Pisco Sour at The Bristol.

Two meals in Bucktown/Logan Square:

 

The Bristol
I’ve eaten at The Bristol three times. I wasn’t wild about brunch but the two dinners were both excellent, a dish with duck egg and orange sauce nearly made my ten best last year. So I was a bit mystified by a recent dinner that just… well, it was a dinner for somebody else, not me. Everything I ordered was well crafted, interesting, subtly flavored, but I just sat there admiring it without liking it. It was like the food someone else would have chosen, who has a completely different idea of what’s good to eat. This is a well-constructed salad of apples, celery root and manchego cheese, but I chewed it like it was cud:

This was a tete de veau (veal headcheese, though the staff uniformly called it tete de vous, Head of You) with a nicely bitter salad and… get ready for this one… fried duck testicles. Of course. When the server described them as “fried and just adding a little creaminess,” I said “You should have let it go at fried duck testicles.”

Anyway, I ate ’em, and they were probably the best part in a fried organ meaty kind of way (though I found the variation in size alarming); the tete though, served quite cold, just didn’t have a lot of flavor, especially after the excellent similar one at Big Jones a week or two ago. I know health regs require stuff like this to be kept cold, but I wish there was some subtle way to bring it up to room temperature before serving; I can’t believe it would be served slab-in-the-morgue cold like this in France.

The last thing I had was ravioli stuffed with peas, topped with diced bits of sugar snaps and basil and lemon confit. This is the sort of hyperseasonal straight-from-the-farmer’s-market dish I’d be all over, so I was really surprised that this didn’t really do it for me either; it was almost too brightly green, too basil-y and lemon-y and spring-y. Too many notes, young Mozart, too many notes.  Yet Mark Mendez tweeted about this dish rapturously. [NOTE: correction in comments]

I’ve argued in the past against the idea that somebody blogging about food night after night, taking each meal as it comes, has to stick to the Phil Vettel rules of trying a place multiple times before laying down your verdict for all time; I’m capturing each moment in time as it happens, and always subject to revision. But this was the kind of moment in time that argues for multiple visits; I’m not suggesting that The Bristol has gone downhill at all, everything represented obvious skill and care, but we just didn’t click, The Bristol and I, that night, the way we have before.

Longman & Eagle

I popped into Longman & Eagle after an event that didn’t wind up feeding me (the nerve!). It was packed, I grabbed a half seat wedged between some guys at the bar and, well, the actual brass bar next to the drink ordering computer.  Just enough room to try two things: some grilled sardines with a nice char, and a dish that was so good, I had to stop during the first bite and just sit there, savoring it, as the music on the iPod went skee-ratch! and the whole room froze and a hole in the space time continuum burst open, revealing my past life as Zarxis, Avenger King of the Mindanites.

It was a tete de cochon, covered with the frankly getting a bit ubiquitous if not ridiculous egg (duck, I believe).  But it was roasted with a Chinese-y tart mustard glaze, and accompanied by some brightly vinegary onion; imagine the best stray bits of pork meat assemblage from Mado, trucked to Sun Wah for them to glaze and roast Chinese BBQ style.  Voluptuous and bright and hot and tart all at once, the only thing against this was that it’s too much of a rich thing for one person to eat all of, but if you’re going there with anyone at all, assuming you can find more than half a place to sit, it’s a thing you have to have.

*  *  *

Next week I’ll be guest-blogging at Grub Street, come on by!

As you’ve probably noticed by now (say, around the time that a post on burgers turned into a long piece on the Cold War and the Space Race), food can lead to some pretty highfalutin’ flights of literary fancy around here.  But not every meal inspires my muse.  This post will be a short roundup of some recent meals which might have some interest as possible places to try, but didn’t inspire me beyond that to write much about them. (It includes the 48th and 49th entries in my series of 50 places no one has written about on LTHForum. I promise I’ll find something more interesting for #50.)

