I have a cold and I have a bunch of shooting to do and Hammond and I are giving a presentation at Mensa’s confab this Thursday on sustainable fish and I have to carve pumpkins with the kids and oh, it’s a busy week and I have no inspiration to write something. So if anyone does happen to visit this week, I’m going to dig way back in the archives to find something for you, here’s something I posted at Chowhound many years ago when my tall, self-assured 8-year-old was a mere baby traveling the city with his food-obsessed dad. This place is still around but I have never been back, sad to say.

Entering the Pharoah’s Chamber

Someone posted on Luxor a few weeks ago and that sent me out to explore further reaches of Lawrence where I evidently hadn’t been for a while– long enough to allow a new middle Eastern restaurant to pop up, at least.

In fact, it seems to have been long enough for an entire Egyptian enclave to have popped up in Albany Park; just driving along Lawrence I counted no less than three places bearing three of the most stereotypically Egyptian names possible– no, nothing named King Tut, but Luxor, Nefertiti Cafe and, simply enough, The Pharoah’s.

Entering The Pharoah’s takes you back to the days when all Chinese restaurants were named The Great Wall. Not only is the name stereotypical, but the room has been done in the style of a pharoah’s tomb (at least a pharoah whose preparations for the afterlife included a big screen TV), with off-the-shelf bas relief tiles of the most cliched Egyptian scenes. Ten years from now, it will be that taqueria that mystifies everyone with its Egyptian motifs.

So am I mocking The Pharoah’s? On the contrary. I am saluting the entrepreneurial spirit of the immigrant, who seeks to offer the customers of the new country exactly the stereotypical experience of the owners’ native land they expect. In fact, The Pharoah’s proved to be a totally welcoming and friendly environment that checked off every single one of my signs of an authentic immigrant restaurant experience (see below). How welcoming was it? Well, one of my party not only got to dance with one of the female proprietors, he wound up being kissed by her– and then being fed by her by hand! Of course, he’s 17 months old, so that might have had something to do with his special treatment.

Having the baby along gave me the excuse to order way too much food so I could try several things. The baba ghanouj (which I noticed they pronounced with an actual j sound, ganoodge, not ganoosh) had a good smokey flavor. The baby and I both liked it a lot. The beans in the foul likewise seemed to have been hand-roasted over a flame and bore visible grill marks; I missed the little hint of a liquory flavor (presumably not actually alcohol) that these have at Tut Oasis, but the freshness was inarguable and I certainly liked them better than Al-Khaimyeh’s (or whatever the place is on the opposite side of Kedzie from Noon-O-Kebab). We had no problem finishing most of that, too, both of us. The chicken schwarma sandwich was a disappointment only in that at the low price of $2.95, it was pretty thin and thus the chicken tended to be a little lost amid other things; I would have paid a dollar or two more for a fatter sandwich (like Tutunji’s), not that I strictly needed more today, anyway the chicken eaten by itself was very flavorful and moist, I might well order a dinner choice instead of a sandwich next time and see how that comes out. (Though the front of the menu was pretty much the usual stuff, there were some more unusual items on the back worth future exploration.)

Last but not least, I think The Pharoah’s might well be an interim step, at least, in Vital Info’s search for the perfect middle eastern place, since they brought us a plate of pickled peppers and such, and also a plate of extra tomato and cucumber, alongside our meal. (She also got a yogurt from the fridge and fed it to my son while bouncing along to the Egyptian music videos, but you can’t expect the same treatment.)

Oh, and they also have hookahs, like Luxor. Though at lunch time they seemed to be just cleaning them, at least they didn’t offer either me or the baby one.
* * *

Mike G’s Signs of An Authentic Immigrant Restaurant Experience
with The Pharoah’s score

1. Large screen TV showing native programming [Y]
2. Male proprietor walks through non-smoking area with lit cigarette [Y]
3. Male proprietor walks through entire restaurant talking on cell phone (can be combined with #2) [Y]
4. Female proprietor fails to understand item you are pronouncing (“fool… fowl… fole?”) until you point to it, at which time she says “Ah, fool!” pronouncing it exactly the way you thought you said it the first time [Y]
5. Multiple family members at work, more than would be needed if employing the whole family was not the point of restaurant [Y]
6. Presence of older man, not an owner but with undefined other role in the running of the restaurant, with extravagant mustache in style of the village they came from [Y]
7. Everyone in extended family/staff comes out to at some point to say hi to the baby (optional if no baby available) [Y]

Pharaohs Cafe
(773) 478-8400
Albany Park/North Park
3949 W Lawrence Ave
Chicago, IL 60625

I could take this moment to salute the record time in which a restaurant went from being one of 50 Places Not Mentioned on LTHForum to an LTHForum Great Neighborhood Restaurant… but the work of a food adventurer is not to rest on laurels, but to press ever onward, ceaselessly expanding the world of food knowledge.

These are three neighborhood places (not necessarily in my neighborhood, but at least on routes I travel fairly frequently, so they feel like neighborhood places to me). How far should you travel to try them? Not very, I’d say. Find their equivalent in your neighborhood, I’d say. Still, I don’t dismiss them, either, and in fact I’ve already been back to one.

Paradise Sauna

I’m surprised that this place never got an LTH review, as its sushi-sauna combo is not only unique but has had its fans over the years, as I noted a couple of years back. Chefs are always being asked where they go to eat besides their own places, and being competitive, they rarely name a competitor. Typically, they either go regular-guy (Grant Achatz’s love for Potbelly), or… they say sushi. Sushi seems to be the neutral ground, the Switzerland cuisine for chefs.

