Review: Bloom Plant Based Kitchen is firmly rooted in Wicker Park — and you’ll never miss the meat

Chicago has long been a carnivorous restaurant city, from our historic hot dog stands to barbecue rib tip joints to steakhouses old and new.

But Bloom Plant Based Kitchen in Wicker Park has firmly taken root in spite of that, fighting for our future by showing us that we won’t miss the meat when the food proves stunning.

Chef and owner Rodolfo Cuadros opened the restaurant in 2021. Michelin has since awarded Bloom a Bib Gourmand, while the James Beard Foundation named Cuadros a Best Chef semifinalist in the Great Lakes region in 2022. The accolades are well-deserved for dishes so striking that on one recent night, someone shouted, “Look at this — it’s art!”

I don’t know what our excitable fellow diner had, but he was undoubtedly right. Each dish is a marvel, even what’s become the gateway plant-based dish for avowed carnivores: Buffalo cauliflower.

“That’s kind of exactly why we made that dish,” Cuadros said. “Because we’re trying to introduce more and more people to this food. We thought, ‘What’s the safest option that we can give people? And then, ‘How can we turn it into something memorable?’”

At Bloom, golden nuggets fried hard hold their crackling crunch under a fiery housemade habanero hot sauce, finished with feathery bits of fried garlic. Instead of just breading and frying the cauliflower, Cuadros pickles it first, adding complex flavor with his chefs’ labor.

“Besides acidity, we add a lot of herbs and spices,” said the chef, plus a little bit of nutritional yeast to get umami into the vegetable. “Because we don’t use egg or egg substitutes, we make like a backward tempura. We do flour, batter, flour, then fry,” Cudaros added. That extra final flour dredge gives each bite a remarkably crunchy texture throughout.

It was by far the best Buffalo cauliflower of the ubiquitous florets I’ve tried — and he just took it off the menu.

“We’re just going through a big menu change,” Cuadros said. “Our customers now compared to when we opened are growing with us when it comes to plant-based food. It’s a little bit more advanced than where we started.”

Margo’s Flat Bread will remain though, with a brilliant mala arrabbiata sauce (its subtly numbing heat from Sichuan peppercorns) topped by beautiful tangles of blackened broccolini and fat dollops of ricotta-like requesón, made in-house, as is all the dairy-free cheese. The head-turning Margherita-inspired pizza is an exquisitely absurd achievement for a plant-based restaurant, which is also gluten-free.

That means we don’t find seitan, or Impossible- or Beyond-brand meat alternatives, or store-bought dairy-free cheese for that matter, all by the chef’s deliberate choice.

“We make a cashew requesón, a South American style of cheese meant to be salty and a little bit astringent,” he said. They also make their own chile oil. “It’s a simple flatbread that takes a lot of work, but it’s really fun.”

Most of what you’ll find placed before you at Bloom is far from simple.

Yucca gnocchi hints at the restaurant’s origin story. Plump dumplings are toasted crisp on the outside, served on a silky bed of celery root purée, laced with aromatic mushroom sofrito, and garnished with shaved cashew pecorino.

“It’s actually based off of the first dish I ever made for my wife’s vegan family,” Cuadros said. The couple met in Miami, where Cuadros worked at a hotel restaurant in the early 2000s.

That’s when he started working on plant-based dishes with his own culinary traditions.

“The yucca gnocchi was a way that I could mix in my heritage,” said the chef, who’s Colombian and grew up between California and New York. “For me growing up, fried yucca was a staple food.”

He has transformed the staple into lovely bites with buttery flavors, on a menu that’s intentionally priced.

“We didn’t want to put ourselves out of reach from the brown and Black communities that I come from because of price,” Cuadros said. In line with that ethos, a 20% discount during happy hour is among the restaurant’s big recent changes.

Bloom began as a means for the chef and his employees to survive financially, an early pandemic pop-up out of the kitchen of his first restaurant Amaru around the corner, which is omnivorous. Together, the two restaurants reflect his own practice at home.

