This will be a restaurant review in a moment, but first a couple of words about upcoming videos.  (Or skip to the second photo below.) It’s been nearly two months since the Hoosier Mama video, but your Sky Full of Bacon correspondent has been busy and two, count ’em two, pieces should be up shortly, both of which, oddly enough, involve subjects skirting the edge of modern American food safety bureucracy.

The first, which should be up later this week, will be kind of a cool collaboration with my buddy David Hammond, who does little audio documentaries about food for WBEZ. In this case, David was interested in non-aged raw milk cheeses, which are illegal in this country because of supposed health risks (which somehow manage not to kill millions of Frenchmen every year), and he connected with a woman named Coleen Graham who makes raw milk cheese at home. (I hasten to point out that Coleen does not sell cheese, raw milk or otherwise; she just makes them for consumption amongst friends, which is legal, assuming you buy the raw milk in a neighboring state where it’s legal.) So David invited me along to Coleen’s house in November to shoot the process of making cheese at home. That’s as far as my video goes, but a few weeks later we went to a wine bar in Itasca to taste the cheeses and see if we could tell the difference between raw milk and pasteurized camembert, and so you’ll be able to watch the video, and then get the rest of the story from David in a radio piece on WBEZ’s Worldview next Monday, February 15th. UPDATE: moved to February 22.

The second is, as promised at the end of the last video, a remembrance of Healthy Food, the last surviving Lithuanian restaurant in Bridgeport. Lithuanian Chicago is little remembered today, but at one time (c. 1920s) there were more Lithuanians in Chicago than in any city in Lithuania, and Healthy Food, which opened in 1938, was the oldest surviving Lithuanian restaurant in the world. Healthy Food was one of the places on my mental list of places I thought about doing a video about someday, so when I heard that there were closing within the week last December, I raced down there and basically camped out for a couple of days, interviewing the owner and staff and— this was the coup— filming the making of kugelis, the baked potato-bacon pudding that is Healthy Food’s signature dish.  Why was this a coup?  Well, let’s just say that there are certain old world cooking practices involved which the owner said she didn’t let previous camera-toting visitors like Steve Dolinsky film, for fear of attracting unwanted Health Dept. attention.  But since she was planning to close in a few days anyway, she said what the hell, and so I document the making of kugelis in all its pre-modern glory.  If the result frightens you… well, it’s closed anyway, so you not only don’t have to eat it, you can’t.

That piece will be up in a couple of weeks, which brings us to the restaurant review…

To finish it up I needed some shots of the now-defunct Lithuanian shopping strip in Marquette Park on 69th street, which is labeled “Lithuanian Plaza” although since the closing of Lithuanian Plaza Bakery & Deli a couple of years ago, it in fact has no functioning Lithuanian businesses left (at least that were apparent in daytime; hard to tell with some that might still be taverns).  In doing a little research ahead of time I discovered that there was still one remaining Lithuanian restaurant in the city, two blocks south on 71st street.  (There are more in the south suburbs, including a new branch of Lithuanian Plaza Bakery & Deli.)

Reading the one LTH post by Rene G, Seklycia sounded elderly bordering on sepulchral, its entrance disguised to the crime-ridden neighborhood around it (note his photo of the sign cryptically promising “Lithuanian Human Services”), a buzzer allowing admittance to the few who know.  I envisioned the last, preserved-in-amber holdout against the waves of change that had integrated Marquette Park in the 1960s.  Marquette Park’s place in the turmoil of the 60s is usually depicted one-dimensionally, Martin Luther King versus white racists, but I could certainly imagine sympathy for the ethnic immigrants who had created a little neighborhood of their own in pursuit of the American dream, only to see bigger historical forces blow it away.  (I mean, it’s not like Lithuania has any history of being wiped off the map or anything.)  It seemed as if I was coming to the most obscure restaurant in the most obscured ethnic enclave in Chicago, and I fully expected a cobwebbed, funny-smelling grandma’s house atmosphere to match, like Zakopane or the like.

In fact, Seklycia is nothing much like that at all.  The cryptic sign is down, replaced by the jaunty message above, and there’s no bell to ring to go in.  (The neighborhood doesn’t seem bad at all, frankly— mostly daycare centers.) The dining room could be any modest cafe in a small town, and a waitress several decades below 80 cheerfully took my order as modern American pop music played on a tinny radio.  Figuring this was likely to be my one shot here, I ordered the $7.99 Lithuanian combo.  It started with bread, continued with a huge bowl of beet soup (which tasted a bit French oniony, as in, there might be a package of onion soup mix in there) accompanied by a boiled potato, and then— I was nearly full by this point already— proceeded to a massive plate of kugelis (fluffier than Healthy Food’s, quite good), sausage (overcooked and not that interesting; definite win for Healthy Foods here), sweetish sauerkraut (just fine and improved the sausage immeasurably), and a terrifyingly large “zeppelin,” a big wad of ground pork meat inside a 3/4″ football-shaped shell of gooey potato dough, which I could barely face at all— it was like some form of mutant dim sum.  Lunch concluded with tapioca pudding, which I enjoyed shamelessly.  All in all, the meal was just fair, and not a replacement for Healthy Food, but clearly there are at least some good things on the menu.

