Devon Seafood & Steak

How the Menu Is Built, and What That Tells You

The dual-identity format of a restaurant that commits equally to seafood and steak is rarer than it sounds. Most American steakhouses treat fish as a concession to non-beef eaters: a salmon fillet, perhaps, or a lobster tail bolted onto the menu without much culinary conviction. Devon Seafood & Steak, a Seafood & Steakhouse in Oakbrook Terrace, is a full-service restaurant with a Google rating of 4.5 and an average price of about $70 per person. Devon Seafood & Steak, located on West 22nd Street in Oakbrook Terrace just off the I-294 corridor, structures its menu differently. Seafood and steak are co-headliners, each with its own internal logic, its own sourcing commitments, and its own preparation vocabulary. That architecture tells you something about what the kitchen values and, more practically, about the kind of table it serves best.

In the broader American restaurant tradition, the seafood-and-steak format has deep roots, it traces back to the mid-century supper club model, where abundance and variety were the selling proposition. Contemporary versions of that model have either leaned into nostalgia or attempted to modernize it with tighter sourcing and seasonal variation. Devon's position in the Oakbrook Terrace market places it in company with a western suburban dining tier that has grown more sophisticated over the past decade, as the area's corporate hotel corridor and upscale retail base have pulled more destination dining westward from Chicago proper.

The Oak Brook Dining Context

Oak Brook and the immediately adjacent Oakbrook Terrace sit at a particular intersection in the Chicago metro's restaurant geography. The area is not Chicago's restaurant core, that remains concentrated in River North, the West Loop, and Fulton Market, where places like Smyth in Chicago define a different tier of ambition and investment. But Oak Brook is also not a food desert. The Oakbrook Center mall's gravitational pull has steadily raised the floor for dining in the corridor, and several notable independent restaurants have established real reputations here.

Antico Posto handles Italian with a degree of seriousness that punches above its suburban setting. Coa brings Mexican cooking with a similarly considered approach. The Champagne Sunday Brunch at the Drake Oak Brook and the Colonial Room represent the hotel-dining tier, while Ditka's Oakbrook anchors the celebrity-brand steakhouse format. Devon sits in a distinct lane from all of these, it is neither a hotel dining room, a celebrity steakhouse, nor a single-cuisine specialist. Its dual mandate is the differentiator.

Seafood as a Primary Subject, Not a Footnote

The decision to treat seafood as a genuine co-equal with steak has real menu-building implications. A kitchen that takes this seriously needs sourcing relationships that go beyond a standard broadline seafood distributor, preparation knowledge across multiple fish species and cooking methods, and a team that can execute both a dry-aged beef service and a cold shellfish program at the same time without one suffering for the other. When restaurants at this format level succeed, and the national comparators worth studying include Le Bernardin in New York City, Providence in Los Angeles, and Emeril's in New Orleans at different tiers and with different emphases, it is because the seafood side of the menu carries its own narrative integrity rather than serving as a supplement to beef-forward programming.

At Devon, the menu architecture reflects that dual-primary commitment. The result is a room that serves two distinct diner types simultaneously: those who came for a serious fish preparation and those who came for a prime cut, both finding enough depth on their respective side of the menu to make the trip from the western suburbs feel worthwhile.

Atmosphere and Setting

The West 22nd Street address places Devon in the dense commercial stretch of Oakbrook Terrace, a location that is practical rather than picturesque, close to the interstate interchange, surrounded by hotel properties and office towers. Suburban dining rooms in this context tend to compete on interior experience rather than street presence or neighborhood charm, and Devon's format as a formal seafood and steak house implies a room calibrated for business dinners, occasion meals, and the kind of group dining that the area's corporate hotel base generates. The physical environment is geared toward the expectations of a guest arriving from a company headquarters or checking in at one of the nearby hotels: composed, comfortable, and oriented toward the plate rather than the backdrop.

For diners accustomed to destination restaurants that make the room itself part of the proposition, places like Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown or The Inn at Little Washington, Devon operates on a different register. The setting is suburban-formal rather than architecturally transformative, which is consistent with its position in the Oak Brook market.

How Devon Compares Within Its Category

Nationally, the seafood-and-steak format occupies a specific market tier. Below the Michelin-starred seafood temples like Le Bernardin or the agricultural-narrative restaurants like Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg and The French Laundry in Napa, and operating in a different register from the tasting-menu format explored by Lazy Bear in San Francisco, Atomix in New York City, and Addison in San Diego, Devon positions itself as a full-service, à la carte operation where the guest controls the experience rather than submitting to a fixed progression. That format is, in many ways, more demanding to execute: there is no chef's-choice narrative to lean on, and every table constructs its own meal from a menu that has to deliver coherence across a wide range of orders.

Within the Chicago metro, the western suburban dining market has historically operated at a discount to the city proper in terms of culinary ambition, but that gap has narrowed. Venues like Devon that maintain a dual-serious menu across two protein categories are part of that narrowing.

Planning Your Visit

Devon Seafood & Steak is located at 17W400 West 22nd Street in Oakbrook Terrace, easily accessible from I-294 and within a few minutes of the major Oak Brook hotel corridor. Reservations are recommended, especially for weekend evenings when the area's hotel-and-retail traffic peaks. Given the dual seafood-and-steak format and a room that draws a mix of business and occasion diners, dress expectations are business casual.

For a broader sweep of American seafood dining ambition, the work being done at Atelier Moessmer Norbert Niederkofler in Brunico provides a useful international counterpoint to the domestic tradition Devon operates within.