In July chef Chris Pandel (the Bristol, Balena) told Chicago magazine of the Boka Restaurant Group steak house he’ll helm come October: “We don’t want to change the steak house. We want to elevate it.” So far, though, the place has been defined by change. Originally the restaurant was going to be called Armour & Swift, a name meant to honor Chicago’s meatpacking legacy, but Armour, which is still an active brand of meat, threatened to file suit. The “Swift” part was apparently fair game, so the group settled on Swift & Sons instead. (As Michael Gebert pointed in an August blog post, Boka has had to change a name once before: Stephanie Izard’s Drunken Goat, which shared a name with a Spanish brand of cheese, became the Girl & the Goat.) The presumably pricey spot has a built-in high-end clientele—it’s opening in the Google headquarters in the West Loop.
Expected to open in October. 1000 W. Fulton Market