I would borrow a bit of acidity, perhaps from the calamansi crème brûlée citrus gelee.

I’m still not sure why the restaurant at a luxury hotel in Chicago is Japanese-inspired. That’s a culinary existential question that doesn’t have a real answer, except that the cuisine has largely replaced French for a certain kind of traveler right now.

But when I worked at a Michelin three-star French restaurant in Paris, some of the wealthiest guests ordered off-the-menu chicken nuggets and pizza for room service. Incidentally, at the only St. Regis hotel in Japan, they have Italian, French and a seasonal teppanyaki restaurant. Here, chef Evan Funke’s Italian steakhouse Tre Dita is expected to open on the second floor later this year.

By day, I left Miru in a blissful state, buoyed by the transportive Tokyo breakfast platter, served with hospitality that gave a priceless sense of place — a place with stunning views, and true luxury, if you know where to look.

Miru

401 E. Wacker Drive (The St. Regis Chicago hotel), 11th floor

312-725-7811

mirurestaurant.com

Open: Daily from 7 a.m., Sunday to Thursday until 9:30 p.m.; Friday and Saturday until 10:30 p.m.

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Prices: Breakfast mains, $19-$44; lunch mains $22-$44; dinner mains $22-$69

Noise: Conversation-friendly by day; conversation-challenged, but electronic dance music friendly by night

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible by elevator to 11th floor, with restrooms on same level

Tribune rating: Very good to excellent, 2½ stars, by day. Good to very good, 1½ stars, by night.

Ratings key: Four stars, outstanding; three stars, excellent; two stars, very good; one star, good; no stars, unsatisfactory. Meals are paid for by the Tribune.

lchu@chicagotribune.com

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