So I was talking with a couple of friends about Great Lake, and though all admirers of the pizza, we agreed that it being named the best pizza in America by Alan Richman in GQ had more to do with a magazine’s need for the kind of buzz that you get from “owning” the discovery of a great new food spot that nobody else has found yet. Great Lake— artisanal pizza of very high quality from a hot food city, yet so new that it wasn’t really on the national radar yet— fit the bill perfectly; and so did Snow’s, the improbable Saturdays-only barbecue joint that Texas Monthly plucked from obscurity and anointed the best BBQ in Texas a couple of years ago, shaking up a competition whose top ten had been so fixed for so long it could be recited by most Texas schoolchildren.

So that was the mindset I was in when I read this in Time Out barely 12 hours later, about a hitherto unheralded Italian spot on the Sex and the City Southport strip:

Who the hell is Matt Troost, and why haven’t I heard his name before? More to the point, why hadn’t I eaten his food until a recent meal at Fianco?… It’s surprising, to say the least, that a chef with no reputation, in a restaurant on a notoriously generic strip, would be putting out such a dish. Yet with each subsequent plate, Troost proved this was no coincidence. This is a guy who clearly knows how to manipulate flavor….

Admittedly, David Tamarkin stopped short of any “best Italian restaurant in Chicago” hype. Still, he was doing a pretty good job of trying to elevate this neighborhood obscurity into the ranks of, at least, the top neighborhood Italian spots, with all the bragging rights that would accrue to the first guy to find a place. So I packed up the family and we set off to see if this really was the marvel he said— or if he’d been carried away by his excitement and wishful thinking.

It was still fairly empty at almost 6, though perhaps by 7:30 or 8 it isn’t. Later, I heard someone congratulate the chef (for reasons I didn’t catch); that was the only possible sign that Time Out’s praise was being felt here, there definitely weren’t hordes of trendy Time Out-clutching twentysomethings fresh from buying new shoes and artisanal absinthe on Southport.

We started with the chicken liver pate, creamy pate well paired with “strawberry preserves” (well, some preserved strawberries, anyway). It was every bit as nice and flavorful as you would hope it would be.

Two of us had pasta dishes. The winner of the night, pretty comfortably, was this ravioli with mint and peas in cream sauce. The ravioli were delicate and velvety, the sauce sang of bright spring flavors, cheerful and distinct; as good an Italian dish as I’ve had anywhere in recent memory.

More conventional was this bowl of canned tomatoes, some shaped pasta, and lamb sausage; what lifted it above the perfectly decent was the lamb sausage, zingy with the contrast of fennel.

The star among meat entrees was the (enormous) portion of braised and grilled pork with a salad of beans and greens. I liked my taste of this, but I felt like it was only 3/4ths of the way toward what it could be; it needed a sharper contrast from the grilling, some acidic bite in the comfy bean-salad atop it. I felt it was too understated, and only a couple of steps away from really popping.

Perfectly acceptable, but more ordinary, were some grilled scallops, again huge, in a nicely bright pea puree. This too seemed understated and would have benefited from something on the plate that offered some real contrast, like an onion marmalade or something.

Banana-chocolate bread pudding, shared four ways, made a nice conclusion, though overall I didn’t find the dessert list all that interesting.

So we were not quite as dazzled as Tamarkin. But still, take 20% off the top and his assessment was largely right— on a strip where Italian has meant suburbanite-safe places like Strega Nona, here was a neighborhood spot, of simple decor straight out of the exposed-brick-urban-restaurant kit, which at least was off to a start of making some things to rival the best neighborhood contemporary Italian spots in town, the Riccardo Trattorias and Merlos. Give the chef some time to push the envelope of a Southport restaurant located between a Potbelly’s and a Homemade Pizza, and everything he makes might be about as good as the best things we had. In the meantime, peas won’t be on the menu for very long, so go have those ravioli.

Fianco
3440 N. Southport Ave.
(773) 327-6400

The five course meal at Han 202, a new Chinese place in Bridgeport from the owners of Evanston’s former Restaurant Guan, costs an amazingly low $20 per person (plus whatever you BYOB), and at the end of it, a summit of the foodwriting intelligentsia was discussing how much we would be willing to pay for it and what we would think of it at different prices. At $28 (currently the magic price point for many restaurant entrees, since it’s just shy of breaking the $3X barrier), it would seem fairly priced. At $35 or $40, we might start to become critical about which parts of the meal were on and which were off: some things were really well balanced in their flavors, others were almost candy sweet; some were exquisitely plated, some seemed kind of like ordinary Chinese food.

All of which is to say, this may be an arty five course meal, but it isn’t Alinea, or even Schwa, in its level of accomplishment (or caliber of ingredients). Still, at the insanely low $20 or even a perfectly reasonable $30, this is a meal which delivers an impressive amount of fine dining experience for the bucks, in an atmosphere which feels hip and nice but is still pretty casual. If you’re a twentysomething guy looking for a nice place to take a hot date and feel like you took her somewhere fancy which you can’t really afford, there’s probably no better choice for you in town at the moment.

