Amira

Vegans happen. And when my friend decided to get engaged to one, a vegan happened to me. Thinking a Mediterranean restaurant might be able to accommodate John the vegan—who (as if he weren’t committing enough culinary crimes already) doesn’t drink, either—we headed to Amira.

Eating with vegans can be stressful for a restaurant critic—it’s hard to watch a perfectly good palate go to waste—but eating with people who don’t drink just means that there’s more wine for the rest of us. But ordering wine at Amira was no easy task. When we asked for a list, we were told there wasn’t one—they hadn’t been printed yet. Seeing the fear in my eyes, our server quickly assured us that there was wine—we’d just have to tell her what we wanted and she’d get it for us.

What I wanted were options, but after five minutes of questions (“What’s the focus of the wine list? Can I look at some bottles at the bar?”), it was clear that wasn’t going to happen. Sensing my frustration, the server opened a bottle of pinot grigio and poured me a generous taste. It smelled like flowers and tasted like cool, tart melon, and as I tasted it, my anxiousness faded.

But soon, we hit another roadblock. John told our server he was a vegan, and she immediately started rattling off a number of things off the menu he could eat: “We’ve got salmon, we’ve got tilapia….” When we told her fish was out of the question, her eyes widened and she pursed her lips. “Oh.”

Luckily, Amira had a way of suavely solving this problem, too. Our server headed into the kitchen (at 7pm on a Friday, mind you), grabbed the chef and dragged him to our table. While watching the chef work with John to figure out a vegan dish, my chilly first impression of Amira started to warm. Of course, I was also halfway into our second bottle of pinot grigio by then; our server had brought us another bottle on the house, to apologize for not having a wine list.

The food at Amira is the kind that requires no thought whatsoever; most of it is neither good enough to make you sit up and take notice, nor bad enough to spit it out. Amira leans toward Italian but calls itself simply “Mediterranean,” which gives it the leeway to put Middle Eastern touches here and there. A crab cake, for example, arrives topped with oven-dried tomatoes and kalamata olives, an interesting idea that probably would have been an equally interesting flavor if the pale-orange rémoulade hadn’t overpowered it. Making my way through the mezze plate, I found myself eating the baba ghanoush mindlessly—had it been nice and smoky, it probably would have jolted my taste buds awake. As it turned out, I had to leave that to the hummus, which caught my attention with its bright flavors of garlic. I took notice of the tabouli, too—mainly how mushy it was.

Gnocchi was clearly house-made, but had been overworked and was slightly chewy when it should have been soft and ethereal. Steak, a top sirloin with an irresistible description on the menu involving pancetta, green-peppercorn cream and crispy shallots, was perfectly fine, though not nearly as exciting as the menu made it out to be. But then there was John’s vegan pizza, topped with marinara and a pile of roasted vegetables. To a cheese-loving meat eater like me, it wasn’t anything special (though the crust was nice and crisp); John, on the other hand, was in heaven, not only because of the pizza’s flavor, but because it was the first time in his 15 years of being a vegan that a restaurant had gone so far out of its way for him. That’s the paradox of Amira: It’s hard to love a restaurant whose food is merely fine. But trying not to love it when it cares so much about its customers is even harder.

455 N Cityfront Plaza between Water and Illinois Sts (312-923-9311). El: Red to Grand. Bus: 2, 3, 4 (24 hrs), X4, 10, 26, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 151 (24 hrs), 157. Average main course: $14.