It was when I went to the bathroom that I discovered that in fact my original preconception of Seklycia wasn’t entirely wrong— the next room was the grandmotherly holdout against history that I had expected the whole restaurant to be, with old ladies playing cards or knitting at tables and, interestingly, a “Bibliothek” full of Lithuanian books.  I no longer saw it as sad and a bit gothic, though.  As the sign says, Seklycia is about 20 years old— which means it’s really not a remnant of the old Marquette Park community but a new business, relatively.  Someone saw the neighborhood as it was in the late 80s, long after all the turmoil and the “white flight” and the irreversible emigration of Lithuanian Chicago to the suburbs, and still had faith enough in it to open a restaurant and make it a kind of center for what community remained.  I find that kind of heroic, and if you ever find yourself in that area, or feel like making a trek to an obscure corner of the south side, you could do worse than to offer Seklycia a little support— and, as the sign says, enjoy Lithuanian gasp.

Seklycia
2711 W 71st St
Chicago
773-476-1680

I have seen the future, and it works from home.

Or at least from a cute little sandwich shop in Roscoe Village.

So I read there was this new Hawaiian cafe in my neighborhood, Roscoe Village. Hawaiian? I realize that the stereotype, that the main ethnic type in Roscoe Village is Strollermom-American, is well founded, but there’s a reason nearly all the Turkish restaurants in town are within walking distance of me, too, to name one other socio-ethnic group, and so I guess I thought it was possible that there were Hawaiians with a hitherto unsuspected desire for Spam musabi in the vicinity. So I walked up, and saw the day’s special:

Uh, yeah, Hawaiian. Turns out the name was just chosen for its new-agey visualize-your-inner-beach qualities, and otherwise, this is a sandwich shop targeting, yes, Stroller Mom America. It’s attractive, it’s low-key (so no death metal will come on the iPod and wake Baby), the stuff is tame and fairly fresh… and the meats are all, Proudly, from Boar’s Head. Which is when I realized another thing: someone had posted something on LTHForum about a place in my hood selling charcuterie, which had picked up a fryer on the cheap from the late Kaze down the street.  And this was it.  At that moment, my visions of a Salumi-level charcuterie mecca disappeared down a Boar’s Head’s gullet; it’s not that Boar’s Head is bad, exactly, it’s a supermarket brand and it’s one of the better ones, but all that means is, it’s processed to still resemble what it came from, it’s not totally fakey. But it’s not fresh-roasted turkey from Paulina, either, and there are places, like Wicker Park’s Birchwood Kitchen, that don’t just settle for the obvious marketing support you get if you commit to a full Boar’s Head program, but insist on real, fresh (or in the case of La Quercia, cured) food.  And I didn’t just get one of those two minutes from my house.

That said, nothing says you have to eat the things that use Boar’s Head meat-like meat™, and so looking around the menu of fairly light, very white food, I spotted a chicken salad sandwich.  It had asparagus spears in it, which was a nice touch.  It had a lot of lettuce and mayo mixed in, it was clean-tasting rather than especially interesting, if not for the asparagus and the rosemary bread it would have been bland, but (this is the dirty secret of my life as a food explorer) there are plenty of days when I just have to grab something on my street, none of which is going to lead to shouting great discoveries from the rooftops.  So I will be happy just to have this place making fresh, decent food within walking distance.

In any case, what interested me most about this place, as I sat there, wasn’t the food.  Like a lot of people, I think my reaction to Apple’s announcement of the iPad last week was somewhat contradictory: on the one hand, it seems a bit underwhelming, but on the other… I can’t help but feel, and hope, that this oversized iPod Touch is an important first step toward whatever the next thing computing will be is.  It’s a little glimpse of the future, even if it doesn’t quite do much that’s new yet.

Across from me there was a large table.  Two women sat there, with laptops, working.  Next to them was a kid’s table.  Sunlight streamed in the window.  Soft music played overhead.  They nibbled at their food.  We imagine that the future will be shiny, metallic, vaguely fascist in a nice way.  We imagine a future in which all of life is sort of like the Air Force Academy, basically, modernist and hyperorganized:

But in reality, this is the future for which Steve Jobs is creating the iPad, and it’s already here: Mom sitting at a table, doing her work while somebody else is making her lunch, just as when she was a kid herself, and drew at a table while her mom made her lunch.  Or maybe she wasn’t drawing; maybe she was using an Etch-a-Sketch.

Aloha, 21st century.

Nohea Cafe
2142 W. Roscoe
(773) 935-7448
noheacafe.com

A jibarita at La Bombonera.

I haven’t posted one of my 50 Places Not Talked About on LTHForum for a while, because most of my new places in the last few months were those 14 supermercado taquerias I posted about the other day. And while there were probably enough new places on that list to get me to 50, it would have been boring to finish off the list in one post.

But that doesn’t mean I had my eyes shut all that time.  In fact, I noted a number of places as I was scouting out the supermercados, including several new Cuban or South American places on the northwest side.  One of them, I found interesting enough that it turned into a blog post at the Reader, so go read it there.

In the meantime, a quick followup to my Bolzano Meats post: take some thin slices of guanciale.  Heat in microwave for about a minute, to sweat some fat out.  Dice and place on pizza:

I don’t know if there was such a thing as guanciale pizza before, surely there was, but I was very happy with my possibly-not-original invention.  P.S. Just did a search, should have guessed.  Mozza, whose menu is visible in the entrance at La Quercia, has a LaQuercia guanciale pizza.

So some years ago, a guy who had experience under one of the most respected chefs in town went out on his own and opened a comfort food restaurant, which I have expressed love for on many occasions.  It was in an unpretentious suburb (Burbank), had his name and a picture of a pig on its sign, and in general, it looked and felt like exactly the place in which you expect to get comfort food like chicken-fried chicken with mashed potatoes, sage gravy, and green beans with bacon bits for about $8.99.

