Doug Sohn, “Hot Doug,” has long been recognized as one of the key innovators on the Chicago food scene, albeit one usually relegated to a lesser position than the fine dining innovators— Achatz, Cantu, D’Angelo, Gras— because of lingering prejudice (rooted in 19th century aristocratic notions of what constitutes food art) toward common foods such as hot dogs and sausages.

Nevertheless, I think one of his new works represents a breakthrough for Sohn which catapults him into the ranks of Chicago’s most formally innovative and structurally incandescent chefs. I was fortunate enough to experience it today and, though I’m still digesting my experience (figuratively, not literally, as you’ll see), I have some initial thoughts which I think should encourage any of you to repeat my lunch sooner rather than later.

I noticed the surprisingly bare celebrity sausage board (as well as the uncommonly low price for a special) as I walked in.  “What’s it like?” I asked Doug as I reached the front.

“A little bit of everything,” was his cryptic reply.

Curiosity piqued, I ordered it along with fries and a drink.  “Be sure to have the special first, before you get into the fries,” Doug urged me.

A few moments later I heard “Mike G?” and I turned around.  As the guy who works the floor handed me the tray, he looked at me and said, “It’s not a mistake.  This is how it’s supposed to be.”

As soon as he set it down, I saw where the confusion might arise:

We often speak of minimalist hot dogs but clearly Doug was pursuing this to an entirely new level.  I stared at the meal, trying to comprehend how to eat it— which end to pick up, where to begin, whether ketchup was appropriate.

And as I stared at it, a curious thing began to happen.  Though I wasn’t eating personally, I began to take in the eating all around me— the kids sucking on the sticks of their corn dogs, the guys from the gaming company chomping into spicy pork sausage and bacon-cheddar elk sausage.

As I listened more closely, I began to pick out individual notes— the crunch of sauerkraut, the beery tang of St. Jacques mustard, the sweet-tart cherries on a pork sausage.  Flavor after flavor came at me from all directions, and the lack of anything on my own plate meant that I could savor everything in the restaurant.

In many ways it was almost overwhelming to experience so many flavors simultaneously.  I felt my vision begin to expand, I seemed to take in all of the restaurant at once.

The experience lasted a little under five minutes and then the sensations seemed to subside and I ate my fries and drank my Pibb Xtra while contemplating, a little shaken I must admit, the extraordinary synesthetic experience I had just had.

Doug has long been a playfully radical innovator, selecting ingredients by casting the I Ching or sometimes by playing canasta, but this meal exposed a new side of him, the hot dog artist as shaman, as trickster and mendicant, opening the doors of perception by bringing into question the very meaning of such concepts as “sausage,” “lunch,” and “value meal.”  As much as I’ve enjoyed my past meals at Hot Doug’s, I felt that this one took it in new directions which have for me completely redefined the experience of eating sausage.  I emerge from it reborn and grateful for the changes it has wrought in me for what is, unquestionably, a very small price for such, dare I say it, genius.

Hot Doug’s
3324 N California Ave
Chicago, IL 60618
(773) 279-9550

I kept meaning, a couple of years ago, to go back to Follia, Bruno Abate’s ultrachic Italian restaurant that launched the strip that now includes Moto and Otom, to have true Italian-style woodburning pizza. Then suddenly woodburning Italian pizza places opened all over town and the urgency was gone. When I did finally have it, it was fine, but others were better and Follia did other things better.

Now Abate has himself opened a woodburning pizza place that looks chicer than a year’s subscription to L’Uomo, in Wicker Park, done in space station moderne and filled with his usual beautiful people (not least of them the imposingly tall and impeccably dressed Bruno himself, who looks exactly like he should look). It would be easy to make fun of Bruno and his places for empty glitz and eye candy over food, but tragically, he also runs really good Italian restaurants marked by his devotion to sourcing eye-openingly superior ingredients. I had the best caprese salad of my life, thanks to the best bufala mozzarella of my life, at Follia— and great ingredients are also the making of Tocco.

Well, they’re the making of the pizze, anyway. There have been rather bad notices so far for the other things at Tocco, but the pizza has gotten good comment, and since the pizza and everything else are basically coming out of two separate kitchens, it’s perhaps not surprising that there should be so much divergence. The pizze are made at an area behind the bar— infelicitously, at one point a stinky cheese wafted from that area over the bar— and cooked in some very handsome ovens behind a black tile wall. The crust is almost paper-thin, and frankly, it’s not as interesting as many of the other Italian-style pizzas in town, in terms of its own flavor or chewy texture. But the stuff that went on both of the ones we tried was absolutely top-notch— tangy, complex bufala on one, prosciutto and buttery mozzarella on another. In one of the pizza wars on LTHForum, Antonius said “pizza is about the bread,” to which I replied “except when it isn’t,” ie, when it belongs to a style where the crust is secondary, like Chicago deep dish. This is a pizza that belongs to a style that ought to be about the bread, but transcends it because the stuff on top is so good.

Service at the bar, another complaint in the Time Out review linked above, was helpful, knowledgeable and attentive; the only downside to sitting there is the absurd barstools, which are shaped so inexplicably I still don’t know, after two hours on one, which way you were really supposed to sit on it, and which sink much too low if you’re not model-thin. So try to get a table, and stick to the pizza, and Tocco will make for a solid evening of pizza and beautiful people.

