Parson's Chicken & Fish is Summer's Hotspot; More

Parson's Chicken & Fish is the "place to be" this summer, writes Mike Sula. The fried chicken "clads explosively juicy flesh, adhering faithfully until it shatters like glass to tooth" while the fish arrives as "lightly battered, hot, fluffy, minimally greasy planks." The raw oysters are "some of the more perfectly shucked" ones encountered, "brimming with liquor," but the clam roll is "rubbery" fried clam strips "overburdened" by bread, lettuce and pickled peppers. The restaurant's excellent beverage selection includes a "beautifully bitter" Negroni slushy and one of the "most delicious, savory-salty" micheladas. [Reader]

The Green Room is pleasing residents of Libertyville with its take on time-honored classics. Deborah Pankey starts with the chicken soup, whose stock "feels more homemade" than her own, before moving onto a "tender and pleasantly sweet" Polynesian skirt steak that's a "winner." A "stand out" pan-fried walleye seems "almost bigger than the plate" and is cooked to a "nice flaky doneness" but the gravy in the beef and broccoli is "just so-so." For dessert, a mini Key Lime tart "screamed lime without making you pucker, and the crust had crunch without being brittle." [Daily Herald]