The meal started with an amuse-bouche of mushroom topped with a styrofoam-crunchy radish-like vegetable (which the waitress said was called bacha, though so far I’ve been unable to find any vegetable with a name like that).  [EDIT: Rene G at LTHForum identified it as bac ha, taro stem.] The textural contrast and presentation were a fitting statement of intent for the meal to follow— mainly, that this isn’t going to be the usual throw it all together in a wok delivery Chinese; that some of the precision and delicacy of Japanese food is coming.

You choose four of your five courses (the one dessert is a given).  The first course is a salad, and at least two of them are extremely pleasing in their simplicity: a mix of lettuce with wakame seaweed (and, in this season of strawberry bounty, topped with a slice of one) which is an inspired salad, mixing the ultrafamiliar with the gently exotic; and silky beef over a bed of sliced green apples:

The next course is miso, and is relatively dispensable (might as well get the spicy version with a dollop of real crab meat; we mostly ordered it to see if it really would be crab and not surimi, which happily it was).  But the course that followed, appetizers, was to my mind the clear highpoint, with three of four dishes standouts.  The simplest, but in many ways the one that impressed me the most precisely because it did so much so delicately with so little, was this creme brulee-soft tofu speared— oh, sign me up for that job— with tiny sprouts.

Another that impressed me was a substantial chunk of seared tuna with a lime accent to the soy-or-whatever sauce it was sitting in.  Mine was a level down from that— they called it walnut shrimp, after tasting its unsubtle blast of orange extract I dubbed it “Shrimp in Tang sauce”— but like the mayonnaise shrimp at Lao Sze Chuan, it was oddly likable in a white trash kind of way.

The main course that followed seemed pedestrian by comparison, like conventional Chinese food, different meats all cooked the same way in a wok, with the same vegetables out of the big foodservice bag of broccoli/green and red pepper/baby corn.  It was pretty good Chinese, the sauces were bright and light, little grease, but hey, I could say the same about P.F. Chang’s, basically.  All in all this course seemed the least novel, the least paradigm-shattering, and the one dish that was different from the others, a small rack of lamb, was prepared well but marred by a gloppy-sweet sauce.  Dessert, apparently, was winged out of commercial mochi and Italian cookies when they ran out of other stuff, my expectations for dessert in an Asian restaurant are always low and this… definitely beat a stale almond cookie.  The dried cherries at least demonstrated that they thought about it for more than two seconds.

I’d love someday to see someone open a truly deluxe Chinese restaurant, like you hear they have in places like Vancouver, but until that happens, I’m happy to have a Chinese restaurant run by people who seem aware of things happening in the broader food scene and ambitious enough to try to offer a fine dining-like experience at barely above cheeseburger prices.  The price surely can’t last and the BYOB may be temporary too (there is a bar, left over from the previous Italian inhabitant according to Chuck Sudo of Chicagoist), so Han 202 is definitely one to try sooner, rather than later.  Like our new Indonesian entrant, with enough support it might be the harbinger of even more interesting and accomplished things to come.

Han 202
605 W. 31st
312-949-1314

Check out Michael Nagrant’s rave, which put Han 202 on the foodie radar, and Mike Sula adds some details in this week’s Reader, even though they totally missed the chance to make a Han Sula pun in the headline.

Anchovy crunchies, for snacking on while fighting your way through the media hordes at Angin Mamiri.

A couple of months ago I was taking my kids to a 4-H meeting and I saw a sign on Touhy announcing that a dead Filipino restaurant was about to become an Indonesian restaurant. Cool, I thought, that’ll make a nice little discovery on my part…

It is to laugh. The thought of Chicago finally getting a lone Indonesian restaurant again (after the closing of August Moon nearly a decade ago) inspired something of a frenzy in the foodie media community, summed up by this Twitter post a few days ago (I won’t say Tweet, I won’t) by Mike Sula of the Reader:

Foodmedia hordes descending on new Indonesian Angin Mamiri (http://tinyurl.com/q23q65) I was 1 of 3 sched interviews today. Hi @mmxdining

Mmxdining is a writer from Metromix, incidentally. As it happens, though, none of those places have actually put their review up yet that I can find, so thanks to the Sky Full of Bacon hyperefficient review generation and approval system, it looks like I’ll be going first after all, albeit probably only by hours.

Actually, media frenzy was not at all in evidence when I went in about 1:30; the three generations of Indonesian family (older parents, grown daughter, her teenage daughter) were scattered around the dining room doing odd jobs, as if it were their living room. They quickly packed up and got back into customer mode. The menu is relatively short— a few curries, a few noodle dishes, lots of sates— and I had to admit the brevity didn’t encourage me, it looked like a menu whose high points would be exhausted quickly. As soon as I asked DeeDee, the grown daughter, what she would recommend, though, she kind of brushed the menu aside and started talking up the special:

—and more to the point, the fact that they planned to have something special and different every day. The menu was much more of a starting point, she suggested. I wasn’t entirely sold by the sound of the special, which looked like fried with a side of more fried, but DeeDee was persuasive, so I went for it and another (fried) appetizer, risole.