And one place I noticed that they named often was Paradise Sauna; the sybaritic appeal for chefs of raw fish, sake and gettin’ nekkid and steamy (plus late, chef-friendly hours to facilitate the above) is obvious enough.

For that same reason, Michael Morowitz informed me that he had never been able to convince his wife of the virtues of fish being sliced a few feet from people getting rubdowns. So he and I went and sampled… only the restaurant side. What may be going on in the other part of the place, we have no idea, but what’s going on on the sushi side is an okay, fairly plain sushi restaurant. We had some sashimi which was pretty good, a nicely hot and somewhat too large spider roll and a pretty mediocre roll with drab, lifeless white fish draped across the top, which we didn’t finish. Prices were reasonable, the atmosphere was exactly what you’d expect. A neighborhood place, nothing more— at least on this side of the door.

Paradise Sauna
2910 W Montrose Ave
Chicago, IL 60618-1404
(773) 588-3304

Mio Bento

A tiny Japanese (or Korean-Japanese) cafe hidden in a generic-monster condo building on a strip of Irving Park near Western that no one walks… hard to imagine the commercial prospects for that, and it’s been pretty empty at lunch, so I’m hoping they do more takeout business in the evening from their deli cases. This is pretty standard stuff— udon with the taste of a commercial broth, small inexpensive sushi rolls with too much ponzu sauce squirted over them— but hey, if I was in Japan, there’d be 15 places like this on my block, no better* and no worse, so I’m happy to have one, get my healthy seaweed salad or my udon with some fresh tempura vegetables in it. Welcome to the neighborhood Mio Bento.

* Of course, objectively they’d be better because they’d be in Japan where they could get better stuff to start with, but relatively speaking, there’d be a pack they’d all be in the middle of, where Mio Bento is in the middle of a pack of one.

Mio Bento
2245 W Irving Park Rd
Chicago, IL 60618-3840
(773) 539-2500

La Cabana de Don Luis

Normally, this has the kind of Mexican compound name that says “stay away” to me, see my rules and “Los Dos Sombreros de Señor Guacamole,” and the window saying “Authentic Mexican Food” was another warning: authentic Mexican restaurants don’t say “Authentic Mexican Restaurant,” they say “Menudo Fines de Semana.”

But I gave it a shot. It’s a friendly family-run place. I wasn’t wild about the red and the lettuce-based green salsa, but you can at least say they were hot, and bringing out a plate of beans to dip in was a hit with the boys. One son had a steak burrito, and the steak seemed pretty decent. I had cochinita pibil, just because I was surprised to see it on the menu. I don’t think it was slow-roasted in banana leaves in the ground, but at least it was stewed in a pot with achiote paste and orange, and was plenty hot. It won’t give Xoco a run for its money, but it wasn’t a bad rendition. Maybe they make something else that’s not merely better than you expect, but better than you’ve had elsewhere.

I could wish the TV wasn’t blaring (and they changed it to English-language news for us, meaning my kids got a full dose of swine flu hysteria and Fenger High beating deaths), but all in all, a decent family run Mexican place. A neighborhood place.

La Cabana de Don Luis
5157 N Lincoln Ave
Chicago, IL 60625-2520
(773) 271-5176

Further adventures in free lunch:

File photo.

Quartino

I had eaten at Quartino once before, and for a place that fell pretty heavily on the concepted/Disneyfied side at first glance— an imitation old school meat market type place inside a brand new skyscraper, serving as a different sort of meat market for expense account types— I was pretty impressed by the food. And, for that matter, the decor; the thick white tile design and the well-crafted charcuterie and pastas seemed to be doing an equally good job at convincing you there was some genuine heritage to a place that was a hole in the ground five minutes earlier.

This time, it was a lunch PR event for chef John Colletta’s new book, 250 True Italian Pasta Dishes:

In addition to a platter of their house charcuterie, which is very nicely made, we were served a number of dishes allegedly from the book. I say allegedly because, well, there was a definite disconnect between the mass appeal, Better Homes and Garden-ish look of the book and the dishes we were served, which included a lot of ingredients like guanciale or oddly shaped pastas you don’t readily find at the Piggly Wiggly in Huntsville, or even Whole Foods. In fact, the whole affair seemed a bit of a strange meeting of different worlds; the chic, masters-of-the-universe big city restaurant producing a cookbook for an audience that clips recipes from Sunset and Parade, promoting that book by feeding its food to writers from The Onion (that’s who we sat with) and other urban-hip publications. (And sure enough, close examination suggested that the recipes bore only modest resemblance to the dishes we were served— the best of them, a complex bolognese-like pork ragu that bespoke many hours of stewing, seemed to be an entirely different dish from the quick, tomatoey thing pictured, for instance.)

Having attended two of these events (thanks to Mr. Hammond) with roughly the same crowd of local food niche media, I continue to wonder, does this kind of PR make sense? Is a message reaching any sort of target market for this book (obviously the kind of urban-hip people who buy chic-looking Italian cookbooks like this one will judge Colletta’s by its middle-America cover)? It seems like these folks get invited out for things like this because they are the folks you can get to turn out for an event like this (and I saw many of the same hearty eaters from my last adventure in PR events). But with the media changing so rapidly, I really wonder if the way of really reaching the audience for this book, whoever they are, hasn’t changed too— or should, anyway.

But to return to me heartily stuffing my face… authentically from the book or not, several of the dishes were outstanding, particularly that pork ragu with orrechiete. I came home with the book, but mainly it made me  interested in returning to Quartino sooner than the next Super Bowl with Chicago in it.