Even if Chuck Pine occasionally shows his Bayless background by making artisanal-Mexican hybrid dishes like Mexican Pot Roast, he’s firmly within what we would call The Comfort Food Paradigm, which is to say, unpretentious, a little affectation of down hominess and honky tonk good times, easy to like flavors, modest prices— in short, nothing that Grandma wouldn’t recognize as food.

*  *  *

So two guys who had experience under some of the most respected chefs in the world, Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz to be specific, now turn up in a sleekly modern yet welcoming space in Lincoln Park, Kith & Kin.  And they start serving comfort food in something of a fine dining atmosphere, sometimes with French words or the names of pork breeds on the menu (though in general it’s very light on the ingredient-genealogy thing).  In some ways they’re fitting The Comfort Food Paradigm, in some ways they’re breaking it wide open.  A lot of people are loving it.

Me… some of it impressed me, some of it left me thinking, is that it?  Is comfort food enough when you’re performing on this stage, or should we expect more?  Does the mere fact of being in this fine dining atmosphere, in this neighborhood and with these resumes, oblige you to play at the more elaborate games of teasing and subverting expectations and expanding minds that seem to be de rigeur for fine dining these days?  Can you look like The Hot New Chicago Restaurant Paradigm and serve food like The Comfort Food Paradigm at the same time?

Or am I just asking questions that no else wants the answers to?

Before you answer that, let me walk through a couple of dishes.  One that’s received a lot of acclaim is the fried confit chicken thighs, and this is a good example of how a deceptively simple dish— fried chicken, dumplings, gravy— can have a lot of technique and work behind it which produce incrementally more wonderful results.  Doing chicken as confit produced dark meat that had reduced halfway to a jerky texture in some ways, yet still had the juiciness and crispiness of fried chicken, set off simultaneously by salty gravy and skin, the fluffy blandness of dumplings, and the bitterness of some brussels sprouts.  The technique and balance of this dish were impeccable, redefining the very idea of chicken and dumplings as a dish.

But if you’re redefining dishes, are you still in a comfort food zone?  At the very least, you’re pushing it to the edge of comfort, but with great success in this case.  At the same time, though, my wife had short ribs in a traditional veal stock-wine braise.  A classic dish, executed very well… and exactly as any nice French restaurant might make it, or would have made it in 1920, or indeed, as I’ve made it at home.  You got a problem with that?  Not exactly, but if I’m again expecting something as revelatory as the fried chicken thighs, I’m left waiting for the punchline.

Or is that just me?  Maybe.  But that’s how I felt about the meal— constantly wondering, should I just be happy to be comforted, or do I want my comfort nudged to the next level?  A salad was another good example— pecans and blue cheese and some poached pears could be in a salad anywhere, there’s one not entirely unlike it at California Pizza Kitchen, but not many places would use lightly grilled escarole, softening its texture and sharpening its taste; a wonderfully simple but refined touch.  But hardly safe or expected, if that’s supposed to go with the comfort territory.

On the other hand the pork “crock,” a spreadable pork pate, was pleasant enough (we ate it all) but it hardly seemed memorable as pate goes; here’s where Kith & Kin seemed timid next to the Mados and Bristols and Purple Pigs.  (The LTHer who damned it as being like Underwood deviled ham wasn’t being that cruel.)  Likewise, one dessert pulled off the highwire act with great success despite an executional error— an olive oil cake, served a little hard and cold, but beautifully balanced with a lush orange-vanilla ice cream; the other played it safe (fresh churros with a chocolate ganache to dip in) and was appropriately choco-decadent, but no more.  Again, the one that tickled the mind, too, made the one that merely pleased the belly look a little small.

It could be that Kith & Kin is exactly what it wants to be— sometimes ingeniously innovative, often simply a nicer version of Stanley’s Kitchen & Tap.  An audience for what it is has clearly found it, and so maybe everyone will just live happily ever after and not every meal has to be overthought like I’m doing right now.  But I liked the Kith & Kin that pushed my comfort zone so much more than the one that comforted me and no more, that I think it’s almost a shame if you have that ability and don’t use it to the fullest.  Enjoy your success, Kith & Kin— but don’t get comfortable.

Kith & Kin
1119 West Webster
Chicago, IL 60614
(773) 472-7070

HC Monterrey, Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

The tourist district of Playa del Carmen was just a few blocks behind me, but already I was in a different Mexico, dusty and built out of crumbling plaster. I couldn’t see it ahead, the place I’d heard about, but suddenly I could smell it, sizzling beef on the air. I walked into the butcher shop and there was a counter where they sold the goods— but mainly there was a grill, the size of a double bed, smoke rising from it as a couple of guys with tongs threw long, jagged pieces of meat onto the grill. The smell of arrachera, skirt steak, was manly and primal, and a few dollars’ worth of pesos bought me a hunk of still sizzling meat with the barest of accompaniments— a baked potato and some limes. It was maybe the greatest beef experience of my life.

*  *  *

Los Potrillos, Chicago.