I also tried the one Indonesian drink in the cooler, a very sweet, flowery tea:

In my limited experience Indonesian is sort of like Thai, but even more comfort-foody. That was certainly the case with the risole, which is sort of like an egg roll crossed with a chicken pot pie, and pretty damn indulgently delightful. The main dish was in the same vein:

Fried chicken (just about worthy of the Thai fried chicken at Spoon or TAC), potato croquettes (reminiscent of some of those Japanese potato dishes which seem like grandmother food from an alternative universe), and a spring roll, along with some rice topped with, and subtly tasting of, toasted coconut. A lot of fried stuff, but all done with a judicious hand, and the little hot pickle-chutney stuff at the side was tasty. Best of all, it really seemed homemade, and so I asked DeeDee when she came back about who did the cooking. She said her mom, Ida, is the main cook, does it all, even rolling the spring rolls and risole herself. They’re starting out with a basic menu but will have new specials all the time; they’re also thinking about how to do a rijstaffel, the traditional Indonesian banquet/buffet from Dutch colonial days, probably as a special dinner event using some sort of advance ticket system.

I asked DeeDee if they had had a restaurant before, somewhere else, and she said no, they’ve lived in Chicago for 25 years, and cooked things for Indonesian festivals, and people always asked where there was an Indonesian restaurant, and for years they said they were going to open one. (The name, incidentally, means “wind” or “breeze,” she said.) Now they finally have; and it’s a good one with potential to be a very good and culturally important one. Don’t just read the food media about it; support it now, and help it grow into what it could be.

Angin Mamiri
2739 W. Touhy
(773) 262-6646

An earlier, stranger experience with Indonesian food.

For me!  The first time I’ve ever been somewhere and the Reserved signs were not to keep me away, but to save a spot for me! Overlooking the city laid out before me.  I am Ozymandias, king of food bloggers!

Ahem.

When we last visited my conscience, I was expressing doubts about the need to have a formal code of ethics that foodbloggers signed onto (let alone wore a badge for).  When we visited it the time before that, I was debating whether or not to attend a PR event for a restaurant (as it turned out I couldn’t anyway).

And so Thursday night I went to a hoity-toity event arranged by a PR firm, ate and drank free and schmoozed.  Like a floozy!

What happened?  Several things.  One is, I’ve lately been to two freebie anniversary parties at restaurants where I knew, at least a little, the chef (Mado and Graham Elliott).  In both cases it just felt, I dunno, pretentious to even think about getting on the reviewer’s high horse and saying “Do not tempt me with the base gelt of charcuterie or buffalo wing sweetbreads, thou blackhearted chef thou, for I am… A REVIEWER!”  Partly because, well, I’m not.  (I write some capsule reviews for Time Out or the Reader on occasion, almost entirely of dives and taquerias and such.)  

But more than that, it’s not how the rest of Sky Full of Bacon works— I mean, I didn’t go to La Quercia to get their side of the story and then go talk to some critic to get his blistering attack on them.  I admire what they do so I made a movie about what I admire about it. The whole premise is personal and thus partisan in a way that a newspaper is not meant to be—which is why this is not a newspaper (among other reasons).  So really, all I aim to do here is be 1) hopefully, interesting and, 2) absolutely, straightforward about the circumstances, so you can judge for yourself how much I’ve been sucked in.  As I said before anyway:

the real temptations are not in gold or jewels but in flattery, in access, in the illusion of collegiality.

So anyway, the chichi places in a chichi new hotel:

had a meet and greet, or a Taste and Schmooze, and David Hammond invited me to come along on his invite from a PR firm.  Two more things that appealed to me about attending this were the fact that this is the sort of place I would never ever go on my own, I mean, the last place I’m going to go drinking normally is a posh bar next to the Leo Burnett building; and second, the opportunity to observe, anthropologically, the other members of the food media tribe.  For one thing I was just curious who actually comes out to things like this, since most of the food writers I know don’t.  For another, I was curious what the protocol was for such things, and how it would play out— would the PR people muscle me, flatter me, or stand back and let the chips fall for their client?

First stop was Roof, the bar at the top of the building. This is a very classy and glassy open space, some of it literally open to the outside, much of it modernist steel and glass, very white and cosmopolitan although I must admit, they may strike me off the PR schmooze list just for saying this, something about the high glass walls and the snaking colorful duct work and glass said… forgive me… McDonald’s Playland.  I was ready to take my shoes off and start climbing straight up the air duct, looking for a slide back down.

And no, it wasn’t the lamb burgers that made me think that, either. But hopefully for them, no one else will make that association (this very beautiful-people crowd looks mostly no-kids, or at least no trips to the McDonald’s Playland with their designer kids, anyway).  I had a couple of the signature cocktails— just a couple, hic— but I was fairly unimpressed with the design of either one— an allegedly peach one was more lemony-tart, an alleged tropical one (the Ipanema) was just orangey.  Still, I’m sure they make a fine gin and tonic or whatever the alcoholics at Leo are drinking these days.

