Ryan McCaskey and his team at Acadia

The good news for Ryan McCaskey is that his restaurant, Acadia, a fine dining pioneer on the near south side, still gets publicity after 20 months in business. He just has to be philosophical about what kind of publicity it is.

“During Baconfest, I walked down the street and someone yelled, ‘Hey, you’re the burger guy!'” McCaskey says.

Acadia came out of the box as a fine dining restaurant—it landed on the cover of Chicago magazine’s issue featuring the Best New Restaurants of 2012 and earned a Michelin star in its first year. Yet because Acadia was opening in a neighborhood that not only had no fine dining restaurant, but was fairly thin on restaurants at all, McCaskey felt he needed to be both a high-end destination and a neighborhood place where locals could come once or twice a week. And so dishes like the burger or the Maine lobster roll served in the bar tend to turn up on lists of the best in town, stealing the spotlight from his higher-end cuisine.