Wine Dinners At Telegraph Restaurant | Logan Square, Chicago

Wine pairings typically start with the kitchen and end with the sommelier.

With Telegraph's wine dinners (three-course pairing menus offered nightly and changing monthly), it's the reverse: The kitchen creates dishes to complement the wines.

Jeremy Quinn, the Logan Square restaurant's wine director, is adventurous and peripatetic in his tastes. Past wine dinner menus have jumped all the way from New Zealand's Pyramid Valley to Sicily and Spain's Sherry Triangle.

This month he's pouring Riesling, which Quinn deems his "favorite comfort wine." Fittingly, chef Johnny Anderes and his kitchen designed a Carolina comfort food menu to match ($55, including three half glasses).

Inside Telegraph

This is a menu meant for tasting, sipping and thinking. Of chicken liver mousse paired with a German dry Riesling, Quinn says: "Every component plays with the wine differently. The acid cuts through the fattiness of the mousse. The pickles balance the sweetness. Put them together on bread and the wine tastes different again."

But true to Telegraph's modus operandi, it's a menu that doesn't take itself too seriously, pairing a medium-dry German Riesling, for example, with a hunk of slaw-topped chicken-fried pork.

November's menu will highlight new California growers; December's, French Pinot Noir–but not necessarily from Burgundy. The kitchen hasn't picked the food yet, but Quinn's rooting for boeuf bourguignon.