The food, on the other hand, I found pretty good, definitely creditable for a bar.  The lamb burger was excellent, good strong lamb flavor mixed with a little herb butter or mayo.  Some thing involving cheese over an egg on bread— pretty much parmesan toad in the hole— was also quite tasty (though totally ill-suited for noshing at an event like this and arguably for any bar situation—going to be a lot of runny egg on little black dresses).  Some mozzarella cheese balls were heavy enough to use as buckshot, while some woodburning pizzas had nice toppings but the crust was fairly standard-issue.  Still, well above average overall for a bar, and I really might go back, as improbable as it might seem (or as I might seem to this crowd), for those lamb burgers.

Anthropological observation #1: food media know not to fill up on bread:

Afterwards we were summoned downstairs to State and Lake, the restaurant in the lobby of the hotel.  As with Roof, State and Lake is dressed to the nines, dark, leathery, techno:

Alas, if Roof managed to escape serving food that screamed “hotel,” State and Lake has not been so lucky.  Nice, pretty adventurous food for a hotel, but there was a little-of-this-little-of-that character to the menu that made it hard to see what it was aiming for, and most things were well executed but unmemorable (and I picked the one entree, pork shoulder, that was a little worse than that, although it’s not like I went hungry that night as a result).  Pretty much anything we had (short ribs, scallops, whatever), I could think of a tastier, more inventive and better conceived version I’d had recently somewhere else, like Avec, or The Bristol, or Avec.  And it usually came with some gloopy cheese-and-creamy side that was threatening to cross the line between Comfort Food and sheer Pander Food.

Again, within its genre it might be pretty good— though hotel dining has stepped up its game lately with places like Avenues and Mercat a la Planxa— and the desserts were very good (who knows where they’re made, though), but if someone asked me where to go eat that’s dark brown, hip and hopping, I’d be all over Sepia or Hot Chocolate long before I ever said this place.

So back to the anthropological stuff: how was the crowd?  How was being the target of PR?  I talked to several people from different kinds of food media—a magazine for chefs, for instance (she told me they did bacon last year and it’s so over; damn, I knew I should have called it Sky Full of Mangosteens), or a very nice lady who writes for a food mag aimed at the north shore (but was eager to hear about all our latest LTHForum city-divey discoveries).  That part was enjoyable and I did some PR-in-return by talking up Sky Full of Rainbow Chard (new logo coming soon).  As for the PR folks, they were friendly and easygoing, they know better than to push too hard for any one client, they’re in this for the long haul.  In the end, a restaurant has to stand on its own feet.  Roof does, State and Lake kind of doesn’t, at least to my standards and needs.  They can create the opportunity for a place to shine, but they won’t go nuts trying to convince you there’s starlight where there isn’t.  Or at least they didn’t.

I thanked them for inviting me and then took the train back home to return to my life, not as a mover and shaker, not Vettel 2.0, but just a guy.  Who has a food blog.

Roof/State and Lake
The Wit Hotel
201 N. State, Chicago

The theory is that Taxim, the new Greek restaurant in Wicker Park, is kind of the Greek equivalent of the early new Italian restaurants that helped get Italian food out of the meatball-and-red-sauce rut. That’s what Mike Sula reported in the Reader:

If a single historical figure could be blamed for that orthodoxy—the one that upholds the ideal of Greek food as bechamel-blanketed pastichio and high-viscosity avgolemono soup—it would be European-trained Greek chef Nicholas Tselementes, who in the early part of the last century sparked a culinary revolution in his homeland, exiling simple, fresh ingredient-driven dishes made with olive oil, garlic, and native herbs in favor of a French-influenced hybrid employing butter, cream, and flour. Tselementes wanted to purge Greek cuisine of Turkish and other influences… Since then a kind of collective denial of eastern Mediterranean Greek cuisine has persisted in Greece and abroad, while Frenchified Greek cuisine, aided and abetted by the tourist trade, has been exported all over the world.

I tried this theory on Stevez of LTHForum, and he didn’t quite buy it; his wife is Greek-American and he says the Greektown classics are what all the old ladies make when they’re cooking for themselves, too. It’s not just Greek food for tourists, in other words. But he did buy that it might at least be similar to Greek regional foods unknown in the US, but similar in many ways to Turkish and other neighboring foods (not that you’ll make any friends in Greece saying their food is like Turkish).

Whatever the provenance of its style, Taxim is the first new Greek restaurant in Chicago to get excited about in a long, long time. Chef David Schneider came from places like Green Zebra, not The Parthenon or Santorini, so he’s blessedly free of the Greek orthodoxy that insists on all the flamingly cheesy cliches of the cuisine; he’s broken Greek food back down to first principles, and even something as simple as the baba ghanoush-like melitzanosalata feels reinvented back into the fresh and distinct flavors— charcoal-grilled eggplant, olive oil, garlic, toasted pine nuts— that are usually blended into a gray mush.