Lots of grocery stores have a place to grab a bite in them, whether it’s slice pizza at Dominick’s or the full-fledged food court at the Kingsbury Whole Foods. But there’s a unique character to the taquerias inside Mexican markets— partly it’s that you can tell they want to show off the meat counter’s goods in the best light to encourage sales, like that butcher shop in Mexico did; partly it’s the social side, the fact that a market is something of a community gathering place, like a Mexican town square, especially on weekends when they expand their menus to include specials like birria and menudo.  Whatever the reason, they’re only about a million times livelier than their wan equivalents in American groceries, and they make for an immersive experience in Chicago’s Mexican culture.  In some ways they’re about the most authentic Mexican eating experiences in town, at least in the sense that they’re making the fewest concessions to the gringo trade in terms of menu items or English on the signage.

Taqueria Ricardo.

Which is not to say they’re all the same— in fact, they have many different characters and feels.  Some are big bustling cafeterias with lines of guisados (stews) or gorditas frying; others are like corner diners, a few stools lined up in front of a grillman as he works in a cloud of meat smoke.  Although tacos de carne asada, steak tacos, are the universally standard menu item and seem to account for half the business at any taqueria, beyond that there are plenty of regional variations which seem to suggest that Chicago’s Latino neighborhoods are in turn reflecting Mexican regional differences.  For instance, on the northwest side (which besides Mexicans includes many South Americans) rotisserie or grilled chicken is an important item, and a cafeteria line of guisados is often found.  While on the south side, handpatted tortillas (tortillas heche a mano) and skilled tortilla-makers visibly at work on the line are the center of attention.

Los Potrillos.

For the last few months, I’ve been scouting out and sampling supermercado taquerias around town whenever lunchtime presented me with the desire for Mexican food.  To be honest, I felt like I had fallen into a bit of a rut in my Mexican dining, eating at the same few places, a not uncommon ailment even among foodies, and this gave me an entire new subcategory, largely uncharted, to use to compel myself to try new places.  Only one Mexican supermercado taqueria is widely known in the Chicago foodosphere: Wicker Park’s Tierra Caliente, formerly Carniceria Leon, famous for some of the best tacos al pastor (the real kind, on the gyros-style cone) in town.  My initial thought was, here was an opportunity to find a place that might even surpass Tierra Caliente at the thing it’s famous for.  Ironically, that’s the one thing I didn’t really do; as it turns out, only one of the other supermercado taquerias I found actually serves pastor on a cone at all, and though it’s every bit as good as Tierra Caliente’s, I’m still happy to say that if you want pastor, Tierra Caliente is the logical place to try first.

Pastor spit at Taqueria Ricardo.

But I found so many other interesting things that it hardly mattered.  What follows below is my notes on more than a dozen supermercado taquerias all around town.  Typically, I tried carne asada tacos on the first visit, because that seemed an easy standard for comparison between places that cared enough to try harder and places that didn’t; but if there was any reason to think they emphasized something else, I tried that instead, and aimed in general to sample the various restaurants’ strengths.  (As has been noted on LTHForum, one of the challenges for these places is that since they’re cranking out food in quantity rather than to order, you have to time your visit well for the peak experience— for instance, steak tacos are best at lunch rush, when turnover is high and you have the best odds for getting steak fresh off the fire; but tacos al pastor are better a little off peak hour, when your meat has time to really crisp up in the gyros machine.  And of course, if there isn’t a gyros machine, take a pass on pastor— fried in a pan is common, but nowhere near as good.)

Carne asada tacos, Los Potrillos.

*  *  *

After I had compiled a list of about a dozen places or so, I arranged an LTHForum event at three of the best, which took place this past Saturday.  Besides wanting to introduce my finds to more people, I was eager to visit some of them in a larger party that would allow me to explore their menus in greater detail.  So if you’re interested in checking some of these taquerias out, I’d recommend these three first as not only three of the best but offering a good cross-section of the scene and what’s to be had at different places.  Our first stop was Los Potrillos:

This is a small taco grill that really does first-rate steak tacos, cecina tacos, etc., thanks to an excellent grillman who serves good quality meat hot and juicy off the grill in big, tender chunks.  We also ordered the consomme de chivo which had impressed me on an earlier visit, though it was kind of watery and not as exciting this time— maybe it would have been better after cooking down for another hour or two.  (The pot on which Consomme de Chivo is painted in big letters was curiously missing as well.)

Next was Taqueria Ricardo. Besides the best atmosphere (you wouldn’t necessarily know you were in a supermercado at all, as it’s pretty separate), a ramshackle riot of tile that suggests the over-the-top exuberance of Mexico, this has such an extensive menu that we wound up really having a full (very full) lunch here.  Chicken grilled over live fire was a star here, but so were pastor tacos served at the peak of grilled crispiness, an excellent green salsa-poblano tamale, a lively caldo de siete mares (soup of the seven seas) with a big langoustine plopped right in it, a weekend special of barbacoa de res, and more.  (Though one I wouldn’t recommend was David Hammond’s choice of pickled pig’s feet, which proved that there is a lot of fat and not much meat on a pig’s foot.)  This is really a great Mexican restaurant in both food and atmosphere, which deserves wider attention and discovery.

Taqueria Ricardo; above: chicken over heater, below: caldo de siete mares, pickled pigs’ feet.

Finally we headed down to La Villita to Carniceria Aguascalientes, which has a large cafeteria-style area built on the handmade gorditas that are its star attraction.  Pork in red and green salsas and a poblano-cheese filling all proved to be worthy fillings for the wonderfully warm and nurturing freshly-fried gorditas.