Hearty Boys

The Hearty Boys are caterers. The Hearty Boys had one restaurant, HB, now sold to somebody else. The Hearty Boys are gay. The Hearty Boys had a TV show for one season. One of the Hearty Boys introduced me at the Printer’s Row Literary Fest earlier this year.

That concludes a complete inventory of my knowledge about the Hearty Boys, Dan Smith and Steve McDonagh, before I was invited to a party at their house for 1) an artist who used to work for them, Matt Lew, and 2) their new upcoming restaurant, Hearty. They knew even less about me, I’m sure.

In any case, I had a pleasant time chatting with assorted food industry and food media folk while noshing on assorted catering stuff that, again, was alleged to represent what was going to be offered at the restaurant when it opens on November 4. Hard to tell from such little noshes what entrees will really be like… but I gotta say, they’re very good caterers. The stuff was all fresh and lively, not merely generic alcohol-soaking stuff, nasty little puff pastry bites or stuffed mushrooms or whatever. (The most interesting item: an assortment of hardboiled eggs stuffed with various things like beets; this actually will be an item at the bar, a rather ironically named egg “flight.”) And nothing wrong with the alcohol either… they were primarily mixing Aviation and Brown Derby cocktails, and I like the idea of focusing on classic retro cocktails a lot.

So: I wouldn’t say I came away with too clear an idea of what they’ll be serving, but I will be interested to see when they open next month.  As for the social side of the party-Hearty… I remember reading a book where a Russian emigre to the hipster scene in early 80s New York comments that “American men were all so neatly dressed that I thought they were all gay!”  At this party, I definitely felt like I was standing up for the traditional heterosexual values… of rumpledness and schlubdom.

Edzo’s Burger Shop

Eddie Lakin, LTH poster, blogger here and here, and chef here and there, is opening a burger place in Evanston.  You can read all about it at the second of those two links.  No, really, you should.  It’s pretty interesting, reading all the mundane but nerve-wrackingly necessary stuff that goes into making a restaurant happen.  I talked with Eddie about the possibility of chronicling his progress toward Burgerdom as a Sky Full of Bacon podcast, but we were both too busy to be in each other’s faces for the amount of time it would have taken to do that, so go read his blog and gain a new appreciation for what it all takes.

Anyway, by now he may just be a few days from opening, but last week I went up to his place to try what he was making and offer feedback as he worked at training his staff (Mexican cooks he inherited from the space’s previous incarnation as a pita and hummus joint) in the finer points of burgerdom.  What’s going to be really cool about Edzo’s is that he’s really studied the different classic burger styles that exist around the Chicago area and is aiming for, yes, exactly the kind of fresh meat, thin patty burger that a certain blogger posted about here, among other places.  Here you can see how he’s going for the Schoop’s-like crisped lacy edge:

It was still a work in progress as of last Tuesday, but I offered my feedback (as did the others there that day) and I think Eddie’s well on his way to changing the burger paradigm on the frozen-burger-puck-plagued north side.  There are lots of little signs of his personality and willingness to try new fun things at Edzo’s, and of the many new, quality-burger joints to have opened in the last year or so (Five Guys, Counter, Epic, etc.), I think Edzo’s will be the one that defines a particular Chicago style and has the potential to be the Hot Doug’s of burgerdom.  I can’t wait!

Edzo’s Burger Shop
1571 Sherman Ave.
Evanston, IL

Whoever said there’s no free lunch never had a food blog; in the last couple of weeks I’ve had plenty of opportunities to partake of free food, and to observe the circumstances under which free food is flung at writers who might maybe say something nice about the flinger.  Draw your own conclusions about the level of corruption to which I have undoubtedly sunk, as I recap (in two parts):

Perennial/Boka/Landmark

Kevin Boehm, developer or impresario or whatever you want to call him of these hoppin’ Lincoln Park spots as well as the upcoming Stephanie Izard restaurant, invited David Hammond to pull together a group of a dozen prominent LTHForumites for a tasting of his three restaurants. At one point LTHForum was considering a no-freebies-ever policy (which even at that point was not strictly true, though the freebies tended to be pretty low cost at that point) but as this thread suggests, with more of us moving into more official journalistic endeavors which pierce the veil of reviewer anonymity and so on, they seem to have decided, screw it, let’s eat! That there is still some uncomfortableness about this choice, however, is made evident by the fact that when this goes up, I’ll be the first of the dozen to post about the dinner, now two weeks past.

Anyway, we had about five courses at each of the first two restaurants, and then dessert at Landmark, by which point we were quite stuffed by the competing dinners before. The first spot, Perennial, occupies the kind of space you’d expect to find a coffee shop in, a sort of V-shaped space in the corner of a hotel, and if the room seems awkward at first it actually proves to be a pretty lively combination of fine dining with the bustle and urban liveliness of a diner on a corner overlooking the park. (Ironically, the hotel is the least lively part of the building— apparently the developers went bust and are now under indictment, so Perennial is sort of the restaurant for a hotel that doesn’t exist. I didn’t ask if any of the bartenders were named Lloyd.)

Perennial is pretty committed to fresh local ingredients, as you might expect from a place across the street from Green City Market (and in fact I saw chef Ryan Poli there on Wednesday), and that was the strength of what we had. One of the best things of the night was the first— a simple corn fritter in a corn soup, which tasted like really, really in season corn. Unfortunately I felt like most of what followed just missed because of this or that executional issue— squab with foie gras and a tomato marmalade (excuse me, Iron Creek tomato marmalade, to namecheck a Green City vendor) had great flavor and others found it perfect, but I found my squab to be on the uncooked side of rare; Roman style black truffle gnocchi had great accompaniments, not least a generous slice of truffle, but the gnocchi (formed into a loaf and then sliced) seemed gummy. And a dish of lobster with French-style lentils with bits of Berkshire pig trotters in them, seemed like two dishes that were better eaten separately.