Tocco
1266 N. Milwaukee
773-687-8895

The number in the headline refers to my ongoing series of places not written about so far on LTHForum.

I went to a community meeting the other night in which people who’ve lived in my yuppified ‘hood for something like 60 years were complaining about the new parking problems caused by the ‘hood’s recent hotness.  It reminded me how often people in Chicago think the way things are is the way they should stay, and so they don’t even see the irony in, say, Latinos complaining that Pilsen is losing its traditional Hispanic character or that breeders are overrunning traditionally gay Andersonville.  Neighborhoods in Chicago are in constant demographic evolution and be glad of it, because the alternative is Detroit.  Or Dayton, Ohio.

All of which is by way of saying that I was a bit surprised to run up to Kedzie near Lawrence and find my attempt at a middle eastern lunch experience should be so Mexi-flavored.  I don’t think Kedzie is going to stop being middle-eastern any time soon, and there had been taquerias and such on Kedzie before, but it was still striking to, for the first time, see such a Latino presence here in two places, both new but only one of them intentionally Latino.

The first was in a new restaurant called Zahrat al Madaa’en, named for a nickname for Jerusalem.  I went in to the pristine, empty restaurant and saw what looked like pretty decent beef and chicken shawerma cones, with a fair amount of outside char.  But I also saw something I couldn’t quite decipher on the board.  I asked about it and the guy kind of shrugged and said something about the main guy being back soon.  Likewise I tried to order baba ghanoush and it became evident that this guy had no idea what it was or how to make it.  It wasn’t necessarily clear at first glance, but I soon realized that he was the Mexican hired hand in the kitchen, and I’d have to wait for the Palestinian owner for anything beyond simple shawerma.  So… I ordered beef shawerma.

I had misjudged how done it was– it was kind of rare, which isn’t all bad, but was certainly a bit odd for shawerma– but the flavor wasn’t bad at all.  For a Shawermachanga.  No, it was a decent version, and the place has at least modest promise, and I’ll probably check it out again when the owner is on the premises, since Kedzie is close and the best known places (I’m talkin’ to you, Salam) have disappointed me a few times in recent times.  I wouldn’t mind some good competition for the established places on the strip; we’ll see if this could be it.

I walked up a few more blocks and found a new spot next to the El called, simply, Antojitos!, supposed to be offering simple snacks to commuters.  Well, there must be a fair number of Latino commuters in the area, since it’s hard to imagine Palestinians or Lebanese munching tamales in their corn husk wrapping on the Brown Line.  Anyway, I got a salsa verde chicken tamale, and it was fine.  It was just like authentic tamales sold out of Coleman coolers at Mexican bakeries all around town.  The interior is nothing great, tiny and with daytime TV blaring.  If you live nearby, check it out, if you don’t, not a lot of need to travel that far. A cutesy name has gotten this place more attention than it would rate if it was called El Gallo Loco or Panaderia Juarez.

The numbers, incidentally, in the headline refer to my ongoing series of places not written about so far on LTHForum.  Aha, you say, they may not have been written about on LTHForum, but Mike Sula just posted about both of these at The Reader.  Yes, he did, but I actually beat him to eating at at least one of them.  How do I know?  Because I ran into him outside Zahrat as he was walking to Antojitos!, and he told me so.  (He definitely hasn’t been to Zahrat yet, I wasn’t sure if he had eaten from Antojitos! but he was on his way to talk to the proprietor.)  So watch the Reader for more on at least one of these, anyway.

Zahrat al Madaa’en
4503 N. Kedzie
(773) 279-7200

Antojitos!
4645 N. Kedzie

I can allow myself a small measure of self-congratulation for having sensed, when I went to Schwa two years ago, that it was one of those volcanically volatile expressions of creativity where matter was bound to collide with antimatter in a big messy bang sooner or later. (Note my title.) No, I didn’t predict the precisely public nature of the implosion— recounted superbly in Alan Richman’s article— but it had the feel of something that would have a season, then spin apart violently and irreparably, sending its members on to greater things, and giving a few of us the ability to say “Oh, did you eat his food when he was at Schwa? You didn’t? Oh, that was really something…”

Schwa did blow up, and then it reopened, with a new guitarist and drummer, a coat of paint and some nice pictures on the wall thanks to chef Michael Carlson’s girlfriend. And if the original Schwa existed in a fever of creative energy that couldn’t last, the new Schwa seems cooler and more calculated, with the confident assurance of the showman who’s cleaned himself up, cast off the second-rate material and knows how to deliver a precisely timed evening of rock and roll better than just about anybody:

The sense of imminent danger is gone and surprisingly, what Schwa now impresses you with is its delicacy, its refinement.  This may not necessarily seem like a compliment— Carlson wasn’t sure he felt it was, when we said it, and as if to drive home the point, “refined” was sneered at at one point on Top Chef last night— but it is one.  There’s new subtlety at Schwa, even when Carlson is deliberately being unsubtle, as at dessert, which he seems to view (then and now) as a place to probe your point of revulsion by combining sweets with something so strong it’s almost offputting.  (It did put off one of the four of us, but the other three loved it.)  Not to keep ragging on my December visit to Avenues (but I will anyway), but Schwa at little over half the price proved superior in nearly every way— pulling off the same tricks of powders and foams and smears of flavor across plates, yet doing so in a way that respected and preserved the original ingredients’ flavor and textures, and in combinations that opened your mind with the way they made you look at meats or vegetables freshly.  Two months later Avenues seems an indistinguishable blur of dabs and gels no longer recognizable as what they came from, but a year from now I’ll find inspiration in sunchokes and roasted orange or parsnips and caramel or a brilliantly purple beet risotto.

