Somerset

Gold Coast Fine Dining and Where Somerset Fits

Somerset is a modern Mediterranean restaurant in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood. The strip along and around N State Street supports a tier of restaurants that are neither casual neighbourhood bistros nor full tasting-menu fortresses, but something in between: ambitious New American tables where the kitchen takes seasonal sourcing seriously and the room is designed for a comfortable dinner. Somerset, at 1112 N State St, sits in this middle register.

That positioning also means Somerset draws comparisons with Chicago's broader progressive American cohort. Alinea and Smyth operate at a different register of ambition and price, while Oriole and Kasama have staked out distinct identities through format discipline and critical recognition. Somerset's address and style place it in an accessible bracket, where value depends on the service and the kitchen's menu that week.

The Lunch and Dinner Divide

In Chicago's fine-dining tier, the gap between lunch and dinner service is rarely cosmetic. At the city's more ambitious tables, lunch tends to compress the menu into a tighter format, lower the ambient intensity, and attract a different kind of diner: the power lunch crowd, the pre-theatre visitor, the guest who wants serious cooking without a three-hour commitment. Dinner, by contrast, is where a kitchen like Somerset's has room to extend, layer, and demonstrate range.

This divide matters practically. A lunch visit to a restaurant at Somerset's address and price positioning typically offers the sharpest value in the building: the kitchen is running at full capacity, sourcing is identical to the evening, but the format is condensed and the room carries less pressure. Dinner shifts the mood toward occasion dining, with longer pacing and, in most cases, a fuller menu that allows the kitchen to show more. For a visitor choosing between the two, the question is less about quality and more about what kind of experience the evening requires. If the goal is efficient access to the kitchen's sensibility, lunch is the case for it.

Lazy Bear in San Francisco runs a structured evening format with no lunch equivalent, while Single Thread Farm in Healdsburg and The French Laundry in Napa both offer service windows where the lunch-to-dinner value differential is well-documented by repeat visitors. Chicago's Gold Coast operates on similar logic.

The Room on N State Street

The address itself carries context. N State Street in the 60610 zip code sits in the Gold Coast, close to Lincoln Park and part of the area's established dining geography. The physical approach is urban and direct, without the converted-warehouse drama of the West Loop or the industrial-cool of Fulton Market. What this part of the city offers instead is a certain density of serious restaurants operating in a relatively compact corridor, which makes it a workable base for a multi-night visit that treats dining as a primary activity.

Chicago's restaurant scene continues to favour this kind of neighborhood-anchored address. Gold Coast tables have maintained a distinct identity, serving diners who value proximity and discretion over scene-making. Somerset fits that pattern.

Chicago in a National Context

Placing a Chicago modern Mediterranean table against its national peers is a useful comparison. Le Bernardin in New York City and Atomix in New York City represent the upper bracket of East Coast fine dining, where Michelin recognition and multi-year reservation lists define the competitive set. On the West Coast, Providence in Los Angeles and Addison in San Diego have built durable reputations through consistent critical recognition. In the South, Bacchanalia in Atlanta and Emeril's in New Orleans anchor their respective cities' fine-dining reference points. Further north, The Inn at Little Washington and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Tarrytown represent the farm-to-table format at its most resolved. 8½ Otto e Mezzo Bombana in Hong Kong illustrates how the same tier of ambition functions in an international context.

Chicago, with its own deep bench of serious tables, tends to be underestimated in these national rankings. The city's geography keeps it off the coastal conversation, but the concentration of serious kitchens per neighborhood is high, and the Gold Coast supports a dining culture that rewards repeat visits.