Others seemed happier than me (no one else seemed to find their squab undercooked, a couple even used the word “perfectly”) so it may be that the challenge of serving 12 at once threw a wrench into the restaurant. Anyway, I think it has promise and Poli, who came to perhaps a bit too early fame at Butter when John Mariani raved about it, is clearly a capable chef worth watching, but I’m not convinced Perennial quite achieves the level it’s aiming for yet, next to other chefs making noise about their commitment to local ingredients. But the night is young.

Boka I had actually eaten at already, not entirely happily. It’s one of the city’s most beautiful rooms— dark brown, with white sails along one wall— and I had some things that I liked a lot, but by the end, dividing the price tag by the things I really liked, it didn’t feel like that great a deal. Some of it was that the food seemed out of date— Asian fusion, been there done that— but more of it was that things just didn’t work often enough for the price. If you’re going to be next door to Alinea, you need to wow, even adjusted for price (and though expensive, it was certainly nowhere near as expensive as Alinea).

This time, I was much more favorably impressed— though I have to say that that seemed to be a minority opinion at the table. The tasting started with a bento-like box containing four seafood tastes including one sitting in smoked salt. Others felt that the smoke overwhelmed everything but I thought this was exquisite, delicate little hints of the sea that absolutely made the case for Asian fusion as a still lively area of culinary exploration. The other wow dish came from the absolute opposite end of the spectrum— braised Gunthorp pork belly with a quince sauce, a marvelous savory fall dish.

We ended at Landmark, which is as much a club-slash-party space as a restaurant, and a very impressive adaptation of an old candle factory into rooms with moods ranging from urban chic to mock-Arabian sybarism. (Seeing the latter, all I could think was, if you can’t get laid at an office Christmas party here, you can’t anywhere.)

Landmark and Boka’s desserts are done, or now I should say were done, by Elizabeth Dahl, wife of Blackbird pastry chef Tim Dahl (seen in Sky Full of Bacon #6; actually Elizabeth is in it too, but I didn’t identify her because she was just helping her hubby out, not officially part of the mulefoot dinner crew). They have now left to return to Madison to open a restaurant, so no telling what that means for desserts at these places, which were one of the strong points with her there; anybody who can make me like a concord grape sorbet (I really don’t care for concords) is a dessert whiz, and she certainly is one.

The best part of the experience at Landmark, though, was sitting down with Kevin Boehm, the mastermind behind these places. One downside of the cult of the chef is if we ignore the role of clever owners, much as film critics rave about the work of directors who were really on short leashes held by powerful and creative producers. Boehm is one of those energetic 36-hours-in-a-day types who started his first restaurant (a sandwich shop in the “new urbanist” community of Seaside, Florida) with everything he had except for a car to sleep in, and has worked his way to a small empire of name restaurants in one of the major restaurant cities in the world.

He has very clear ideas about what he wants his places to be and what kind of a good time you’re going to have in them.  And even if my personal tastes favor the most chef-driven spots (Vie, Mado), he demonstrates that one of our scene’s greatest strengths is these companies that can create cannily commercial concepts that don’t feel concepted, using the good suppliers and serving food that can hold its head up in any company.  They don’t always work (to name a place belonging to somebody else, I think The Gage, for instance, is an example of a restaurant that buys great ingredients and turns them into Cheesecake Factory food) but at their best, they’re some of our best, and it’s the showman, more than the performers, who’s responsible if you liked the show.

Perennial
1800 N Lincoln Ave
Chicago, IL 60614
(312) 981-7070
perennialchicago.com

Boka
1729 N Halsted St # 1
Chicago, IL 60614-5537
(312) 337-6070
bokachicago.com

Landmark Grill
1633 N Halsted St # 1
Chicago, IL 60614-8640
(312) 587-1600
landmarkgrill.net

I liked the idea of Vie more than I liked the reality when I ate there in early 2008. I went in the dead of winter, hoping to taste deeply of the bounty of their closet full of preserved things (above, as seen in Sky Full of Bacon #5; it’s actually been moved upstairs now, though). I liked the idea of a place so devoted to local eating that it was doing all this canning and building a cuisine around those tastes. That said, I found it nice, well-prepared and skillful, but kind of tamed down for the good burghers of suburban Western Springs, certainly not as adventurous in terms of nose-to-tail eating as John Bubala’s short-lived Baccala or the wonderful spot that would open a few months later, Mado.

But I kept having tastes from Vie, and they kept suggesting a much better place than I felt I had been to. Mike Sula and I had the secret hamburger (made from the sides of artisanal Dietzler beef they were getting in house) and the superbly well-balanced Vie salad, and even though I found the toppings on the burger eccentric, there was no denying that it had a purity of beef flavor that left other hamburgers in the dust. The cotechino (a kind of peasanty fresh sausage with bits of organ meat and skin it) Vie provided to the mulefoot dinner was unquestionably one of my top two dishes from that dinner. And Vie’s take on Southern food for the Green City Market BBQ was maybe my favorite thing there, too, smoked turkey with pickled greens on it that reminded you of a big bowl of collard greens, but dialed up to 11.