We mainly worked our way through the appetizers because, well, that’s pretty much what you should do in almost any restaurant these days, and it paid off.  A “rampopita”— spanakopita made with ramps— was exponentially more flavorful than spinach would have been.  A stew of lamb, fava beans and housemade yogurt was deeply comfy.  Most exotic was a special, urged on us in no uncertain terms by our James Spader-circa-Tuff Turf waiter, of grilled sable liver with grilled zucchini; the funky, slightly fishy liver, the pita crisps and the soft zucchini melded beautifully, lushly magnetic-repellent.

We were fairly full after these four dishes and split our only entree, the duck gyros, which has been (understandably) the most talked-about dish to date.  Duck, prepared basturma style (basturma is basically pastrami; I’m not sure what it means in this context as it’s certainly not nearly so salted or dry as pastrami) is then grilled on a gyros spit and served inside a flatbread with pomegranate sauce and the housemade yogurt (again):

It makes for probably the best wrap you’ll have this year, although I must admit I ate about half of my share by simply picking the roasted duck out of the wrap and gnoshing on it directly; it was delicious enough to not strictly need anything more than that.

The wine list is mostly Greek and following our waiter’s guidance we variously ordered (or were given a glass of) white, rose and red Greek wine; all of it was pretty good, none of it said “minor wine-producing nation.”  To our surprise, the restaurant was empty when we arrived at 6, but by 7:30 or so it was getting pretty full; it is Wicker Park, after all, 8 pm is the early bird special (and as we were leaving even The Violet Hour didn’t have a line yet).

It’s not quite as modest-priced, and it’s more upscale in appearance, but in many ways Taxim seems to me like this year’s Mixteco Grill, the place that catches fire for a fresh and appealing take on a familiar cuisine.  It should be packed soon, go now so you’ll want to go later, when it’s harder to get into.

Taxim
1558 N. Milwaukee
773-252-1558

Here’s Mike Sula’s video of chef David Schneider preparing the flatbread which wraps the duck gyros above:

Making Pontian satz bread at Chicago’s Taxim Restaurant from mike sula on Vimeo.

Fairland Cafe, Wichita.  Photo by Scott Phillips, c. 1980.

Emily Nunn had a post recently about how the one thing a transplant to Chicago can’t do is publicly confess longings for New York; I have no big longings for New York, or it wouldn’t be a decade since I last went there, but I will confess, in a similar spirit of emigre honesty, that there are certain things I used to do in Kansas without a second thought which I find too scary to do in Chicago.  One of these, for instance, is eat in 24-hour diners.  In Wichita, I’d find it charmingly colorful to be surrounded by Woody Guthriesque Okies nursing hangovers, or just taking an interregnum between fading hangover and impending bender; somehow the same people in the same state in Chicago intimidate me more, leave me more fearful of imminent danger.  This despite the fact that I could relate a number of tales relating to criminality in Wichita diners:

Back in the 50s or 60s, there was a place near the newspaper and the police station called the Fairland Cafe— a 24-hour diner/chop suey joint— and one night a gangster got tipped off that somebody planned to bump him off; he hightailed it to the Fairland and set himself up in a back booth, drinking coffee for two or three days as the would-be killers sat in the parking lot waiting for him to come out.  By the last day he was smelling so bad he had to toss $50 bills at the waitresses to get them to bring him more coffee.  Finally the standoff ended when he had a heart attack and left the restaurant in an ambulance, the assassins watching helplessly as he was carried out of their reach.

Even less logically, the presumed hygiene of such a place—which never closes long enough for a really thorough cleaning— bugs me more in Chicago then it ever did in Wichita.  There’s no sense to this at all, it’s not like we didn’t have germs there too, but what can I say; the tattered, rundown place that seems charming on Kellogg in my hometown seems a little squicky to me on Western or Pulaski.  I should point out that most of the time, there’s no factual basis for this; the paneling may be chipped, the counter may be stained, but I have no reason to think the place doesn’t meet basic hygiene standards.  But the dilapidation just nags at my subconscious in a way the same basic place in Wichita wouldn’t have.  What I’d find comfortingly familiar there, seems here to be part of the vast big city conspiracy just waiting to devour and doom the migrant from a distant, more innocent land.  It happened to King Kong, it’s bound to happen to me too.  Meet a blonde and next thing you know, it’s the biplanes.  She gets a movie contract and you get a one-way ticket down a skyscraper.

So although I’ve lived within a short distance of Jerry’s Diner for almost two decades, I have been there— like the title says— only about once every ten years.  I think it’s enjoyed praise on LTHForum for its ham but somehow, whenever I try to think of some place to grab breakfast, Jeri’s has elicited a weaselly “Ennnh… some other time” in my inner dialogue.

