Nacional 27

By Naomi R. Kooker

Dishes: smoked chicken empanadas, grouper Huachinango, truffle-crusted filet mignon
Price: $2-$27.95
Company: Nacional 27, part of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, Chicago, opened in 1998
Units: 1
Seats: 250
Description: The truffle-crusted filet mignon is an 8-ounce portion with black truffles folded into whipped butter; truffle oil and panko crumbs are added, and the mixture is placed on steak and served wtih three-potato chorizo hash.
Developer: Randy Zweiban, executive chef and partner; and sous chef Francisco "Chico" Vilchez

Randy Zweiban grew up in Queens, immersed in New York's culinary melting pot. So it is no surprise that he embraces the melding of Latino and Caribbean flavors in his cooking.

"I always loved big, bold flavors," says Zweiban, executive chef and partner of Chicago's Nacional 27, the Nation's Restaurant News 2004 MenuMasters Best Independent Operator Menu Award.

He and his staff created an award-winning more-than-60-item menu, which features strong flavors from 27 Caribbean Latino, Central and South American nations; hence the number 27. It also carries the cachet of an upscale restaurant without being too high end.

The trick, Zweiban says, is to balance the menu. "One of the credos of Lettuce Entertain You [Enterprises, the restaurant's parent company] is that we present great quality with great value," he says. "And that's something I really strive to do, in ingredients and portion size."

Tapas start at $2. Most entrées average around $18.

Among his best-selling items are smoked-chicken empanadas, $6.95; grouper "Huachinango," $19.95; and his signature truffle-crusted filet mignon, an 8-ounce portion served with three-potato chorizo hash and Malbec reduction. At $27.95, it is the highest-priced item on the menu.

Black truffles are folded into whipped butter. Truffle oil and panko crumbs are added, and the mixture is rolled out like a cookie dough, frozen and then cut for each order. The buttery slab gets placed on the steak and is broiled lightly to form a thin crust.

The chorizo for the hash is made in house. In addition, the Malbec reduction includes veal stock and is reduced with mirepoix and then strained.

"I can't say every single item takes that much labor intensity," says Zweiban, who declines to disclose labor costs.

The most challenging dish was the smoked-chicken empanada, in which the chicken is cold smoked in house. The smoking wasn't the problem, but the dough was. The kitchen had to create an empanada that would not get soggy from the moist filling or too greasy from being deep-fried. "We probably tried empanada recipes for a couple of months before we got what we wanted," Zweiban explains. The result is a light empanada that tastes as if it were baked, he says.

The Huachinango, a traditional Mexican dish that normally employs red snapper, uses a 7-ounce fillet of black grouper instead.

Zweiban, who is inspired by eating out and traveling, approaches his menu in two ways. He reinvents traditional dishes to fit a Chicago or contemporary palate, such as substituting grouper for snapper. And he uses indigenous ingredients to create his own dishes, such as ahi tuna and watermelon ceviche.

According to Zweiban, food costs range from 28 percent to 30 percent, and the check average runs from $39 to $44, including a beverage. Nacional, which is open for dinner only six days a week and is closed Sunday, does an average of 200 covers weeknights and as many as 400 on weekends. It has 250 seats — 175 in the dining room and 75 in the smoking bar-lounge, where a full menu is served.

When the 28-seat patio opens this summer, he anticipates his sales will double in ceviche, which will be priced between $4.75 and $10.95, and in oyster shooters, $2.50. His five-course chef's tasting for $44 is a hit Wednesday nights when he offers the wine pairing, a $25 value, for free.

After attending classes at Queens College and working as a diamond setter by day and a drummer by night, Zweiban attended Peter Kump's New York Cooking School to see if cooking could be his next career. "I realized it was," he says.

He moved to Miami in 1989 and worked with Norman Van Aken, learning about the bold flavors of Caribbean and Latino culture. In 1995 he helped open Norman's in Coral Gables and was partner and chef de cuisine there before opening Nacional 27 in 1998 in Chicago.

Van Aken says Zweiban has "heart, loyalty and a mentality for success that is a business-minded sort of approach; he really gets that more than other chefs do."

He's also done a "fantastic job" with ceviches, Van Aken croons.

The shrimp and scallop ceviche — small, $4.95, and large, $9.95 — is Zweiban's top seller.

In the two years that managing partner Scott Barton has been with Nacional 27 — he's been with LEYE since 1992 — he never has received a complaint about the food. "Randy's commitment to quality is no different from that of a four-star chef," Barton says.

Much of Zweiban's approach is a keen sense of knowing what the customer likes, Barton says. Zweiban recently added "high-protein, low-carb" selections to please the diet-conscious masses and business travelers. Though the menu is his "baby," Zweiban underscores that it takes a team effort to create it. He lauds his staff with hard work and consistency and the restaurant with good internal marketing. "Five years ago when we started doing Latin cuisine in Chicago, no one understood it," Zweiban says. Now with its growing popularity in the press and on menus everywhere, that's changed. "I think people are a lot more educated and a lot more open to it."