Here’s what we had, the most outstanding dishes bolded:

• Amuse of thinly sliced grapefruit on a honey gelato, with a hint of stronger things— garlic and truffle oil, I think.

• Beet risotto, earthy and dramatically colorful, with a streak of taleggio cream adding lushness and horseradish foam (the only foam of the night, frankly, which had a noticeable flavor) adding a light hint of tartness and heat.  Oh, and snail eggs, which are a new new thing, figured in there too.  (They’re like pretty much any other caviar that isn’t top-drawer caviar.)

• Sunchoke soup, a savory and robust soup (not that I could ever have said that its flavor was sunchokes) combined with finely shaved bits of sunchoke and roasted orange.  I’ve had sunchokes a lot at Mado lately, where they’re rustic and crunchy, which seems to suit them just right (they’re as unpretentious as potato chips); it was interesting to taste them taken in a completely opposite direction here, as refined as pickled ginger.

• Pad Thai, made with amazingly supple and delicate slivers of jellyfish, contrasting beautifully with gritty little bits of peanut.  The showiest of his dishes conceptually, but it’s pulled off superbly.

• Quail egg ravioli, the signature dish of the original Schwa, still a marvel but no longer, to me, the most amazing trick he’s capable of.

• Arctic char roe.  Interestingly, the one dish I don’t really remember from last night— some “noodles” made of white asparagus were a lovely salad, but I can’t recall how the rest of it worked.

• Lobster with chestnut and persimmon, and prosciutto— this seemed like a real misfire at first, the lobster might have been a little overcooked but in any case the combination of lobster and pumpkiny persimmon was off, bad, wrong.  Once I kind of thought of it as two dishes, it worked much better— the lobster with a little chestnut puree was a good combination, the persimmon and salty prosciutto was an excellent one.  They just shouldn’t have been in the same bowl.

• Pork belly in rutabaga broth, with rutabaga pearls and greens and a beer foam, with a thin piece of something brittle on top— this dish was supposed to be chicken liver, according to the menu, but nobody complained for long, it might well have been the best dish of the night.  The earthiness of the rutabaga and the soulfillingly tender and meaty pork belly combined beautifully, and the brittle— a fellow diner says peanut, I thought it was something else, like rutabaga— added just the right note of sweetness.

• Duck— duck breast atop duck confit with a little brussel sprouts in between, sprinkled with (I think) truffle salt and bitter chocolate.  This was a little bit of an “ennh” dish, would have been better either with more forward chocolate intensity, or just a nice big juicy piece of duck, not the precious little (and lukewarm by the time it reached us) morsels we got.

• Cheese— taleggio under a coddled egg with a layer of crisped honey on top.  This seemed about 3/4 there, okay as a palate cleanser, but not a wow.

• Parsnip custard— this was the dessert that wowed three of us and repulsed the fourth, and I asked Carlson if that was somewhat typical of the reaction, which he suggested it was.  I was dazzled by how the almost tomatoey savoriness of the parsnip blended with, first, a richly sober caramel sauce, and second, a psychedelically bright passionfruit sauce.  (There were also some candied sweetbreads, which were almost forgotten next to all that.)  Along with the pork belly, probably my favorite dish of the night.

• Lime tuile with green curry ice cream and sassafras foam— another dish that pushes the dessert envelope, and in this case, he warned us first to eat the ice cream, then down the rest.  I didn’t find it as challenging (or quite as magical), though the lime cone was really nice and an idea worth stealing.

I said I expected that Schwa would last a season and then people would be on to other things; to a large extent that was true, and Schwa 2.0 is a new place, with many of the same virtues (not least, of course, the stunningly good value relative to other places in its class, of which there are a very small handful in town), but a different air that probably reflects Carlson’s life calming down and him finding a better groove to operate in at his restaurant.  Schwa has matured in all the best ways, smoothing off its rough edges but only enhancing its air of adventure.  (Did the music switch coincidentally from hiphop to bebop when an older party of four came in, or is Carlson even taking his guests’ musical preferences into account now?  That would be the real sign that the old Schwa is no more.)  In one of the best quotes in Richman’s piece, one of the cooks calls the group of them “a pirate crew.”  It’s a wonderful image, of topflight chefs beholden to nobody and cooking for their own raucous, pillaging, freebooting pleasure, but it leaves out what a smooth sailing ship the revived, revisited Schwa has become.