Finally I overcame this, or my inability to think of anywhere else on a solo Sunday morning did.  I went into Jeri’s and sidled up to the counter, settling in amid the Algrenesque characters reading the Sun-Times (the paper of diner counters, no question) and eating the same thing they’d ordered every morning for more years than they could count.  The paneling on the walls, in 60s orange and yellow stripes, summoned up some distant memory of a dance studio I’d gone to as a toddler for some kid’s birthday (Bucky Buchanan?  Bill Wheeler?)  Some of them conversed, making hard-luck jokes with the waitresses; others were determinedly introverted, noses down into their papers, not about to have a conversation that might reveal, obliquely, how the dreams and aspirations of youth had led to breakfast, alone, day after day at a 24-hour joint.  One day they wouldn’t come in any more, and that would be that.

I liked the atmosphere in all its down-at-heel urbanness.  I could have enjoyed it all day with Frankie Machine on one side and Augie March on the other while Ed Hunter and his Uncle Am solved crimes in the background and Wanda Skutnik tried not to spill what she knew.  The waitresses and counter man were genuinely warm and friendly, they made it a refuge in a harsh land.  You could love Jeri’s… if it weren’t for the food.

Alas, it was the cheapest, most industrial diner food imaginable.  Flavorless rubber eggs.  Pancakes from a box of Bisquick big enough to sleep in.  Ham product that had the sponginess of reconstituted seatcover.  There was probably a time when I could have eaten this just to enjoy the atmosphere.  Today, it said to me, you don’t belong here.  You with your ironic awareness of Edward Hopper and your foodsnob sensibility, you are not one of us, the fallen, the washed up.

But who knows, maybe some day I will be.  That’s always the promise of the city to the hopeful immigrant.

Jeri’s Grill
4357 N Western Ave 
Chicago, IL 60618
(773) 604-8775

Four years ago I posted a long and pretty much rapturous ode to a meal at Avenues under Graham Elliott Bowles, then newly appointed and acclaimed and also, as it turned out, an LTHForum visitor (with one real discovery claim to fame, the much-loved but ill-starred Cafe Salamera, which he was the first to call attention to). Last year Bowles took his molecular gastronomy-tinged show down the street to a more casual venue, his bustling, loud-music-blaring River North spot Graham Elliott. Like a lot of people, I had mixed feelings. The price point didn’t really mesh with the claims that it was making that kind of food less expensive and more accessible; and some of the dishes were just too jokey (haute imitations of junk food) and didn’t work, although certainly the meal had at least some real high spots. Basically, Graham Elliott seemed a work in progress that needed more time to find its precise niche and even out some of the rough spots. Which is fine, except when you have to do it in the full glare of a highly publicized opening.

I haven’t been back since then, but I’ve meant to, so it was a real pleasure to be invited to Graham Elliott’s first anniversary party. (Yes, you should take that as admission of all the impartiality-voiding issues; we were his guests, of course I wasn’t anonymous, etc. There, are you happy John Mariani?) It was an eclectic crowd, less strategically chosen (not all that much in the way of local food media that I could see, though I did meet Janet Fuller of the Sun-Times), lots of old work colleagues or chefs he likes, and mainly just folks who seemed to have been appreciative of his food at some point.

The cocktail hour included a few hors d’oeuvres, of which a little cup of pea soup was by far the best, bursting with springy pea flavors (and a little crispy pork note in there somewhere, I believe). But the best thing during this time— maybe the best thing all night— was a cocktail, called Almost Paradise, built on vodka, cucumber and a teasing hint of steeped rosemary, with some egg white froth at the top. As David Hammond said while urging one on me, “The perfect summer drink.”

The interesting thing Bowles did for this menu was list some items that were on the menu a year ago and then serve us updated versions of the same concept a year later:

I had had one of these, the deconstructed Caesar salad. Last night’s version was less deconstructed than dada, the crouton having grown into an enormous cheese-filled brioche (amusingly called a brioche Twinkie) looming over the now tiny and defenseless bits of lettuce with the anchovies draped over it like melted clocks. This was a Caesar salad’s nightmare, and though parts of it were tasty, I tended to agree with Hammond that this business of taking apart a Caesar tends to lose what a Caesar is.

The second was the latest iteration of a play on buffalo chicken wings, with a beer foam. Then it was chicken and Budweiser; by now it’s sweetbreads with a roquefort gelato, “celery 5x” (five different forms), and a foam from Goose Island’s Matilda beer. I’m no fan of the basic buffalo wing flavor, so I was more entranced with the stuff around it, especially the celery and roquefort together.

The third dish was my favorite and, I think, most peoples’ out of the dinner courses—a scallop with Spanish flavorings including olive, almond and a chorizo vinaigrette. This was really a great dish, exotic and pungent yet accessible, and considering that fish dishes had impressed me the most last time out, I continue to think his adventurous but not overbearing hand with fish is one of the restaurant’s main strengths.

The last course was a variation on last year’s beef stroganoff, which I think I had had a taste of; now it was a cube of steak atop some spaetzles and some onion marmalade (which I’m always happy to see), with a little salt and pepper “station” on the plate. This was a satisfying dish for folks who wanted to see some red meat at that point. Where the dinner courses had been petite tastes of different things the kitchen can do, the dessert was a blowout with a gooey-center chocolate-peanut butter cake, a dab of ice cream, a little milkshake and a sugar-topped bruleed banana.

