March 21–28, 2002
food
Raising the Bar
Simultaneously elegant and hip, the Swann Lounge is not your average watering hole.
Swann Lounge & Café
Four Seasons Hotel,
1 Logan Square,
215-963-1500.
Open 11:30 a.m.-
1 a.m.; lunch, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; dinner, 2:30-11 p.m.
Wheelchair accessible. Lunch reservations
suggested; no dinner reservations. All major credit cards.
![\"image\"](\"pics/big/fd.swan.jpg.shtml\") |
![\"\"](\"/images/spacer.gif\"){kind=spacer} | ||||
|
ARCHIVES .
March 21–28, 2002 food Raising the BarSimultaneously elegant and hip, the Swann Lounge is not your average watering hole. Swann Lounge & Café Four Seasons Hotel, Wheelchair accessible. Lunch reservations
No place hums with this feeling as much as the Swann Lounge in the Four Seasons Hotel. The decor is a great part of the picture, where lamplight glows on paneled walls and coffered ceilings, and on the exquisitely patterned marble floors, where exotic flower arrangements are echoed in the botanical prints along the walls. With its view of the Swann Fountain, the lounge feels as if it could be in one of the capitals of Europe. The bar is always busy with visiting businessmen or the local office crowd, but it still has a foreign kind of charm, where strangers can meet and adjourn to the lounge behind the Coromandel screens to dine, leaving behind "a cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces." One of the nicest things about the Swann Lounge is that you can have anything you want there, lunch or dinner, or just a drink or a late-night snack, or the esteemed Sunday brunch. We chose to have dinner, which is slightly less expensive than the Fountain Restaurant glimpsed through the beveled-glass panes of the doors that separate the rooms. Martin Hamann is the chef, succeeding Jean-Marie Lacroix, and Francesco Bellofiore, that evening’s assistant manager, was everywhere at once, attending to your every need. We are deep in conversation (oh yes, you can hear your companions easily) and decide to go three ways with our meal: One of us will just eat appetizers, one will eat à la carte, and one will have the $55 prix-fixe menu, which seems left over from Valentine’s Day. The Swann offers 15 wines by the glass and some very chic cocktails, but we decide to try to find a reasonable bottle of wine on the notoriously overpriced wine list. Aided by the able sommelier, we order a bottle of Santa Julia from Argentina, a white wine with great floral and aromatic notes ($35), and start our meal. The Swann salad ($9.75) is a fine example of how everything is done here (and, of course, at the Fountain). At first, it just seems to be a heap of Bibb lettuce glossed with a creamy vinaigrette, but as you eat, you find slivers of fennel, pea shoots and baby cress. In short, it is simple in appearance, but full of flavorful surprises. A selection of the breads, particularly a seven-grain loaf and an olive roll, are de rigueur. From the à la carte menu, there is a delicate ragoût of forest mushrooms and asparagus tips ($10), earthy and delicious. For starters on the prix fixe, on a white oval platter, a rosy slice of tuna carpaccio reclines beside a canapé spread with tapenade and a seductive oyster tartare topped with Osetra caviar. Immediately following this is a deep bowl of creamy lobster bisque, perhaps more cream than essence, but lovely nonetheless, with big chunks of lobster in its pinkish depths. Another appetizer, the salad with bay scallop, shrimp and crab meat, is an old favorite here ($17), but tonight the creamy dressing is a trifle bland, even though the big chunks of seafood have a flavor all their own. Much better are the mussels in a bright-yellow sauce of coconut milk, tinged with curry and lemon grass ($14). For the entree, we need a wine with a bit more substance — a Macon-Villages ($45) — that is perfect with the prix-fixe fillet of striped bass topped off with crab meat and bedded on haricots verts. Again, a seemingly simple dish with lots of substance. I must have the daily special, "real fish and chips" (at $19.50, a little higher than on the streets of London), and it is quite real. At least four juicy fillets of cod done in a lager batter that makes them appear to be golden puffs, with a spicy tartar sauce and a huge order of crisp chips with malt vinegar on the side. Not only do I enjoy it, but my companions do as well. We decide that ordering à la carte or from the prix fixe is the best deal. The man with three appetizers longs for more, although the portions are more generous than they used to be. The prix-fixe menu features a molten chocolate cake with ice cream for dessert, and it is well received, but we want to try some desserts from the Fountain menu. The chocolate souffle ($12.50) is airy, but dense at its core, and the entire top of it has "fountain" written in gold leaf — very impressive. The apple pie ($9.50) is like Mom’s, if your mom is French. It contains many layers of paper-thin sliced apples in a crust that is as flaky as puff pastry. It too comes with cinnamon ice cream on the side. With glasses of Fonseca Port, we survey the scene around us. People are now dancing to the live music that began at 10. An extensive dessert buffet has been set up for those who only came in for dancing and something sweet in these elegant surroundings. A table near us looks as if they’ve come from a prom. Ah me, high school was never like this. 
ADVERTISEMENT
|