Tags: schwa

I was starting to feel like my quest to try 50 unwritten-about restaurants was turning into Mike’s list of mediocre bummers.  A lot of places that just didn’t measure up to what small promise they offered from the outside. (Especially since I was sitting on the whole stash of mostly good Bridgeview middle-eastern places till the piece appeared in Time Out.)  Which is the reality of doing this, of course; you try a lot of places and if you’re lucky, once every three or four times they’re good enough to want to go back, once every 50 or 100 times you find a true gem.

You can try to improve your odds in some ways.  First, of course, there’s location; your odds of finding a good restaurant of a particular type go way up if you’re in a neighborhood where those people actually live.  Another is by looking for certain indicators.  For Mexican, menudo and pozole are a good sign— it means they serve a lot of locals on the weekends— while anything that reeks of crude stereotyping and travel brochure cliches is a bad sign, since it means they’re aiming mainly at gringos.  (I call this The Sombrero Rule, as in, never eat at a Mexican place with a sombrero on its sign.)

I tried a place a couple of weeks back that passed the first test but not the second.  It’s called Sol Del Sur (which maybe suggests another rule about avoiding places with Spanish names that English speakers can readily decipher).  The location, Logan Square on Fullerton, could have been promising, there are some authentic places not far away (Gloria’s, Rinconcito Cubano).  But it turned out to be pretty much Mexican-American, aimed at a margarita-swilling crowd and, if I had looked more closely, giving off a number of sombreroesque clues as I walked in (travel brochure-esque decor, chimichangas as a main attraction on the menu).  Actually it was probably above average for that, if I lived in some distant suburb I would be glad to have a place that could make a decent salsa nearby, but in Chicago, it’s nothing special.  (I didn’t count it as one of my 50 places because it had been mentioned, briefly once, on LTHForum.)

Yet another place a few days later proved that the rules are only guidelines.  I spotted this sign:

!Muy sabroso, Senor Pan! Much of it seemed to be on a similar level of not-as-slick-as-it-thinks corporate inauthenticity— or at least suggested that someone involved had had a past career in fast food.  The menu was in the same font as Chipotle’s; a large banner inside offered a dollar menu.  It felt very much like the imitation-American chains you see in Europe, half Mickey D, half Cafe des Poseurs.

But I ordered a Cuban sandwich…

It was shockingly… pretty good.  Quality ham and cheese, house-roasted pork with some crispy crackling flavor around the edges, same Gonnella (I suspect) bread as all the other Cuban places in town, which isn’t Miami-authentic but is what we settle for here.  A side of plantains was just fine, too.  So, you never know.  Judge a place by its sign, you gotta, but accept that sometimes, a better place may lie inside.

Sol del Sur
3268 Fullerton Ave.
Chicago IL
(773) 384-8869

Senor Pan
4612 W Fullerton Ave
Chicago, IL 60639
(773) 227-1020

Kaze file photo.

Some factoids:

• I live a couple of blocks from Kaze, the sushi and Japanese joint in Roscoe Village.

• Kaze has been around about 4 years.

• Until tonight, I averaged .25 visits to Kaze per annum.

I went once, almost exactly three years ago, and, well, that held me till tonight. Kaze’s claim to fame is sort of creative fusion sushi, that is, sushi gussied up with diced banana peppers or truffle oil or who knows what. And I had a very mixed reaction to that overall, three years ago. One thing I had was really good— mackerel in kimchi juice, the tart spicy kimchi juice setting off the oily mackerel nicely. I can still remember how it tasted; and judging by my post, I seemed to have liked a couple of other things pretty well. But some of the ones with a big glob of stuff on top:

One of the problems with the multitude of toppings placed on the fish was that there were far too many for me to keep track of with photos alone. Banana peppers, garlic, enoki, tuna penuche (okay, I’m joking), I just couldn’t keep track of all the flavors being thrown at me. Here is, yes, tuna, with yellowtail which is a TUNA, and salmon, each topped with some damn thing, and slathered with the soy sauce and truffle oil, to the point of practically seeming like dessert sushi (how far were we, really, from tuna with whipped cream and a cherry on top?). Looking back on the meal at this point, where the most satisfactory dish had been the one with the strongest fish, I began to feel that the sauces were doing pretty good fish a disservice, making it seem bland by globbing it up and covering it up with too-strong alternative flavors instead of enhancing and sharpening it with something simple and clean.

But tonight I was craving sushi, and my garage door had broken earlier in the day, making the logical thing a walk to the nearest sushi place, however deep my philosophical differences with it.  So I decided to see if I would feel now the same way I felt then.

I plopped myself at the bar— almost empty when I got there, full within a few minutes on this Friday night— and ordered a saketini (name aside, the least absurd of the absurd fusion drinks on offer) and listened to the specials.  Two really appealed to me— a braised oxtail/coconut curry soup poured over some kind of Japanese custard, and some little river crabs deep-fried with some kind of dipping sauce (you eat them like soft-shell crabs).  But I decided I couldn’t finish the whole order of the crabs myself, and stuck to the soup, as well as a plate of sashimi and sushi, chef’s choice.

The soup— well, it was quite good.  Would have been better if strands of oxtail meat didn’t seem to be as precious as saffron threads in it, but it was plenty spicy and appealingly coconutty.  A very nice soup… although I couldn’t help but think that I had just paid $8 or $9, probably, for a cup of something that (mostly tasting of coconut milk and spicy heat) was functionally identical to the soup going for $2.95 a quart at the Thai place in the next block.