Along the way, Vie chef-owner Paul Virant proved to be a friend of, or at least willing participant in, Sky Full of Bacon, in fact he’s appeared in half the videos so far (one accidentally— he was at Green City Market and literally walked through a shot as I was shooting). And cooking things up at the Shedd event-slash-Sky Full of Bacon premiere recently, he put the squeeze on me to come out and eat at his place again. So we invited a couple of other couples and went out there Saturday night.

I don’t know if it’s my perception or the restaurant that has changed more, but there’s nothing timid or suburbanite-safe about Vie as it exists in September 2009. In fact it might be the most radically whole animal-oriented restaurant in the Chicago area, even moreso than Mado, the Bristol, the Publican, anybody. The menu has item after item which takes a turn into organ meats, offal, once-ignored cuts like pork belly— and an older suburban crowd had packed the place and was eating the weird stuff happily (believe me, you know when the table behind you gets a plate of pork belly and smoked pork loin).

It’s easy to see why they trust his kitchen with such stuff— because Virant and his crew are preternaturally good at mining deep flavors from a dish. They can get away with offal because they use it to add complexity and depth to dishes— you don’t taste aggressive liver, you taste an orchestra which includes some earthy bass notes. A lamb “bolognese” had all the brightness of lamb, the funkiness of offal, the comfiness of a warm, nurturing pasta dish with housemade pasta— it was as deeply satisfying as anything I’ve had in years. Yet they do delicate just as well— sturgeon was topped with a fruity root-vegetable slaw that sang of the simple virtues of well-chosen in-season produce. And taste after taste seemed sharpened to its best possible result— earthy cotechino with crisped edges, a supple, eye-opening slice of cured goat loin (!) on “Nathan’s charcuterie plate” (sous chef/charcuterie whiz Nathan Sears, who’s also been in my videos with Paul), the flavor of smoke trailing off a wood-smoked pork loin, a melt in your mouth blue cheese served with local honey, a smooth and concentrated strawberry sorbet (I saw their new ice cream machine, which Nathan said costs as much as a car— “But a car can’t make ice cream.”)

I don’t know enough about the tippy-top of the dining scene to say what the best restaurant in Chicago is; even when I’ve been to such places, I haven’t been enough and recently enough to make a remotely fair judgement. But I do know that as much as I admire what’s happening at the very high end, my soul likes a little funk in the mix, and I find the precious arrangement of things into little cubes to get sterile sometimes, however exquisite it may be. For me, then, in my experience there’s no Chicago restaurant at work right now better than the meal I had last Saturday night, for its dedication to getting the best, richest, most purely satisfying flavor out of the best ingredients. And if you can think of other things a restaurant should be doing first, well, we just have different priorities, I guess.

Dept. of Disclosure: We paid for our meal but the kitchen knew we were there and sent out a couple of extra things, which we enjoyed happily.

About a year ago, I decided to see if I could review 50 restaurants that had never been reviewed on LTHForum.  (A tangential mention didn’t count.)  This was largely in response to what I saw as LTHForum having grown a bit moribund as a discoverer of new things on the culinary scene.  It seemed like all anybody wanted to talk about was hamburger franchises like Five Guys and Sonic and the phone-answering deficiencies of Schwa; even the old pros seemed to be bringing us the latest breathless dispatch from their 900th visit to Salam or Patty’s Diner or Myron and Phil’s rather than trying anything new.

Since then, I have to say things have improved somewhat.  The burger chain threads haven’t totally vanished (and Schwa’s telephone habits just flared up again) but there have been good, wide-ranging and new-ground-breaking threads on things like carne asada tacos; and people have actually tried new restaurants like Taxim and Nightwood and Fianco and so on.  You’re just about ready to think it’s getting lively again when, suddenly, there’s a thread like this.

Brief recap: Mike Sula wrote about an illegal taqueria operating out of a garage on weekends.  Gary Wiviott posted about trying it.  Both concealed the address (though made it fairly easy to see how you could get it).  And then… LTHers got all hinky about somebody writing about a place and not telling you how to go there and try it for yourself!

Well, in the words of Brian…

The point isn’t that there’s one taco stand somewhere in somebody’s garage, that G Wiv found out about from Sula who found out about it from Rob Lopata, and now you can find out about it from him. The point is, there’s stuff like this all over if you go looking for it, and any of us can do that if we just make the effort. But you have to make the effort; complaining that a leading LTHer hasn’t spoonfed it to you is, well, as bad as talking about chain hamburgers. Get off your duff, roll down your windows, and start driving around Mexican neighborhoods till you smell something good! Then get out of your car, be friendly, eat something, take some pictures and post about it. It all starts with somebody going out and finding something that nobody had any idea was there until they went out and looked for it. Go out and find something that nobody’s seen before!

Or, like me, you finally could go try a place you’ve been driving by for 15 years.

* * *

Mr. V’s Pizza is in a strip mall on Elston, up in the far-northwest Forest Glen neighborhood.  It was the strip mall, I guess, that kept me from following Mike G’s Rule of Pizza (“Always try a pizza that dates back to the 1950s. There is always a small possibility that in the intervening 35+ years, they have NOT screwed it up by trying to make it more like Domino’s or something.”)  It looked like a lame slice place sticking generic toppings on premade crusts.  But somehow, my curiosity was finally piqued, and I went in.

There were a lot of good signs once I went inside.  It may not seem like a good sign that the menu has everything from Italian beef to ice cream, but it suggested to me that there was an old school Italian family restaurant concealed behind a pizza facade.  It was a good sign, too, that the menu mainly offered cheese and sausage pizza— there was a list of alternative toppings, but this was all about the Chicago classics, cheese and sausage.  It was a good sign that the slice rewarmer seemed to not be in use.

