Review: Loaf Lounge, home of ‘The Bear’ chocolate cake, makes sandwiches we need to eat in Chicago

This has been the year of “The Bear.” Not as in a Chinese zodiac animal, but the critically acclaimed kitchen drama about a young chef who leaves the fine dining world to reluctantly run his family sandwich shop.

In the case of Loaf Lounge, art imitates life.

Chefs Ben Lustbader and Sarah Mispagel also left finer dining restaurants, to run their own sandwich shop with intention. They opened Loaf Lounge in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago this summer.

To further blur life and art, Mispagel worked as a pastry consultant on the show. You can now taste what’s called The Bear chocolate cake at Loaf Lounge.

“It’s three layers of chocolate cake stacked with a dark chocolate mousse,” Mispagel said. She uses Valrhona 64% Taïnori single origin chocolate for the airy mousse, then finishes with a chocolate American buttercream icing.

The chef said tasters typically fall into two camps.

“If you’re not much of a chocolate person, then you’ll take one bite and save the rest for later. If you are a chocolate person, then it’s breakfast every day,” she said, laughing.

While the cake has become famous, Lustbader’s breakfast sandwiches have quietly become just as popular in their own right.

“There are days when we’re neck and neck,” Mispagel said about her husband. “He’ll sell 120 sausage muffins, and I’ll sell 119 slices of the cake.”

Despite appearances, it is no simple sandwich.

“We make the English muffins, griddle them in clarified butter, then smear this herby mayo on,” Lustbader said. “And we sear the sausage, flip over a medium egg and melt on American cheese.”

The chef forgets to mention he makes his own sausage.

“The major flavors there are roasted garlic, chile flake, porcini, fennel seed and maple,” he said.

The veggie breakfast sandwich swaps the sausage with braised kale, flavored deeply with pickled mushrooms and spicy peppers.

But it’s their stunning salmon breakfast sandwich that hints at past and future stories. I felt thoroughly underdressed for the open-faced canvas arranged extravagantly with cured curls and glistening roe.

Lustbader soft-cures the salmon with brown and white sugar, fennel seeds, black peppercorns, Aleppo pepper, orange, lemon, dill, basil and gin.

“Then we make a cream cheese that echoes all those flavors,” he said. They were garnish ing with melon from Three Sisters when it was in season,but have replaced melon with sculptural cucumber ribbons, sliced thin with radish rounds and slivers of pickled red onion.

That’s all on the marbled rye, one of nearly a dozen rotating breads they bake, available by the loaf. It’s unexpected on their sleepy stretch of Milwaukee Avenue, until you remember from where they came.

“He’d done Malört-cured salmon at Nightwood for brunch specials here and there,” Mispagel said.

The chefs met and worked together at the beloved restaurant in Pilsen, before it closed in 2015.

“We had a cured salmon at Giant on one of the early menus,” Lustbader said. He opened the restaurant in Logan Square in 2016 with Jason Vincent, who received a James Beard nomination for Outstanding Chef in 2022.

“Even at Nightwood, Ben said he wanted to open a sandwich shop someday,” Mispagel said. “When he and I started dating, then eventually got married, it became the thing that we were always working toward.”

Mispagel also worked at Giant for a bit, but left to become the pastry chef at the Michelin-starred Sepia and its related restaurant Proxi next door.

“In my head, I was like, this is the last restaurant job I’m going to have before I open a place with Ben,” she said. “And I intentionally wanted to do something a little fancier than I had before. I wanted to see if I had it in me to do something like this really fancy restaurant, and then I wanted to open the sandwich shop.”

They started looking at spaces in fall 2019.

“And then March 2020 happened,” Mispagel said. “But after a few months, we kind of realized that if all of us were going to live, we’d still need to eat sandwiches.”

They began baking at Superkhana International, the modern Indian restaurant also in Logan Square, as a pandemic pop-up, but not making any sandwiches.

Sandwiches seemed like a curious focus, given their experience, until Lustbader explained.

“The paths of cooking that I’ve really fallen in love with are sandwich-related,” he said. “Even though I’m less involved with the bread team right now, I love making bread. I love charcuterie. I love brunch cooking like I love egg cookery. All those come together in this sort of a restaurant and I just genuinely love it.”

That love shows with the perfect, runny yolk eggs, cooked to order and hidden within the breakfast sandwiches.

And then there’s a whole other collection of lunch sandwiches, available at noon, built on their outstanding bread.

The BLT layers thick-cut bacon, lettuce, tomato and housemade mayonnaise on an outrageous jalapeño and cheddar studded bread. The California veggie stuffs what must be a monthly mortgage payment’s worth of avocado with cheddar and sprouts on crackling crusted country sourdough. The turkey, made by their friends at Serbian sandwich shop 016 in Lincoln Square, gets slathered with roasted garlic ranch on seeded bread.

Baked goods at the small pastry counter are available throughout the day, while supplies last, from classic chocolate chip cookies to kouign-amann to seasonal danishes, sweet and savory. As are coffee drinks, made with Four Letter Word beans, including a local cook’s cult favorite called Kyle’s Go Juice, prepared with espresso, Angostura bitters and delicately sweetened by honey.

The butter croissants hold housemade capicola and fig mostarda as a beautiful breakfast sandwich, but on their own, they’re a bit bready, rather than shattering crispy layers.

“It needs to be structural enough for it to hold up to the sandwich,” Mispagel said. “And I don’t love it when you get a croissant and it just crumbles into nothing. Like it’s really beautiful, but then you don’t actually get to eat anything.”

So she does one less turn for this croissant dough.

“It’s similar when we talk about bread,” Lustbader said. “Super high hydration breads are very popular among some bakers, and they’re gorgeous. But we’re a sandwich shop. So if we were to start building sandwiches on these breads with massive air holes, it wouldn’t be a sandwich.”

And Loaf Lounge is a chefs’ sandwich shop with dedicated intention.

lchu@chicagotribune.com

2934 N. Milwaukee Ave.

773-904-7852

loafloungechicago.com

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Open: Wednesday to Sunday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.; closed Monday and Tuesday

Prices: $7.50 (The Bear chocolate cake), $9 (sausage, egg and cheese breakfast sandwich), $12 (caramelized onion loaf), $13 (BLT), $14 (salmon breakfast sandwich)

Noise: Conversation-friendly

Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible with restroom on single level

Tribune rating: Excellent to very good, 2½ 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.

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