My plate of sashimi/nigiri—virtually identical to what I had three years ago, I believe, everything I mentioned above (banana peppers, garlic, enoki, mushrooms, truffle oil) turned up on it.  And like I thought three years ago… it was, basically, a disservice to the fish, which is of pretty high quality, not mindblowing, but certainly above bargain sushi lunch spots like Umaiya.  By far the best part of the plate was among the simplest— there were some really nice slices of amberjack, fatty and very clean-flavored.  Dipped in a light ponzu sauce, they were first-rate.  But at least half of the gussied-up sushi pieces were, to me, botches, muddying fish flavor with something not only heavy-handed in itself but persistent enough (e.g., truffle oil) to hang over onto the next piece.  Not good.

After this, my preconceptions largely reaffirmed, I felt like ordering one cooked dish.  My waiter suggested a flounder in a parsley-butter sauce; he was high on this, it sounded like boring banquet food to me, so I pushed him for another suggestion.  Somehow that led to tuna tartare, the official dish of California in 1996, which I’d gotten stuck with three years ago after explicitly saying I didn’t want that kind of obvious thing.  Hurriedly backtracking to the cooked kind of cooked dishes, I said oh fine, give me the flounder, without much enthusiasm.

To his credit, he didn’t steer me wrong.  It was small but terrific.  Lightly, almost fluffily fried, floating in the middle of a vast green sea of parsley-butter sauce, it was a sunburst of happy fried and herbal flavor on the plate.  Now, I have two cavils about the way it arrived— one, it seemed like a spoon might have been more appropriate for eating it and enjoying the sauce (and not the teeny-bowled parfait spoon that came with the soup earlier), and two, as if to mock the crack I made three years ago, there actually was whipped cream on top of it.  I thought I must be crazy, it had to be creme fraiche or something, but no, it was honest to God sweet whipped cream.  But easily shoved aside to melt at the far edge of the parsley sea, I ate the fish without it, and I loved it.

Kaze seems to be popular as heck with my fellow Roscoevilleins, everyone else at the bar seemed to know the sushi chefs already, so there must be an audience for fusion sushi banana splits.  But having given it two shots, I have to say I remain convinced that that’s a sure way to ruin good fish with a lot of flash and filigree it doesn’t need.  So the thing Kaze is famous for, I would say beware to.  Yet around the edges of all that there seems to be quite a good Japanese fusion restaurant turning out interesting dishes of high quality.  So I may be back sooner than 2012, but if I do, it will be while ordering carefully to avoid the main attraction.

Kaze Sushi
2032 W Roscoe
Chicago, IL 60618
(773) 327-4860
www.kazesushi.com

Tags: fusion, japanese, roscoe village, sushi

I suddenly had a craving for Indian food, and not for Khan BBQ, which was the last Indian Indo-Pakistani place I went to… maybe the last two or three Indian South Asian places I went to. So my friend Wyatt and I went to Udupi Palace for first-rate vegetarian, fresh and brightly flavored. (They don’t have a buffet, so it helps to go with someone else so you can order at least two or three things. Not having a buffet is, otherwise, a benefit— things taste fresher and brighter.)

Two days later I still had a craving for Indian food food prepared in a style indigenous to or at least reflective of the Asian subcontinent, and had no one in tow to help me order, so I decided to fall back on a buffet. There’s a newish one… maybe… at 2525 W. Devon.

I say maybe because although the name is new— Punjabi Dhaba— the same location has been Sher-A-Punjab and Moti Mahal. And since the website says they’ve been serving for 15 years… well, they may be new, but you know that old joke about how all the moussaka in Greektown or won ton soup in Chinatown is cooked in one underground kitchen and trucked/piped/whatever to the various restaurants? It starts to look like less of a joke when the same restaurant has borne half the names you see on Devon, dishing up a more or less identical buffet of saag paneer and curry made from leftover tandoori chicken each time.

And that’s how things tasted— like something they’d made and I’d tasted too many times before. The dishes were okay— it was a cold day, they hit the spot, they assuaged my craving a little more— but the colors that had been bright at Udupi Palace were stewed to a muted pastel by comparison. LTHForum poster Zim, who is Indian (and deserves eternal thanks for being the one who kicked off the community’s exploration of Khan BBQ), once advanced the theory that you should only eat at an Indian buffet in its first six months, that’s when they’re likely to have new offerings you haven’t seen a million times and to be trying hardest to make flavors sparkle. Punjabi Dhaba, alas, manages the neat trick of being a new restaurant… whose first six months appear to have been many years ago.