I ordered one of each, thin, and was told 20 minutes.  I went to walk around the immediate area, which was nondescript but suggested a thriving family neighborhood.  In the park next door, a family ate pizza while the kids played on the swings, and a little ways over I saw these guys:

There’s a funeral chapel with a 60s mansard roof next door; I peaked inside and saw, inexplicably, a merry-go-round goat:

And what’s up with this?  I started to feel like I was wandering the village in a Lovecraft story, and had stumbled on the portraits of the ancestors the locals don’t like to talk about:

20 minutes were up and I drove home.  I tore the paper cover open and:

Classic Chicago thin crust, not the best I ever had, but not bad at all— the crust is almost certainly prefab, which is a bummer but hardly unusual; but the cheese and sausage were of good quality, the tomato sauce had a little sweetness and a little tang, the whole thing was not too greasy, well-cooked.  A pizza to make you happy on a Friday night, and not make you regret it the next morning.  If I lived in Forest Glen and this was my local pizza, I’d have it on my speed dial.

And so the pace of discovery continues…

Mr. V’s Pizza
5285 N Elston Ave
(at Forest Glen Ave)
Chicago, IL 60630
(773) 736-9434

Years ago, when LTHForum was new and time was infinite and I had nothing better to do than go on for 1500 words bringing up Georges Bernanos in a pizza review, I posted something about a thin crust pizza place way up in Mundelein:

Every once in a while I think of what must be, without doubt, the most obscure book I have ever read. I found it in the library of my Catholic high school, was perversely attracted to it by the fact that it had not been checked out since 1958 or something, and read it– or more likely only part of it– for a religion class book report.

Alas, I don’t remember the precise name, and I’m sure it’s unretrievable by the usual means. The title was something like “Unknown Saints of Rural France,” by Father Somebody or other, S.J. And basically it was an effort in ecclesiastical expense account justifying; shortly after WWII this priest had had a bicycling vacation in France, and to make more than a holiday out of what he was doing, he spent part of it going from village to village, tracking down tales of especially pious people who had been mentioned to him by someone else a village or two over.

Most of them were farmwives, the long-suffering women who are the mainstay of every church, and there was little enough remarkable in the story of any of them– no unsuspected Bernadette Soubirouses or Therese Martins having visions among them, just hardworking peasant mothers. Had the good father been more of an artist, he might have made something of his theme, that in the devotions of these unremarkable women, often half-ignored even by their families, was to be found the truest sainthood and love. This was, after all, the time and countryside of Bernanos’ Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (and Bresson’s masterful film of it), about saintly grace going unnoticed and even despised by the world. But he wasn’t an artist, and I was a high school punk amused by the book’s flimsiness as a vacation document rather than touched by the artistic portrayal of grace, and so here we are, 25 years later, probably more of us reading this now than ever read the book in the first place, using it merely as a device for a review of a pizza place in Mundelein.

* * *

What made me think of Father whoever and his forgotten book was the fact that I had had to go up to Gurnee Mills, of all ultra-worldly places (though the Bass Pro Shop is certainly worth a visit), and then decided to take some meandering old-school road back rather than zip back on boring 94, the idea being– like Father bicycling from village to village– to see what unknown historic or culinary curiosities might be revealed along the former highways now shoved aside by the giant expressways and the chains they draw like magnets. I wound up on Route 45, whose supply of old road houses and such things was none too plentiful except perhaps around Gages Lake– but I only needed one, and at Diamond Lake Road and 45, I found it. A handsome vintage neon sign announcing a little hot dog and pizza stand called Bill’s, next to which sat a larger, hunting-lodge-like establishment called Bill’s Pub.

The Pub was not open but in the window of Bill’s the stand, they promised “Fabulous Hot Dogs.” I was prepared to try them but secretly I had my heart set on pizza, because I saw a box which said “Since 1957,” and one of my rules is, always try a pizza that dates back to the 1950s. There is always a small possibility that in the intervening 35+ years, they have NOT screwed it up by trying to make it more like Domino’s or something.

I asked the young lady behind the counter which I should have, the hot dog or the pizza. At first she answered with the answer that always shows a lack of imagination, “They’re both good,” but then, warming to her theme, she said that she has gladly come in on her days off to have the hot dogs, and she has gladly come in on her days off to have the pizza, and that I couldn’t go wrong either way. And so, bowing to her enthusiasm, I ordered a small thin pizza.

Fifteen minutes later the box was perched on the hood of my car. The verdict? This pizza, unknown and unheralded in Mundelein, was worthy of the same devotion given to any cracker-crust thin pizza to be had in Chicago– not better, perhaps, than Vito & Nick’s, Candlelite, Zaffiro’s, etc., but undoubtedly comparable in its paper-thin crackliness, its foldability, its boldly spicy tomato sauce and thin layer of quality mozzarella. Given its location off the beaten path in a far northern suburb, it is unlikely ever to be known to the greater world; it is unlikely pilgrimages will be made to it from Chicago; but I can only say that I hope it is appreciated by its family and friends, that they are grateful to have its example among them, providing warmth and sustenance night after night, and that I have been encouraged to continue my quest by the fact of having found this example of pizza grace toiling in obscurity.