Thanks to all who came along with me on Saturday and I hope many more will follow in our footsteps, discovering one of the last frontiers of ethnic food experience in Chicago.  Now here’s my list:

FAR NORTH

Chapala Taqueria
7117 N. Clark
An attractive modern grocery whose taqueria stresses pollo asado al carbon, char-grilled chicken. It was indeed first-rate, with a subtly seasoned outside (not just Goya Sazon) and cooked well; carne asada was fine if not first-tier. Weekend specials, including carnitas and menudo, would be worth checking out.

Chapala Taqueria.

Supermercado Carreta
6906 N. Clark
If you have an elderly aunt who wants to try a supermercado taqueria, this one is easily the spiffiest and most friendly to the hygiene-obsessed in its area, and the menu pictures on the wall looked promising. But a gordita with carne asada was fatally bland, flavorless masa and the meat smothered in lettuce, chese and crema. Deserves another try from another part of the menu, but disappointing.

Supermercado Almita
5957 N. Clark
This little grocery with a tin ceiling and wooden shelves has a 1927-in-amber decrepitude that will either charm you or creep you out; I was charmed by the two ladies running it, watching Mexican soaps as one of them made me a homey, but perfectly decent, steak taco.

NORTHWEST

Taqueria Ricardo
4429 W. Diversey
Easily my favorite find to date; I can’t think of another Mexican restaurant in Chicago that so captures the ramshackle charm of Mexico itself, from the over the top tilework to the grill haphazardly stacked on top of its burning wood. The menu is wildly diverse, ranging from seafood to grilled chicken adobo and rabbit. Carne asada is good and the pastor is flavorful with lots of pineapple dripping down. Wood smoke means the chicken is outstandingly flavorful, and the presentation of a whole chicken on a metal stand is impressive. A milanesa torta was freshly fried and the bread was toasted, both good signs. Though the guisados were hit (chicken in green salsa) and miss (chicharron), a weekend special of barbacoa de res was excellent, and so was a tamale of poblano and cheese. Among the seafood items, the caldo de siete mares was very nice, impressively decked with a whole langoustine, but a shrimp cocktail, though the shrimp were of nice quality, was way too sweet. In summer I’ve also seen them grilling in the parking lot.

Los Potrillos
3624 W. Belmont
With religious iconography on the walls, this tiny taqueria has a real step-out-of-Chicago feel.  Good quality beef, cooked to be tender and juicy by an expert grillman, makes the carne asada tacos and cecina tacos some of the best in the city.  But my favorite find on my first visit was the weekend special of consomme de chivo, goat soup, which had big chunks of goat in a great ancho broth.

Carniceria Jimenez
3840 W. Fullerton/others
I can’t speak to other outposts of this grocery chain, but with its decor of old radios and vintage Mexican movie stars like Pedro Infante, this taqueria bizarrely comes off like the Burt’s Pizza of supermercado taquerias. For some odd reason I ordered a torta milanesa, which looked textbook-correct but was kind of less than the sum of its parts; the better looking things are the guisados.

Guisados at Carniceria Jimenez.

El Gigante
2500 N. Laramie
Not gigante at all, but this small market with a new taqueria has neon in the window to announce Barbacoa and Carnitas on weekends, which is promising. A weekday steak taco had good, tender beef, but was undercut by rubbery tortillas…

Carniceria y Taqueria La Loma
2535 N. Laramie
…while infinitely better tortillas were a strong point across the street; the steak seemed slightly cheaper (and cut to tiny bits) but it was greasy and salty in all the right ways. Pastor was given pride of place on the menu, so even though no cone was visible, I fell for it, and was reminded once again: If you don’t see a cone, leave the pastor alone!

El Gigante.

NEAR NORTH

Carniceria Guanajuato
Multiple locations
This grocery chain is one of the easiest supermercado taquerias to find, but I’ve never had anything at the taqueria I thought was better than okay, though I’m sure quality varies by location. Still, in the case of the 1436 N. Ashland location, it would be a shame to come here over Tierra Caliente.

Tierra Caliente
1402 N. Ashland
The former Carniceria Leon is the one supermercado taqueria widely known to gringo foodies, complete with Dolinsky icon.  It also has the highest ratio of taqueria to grocery, suggesting where their attention really lies.  The star attraction is unquestionably the pastor, which if you get it at the right moment (a little after lunch rush) is a perfect blend of crispiness and juiciness, and a contender for best in the city.  But LTHers have identified other notable items such as the gordita de chivo and weekend carnitas.

Danny’s Fresh Market
2140 N. Western
You’d think proximity to possibly the best steak tacos in the city, Las Asadas, would step up your game, but everything about Danny’s was dingy and tired; a pork guisado had the taste of seasonings that expired in 2005, and a steak taco came with purple (!) onion, lettuce tomato and mayo, giving it an unmistakable eau de Whopper.

Huarache at Laura.

Carniceria y Taqueria Laura
1051 N. Ashland
The enormous huarache I got, piled high with lettuce, starchy winter tomato, avocado and crema, looked like a monstrosity, and the fact that both meat and huarache were reheated seemed a second strike. Then I bit into it— and was surprised how good it was.  The steak was full of flavor and the huarache toothsome and comforting.  This place is surely overlooked due to the three La Pasaditas being just up the street (though Vital Info praised it in a long-ago Pasaditathon on Chowhound), but it deserves more attention and a return from me.