Punjabi Dhaba
2525 W.Devon Avenue
Chicago, IL 60659
(773) 262 – 2080
http://punjabidhabaonline.com/

Udupi Palace
2543W,Devon Avenue
Chicago,IL 60618
773-338-2152
http://www.udupipalace.com

Tags: devon, indian

It sometimes seems as if there are no more food discoveries to be made in Chicago. The truth is, while it may be harder these days— though far from impossible— to find unknown places in Chicago, there are all kinds of unexplored suburbs around the city, especially in less-traveled-by-internet-users areas like the south suburbs. So don’t think it improbable if I say that as far as I am concerned, the best middle eastern food in Chicago is in an area that has gone almost entirely undiscovered (with one exception) until now— that at least half the times I’ve stopped for food there, I’ve had middle eastern food that for brightness of flavor, freshness of preparation, and the hospitality with which it was served handily surpassed almost any middle-eastern meal I’ve ever had within the city. After repeated middling experiences at what I’d long considered the best of them in the city— Salam— and adjusting my expectations for middle-eastern downward, the food in and around Bridgeview has given me new hope for the existence of an authentic, lively example of this cuisine in Chicago.  I chronicled these explorations and discoveries in my Time Out “Taste Quest” last week; this will offer some notes and further explication of that piece, which I would recommend as the primary, easily referenced primer for the explorer.

I had vaguely known for some time that there were middle eastern restaurants down in this area (which, to help set the scene, is located straight south of the city on Harlem avenue in the 80s and 90s, mostly; or in foodie terms, it’s about a mile southwest of Chuck’s). In fact Salam even had an outpost here at one time. The Arab community here— mainly Palestinian— originated in Chicago’s oldest middle eastern area, which was in the South Loop, and for many years they were the shopkeepers for the south side black community, both necessary and resented by the local population (a la Korean bodega owners in black neighborhoods today). The community moved over time to the area around 63rd and Pulaski, and there are still some remnants of it there; I took part in an event during the time between the abandonment of Chowhound and the launch of LTHForum in which several of us ate our way up and down 63rd, checking out the restaurants and shops that existed then. However, when the best known to us of these, Steve’s Shish Kabob, closed up around 2006 (eventually reopening somewhat to the southeast of Bridgeview), the whole south side Arab community kind of fell off the local foodie radar.

To get back to its history rather than mine, the community had started looking for a place to build a mosque as early as the 1950s, and a Bridgeview mosque was built in the 1970s. The Bridgeview mosque has inspired controversy which is best understood by perusing the Chicago Tribune’s series of articles on it from a few years ago, but whatever may be happening inside it, the commercial activity around it remains warmly welcoming to the outsider, if to judge by appearances, rarely seeing many from the Irish, Poles and Lithuanians who also live in the area.

The first place I visited, a bit to the south of the main area, was Al-Basha in Palos Heights, which seems to have been around for a number of years, to judge by both the slightly worn decor and the very relaxed air with which regulars were being served. First impressions were not promising— and it took long enough to get our order taken that they had a long time to sink in— but all doubts were swept away once food arrived. Everything— falafel, kifta, the bowl of complimentary pickles— just sparkled a little brighter than any I’d had locally for some time. Tastebuds that had been lulled into slumber woke up, ready for duty. The food was as jaunty as the chef in the window:

Al Basha
7216 W. College Rd.
Palos Heights
708-671-1440

A month or so later my wife and I were in that area again and I suggested we just pick and try another random unknown spot. She’s the one who found Albawadi Mediterranean Grill in a strip mall parking lot on 87th. If I had one knock against Al-Basha— besides the fact that smoking is still allowed in restaurants in Palos Heights, shock, horror!— it would be that the menu seemed to offer only the expected standards of middle eastern cuisine. Albawadi proved not only to be at least Al-Basha’s equal in flavor but to show more ambition with an extensive menu that includes everything from meat to seafood, and begins with a relish tray centered around a wonderful garlicky eggplant dip (something like the Turkish imam biyaldi). The grilled meats were outstanding, perfectly done, while the decor led to a rather amusing moment:

Al Bawadi is located in a former fast food building, which they are in the process of expanding so that they can have a nonsmoking original building and a separate hookah room. The building looked vaguely Alamo-like, but I couldn’t quite place it, so after our meal I asked our waiter if it had been a Mexican restaurant. He clearly thought I was asking if the meal we had eaten was Mexican food, and, eyes bulging in disbelief and dismay, carefully explained to the astonishingly stupid gringo (who somehow knew baba ghanoush and falafel by name, but apparently believed them to be salsa and chips), that the restaurant was Jordanian-Palestinian. Eventually I got out of him that the building had once been an Arby’s, but I’m not sure I ever convinced him that I hadn’t mistaken his place for Senor Sombrero’s.

Albawadi Grill
7216 W 87th Street
Bridgeview, IL 60455
708-599-1999

At this point, 2 for 2 on random picks having turned out to be pretty damn wonderful, I decided I had a mission to try every middle eastern place down here. As it turned out, Albawadi turned out to be the best by a comfortable margin, and indeed I would anoint it the best middle eastern restaurant in Chicagoland— and thus the one to visit if you feel inclined to make a trip down there and check the area out. And since the menus tend to be fairly similar from place to place, that’s not a bad strategy. All the same, there are several other worthy places worth noting, and without duplicating the Time Out article (which extends to groceries and sweet shops), here are a few more restaurants which warrant attention (and which I will number as part of my series of 50 places previously undiscovered by LTHForum and the local foodie community generally):

21. The Nile
This is a second outpost of a restaurant that still exists on the 63rd street strip (the similar-named place in Hyde Park may have been related once as well; or “The Nile” for a middle-eastern place may be “Great Wall” for Chinese restaurants). The cafeteria-like atmosphere is nothing to get excited about, but the bustle behind the counter suggests that they’re doing more than lazily serving up falafel— mensef was the special one day I came in here. (The specials board is in Arabic, so you have to ask.) I didn’t have the mensef, I wanted to just try the regular menu (and being on deadline, I had another lunch ahead of me that day, so I didn’t want to order big), but the shish taouk was grilled spot-on perfect and the falafel were bright and flavorful. It’d be worth checking out again.