Bill’s Pizza & Pub
Diamond Lake Road and Route 45
Mundelein, IL 60060
847-566-5380

I revive this ancient palimpsest mainly because attending the Lake County Fair in its new fairgrounds gave me my first chance to try Bill’s again, indeed, to dine inside. And you know what? I really do think this is one of the best thin crust pizzas in Chicagoland, right up there with Vito & Nick’s, Marie’s, Pat’s, Candlelite as it was a few years ago, D’Agostino’s or Zaffiro’s of Milwaukee for that matter. The crust is cracker-thin, yet it doesn’t just soak up grease like Pat’s does; there’s a little more kick to the sauce and sausage than at D’Agostino’s, though it’s still definitely on the mild side; really, this is an admirable old school thin crust in every way that deserves to be better known. And as for the place itself— oh man, it is a trip. Northwoods hunting lodge on acid, with goofy stuffed animal displays, peanuts on the floor, and gaudy stained glass images of Disneyesque deer. It must be seen to be beyond belief.

Oddly enough, when I wrote my original review it enraged a northwest suburban LTHer who thought I was mocking his part of the world with city condescension. So make no mistake: I am sincere when I say this is one of the best pizzas in Chicagoland and you should make a considerable drive to go have it. Maybe not all the way from home, but certainly worth a 15 mile detour in the northern reaches.

There was a time when you could just open a new neighborhood restaurant and let the broader world discover you, slowly.  That time is not now; now a place like Browntrout is hyped in between the week’s other debuts (Nightwood! Cibo Matto! Rootstock!) in media the whole world can read.  Even a fish has to sink or swim, it appears; there are no more little neighborhood finds.

Even so, I’d like to create a little protected habitat where Browntrout has a chance to get bigger before it’s devoured.  There’s some real promise here, in a year this could be the Mado of fish, and yet my meal also went seriously off rails at a certain point.  What was good was good enough that I’d like to see it mature a little, find its footing (which is obviously even harder if you’re a fish), and become what’s in its chef’s head.

Browntrout (BYO at this point) aims to only offer sustainable, high quality and organic ingredients; it divides the menu into sharable small plates and bigger entrees which, once you get into sustainable, high end fish, are not cheap. I stuck mainly to the small plates in order to have more to try.

What was good— very good— is the plate shown above, a trio of small servings of fish meant to be nibbled as nosh.  At the top was a housecured, orange-scented golden trout, which was served lox-style with bagel chips and as delicate and rich as very good lox.  The middle was a smoked trout salad, and the bottom a piece of yellow perch, fried with a sort of remoulade/tartar sauce accompaniment.  The first two of these were really wonderful, showcasing the delicacy of good fish beautifully; the perch was more ordinary, and the remoulade or whatever it was could have used more bite, more body, more oomph.  Still, for $13 this was a substantial (and substantially terrific) plate which Avec or The Bristol would be proud to serve up.

We ordered this as an appetizer, and were grilled fairly extensively about the precise order of the other dishes we wanted; our waiter seemed very concerned that the order and timing be precisely calibrated, somewhat beyond the easygoing vibe of the restaurant (which, that night, had several of Bin 36-vet chef Sean Sanders’ relatives wandering about).  The reason for the jarring appearance of a control freak note to our experience only gradually revealed itself as we waited… and waited… and waited.  The night grew dark, my opportunity for picture taking vanished, we found ourselves making faces we recognized from the “before” parts of a Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, we were apologized to enough times that we were ready to say “Stop apologizing and just go kick somebody’s ass in the kitchen!”

They handled it very nicely, we wound up with both a salad comped and some free cookies, can’t complain, but still, given the simplicity of the items involved, it was hard to imagine how the kitchen— not at all overstressed on Sunday night— could have possibly taken so long to produce these items.  I’d be nervous about Browntrout for pre-theater dining (we’ll be late for Cornservatory!) or even for the lunch which has gotten some attention lately.

Nor did the items we have entirely justify the wait on a flavor basis.  Best, by far, was a burger made from Tallgrass beef.  I’ve only had one Tallgrass steak, at the Harry Caray’s by O’Hare, which was bad enough that I wanted Bill Kurtis to narrate it like a crime scene (“But when he cut into the steak… what he found was not the juicy, flavorful steak he’d hoped for… but a gnarled and gray nightmare that had only just begun”).  This was, let me estimate, one frazillion times better, maybe oversalted a tad but a richly flavorful burger that was like meaty meatiness all wrapped in meat.  I was just tvetching (kvetching on Twitter) about the popularity of the very good, but at that price it should be, Rosebud Steakhouse burger; here’s one in the same ballpark pricewise which to me beat it for depth of flavor.

Less exciting was a pea salad, “peas three ways,” which mainly revealed that the actual peas are the only parts of a pea that have much flavor; eating the shoots and leaves was kind of like munching ivy off the side of your house, and the salty dressing did little to bring it all to life, being desperately in need of a sweet note, or any note that would have made the leaves and branches palatable.  While the final dish, a special of an escargot “tart” in a veal demiglace, was executed perfectly well for something assembled out of foodservice ingredients (puff pastry tart shell, demiglace in a jar), but seemed a dining-in-1955 dish that was way out of step with the rest of the restaurant and the approach promised by the fish trio at the beginning; it might have strolled over from Lutz’s a few blocks away.

Still, the things that were good, especially that fish plate, were very good indeed.  If Browntrout can build on that kind of treatment of excellent fish, get more confident and coherent in what it’s offering, and not least, get that kitchen working at “After Gordon” speed, it could become a really impressive restaurant, truly a fish Mado (or whatever it is they actually hope to become).  For that to happen, maybe it needs to be ignored for a bit by the whole planet, and just serve its neighbors for the time being as it finds its footing.  So if you’re a neighbor, check it out, enjoy it, get to know its obviously committed husband and wife owners; but if you’re the kind who hops from hotspot to hotspot, delivering quick and permanent judgements, maybe you should let Browntrout go for a little while, and see what it’s grown into a season or two from now.