So where do I think Graham Elliott lands at this point? I don’t think it’s been radically transformed, but it seems to have grown into its skin as a place offering a certain degree of the experimental art cuisine you get at Alinea/Moto/etc., but in a more casual, nightclubby atmosphere. It seems like a good niche and while see-and-be-seen restaurants are often more flash than substance, that’s obviously not the case here. In general, the things I thought had been especially weak a year ago (cocktails and dessert) were far better, and the main courses probably batted a little higher overall.

Graham Elliott is very much a reflection of Bowles’ personality, which is less mad scientist and more puckishly playful than his molecular peers. One thing that was really charming about this evening was Bowles’ mom going around from table to table; she talked with us for quite a bit and had obvious pride in her son’s accomplishments. After dinner, he invited us back into the kitchen and showed off the modest space* from which they’d fed 130 people more or less on schedule (they were thrown off by some special requests, which seems vaguely appalling to me when you’ve been invited to a free dinner). I liked seeing the row of jars of pickled stuff, not nearly so much as Vie’s, but some interesting things (hot peppers mixed in with fruit, etc.)  It was an interesting capper to a gracious event which I very much appreciated having had the opportunity to attend.  Happy anniversary, Graham Elliott Bowles.

* Though to be honest, if there’s any Chicago restaurant with a vast and spacious kitchen, I haven’t seen it yet.

El Mariel is a Cuban sandwich place that has opened up next to the popular Habana Libre on Chicago. If “Habana Libre” conjures up Hemingway and stiff tropical drinks, El Mariel refers, of course, to the Marielitos, the people who crowded onto boats to escape— or not— Fidel’s rule and land in America. Which makes the Cuban part seem a little more immediate and harsh than at the very picturesque, almost stereotypically so, Habana Libre.

The menu is short and basic, so I ordered the most obvious thing: a Cuban sandwich. I also ordered papas fritas, which is to say French fries, not realizing that homemade potato chips would be served alongside it. Oops.

Before I got any of this, though, the proprietor, a burly mustached man hard at work on some sort of baking project, offered me a cup of soup on the house. It was chicken soup, nothing great, but perfectly okay, fresh vegetables and real chicken, what’s not to like? That was pretty much how I felt about the Cubano, too— nothing that would change my life, but an entirely decent rendition, far from skimpy with the ham, and offered in an atmosphere of eager and hopeful hospitality. I found the attitude winning even when the food would have served its purpose today and been forgotten tomorrow. That will bring me back, to see if El Mariel develops into something more interesting in time.

El Mariel
1438 W Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60642
(312) 226-0455

I wouldn’t have paid any attention to Amelia’s if Martha Bayne hadn’t reviewed it for the Reader. First off, that’s because I would have mistaken it for this Amelia’s, a onetime blight on the Mexican food landscape which (in a victory for truth in advertising, I suppose) now has an even more blatantly inauthentic name like Fiesta Sombrero or Cantina Cucaracha. David Hammond reviewed that Amelia’s thusly:

I’m awe-struck, however, by the transcendently sensation-free salsas. I’m bummed by the Disney-version of mole negro – tasting as though squeezed from a bottle of Bosco. I take a scoop of beans but can barely believe it: there’s weight on my tongue, I feel it, I know there’s something there and yet…there’s just about no flavor, there’s barely even a hint of grease, there’s no there there.

This new no-relation Amelia’s has a far more promising, if also somewhat checkered, Mexican food pedigree: the couple who owned Mundial Cocina Mestizo, an upscale restaurant in Pilsen, divorced, selling it to the third partner in the business; now they are each opening separate businesses. The ex-wife plans to open a bakery, the ex-husband has opened this attractive restaurant in… Canaryville.

And that’s the second reason I would never have noticed this restaurant: it’s in the middle of freakin’ nowhere. This may have seemed like a repeat of the successful urban pioneer strategy Mundial employed, the first high-end joint in Pilsen just as it gentrified. But Pilsen was at least full of life if not entrees over $8; this is in an attractive building facing a vast empty lot that was once stockyards, with next to no housing in its immediate vicinity. You’re going to have to want to go to Amelia’s.

So do you want to go to Amelia’s?  You do, I think.  Chef Eusebio Garcia worked at MK before opening Mundial, and his thing has been high-end Mex tinged with Mediterranean flavors.  My feeling is that the former are much, much more promising than the latter.  Oysters topped with spinach, hot sauce and Asiago cheese reminded me that Asiago cheese should be banished to Panera by now, and it didn’t help that no two seemed to have the same proportion of those ingredients.  A gorgonzola polenta on the side of a ribeye was a bowl of warm blue cheese goo, like baby food for gourmet babies.

But the straight-up Mexican things were quite good, especially scallops in a chipotle sauce with onion marmalade and some grilled vegetables.  And the steaming homemade tortillas were impossible not to want to instantly grab and wrap anything at hand in. Generally, in most of the upscale Mex places I think you’re better off ordering off the appetizer menu, where you’ll find simpler and more authentic things like tamales rather than entrees consisting of a large hunk of protein in a sauce with vegetables on the side, which is not really the way Mexicans tend to eat; and Amelia’s is no exception to this rule.