SOUTH SIDE

Carniceria Aguascalientes
3132 W. 26th St.
This meat market located near the La Villita gate has a large open dining and cooking area in 50s diner white tile, which serves to point attention to the main attraction: a woman hand-patting gordita shells and laying them out in neat rows.  Everything benefits from the toothsome, comfort-foody appeal of the piping hot masa shell, but that’s not to slight well-grilled steak or the complex spiciness of a pork guisado, only two of many choices.

La Chiquita
3555 W. 26th St./2637 S. Pulaski/others
Big, bustling supermarkets on the south side and in suburbs like Cicero and Aurora, these have functional-looking taquerias inside whose main attraction is handmade gorditas, sopas, etc. (Pulaski’s is much nicer, but seemed deader, than 26th St.’s 70s throwback.) Fresh masa made for a very good gordita with pork in red sauce at the 26th street location, though I’d still choose Carniceria Aguascalientes for that first.

Jerry’s Certified
4524 S. Ashland
I came here at off-peak hours, so it was kind of dead like a coffeeshop at three in the afternoon, but I have a feeling that at prime time on weekends, this is an exciting place. There are lots of good signs (literally), with weekend specials like chile rellenos and caldo de siete mares (seafood soup). The emphasis of the everyday menu seems to be on the tortas, and the torta milanesa I had was exemplary; on the other hand, it was one of the only places where I got gringo’d on a steak taco and it arrived with lettuce, tomato and cheese.

Carniceria y Taqueria La Loma.

“Good morning,” the hostess said.

A second later, “Good morning,” a waiter said.

I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve gotten two good mornings at a breakfast place.  The hostess should say “good morning,” that’s her job, but the other one was a completely unbidden freebie.  It’s almost as if they wanted my business!  Were happy to be serving food and see customers!

Things were off to a good start at Nana, the newish breakfast place in Bridgeport (just down the street from the newly-closed Healthy Food, of whom more in the not too distant future).  The place had an attractive combination of blond wood, white paint and sunlight.  It was not crowded at 8:30.  They were friendly.  These are not small things, in the world of Sunday breakfast.

Nana is a modern Ameri-yuppie breakfast place with a Mexican slant to the menu— chilaquiles, huevos rancheros, etc.  My wife had their take on eggs benedict (pictured above), eggs on housemade chorizo on top of a cheese pupusa, with a poblano cream.  This would have been great if the pupusa weren’t cooked hard enough to have to saw through it.  I really liked the flavors of the bite I had, the earthiness of the masa crossed with the creaminess of eggs benedict; but the texture would benefit from a dialing up on the Fluffiometer.  I had something named Benicio, a potato fritter with housemade pancetta on it.  (So if in-house charcuterie is reaching breakfast places, does that mean it’s over as a trend?  Because I’d be just fine with it lasting another century or two as one.)  This had a chipotle cream with a lot of heat, and it was fine, but not as interesting as the Nanadict.  The kids had sweet stuff, and one of them had buttermilk pancakes with spiced apples on it, which was pretty simple and pretty great.

Nana is a long ways from me, and it’s probably a long ways from you, but it’s about 10 minutes on 90/94 from me on a Sunday morning, which is no more than a lot of other breakfast places.  Anyway, I’ll happily drive it for this warm welcome with no waiting.

3267 South Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60608-6618
(773) 929-2486

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Post about Lockwood deleted. See here for details (Facebook registration required).

Big Star, Belly Shack. Gotta get that right. Anyway, so there are three things I had against Belly Shack, the new place from Urban Belly founders Bill and Yvonne Cadiz-Kim, not that it’s especially clear to me why they opened a second one barely half a mile from their first place, with a menu that’s certainly in the same ballpark, if slightly more 21st century fast foodish. One, I nearly broke a tooth at the Green City Market BBQ on Kim’s iron-plated masa. Two, they apparently turned the lovely sunny Vella Cafe space into some sort of urban skater nightmare. Three, their stuff is always insanely expensive.

But curiosity before the year is out got to me, so I went, and am happy to report 1) no teeth broken, 2) the space is much more tolerable than reported, at least on a gloriously sunny day as Tuesday was, and 3) okay, it ain’t cheap, but I’ve certainly done worse for $14 at lunch. The kogi beef with pita-like bread was easy to like, maybe a little too easy, it’s sweet and not a lot of complexity to it, if California Pizza Kitchen ever makes a kogi pizza, it will taste like this. But as I say, easy to like. It came with a side of kimchi, I might be a little chapped if I paid $4 for this, it seemed like pretty straightforward kimchi to me, not sure what’s supposed to make it premium seasonal artisanal heritage free-range kimchi like some claim.

The best thing, though— and if you could only eat this for lunch (not enough for a lunch for me), not only would Belly Shack not be crazy expensive, it’d be downright cheap— was a bowl of soup. I forget what exactly it was supposed to be, but like some of the soups I’ve had at Urban Belly, it was basically chicken with some Asian flavors (lemongrass etc.) and some gooey-toothsome hunks of hominy. The best thing I ever had at Urban Belly was an Asian soup with hominy in it and the same is now true of Belly Shack as well; the best soups I’ve had in any restaurant lately are pretty much those two, too. As I say, the differences between the two are not that vast, but Belly Shack feels like a tightened-up version of the Urban Belly concept, closer to fast food in a good way, unpretentious but with some surprising notes. I found Urban Belly interesting, but despite living a short distance away, have managed not to go back in at least six months. I’m pretty sure Belly Shack will draw me back sooner.