The Nile Restaurant
7333 W 87th St
Bridgeview, IL 60455
(708) 237-0767

22. Baladi Restaurant
This was one I found by searching the internet, as it’d be easy to miss it on a side street off Harlem.  (I don’t have much use for Yelp generally, but it sometimes at least alerts you to the existence of places that locals have commented on that otherwise have gone unnoticed by the internet.)  The first time I went I had an absolutely fantastic grilled chicken off the specials board (again, in Arabic only), perfectly grilled (do we detect a theme?) and accompanied by a kind of red pepper sauce.  I had planned on a second lunch that day as well but the idea of not finishing that chicken while it was warm and crispy was unacceptable.  Baba ghanoush— not that I needed anything like that with this chicken— also impressed me as smoky and delectable.

I returned about a week later with LTHForum poster Gastro Gnome, who had agreed to accompany me to visit some of the groceries and markets and help me understand where the points of distinction were so I could include a few of those in the Time Out piece.  We started with lunch at Baladi, ordering off the regular menu, and… it was one of those times when the second visit completely fails to show your guest what had wowed you the first time.  Everything (shawerma, shish taouk, etc.) was okay, but nothing sparkled.  So I guess stick to the specials at Baladi; that chicken really was great.  I’m not imagining it.

Baladi Restaurant
7209 W 84th St
Bridgeview, IL 60455
708-233-1025

23. Lebanese Cuisine (menu says Lebanese Nights)
This is the only Bridgeview restaurant I tried that didn’t make the Time Out piece at all.  (Al-Basha didn’t make it because it was too far away from the others.) The location is actually where Salam’s outpost used to be, and it was something else in between (as my take-out bag indicated).  I ordered a Lebanese shawerma sandwich (shawerma inside a thin wrap with pickles and so on) and a side of foul, beans.  Running the place (seemingly singlehanded) was a sort of pepperpot lady in a full hijab.  She couldn’t have been more warm or welcoming, and I was ready to love this place… but the food just didn’t do it at all.  The shawerma was kind of mealy and tough, and the foul, despite giving off waves of garlic, was flavorless in that way that only bean dishes can be.  Too bad.

Lebanese Nights
9050 S Harlem Ave
Bridgeview, IL 60455
(708) 430-4377

24. Village Pita & Bakery
This small shop would have been easy to miss in the same strip mall as Albawadi, but I’m glad I didn’t.  They sell a variety of baked goods stuffed or topped with things like za’atar (a green spice of herbs and sesame) or mohamara (a spicy red pepper topping), dirt cheap and, if not mindblowing, totally easy to like.  Not surprisingly, it was the one place where I saw non-Arab customers— the Irish kid delivering Pepsi chimed in to urge me to try the potato filled one.  The owner (you can see his picture at Time Out’s site) clearly takes serious pride in his wares, as he was very insistent, almost worriedly so, that I not under any circumstances microwave the ones I took away (hey, I’d already had two lunches), but warm them on a cookie sheet in the oven.  I did, they made a great dinner that night.

Village Pita & Bakery
7378 W 87th St
Bridgeview, IL 60455
(708) 237-0020

25. Nablus Sweets
I tend to think of things like baklava in terms of David Mamet’s line that there’s no difference between good flan and bad flan, so I included a couple of sweets shops in the piece, but hell if I have any way to tell which is better than the other.  This place stood out for one offering I’ve never seen anywhere else— knafeh, a dish made of warmed white Nablus cheese, topped with orange shredded wheat (once saffron-colored, I imagine), ground pistachios and sweet syrup.  I could only get through half a piece, it was so rich and sweet, but I was assured on the weekends, they line up for it.

Nablus Sweets
8320 S. Harlem
Bridegview, IL
(708) 529-3911

Tags: bridgeview, grilled, hummus, knafeh, lebanese, middle eastern, palestinian, south suburbs

Whilst roaming Bridgeview and environs for my upcoming Time Out piece on the middle eastern food in that obscure suburb, which might be in this week’s issue, I spotted a highly promising sign:

The fact that it was on a former Pizza Hut might not be taken as so promising, but after all, the best middle eastern place I found down there was in a former Arby’s, so anything could happen. What was promising was the promise of “real charcoal.” A taco made of truly charcoal-cooked meat is a wonderful thing, full of charred edges and smoky beefy flavor, but I don’t know of any such place in Chicago, indeed one of the things I pine for here is a place like the one I visited in Playa del Carmen:

where incredibly fresh arrachera, skirt steak, was grilled over coals and served up by the ton.

This place may or may not be related to other places called Arturo’s around town, notably one near Milwaukee & Western, which I’ve never had a burning need to try, belonging somewhere in the middle, apparently, of local chains.  I suppose that’s an oversight, but there’s a lot of Mexican out there and Arturo’s gave off a Los Dos Sombreros vibe, seemed aimed squarely at the need-a-gutbomb-at-2-am crowd.