So the next time you’re facing the prospect of a long line at Mixteco, Frontera, or whatever Geno Bahena’s opened this week, consider being a real food adventurer and making the hike to Amelia’s.  Since there’s basically no traffic for a mile in any direction, it’s an easy shot down the Ryan to 43rd from the north side; the neighborhood is no scarier than, say, Humboldt Park and probably safer just by virtue of being so empty.  You’ll get the personal, relaxed attention those other places are too busy to provide, and you’ll help sustain, for at least a little while longer, a very attractive and pleasant restaurant which probably made the mistake of opening at the end of the universe.

Amelia’s Mexican Cafe
4559 S Halsted St
Chicago, IL 60609
(773) 538-8200

P.S. Chuck Sudo has reviewed it here for Chicagoist.  Note that he had exactly the same things I had!  (Yes, I was his extra ordering power.)

PRE-POST NOTE 1. Bonus points for id’ing that movie reference.

PRE-POST NOTE 2. This is a restaurant review, though it may not look like it for a while.

PRE-POST NOTE 3. I’ve been contemplating a post on the weirdness of life in the personal media age, so add this to the list: you have a conversation with someone at lunch, then you think, I should post what we were talking about on my blog. Where… the person you had lunch with will be one of the three people who reads it. Despite the self-evident futility of doing so, here goes:

So one of the reasons I’ve been urging the LTHForum Great Neighborhood Restaurants awards to be more serious about weeding out places that don’t inspire the posting rapture they once did, is because otherwise, the list will harden into orthodoxy. When LTHForum came along, one of the things we set out to attack was the standard list of Chicago’s best, as encapsulated in every guidebook which said that the places you had to eat at while in Chicago were the likes of The Berghoff, Pizzeria Uno or Gino’s, Lou Mitchell’s, Al’s Italian Beef, Billy Goat, Gene & Georgetti, Carson’s Ribs, Ann Sather’s and so on.  Over time, LTHForum has gone a long ways toward popularizing an alternate view in which the must-eat places are things like Spoon Thai, Burt’s Pizza, Honey 1 Bar-B-Q, Cemitas Puebla… and Al’s Italian Beef.  Okay, that knowledge may not have trickled all the way down to tourists, but at least it’s pretty well disseminated in the foodie/food media world.

The problem is, today’s revolution is tomorrow’s new orthodoxy.  If LTHForum doesn’t keep that list fresh and lively, someone else will have to overthrow it.  And while some places on the list may be remarkable and sui generis, others are just there because they appealed to somebody at the right moment, and other places just as good happen to not get the LTH love through no particular fault, because they just didn’t happen to get the little push that snowballed into them becoming an LTH favorite.  And so the spirit of discovery that found the first place… becomes the spirit of conventional wisdom that prevents people from finding the second.

Take, for example, Palace Grill.  No, not White Palace Grill, the one place to fall off the LTHForum list in this recent renewal season.  White Palace Grill is a standard issue Greek diner just south of the Loop, overlooking where Maxwell Street moved to until it moved again recently, that’s been around forever and usually has a lively scene of the animated owner and staff joking around with cops and other regulars.  Palace Grill is completely different; it’s a standard issue Greek diner just west of the Loop, overlooking the restaurant supply places on Madison, that’s been around forever and usually has a lively scene of the animated owner and staff joking around with cops and other regulars.

So what’s the difference?  Why did one get the LTH love and the other didn’t?  It’s not food quality—in fact, the GNR debate over White Palace Grill was whether its atmospheric qualities trumped its decidedly standard-issue food.  Just the luck of which one somebody posted about and which somebody didn’t at the critical time. Both are pretty ordinary at lunch, so far as I can see— Greek diner hamburgers, that sort of thing, frozen patties and fries, serviceable but nothing to get excited about.  (I got further unexcited about Greek diner burgers here.)

But it’s a different story at breakfast— and this is where Palace Grill, the one on Madison not the one near Maxwell, rises above the pack of Hollywood Grill or Melrose Diner or a zillion other places.  For my Denver omelet, the ingredients were first slapped on the grill, and given several minutes of grilling in the juices of all the accumulated flavors of the grill.  Only once the onions and green peppers had softened, the ham had browned, etc. were they wrapped in the scrambled egg exterior.

Okay, that may sound like a small thing, but it’s all about the small things, isn’t it?  Where omelet ingredients are often smothered by a bland blanket of egg, these were sharpened up by the grill.  Likewise the hash browns had a bit of onion in them, so they weren’t the pure starch of typical Greek diner hash browns but had a little onion sharpness.  The service, for an adult and three kids sitting at the counter, was friendly and welcoming as could be.  For $5.95, that’s how the distinction gets drawn between not bad and pretty damn good.  So check out Palace Grill, not White Palace Grill, Palace Grill.  It’s a great neighborhood… joint.

Palace Grill
1408 W. Madison
(312) 226-9529