1912 North Western Avenue
Chicago, IL 60647-4332
(773) 252-1414

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Some bits and dribbles:

Check out my piecelet in the Christmas/New Year’s issue of Time Out on six restaurants serving ethnic traditions for Christmas. (Page 43 of the magazine, or here.) I asked food & drink editor David Tamarkin if he’d ever done anything on the Julbord (Christmas smorgasbord) at Tre Kronor, and his response was… “How about six restaurants with ethnic food offerings for the holidays, can you have it by Monday?” It was a fun challenge to try to figure out where, in all this city, there would be six different ethnic holiday offerings… without spending an entire week of frantically calling, driving around, etc. Thanks to three folks who let me pick their brains in ways that helped me zero in pretty efficiently on my final choices: LTHers Cathy Lambrecht and JeffB (who incidentally suggests checking out South American grocery stores around this time of year as well, says they have lots of imported holiday baked goods), and Alexa Ganakos.

And thanks for links to the new podcast, to Serious Eats and Gapers Block, and everybody who retweeted it on Twitter.

I first became aware of Chaise Lounge when Carl Galvan suggested including it in my sustainable fish podcast, as he had recently helped chef Cary Taylor move to almost all sustainable fish.  If I’d heard of it at that point I’d filed it in my head as a Wicker Park bar/nightclub, not the kind of place I especially care about unless something extraordinary is happening there, as at The Violet Hour, say.

I met Cary as well as owner Jim Lasky, and interviewed Cary for about an hour.  He seemed a nice, eager young chef; he’d worked at Blackbird and Avenues, and seemed to be taking an intelligently realistic approach to upgrading the food at a place with enough glitz and swanky pseudo-Miami atmosphere that it could just get by on drinks and vaguely island-y, mediocre supper club food.  Recognizing that his place wasn’t exactly a chef-driven restaurant, he was still trying to find ways to use the kinds of natural suppliers that his neighbors like Mado and The Bristol use and turn out food that could hold its head up in their company.

I admired this, and thought it was both to his and to Lasky’s credit that they were trying to offer first-class food in a place where they really didn’t have to… but I have to admit it didn’t quite nudge Chaise Lounge to the top of my fine-dining must-try list until some rave posts at LTHForum by Kennyz, who said “Chaise Lounge does a better job with fish than any place I can think of at a similar price point in Chicago.”  Intrigued by this— since it was swimming against the current of Chicago’s, and my own, rampant porkophilia at the moment— I picked it for my birthday dinner last Friday.

I loved the pork dish.

I don’t mean that to slight the fish dishes at all.  We didn’t try as extensively of the fish dishes as I expected, but the things we did have were generally very good.  Scallops are the new salmon, in terms of being ubiquitous and a bit boring, but these had more flavor than most, were cooked flawlessly, and the stuff they swam in— mainly a schmear of sweet beet puree— was bright and imaginative; in every way it was a cut above most of the scallop dishes I’ve had lately.  A smoked trout brandade was comfy enough to crawl into and pull the crock’s lid behind you; while a special of lobster pot pie showed that Taylor can do comfy and complex and cooked to perfection all at once, big hunks of lobster in a warm and savory gravy of root vegetables like sunchokes.  (Though he talked with us beforehand about the one conceptual/logistical problem with a lobster pot pie– how to do an upper crust without cooking the lobster to rubber.  The solution— a thick disc of pastry baked separately and plopped on at the end— is inelegant but, it seems, a small price to pay for the lobster being cooked superbly.)

Oh, but the black-eyed pea cassoulet, with housemade garlic sausage and duck… that’s what I spent the next day dreaming about.  You know how on the last season of Top Chef, the Voltaggio brothers would impress you with highly imaginative, conceptual platings, and then Kevin would win because his just tasted so damn good?  This was a Kevin dish, reflective of Taylor’s Southern background but with complexity that comes from classic French cookery.  (Even though it’s somewhat hidden on the menu, Taylor takes his Southern heritage seriously, and we got into a discussion of the classic Junior League cookbook Charleston Receipts at one point; a relative of his was one of the authors.)

I didn’t have a lot of expectations for dessert, since he told us beforehand that he is his own pastry chef and he kind of lets his staff play around and come up with ideas for that part of the menu.  But if the process he described sounded a bit lackadaisical, you’d never have thought that from the desserts themselves, which (like the scallop, actually) rose above the good enough with intelligent choices of accent flavors on the plate which suggested greater sophistication, like little bits of bourbon gelee around an apple crisp.  An almond cake (not one of my favorite flavors) was one of the best parts of the meal, beautifully balanced for a flavor that can be cloying.

Chaise Lounge, and the fact that it has a first-rate chef, are not unknown; Phil Vettel recently gave it three stars in the Tribune, in fact he reviewed it before he ever got to Mado, which perhaps says something about his being drawn to what he reviews by the scene more than the cuisine.  But it may still be a bit underappreciated, not least by the raucous crowds attracted by its lively nightclub atmosphere, and it belongs on the foodie radar like any other place run by a Blackbird alum with a keen sense of how to get deep flavor out of top quality ingredients in a simple, unfussy way.  In other words, don’t hate Chaise Lounge because it’s beautiful; inside this raucously lively nightclub, there’s a serious restaurant getting down.

Chaise Lounge
1840 W. North Ave.
773-342-1840
www.chaiseloungechicago.com

In a city with one trillion taco joints, it takes something special to get attention for a new one. I expect if Oprah opened one, if Roger Ebert was slicing the pastor off the cone, if Scott Turow was sprinking the cilantro on your tortilla, they could get attention denied to the opening of El Taco Muy Bien Caliente #2 on Cicero just south of Diversey, and likewise, when Paul Kahan, award-winning chef, and Donnie Madia, a restaurant entrepreneur so super-powered he rescues construction workers from certain death, open a taco joint, well, you may have read something about it.

