Originally Posted by
esmetravels
You can't have it all. You can't have a great restaurant that accepts reservations that doesn't have a long lead time for reservations and you can't have a great restaurant that accepts walk-ins with a short wait time. A person has to choose for quality establishments: either book far in advance or count on a walk-in wait.
We may have to agree to disagree. A random search of restaurants that have availability at 7pm on Thursday (5 days from now) include:
Balena
Balsan
Blackbird
Carriage House
David Burke's
Grace
GT Fish & Oyster
The Lobby
Maude's Liquor Bar
Nightwood
The Publican
Sable
Table 52
Takashi
Now, not all of these meet all of your criteria--you'll pay much more at Grace, for example. And you probably wouldn't describe some of these as "low pretense" (but then again, I'd say the same about soome on your list). But I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that any of these don't have great food. Two, not coincidentally, are also owned by Paul Kahan & his partners (owners of avec and winner of the 2013 James Beard award for outstanding chef). Grace was probably the single most lauded restaurant opening of 2013 (well, late 2012).
This is Chicago: You can get into some of the city's best restaurants with a relatively short lead time.