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Our Story

Since 1924

A century of fire and candlelight on South Sixth Street — kept by one family, one cellar, one quiet promise.

The candlelit VERMILION dining room, much as it has looked since 1924
The Beginning

A supper club born of a long crossing

VERMILION opened its doors in the autumn of 1924, the work of Henri Aubrey, a Lyonnais restaurateur who arrived in Springfield with little more than a copper pan, a butcher's eye, and the conviction that a good table could anchor a whole city. He took a narrow brick storefront on South Sixth Street, hung a single lamp the color of embers, and began serving prime cuts to lawmakers, railmen, and anyone who understood that dinner was a thing worth slowing down for.

The lean years tested him. Through Prohibition and the Depression, the front room stayed warm on thin margins while the real work moved below ground — a back-room cellar where Henri laid down beef and quietly aged the bottles he could not sell upstairs. What began as survival became a craft. The cellar outlasted the hard times, and so did the house.

Three generations later, the Aubreys still keep the lamp lit. The recipes have been refined, never replaced; the grit that built the place has simply been handed down, plate by plate, like a family name.

A raw USDA Prime cut resting in the VERMILION dry-aging room
The Craft

The cellar that taught us patience

The same stone room that hid Henri's barrels now holds our dry-aging cellar. We bring in only USDA Prime, then let it rest — twenty-eight days for a tempered, classic edge; forty-five for the deep, nutty char that has become our signature. Time, salt-cool air, and nothing else.

There is a ritual to the cut. Each loin is examined, trimmed by hand, and chosen for a particular night and a particular guest. By the time it reaches the grill, it has been waited on far longer than any guest will wait for it — and that, we think, is the whole point.

Fire, patience, and a warm welcome — give a guest all three, and the rest of the evening takes care of itself.
— Henri Aubrey, Founder
A Hundred Years, Counted

By the numbers

A Century
Years of Service
45
Days Dry-Aged
600
Wine Labels
3
Generations
The VERMILION wine cellar, lined floor to ceiling with bottles
The Cellar

Six hundred labels, one steady hand

What Henri began as a hiding place is now one of central Illinois's most quietly serious wine cellars — more than six hundred labels resting in the cool below the dining room, from cellar-worthy Bordeaux to the small Midwestern growers we have followed for decades.

Our sommelier keeps no script. Tell us the cut you have chosen and the evening you are after, and the right bottle will find its way to your table — poured, like everything here, with patience and without ceremony.

Join the Story

Experience it for yourself

A table at VERMILION is the surest way to understand a hundred years of it. Reserve yours, or inquire about an evening of your own in our private rooms.

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