“We do plant-based four days a week, Monday through Thursday,” said the chef, who also just opened vegan Don Bucio’s Taqueria in Logan Square two months ago. His wife, Monique Cuadros, teaches special education at Galileo Scholastic Academy, a public elementary magnet school in Little Italy. They have two daughters, 7 and 9 years old. “My wife and I are responding to the world that’s changing,” he said. “So hopefully when our kids have to adapt to a new world, they’ll be more ready to go fully plant-based, or whatever it is.”

Meanwhile, Bloom has been busy during my visits for brunch on a cold Sunday, dinner on a rainy weekday and happy hour on the first summery day this year, with the front windows flung wide open.

Spring dumplings had me wishing our excitable art-loving diner was back so I could rush over to show him my plate. The breathtaking dish could be mistaken for Japanese sakura wagashi, the cherry blossom confections in pink and pale green. At Bloom, what appears to be a leaf is actually handmade pasta made with spring garlic and young coconut, then wrapped around a tender filling of kimchi carrots and fresh peas, finished with a vivid beet and mustard foam.

The delicate and daring dumplings are a startling evolution in not just plant-based cuisine; they rival any expensive wagyu or foie gras tasting menu dish. So much handmade work goes into the food at Bloom, it feels ancient and futuristic all at once.

Pastry chef Veronica Manolizi consults on the dessert menu, but Cuadros came up with the hazelnut pot de crème tart. A dramatically long and slender slice with an almond coconut crust is filled by a cashew dulce de leche that tugs intensely, its texture like impeccable chocolate ganache.

The Purple Pisco cocktail, by director of operations Brett Lander, shakes the namesake pisco spirit with crème de violette liqueur, housemade lavender bitters and lemon, but substitutes the classic froth from egg whites by whipping Versawhip and xanthan gum with an immersion blender. As a former consulting chef who specialized in whips and foams, I can tell you that along with receiving my technical approval, it’s a delightful drink, as refreshing as an elegant lemonade in your backyard garden.

A Strawberry Styles nonalcoholic cocktail mixed with Seedlip Spice 94 and a housemade strawberry rose cordial suspends a moment of late lush summer in a sip.

An ambitious brunch offers a surprisingly abundant selection, but somehow the pancakes and chilaquiles fall flat, with the former inexplicably heavy, and the latter ungenerously adorned.

The Shrooms & Waffles, though, will restore all faith, with fried maitake mushrooms over perfectly puffy pockets, best filled with slowly melting smoked butter and seriously hot habanero maple syrup.

Cuadros’ plant-based sustainable approach extends beyond his dining room.

“We grow all our garnishes in little gardens within the restaurant,” Cuadros said. A tiny greenhouse can be found in the back of the dining room, and plant boxes top partitions between booths. “And all our electricity comes from green sources, wind and solar.”

They also use an ORCA Digester to go even further.

“The best way that I can describe it is a liquid composter,” said the chef. “The machine has enzymes and bacteria preloaded. Everything that goes in is fairly small. It digests about 15 pounds of food per hour. Where we see the impact is that we have a lot less rats in our alley, which is a massive problem in Chicago.”

Not a lot of chefs want to talk about rodents, even their lack thereof, but Cuadros wants to spread the sustainability message even to his meat-focused industry friends.

“I love Chicago so much,” he added. “I would love nothing more than Chicago being one of the greenest cities in the world.”

1559 N. Milwaukee Ave.

312-363-3110

bloompb.com

Open: Dinner Monday to Thursday 5-9 p.m., Friday and Saturday 5-10 p.m., Sunday to 5-8:30 p.m.; lunch Thursday through Saturday 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m.; brunch Sunday 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

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Prices: Appetizers $6-$23; entrees $14-$28; desserts $12, drinks $6-$90; Tuesday three-course dinner for two people for $75.

Noise: Conversation-friendly

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restrooms on single level

Tribune rating: Excellent, 3 stars

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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