Browntrout
4111 N Lincoln Ave
Chicago, IL 60618-3027
(773) 472-4111

Followup to this post.

Taxim, the back-to-basics Greek restaurant which I reviewed very favorably a few weeks back, has taken a bit of a turn in its relationship to internet food posters.  A number of posters at LTHForum have basically said, ennh, what’s the big deal?  Ronnie Suburban was moderately positive but didn’t agree with the Taxim good, Greektown bad tack many supporters have taken:

I am a big fan of Greektown (the opposite side of the dining universe from Taxim) and have learned over the years how to order for maximum satisfaction when I’m in that part of town. What I’m used to with Greek food is gigantic bold flavors, immaculate freshness and not a hint of daintiness. When I was in Seattle last year, I had a really great meal at Lola (Tom Douglas’ contemporary Greek cafe), so I know I can appreciate this cuisine on a more refined basis. But upon first glance, perhaps Taxim is too distilled for me.

Kennyz was considerably harsher:

…it was with enthusiasm, after having read such wonderful praise here and in the Chicago Reader, that I entered this evening’s meal at Taxim. When I left, my enthusiasm balloon had pretty much completely deflated. Taxim bored me to tears.

You can read all that here.

So I went to Taxim for lunch the other day with another blogger and it was interesting that we came down again on the same two sides of the divide as this thread.  What I found the subtle complexity of down to earth Greek ingredients, he found boring next to the mouth fireworks of Greektown.  What’s odd about that is that we’re each usually a bit toward the other camp– he’s big on the quality of underlying local ingredients, I’m more likely to ding a place for failing to put enough pizzazz into a dish.  But in this case he was the one underwhelmed as I often am, and I was the one admiring the simplicity of earthy cooked lentils and bits of tart Greek cheese, say.

I joked to another food writer that as Greek restaurants go, Taxim was the best Turkish restaurant in town.  I think that’s not so much a joke because chef David Schneider frankly admits the strong Turkish influence (not to mention that Taxim is a district in Istanbul), or the hearkening back to a pre-French-influenced Greek cuisine more like other Mediterranean cuisines.  I’ve always liked Turkish cuisine, but part of what I like about it is that it is mostly comfort food, it’s not aiming for the spice of other cuisines even in the nearby middle east (not to mention a little to the east like Indian).  A really good Turkish dish is usually just simple and clean-tasting– like the spinach and yogurt dish at Cafe Orchid— and I find that really satisfying; I loved the “hummus,” for instance, with its flavors of fresh chickpeas and bright, good quality olive oil, and found both it and the pita a cut above the norm.  But if you’re expecting your dish to come flaming to your table, either actually or metaphorically, Taxim is going to seem muted and quite possibly dull by comparison.

Sometimes you go into a place which seems like nothing special, and yet they do one thing which lifts them above the pack. Maybe they do a couple of other things well, too— yet, frustratingly, they don’t quite do everything in a way that earns your admiration. At what point do you say, the heck with minor complaints, this is a place worth talking about?

I spotted Rosticeria Los Fernandez on North Ave. in Elmhurst after shooting at Supreme Lobster for the next Sky Full of Bacon podcast. The wide range of things offered on the windows and signage was not necessarily a promising sign. It certainly didn’t look like authentic Mexican, and yet, something about it suggested to me that it had promise. Oh, right, I remember what it was: I smelled it driving by. Hickory smoke.

Charcoal-roasted chicken is, of course, a Mexican staple, notably in Sinaloa, but chicken with the very American taste of hickory smoke certainly isn’t. Still, I’m enough of a barbecue fan to follow the smell of real smoke anywhere. The place seems sort of inspired by Boston Market— you order a 1/4 or 1/2 chicken, and pick out some sides from a steam table. (Turns out the comparison is unavoidable, or at least was when the one LTHer to go there went.) I imagine you could put together a meal here that gave no particular sign of being Mexican. But at the bottom of the menu was also “1/2 Chicken Mexican Style,” and that settled that. I got a half chicken with rice and grilled green onions (cebollitas), a lone jalapeno, a container of tortillas, a couple of bottles of salsa, and a bottle of Mexican Coke:

The chicken was terrific— juicy and kissed with real smoke flavor. At this point, LTHForum rules would send me back into the kitchen to determine if it was a Southern Pride RCX-700 or an Avenue Metal custom aquarium smoker, but I didn’t do any of that and leave the question to future researchers. Instead I just contemplated what I found excellent about this meal— the chicken in both flavor and moistness, the steaming tortillas— and what I found rather ordinary, a list which would include the rice (a throwaway at the best of places, admittedly), the chewy (held too long after cooking, I suspect) cebollitas and, sad to say, both of the housemade salsas: a char-flecked red one and a lettuce-based green one, neither of which had much kick (refrigeration may not have helped them stand out, but it wasn’t the only reason).

So I wish Rosticeria Los Fernandez was better all-around. Still, that chicken was about the best BBQ chicken I can remember having in a long time, anywhere of any nationality around town. Usual caveats about whether I hit a BBQ joint at the perfect moment apply, but if you have any reason to be out there, you should give them a try and help me decide if this is a real find… or a frustrating near-miss.

Rosticeria Los Fernandez
630-834-0106
522 W. North Ave
Elmhurst, IL 60125