Vela Bar y Cocina — Restaurant in Chicago

If you enjoy eating in the glow of a 6,000-lumen interrogation lamp, Vela is the place for you. For anyone else, who is expecting a restaurant to offer a remotely civilized dining experience, I’d recommend you stay far away.

My recent dinner here was hijacked by two women who I can only assume style themselves “influencers,” who brought in industrial-strength photography lights to take shots and videos of every single dish and drink. For most of our dinner, they turned their table into a full-on studio shoot, blinding nearby diners and completely nuking the atmosphere. It was like trying to have a meal in a dentist’s chair, except without the super cool full-coverage, eye-protecting sunglasses and paper necklace.

You might assume that the restaurant staff would intervene in some meaningful way. Sadly, you’d be wrong. When we raised concerns (upon being specifically asked by the general manager about how our experience was when she came to run our check for us – to be clear, we hadn’t even intended to verbally complain, just to make a quiet exit and not return), the general manager sheepishly said she had asked them to tone it down, but there was “nothing else” she could do. Really? Nothing?

We all know that is nonsense.

Would the GM say the same thing if someone lit up a cigarette inside? “Well, I asked them to stop, but I can’t make them, and they really want to smoke.” What about a guest blasting their own music on a bluetooth speaker? Would a customer loudly watching TikToks without headphones be tolerated indefinitely? What about someone who decided to take a screaming, profanity-laced phone call in the middle of the dining room on speaker? Or let’s make it even simpler: imagine someone talking loudly on their phone in a movie theater. We all know exactly how that ends, and it involves an usher escorting that person to the exit. Private businesses can AND SHOULD ask guests who are behaving in an uncivilized manner to leave if they refuse to act like adults in a shared space.

There’s a clear difference between accommodating guests who want to take normal photos (which is 100% reasonable!) and enabling obnoxious behavior that actively ruins the experience for others. The “nothing I can do” excuse is not just lazy — it’s cowardly. Restaurants have rules for a reason. If anyone should be empowered to enforce them, it’s the general manager. It seems like ensuring a positive guest experience (so that customers return) is a significant part of the job, right? This is about basic respect. The kind of lighting these guests used absolutely dominated the experience, and, worse, it turned every other un-consenting diner into an extra in their content creation.

If Vela wants to become an Instagram studio first and a restaurant second, that’s their prerogative (frankly, I’d have had more respect for the interaction with the GM if she had simply said “we allow this kind of behaviour in this establishment, and if it bothers you, then perhaps you should have dinner elsewhere”). But diners deserve to know what they’re walking into, which apparently includes the distinct possibility of leaving with retinal damage.

All that being said, Quinn, our server, was lovely, and none of this was her fault.

The one star is for the tortillas, which were both very tasty and quite pretty (given the lighting, I got an...

Edit after owner response: The misunderstanding is on your end, not mine. The other guests weren't just taking lit photos of their food, they had an entire studio set up on their table with panel lights shining out into the room for long stretches of time.

Your GM claimed she told them to stop, they didn't stop & her response was "what can I do?"

This is why I make the comparison to a food fight. In the latter situation, it would not have ended with "what can I do?" it would be brought to an end one way or another. By the GM responding as she did & you responding as you have here, what you're saying is "we don't actually care how rude they were being, we don't want to deal with it". OK, fine, but be honest: "We encourage people to treat our bar like an Instagram studio".

Good for you, I'm sure you'll get lots of people to come in, do that once, & never come back. But you'll never get local regulars when you allow that kind of incivility to go not only undealt with, but actually encouraged.

If I could give you no stars, I would.

Original review: To be fair, our waitress was great. We will keep her out of this.

If you’re going to serve raw tuna, I probably shouldn’t be able to smell it from ten feet before it hits the table. Just a thought.

The bug issue:

If I started throwing tortillas around the room, I think we can all safely assume I would be told to stop, & if I didn’t, the police would remove me. So, when a pair of idiots turn their table into a film studio, complete with sun bright box lights which are shining all over the dining room & the GM tells you “what can I do, I asked them to stop & they didn’t”, well you’re getting reamed online one way or the other.

I mean, I can come back & prove the point with a food fight or you can actually train your staff that all guests are on premises at the pleasure of management & to remove people who are being uncivilized.

But either way, as much as I wish River North finally had a Mexican joint worth going to, I won’t be back as a...

THIS RESTAURANT IS POORLY MANAGED AND THE FOOD IS MEDIOCRE. Our party of seven had a reservation at 7PM and we didn't get seated until 30 minutes afterwards. I understand that this is something that happens, but this restaurant's entrance area is super small, so we were just left standing in the way of staff and other guests with nowhere to move (scrolling through other reviews of this place, it seems like this happens too often). Once we were seated, the staff member filling out water cups kept spilling egregious amounts of water on the table and they never returned to clean it up. Since it was restaurant week, many of us ordered the same dishes, but when the food came, they combined some portions into one large plate while some were served as single portions (i.e. 3 orders of churros served in one plate and two orders served by themselves), which is obviously fine, but the staff didn't even bother to explain the plating arrangements. On to the food, the Pollo A La Leña tasted and felt like a pre-cooked piece of chicken that's bought frozen that they just threw in the microwave. The churros tasted like the oily breaded crust of a Popeyes Chicken sandwich, and the Entre-Mezze appetizer was mediocre at best. To make things worst, one of the bathrooms didn't have any toilet paper (on a busy Saturday night), which thankfully I noticed before using it. They also added a 20% tip to our check, however, after checking their website and reservation booking site, nowhere did it mention that a tip would be added for parties of a certain size. I understand that our party of seven is considered large and automatically adding a tip for large parties is customary, but this should be explicitly mentioned somewhere. If you're considering eating here, don't fall for the facade of the decor or the Instagram/TikTok gimmicks, you're better off going to a mom-and-pop Mexican spot in the city or another fine-dining Mexican restaurant that's actually well...