Think of it as a Starbucks with better food. Commune Café and Bar is just slightly more artsy, slightly more hip, than the blockbuster coffee chain, yet it shares the same kind of comfy manufactured ambiance that could easily be duplicated on every street corner. The premise seems to be anytime-anywhere drinking and dining but with better food options than one would find at a mere diner, including a full bar, upscale coffee drinks, and desserts to die for.
Open from 7:30 am through all mealtimes and into the night, the Bucktown space formerly
occupied by the upscale restaurant Confusion metamorphoses daily into several different incarnations, including upscale coffee and breakfast spot, full-service restaurant, business meeting venue, and even twenty-something hangout for the in crowd on Friday and Saturday nights.
The younger set, single diners as well as large groups, tend to be attracted to Commune’s casual feel and ample menu at reasonable prices. The menu has something for everyone — from sandwich platters, fancy salads, pizza, and pasta to comfort food and appetizers and brunch served all day, most at a cost of $10 or less. A specialty also appears to be its house desserts, which tempt with powerful aromas from the moment diners step inside the restaurant.
If a menu too long to read still isn’t enough selection, daily chalkboard specials such as black bean ravioli with roasted corn, poblano in a black bean cream sauce, Indian vegetable curry with basmati rice and crispy pappadum, or vegetable lasagna in a marinara sauce are certainly no slouches. Soups also change daily and seem to include mainly vegetarian options, such as carrot-ginger and Tuscan white bean. Black bean chili is always on the menu; it has a texture more like soup than stew.
Going along with the casual theme, servers direct all incoming guests to "sit anywhere you’d like," whether that is at one of the tables in a separate dining room, at one of the many stools surrounding a giant egg-shaped communal counter, at the bar, or in one of the cozy couch and chair arrangements that face passing sidewalk traffic (one of these areas includes a faux fireplace).
Unfortunately, smoking is permitted at the bar, communal table, and couch area, leaving nonsmokers with fewer options than smokers if they want to breathe clean air. Either way, waiters in a casual uniform of blue jeans and black Commune T-shirts deliver food from the open kitchen at a cadence that reminded me of GAP employees marching in step to the music. But first you have to catch their attention, which sometimes takes a while.
The food was nothing more and nothing less than I expected. It’s not fine dining, but neither is it fast food. No, this place is pure twenty-first century dining — food at the speed of e-mail, a global fusion of ingredients, and any kind of food or beverage, anytime you want it, anywhere you want to sit.
It does the trick, no matter what experience you’re looking for. For breakfast, I enjoyed a double tall skinny latte along with my crab cakes topped with poached eggs and chipotle hollandaise with Commune potatoes. For lunch, I treated myself to beer battered fish and chips, a trinity of lightly battered cod filets angled in a pyramid shape atop a large mound of skinny, crispy fries. (Commune does great fries.) And for dinner, I gave the curry special a shot, a potato-dominated stew of various vegetables dressed in a mild tomato-based sauce with the odd chick pea strewn here or there — a kind of generic Indian curry.
Appetizers are substantial enough to qualify as a light meal if one so chooses. A quesadilla of sun-dried tomatoes, spinach, black beans, and pepper jack is sliced into six sections and fills a plate, but is too flat to be very filling. The penne mac and cheese with tomatoes, bacon, and parmesan is more like a pasta in a cream sauce, but as an appetizer portion. Salads also make a light meal or a good start for more hearty dining; they include inventive versions of spinach, Caesar, cobb, Thai, and caprese salads.
The leaves in the spinach salad were so big I needed a knife to get through them, but aside from that, the sugar-coated walnuts were a nice touch, as were the mustard sherry dressing and ample portion of creamy goat cheese. Caesar is considerably more decadent, with grit from garlicky sourdough croutons and generous shavings of real parmesan cheese clinging to many a leaf.
Best of all, though, are the desserts. As only fine dining restaurants typically have their own pastry chef, one doesn’t usually find as high a caliber of dessert at casual eateries. But Commune is part of the same restaurant group that owns Feast, Tanzy, and Cru; consequently, diners are privy to desserts made fresh every day, including a steaming banana bread pudding spiked with currants, cranberries, pecans and Lord knows what else topped with ice cream; a six-layer carrot cake that looks as if it is wobbling under its own weight; and trays of freshly baked cookies that spill from the oven at regular intervals, blanketing the entire room in a heavenly cookie aroma. So if not for a meal, the Commune also makes a fine stop for coffee and dessert, perhaps after dinner at one of the many neighboring restaurants.
Commune Café and Bar, 1616 North Damen, 773-772-7100.