But we went in, and I ordered tacos, two steak and one pastor:

We can dispose of the pastor instantly, it sucked and certainly never came anywhere near a pastor cone.  The tacos tasted pretty good… I could almost believe in the charcoal cooking, there was definitely char and a smoky taste, but I kept waiting for it go beyond what you could produce on a good gas grill with juices dripping down and sizzling back up… and it just didn’t do it.  Maybe, I thought, it’s been reheated, which would be a major error with freshly grilled beef, but could dampen the flavor.  There was flank steak on the menu, maybe that would stand a better chance of being freshly cooked.

But I took the opportunity of visiting the bathroom so I could snoop on the kitchen.  And all I saw back there was a standard gas grill, no signs of charcoal grilling like actual flame, ashen grates, serious internal smoke ventilation systems, big bags labeled “hardwood lump,” whatever.  I tasted little and saw nothing to support the claims of the banner on the top of the building.  Maybe they’re grilling it out back on a barbecue and then holding it; that would reconcile the taste with the signage and with what I observed.  But I just don’t know.

Arturo’s isn’t bad by any means, but it isn’t the place I’d hoped it would be—and more importantly, that they said they were.  That’s a sin that makes it hard for me to want to go back, much as I’d love to have my suspicions overturned.

Arturo’s Mexican Restaurant
7260 W 79th St
Bridgeview, IL 60455
(708) 458-8004

To see more in this series, click Restaurant Reviews at right and look for the numbered reviews.

Tags: charcoal, mexican, taco

Almost four years ago, I had a stunningly good meal at Avenues under its then-chef Graham Elliott Bowles (two-thirds of whom is now his own restaurant). And as was my wont then, I posted a course-by-course description of the meal with pictures.

Well, it’s a different world now.  Avenues has a new chef, Curtis Duffy late of Alinea, who has had some raves and some pans.  I don’t feel like taking picture by picture accounts of dinners, or writing plate by plate ones; in fact I often don’t feel like reading such things, for fear of losing the novelty which is certainly a big part of what you’re paying for in a “conceptual dining” restaurant (as I called them the other day).

But if I can find a treatise on Communism in a place that simply hadn’t gotten up to speed one Sunday morning, surely I can find some big picture thoughts on a meal this elaborate, right?  Let’s scan our experience for a theme:

1) The tasting course menu is so over. Well, the novelty is somewhat gone, but the basic Thomas Keller theory behind it— that you only really enjoy 1 or 2 bites of something, so why serve more— still holds true for this kind of food (I’d like to see him sell that idea in a Texas bbq joint, though).  I have to say I enjoyed the progression of things (which, incidentally, came fast and furious, good for them)…

2) The tasting menu is the dominant paradigm for chefs today. Maybe.  But after having 20-some things at Avenues, a certain sameness crept in.  Nearly every plate involved little dabs of this which looked like one thing but turned out to be another (eg, “wasabi” made out of some green, pureed), and least appealingly, something turned into a sandy powder.  Looking back it’s hard to remember specific things that stood out because there were just so many flavors in such tiny quantities.  In fact…

3. Molecular gastronomy may aim too low. I felt like too often, dishes had gone below the integrity of the ingredient, I wanted more things to be enhanced by the dibs and dabs around them, and fewer deconstructed.  The best things I had were anchored in some ingredient that delivered lushness and delight on its own— Faroe Island salmon belly, golden osetra caviar, a simple carrot (below)— and could just be flavored or filigreed a little by the powders and goos on the plate.

Looking back on this menu after two weeks— and even with a printed menu in my hand— it has all blurred together in a way that makes it hard for me to remember individual dishes; my memory, somewhat unfairly, is more of grit on a plate than of something that opened my eyes to new wonders.  I definitely came away with less of a sense of a few marvels, a few wonderfully new combinations, than I did from Duffy’s old boss Achatz’s meal at Trio or even from a rather mixed meal at Bowles’ Graham Elliott.  Now, I should point out that one of our dining companions found the meal more appealing than his recent meal at Alinea, precisely because it didn’t seem to be working him over so hard to make him go “Wow!”  In general we were reasonably satisfied with things, liked things pretty well as they happened, but it’s taken me two weeks to post about this meal because the more I think about it, the less I know what I think.

Service was extremely friendly and conscientious; bread service is excellent, but a champagne offering early on, though generous with tastes, proved really to me to be a chance for them to add a substantial amount to the bill while proving that if there’s a difference between pretty good and great champagne, I don’t know what it is.  (Somebody here tasted all kinds of notes that flew by me.)  We had a very pleasant evening with our fellow diners, and that may have contributed to my not examining this meal with the microattention I have devoted to others in the past, but as capable as Curtis Duffy clearly is— and much of this stuff is the kind of thing only someone with remarkable skills can pull off— I can’t say I feel like he’s yet capable of conceptualizing from beginning to end a 20-course meal on quite the auteurist level that other top directors, I mean chefs, like Achatz or Michael Carlson have achieved.

Tags: alinea, avenues, curtis duffy, graham elliott bowles