Forbidden Root Restaurant & Brewery

A burger rebuilt for the glass

Dan Weiland rebuilds a burger from the classic outward as Chef at Forbidden Root Restaurant & Brewery in Chicago, where the plate has to answer the beer without becoming its echo. His Chicago kitchen years included Blackbird, Avec, and this room, and the through-line is not novelty for its own sake. Weiland starts with a familiar form, then changes the structure by technique, philosophy, sustainability, and creativity, in that order. At Forbidden Root, that discipline lands in food made for a botanical brewery: an FR burger, a smashburger, snacks and small plates that can sit beside herbs, fruit, roots, bark, stems, flowers, spices, Génépi, feijoa, and grilled grapefruit without flattening them. The point is fit. A dish here has to belong to the table, the bar, and the brewing program at once. Weiland has said that modern restaurants lose their way when the food and menu stop making sense together. In West Town, that sentence becomes a working constraint at the pass.

Botanicals set the station

The brewery calls itself Chicago’s first botanical brewery, and the kitchen works inside that premise rather than beside it. The beer program looks back to brewing before hops, with a timeline given as 10,000 years for fermented botanical practice and 800 years for hops as the more familiar reference point. That history is not treated as museum copy; it shapes what the food can carry. A burger with giardiniera mayo, aged cheddar, bread-and-butter pickles, and brioche has enough acid and fat to meet a glass built from herbs or wild botanicals. Gochugaru chili popcorn, lamb jerky, n’duja sausage spread with pickled mustard seeds, honey, and toast, cranberry bean hummus with dried fig, parsley, and sumac, a milk-brined pork schnitzel sandwich, and a wild mushroom pot pie give the bar program several registers to work with. The method is less about matching like with like than about keeping the palate moving. Salt, smoke, heat, fruit, fat, and bitterness each get a station.

The old theatre under service

The room still carries the scale of its earlier life. The building is more than 100 years old, designed as the original Hub Theatre in 1913, and the old floor tiles spelling The Hub remain under the restaurant’s present rhythm. High ceilings, hard surfaces, dim light, a central bar, communal tables, and the sound of a lively room make the work public. This is not a hidden kitchen reverie; it is a brewery restaurant with the pass exposed to appetite and noise. Plates move through an industrial room built for gathering, while the beer program pulls the table back toward roots, bark, stems, flowers, herbs, spices, and fruit. Weiland’s food has to hold its line in that setting. The FR burger does not need quiet to make sense at Forbidden Root Restaurant & Brewery.