Super GemFine Dining GemChicago Exclusive Gem$$$$Bayless still remembers the first table that walked in: they opened the menu, said they didn't know what he was doing because this wasn't the Mexican food they expected, and walked right back out — "and that was our first acceptance in Chicago," he likes to say now. The neighborhood didn't help early on either; River North in 1987 was flophouses and a bar next door literally called The Rendezvous, nothing like the polished district it's become since.
None of that stopped what came next: a James Beard Award for Outstanding Restaurant in 2007, a Michelin star for the adjacent, more formal Topolobampo that shares the same entrance, and in 2024 the city of Chicago officially declared March 21st "Rick Bayless Day." The food itself is still built around whatever regional Mexican dish caught Bayless's attention on his travels — tomatillo-based sauces, mole, real masa — served in a room loud with mariachi and covered in Mexican folk art, the same formula that confused that first table nearly forty years ago and has drawn a line out the door on weekends pretty much ever since.
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