Chicago Restaurant Week - Hub 51 Lunch

As you know, or maybe you don't, Chicago is in the midst of it's restaurant week. For those of you who aren't familiar with restaurant week, over 170 of Chicago's top restaurants. The cool thing is you get a 3-course Prix Fixe meal and it will only cost you $22 for lunch and $32 for Dinner. This is quite the deal for a lot of the restaurants featured in this years week!

Patrick and I never go out for large fancy lunches. We usually stick around the work cafeteria or most of the time we just eat at our desks:( Well not yesterday! I took advantage of RW and made reservations for HUB 51 a place we have both wanted to check out.

HUB 51 offers great American cuisine with fresh California influences (per their web page) and I agree.

This restaurant has a really cool vibe. It has an industrial feel with a level of sophistication that makes this a really fun place to be. The space is large and it appears as though the restaurant can turn into a club as well. This would be really nice for those cold Chicago nights. You can get dinner at Hub 51 and stay until the clubin' starts! Don't even have to leave the building, perfection!

Obviously I didn't get to experience the club feel because it was lunch time. But I do see a return visit in the future:)

Here is a look at the menu created for Restaurant Week. We were told that it included their favorite items.

Once we were seated at our table, the friendly waitress brought us a bottle of water for the table. The bottle was a very cute touch!

My first course included a new favorite of mine, Brussels Sprouts. However, I have never had brussels sprouts prepared in this way. Brussels Sprout Salad - medjool dates, almonds, manchego cheese, mustard vinaigrette. This was dance on the ceiling good! I was craving this salad about 2 hours after I ate it. I need to figure out how to make it!

My second course was All - Natural Braised Chicken Tacos - simmered with jalapenos, roasted tomato salsa. Tilt your head to the right and you might get a little bit of an idea what this meal looked like. Had a bit of camera issues:(

In case you had trouble with the rotating head technique below is a close up of the chicken. It was so tender and good but it could have used more spice to it. However, the spice issue was taken care of when I put some of the salsa on the taco! YUM!

I had to show a close up picture of the corn tortillas. They were delicious and you could even see kernels of corn in them. I loved that!

The third course won my heart and taste buds over! It is impossible for me to explain how great this dessert was. I am a HUGE butterscotch fan so when I saw that one of my options for dessert was the Butterscotch Pot De Creme Mini with Caramel sauce, it was a no brainer. I knew it would be good but this was CRAZY GOOD!!! It was a butterscotch creme topped with a thin layer of caramel sauce, in the caramel sauce was a sprinkling of sea salt. The perfect mixture of sweet and salt!

My husband is lucky he got to me first because this little piece of heaven won me over completely!

As you can see I had an amazing lunch. And you know what, the service was excellent as well. HUB 51 is a big winner on my blog!

fyi...all the photos were taken with my phone so I apologize for the not so great photography.