As it happens, I came to Big Star last night after a few weeks of trying close to a dozen different utterly obscure, authentic taco joints around town. And so I have two very different reactions to it. The crowd there seemed ecstatic, and I think if your frame of reference is that here’s a space that used to be the utterly forgettable Pontiac Cafe, and it’s located in an area which has more than its fair share of stupid bad restaurants for young people with more capacity for alcohol than taste, then Big Star has a lot going for it. Taken as a bar, which could just as easily be serving chicken nugblets and potato skinks, you can’t argue with a plate of reasonably tasty tacos on fresh-made tortillas for a couple of bucks each. You can quibble— things were never quite warm, even though we were within arm’s reach of the kitchen; I don’t know why radish slices have to come on everything, their cool wet crunch damping down the savory warmth of a taco full of meat; there’s a reason why Mexican restaurants always put your meat on two tortillas, which will be quickly revealed— but you can’t really argue with the appeal, given that the prices could easily be double what a typical Mexican taqueria charges, and instead they’re at par (albeit everything’s smaller than it would be in a Mexican place). If I had to go to a bar like this with somebody, this is certainly one I’d consider, and feel that I’d shown off an interesting aspect of our culinary scene, and not gotten hosed pricewise.

Taken as a Mexican restaurant, though, in a city with a pretty high bar for gringos offering artisanal Mex (or their Mexican ex-employees doing the same), I had more trouble with Big Star. Basically my feeling was, anything that’s pretty unique to them, was good and interesting— the pork belly taco, with tender braised pork belly, is easily the best thing we tried, and some roasted lamb (replacing, alas, the goat which they opened with) was also tasty and impeccably done. Pastor, on the other hand, is just bizarre— big chunks of pork, with very little of the crispy outer edge you want pastor to have; if they’re going to do an inauthentic style, couldn’t they crisp them under a salamander to fake being more authentic? Great pastor is rare enough in Chicago, but at least it exists, and it was very much not in need of reinvention.

Likewise, I was underwhelmed by a fish taco, partly because proportions were off (too much mayo, a huge honkin’ slice of avocado) but also the fish tasted kind of strong (I was never sure if it was supposed to be fishy, or was simply a bit past its prime, though that’s hard to imagine given the turnover they must have) and is doused in an offputting seasoned salt. And finally, it doesn’t help that the tortillas, though handmade in the front window, are bland and oddly rubbery (somewhat like the interior, which is painted in Art Gum Eraser gray, and generally feels like you’re dining in the U-505).

So again, the worth of Big Star has everything to do with what you’re looking for— out of the ordinary Wicker Park bar, great.  Example of what Chicago has to offer in terms of Mexican food, you need to get out of Wicker Park and see what’s really out there, among the little family joints… that will never be big stars.

I’ve never quite believed those claims that even wine experts, when blindfolded, can’t tell red wine from white. I’m a long ways from being an expert and yet I’m pretty sure that I could distinguish the tomatoeyness of red from the herbalness of white without any visual clues.

However, that the power of suggestion is a powerful factor in taste is undeniable.  We taste what we expect to taste, much of the time.

I went to a new Japanese restaurant in my neighborhood, Mio Bento, a few weeks back.  I liked it okay for what it seemed to be, basically mall Japanese in a new condo building, but the setting and the emphasis on takeout led me to put it in a certain class.  And so one assumption I made was that the udon started with a commercial stock or base product— it had the one-dimensionally meaty taste of beef bouillon.  Using a shortcut product like that seems like the kind of thing a place doing mainly takeout business in a condo building would do.  So I said so on this blog.

Except that udon isn’t made with beef.  It’s a seaweed-based stock, and the owners of Mio Bento replied here:

Thanks for stopping into Mio Bento & posting about us on your blog. There’s a bunch of other dishes that will be rolling out as we continue to grow. If you want to sample the goods earlier on (and maybe give us your input)let us know.

By the way, the udon broth is made from scratch daily

So I went back to Mio Bento a couple of days ago, and had the udon again. Now that I was expecting to taste more than Insta-Beef, I did— the udon seemed richer, more complex, I picked out notes of star anise and cinnamon (whether they’re actually in it or not).

So which judgement is right? Who knows. But I appreciate the good humor that Julie, co-owner, showed when I identified myself after eating there. She explained that the udon is made every day by her mother, who has owned a string of Japanese restaurants in other cities; she and her husband opened this one in part to lure Mom to come live with them. They’re Korean (not uncommon in Japanese restaurants here), and the menu has a few Korean items, and will continue to grow as the restaurant evolves— better signage is on the way, for instance, which their almost-invisible restaurant needs.

We talked about other things, what Asian foods our kids will eat or not eat and so on, and then she pointed out a little glass container of Asian truffles— I mean the chocolate kind— which a friend is trying to start as a business. They had chocolate on the outside, like you’d expect, but the inside was a wheat paste soaked in cognac, and there was a walnut on top. Okay, not what you’d expect from a Belgian chocolate shop, say, but they were kind of good all the same, in a not so decadent kind of way.

It was a pleasant visit, and it’s a nice addition to the neighborhood. Give it a chance. Or in my case, two chances, and see what you missed the first time.