WEST TOWN — A restaurant serving up South American-inspired dishes with an emphasis on wood-fired steaks, chicken and seafood opens Tuesday in West Town.
Brasero, 1709 W. Chicago Ave., is the latest venture for chef John Manion, who’s behind El Che Steakhouse in the West Loop and the now closed La Sirena Clandestina. In the early 2000s, he was also the chef at the restaurant Mas on Division Street in Wicker Park.
Manion’s menu for Brasero was driven by all types of Latin American cuisine, including from Brazil, where he lived for five years with his family as a kid, he said.
Manion said the restaurant takes cues from traditional recipes but adds a contemporary, Midwestern twist — whether it be for pork chops, charcoal-grilled chicken or a feijoada bean stew.
“It draws from all over, specifically Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay,” Manion said. “It’s born out of these traditions. And there’s a genesis and there’s a reason for doing everything. Nothing’s just like, ‘Oh man, I saw this and it seems like that’s a cool thing to make.’ Everything’s got an origin story. Everything has a reason.”
While Manion has been a fixture in Chicago’s restaurant scene for decades, it was his childhood years in Brazil that inspired his career as a chef — and continue to influence his menus, he said.
Manion and his family lived in Sao Paolo but traveled widely, allowing him to broaden his culinary horizons, he said.
“The whole Brazil experience really opened up my world in a lot of ways, and a big part of that was that was food,” Manion said. “As expats, eating out, eating at people’s homes, became very central to our social life. But we traveled a ton, and my parents were super adventurous, so my world got a lot bigger. And if not for that experience, I don’t think I’d be doing this today.”
Manion’s El Che Steakhouse, which emphasizes Argentine-style live fire cooking, opened almost a decade ago and has been in a strong place since reopening after the pandemic, he said.
With Brasero, Manion wanted to experiment with a broader menu in a similar way to how he cooked at Mas. He’s also excited about returning to the West Town area, where he lived for over two decades until a few years ago.
“It was oddly familiar to me, revisiting a really formative part of my culinary career. Being in a neighborhood, it felt very right. So that’s where the idea [for Brasero] came from,” he said.
On top of wood-fired chickens and steaks, Manion’s particularly excited about serving a Brazilian moqueca, a seafood stew he calls “one of the greatest dishes in the world.”
“It’s sort of unheralded, so I feel this responsibility to almost put it out there in the world,” he said. “This version, we’re going to do red snapper and head-on shrimp and mussels. … It’s probably the closest to a ‘by the book’ dish that we have.”
Brasero will also feature wines exclusively from South and Central America. They’re offering 100 bottles under $100 dollars, selected by wine director Alex Cuper. That includes bringing over favorites from El Che, Manion said.
“Part of our mission is to promote the beauty and majesty of South American wines in a market that doesn’t really [do that],” he said. “I mean, everyone kind of still thinks of Malbec as something that you get at 7/11.”
Brasero is taking over the former home of Funkenhausen, the German-Southern fusion restaurant that closed last year. It’s an expansive space that seats 120 people, plus 18 more at the bar. Manion and his team worked with Siren Betty Design and were inspired by 1970s Brazilian design aesthetics.
As Manion prepares to come “full circle” back to the neighborhood that helped shape him as a chef, he said Brasero’s menu is reflective of that journey.
“It starts with traditions, but that’s not where it ends,” Manion said. “The food, the drinks, the wine — it all goes together. It seems like it’s going to be a blast.”
Brasero opens 5 p.m. daily. Reservations can be made on OpenTable.
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