Inside and out, Chicago's Bloomingdales Home is a surprise. This isn't an everyday big box department store.
Look for the onion domes and you'll find the store housed in the renovated Medinah Temple, once home to Chicago's Shriners. This store doesn't sink the kitchenware in the cellar. This department store lavishes kitchenware with the treatment department stores usually reserve for perfume and fashions.
High-end gadgets, pots and pans, small electrics, and a large teaching kitchen fill the main floor of Bloomingdale's Home. When we visited, they were serving potato leek soup and launching a new "toxin-free" kitchen line by Dr. Andrew Weil.
Upstairs, the high-end china (Royal Crown Derby, $670 per place setting) and flatware is fantastically displayed. We loved the natural and black table display that featured ink and natural table runners (a set of two for $84, Dwell).
The staff is "sophisticated and surprisingly approachable" as Citysearch says.
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Bloomingdales Home has one of the best selections of high end kitchenware that I've seen in Chicago. (For locals fyi: they're having a big sale this Saturday, with a few impressive markdowns, like 40% off assorted Le Creuset dutch ovens.) I've had a few friends use their wedding registry, and I can see what made the store so tempting for that. It has good basics, like OXO gadgets for under ten dollars, but it also has fancy silver in six hundred dollars a place setting territory.
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