In the barroom, a jazz trio wails. In the restaurant–a sleek modern space with parquet floors, marble tables, comfortable blue banquettes, and a snazzy spotlit food bar–handsome young servers are delivering appetizers, entrees, and “tastings” (grazing-size portions) ranging from Hung Tao Dragon Noodles to chicken flautas with avocado relish to insalata di calimari. Stodgy Evanston has rarely seen the likes of Bodega Bay, the wildly eclectic restaurant that Leslee Reis and chef David Dugo are running in the bottom floor of a boringly modern downtown office building at Grove and Sherman.
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“Doing these cuisines was pretty much my idea,” says Dugo, 27, who has studied at La Varenne in Paris, done a stint at Roger Greenfield’s American Grill, and has been at Bodega Bay for not quite a year. “The restaurant draws on a wide variety of cuisines, so I thought it would be fun to concentrate on certain areas. Eclecticism is the watchword here–nothing is safe from the menu.”
For Dugo the visits are “much more intense than the way I approach our standard menu. With the kind of eclectic, California-style menu that we do here, you don’t usually have to sit down and think about what you’re going to do. The produce market has opened up tremendously, so you can let your inspiration ride on what you get in the house. You don’t have to sit down and say, ‘I’ll get this and this and this . . . You just connect the lines and there you go. It’s very appropriate that we do jazz here–it’s fusion cooking.”