Meal: Donde Zuly y Marta (#48)
Reason It Failed to Inspire: Puerto Rican Food
The great undiscovered continent in Chicago dining is Puerto Rican food. There’s lots of it to discover, but except maybe for rotisserie chicken, it’s just not the kind of thing that lends itself to rapturous posts and precise taxonomies of whose is best. It’s comfy, it’s easy to take, it satisfies, but the really memorable Puerto Rican dishes I’ve had make a very short list, the difference between the best and the worst is sort of from A to C, and the most interesting places usually take in some other adjacent cuisines which are more exciting, like Cuban. I’m never sorry I ate it, I just don’t have anything to say about it. Anyway, I popped into this new place last week thinking it was Mexican. But instead of tacos, I wound up with a plate of chicken and rice. It was fine. The people were friendly; I imagine that’s Zuly cooking and her daughter Marta serving. If you feel like something homey and plain some day, go check them out.
Donde Zuly y Marta
3638 W. Fullerton Ave.
773-276-7889

Meal: Shawarma King (#49)
Reason It Failed To Inspire: Look, a Shawarma Cone Just Like At…
Two places with this name, possibly related, have popped up suddenly, one on Lincoln around 5500 north or so, one where Louie’s diner used to be just off Devon. It’s a middle eastern place exactly like every other middle eastern place. Baba ghanoush was nice and lemony, and I liked the thin pita with bits of char on it a lot. The shawarma sandwich was rolled up inside foil (like at Semiramis) and it was stuffed with a little too much lettuce, which deadened the flavor a little. The meat was perfectly all right, but failed to establish by what divine right it deserved the title of king. In short, if you were close to this, it would be a fine choice, but there’s nothing to set it apart from plenty of other places serving the exact same menu.

Meal: Joey’s Shrimp House
Reason It Failed to Inspire: It’s a Shrimp House and I’m From Kansas
There are some subjects I’ll dive into with passion and knowledge— barbecue, say. And then there are ones where I know I’m still a hick from the sticks. It isn’t a matter of knowledge so much as of just not having an intuitive feel for something because you didn’t grow up with it. Cocktails are one; what can I say, I grew up in the place and era when all anybody under 50 drank was beer, and the only cocktail anybody had even heard of was the one in “The Pina Colada Song.” You young’uns whose formative drinking was in the cocktail renaissance will never understand how deprived of our cocktail heritage we were in the 80s. We are the Lost Generation.

Anyway, seafood is another one. I’m pretty good on big fish in fancy restaurants, on sushi, but the place I still just have trouble is fish as a fast food, as blue collar joint food, as comfort food. There was no such thing as a shrimp house in Kansas when I was growing up, there wasn’t even the idea that there could be. (Heck, I used to see crawdads in the creek in front of my house, and that was well within city limits. But nobody had the idea of frying them.) Fish was synonymous with Mrs. Paul, even though I used to go fishing with my grandfather for perch and crappie and the like.

So I go and try a shrimp house every once in a while. And I just can’t get to the point where I think it’s a real meal, or can tell a good one from a bad one. This new one has been praised by Nagrant and others, the decor is fun, at least it’s clean (some shrimp places are kind of scary). But the shrimp were cooked pretty hard, the fries were limp, and the breading was just, well, breading. And really, it’s just some fried shrimp, and shrimp all taste the same (which is, like not much), unless you get some really fantastic ones. At least that’s how it seems to me, but what would I know— I’m from Kansas.
Joey’s Shrimp House
1432 N. Western
773-772-1400

Donatella Majore had La Cucina di Donatella in Rogers Park for much of the early 2000s, and most of the reviews of her new place suggest that she has followers wowed by her Italian charm who are happy to have her back in new digs in Evanston. The Rogers Parker who invited me to try the place had a more jaundiced take: “It’s BYOB and cheap for what you get, which makes up for the fact that sometimes you can hear her reaming the staff in back. I don’t think anyone works here too long.”

That gibes with my memory of some of the posts on LTHForum about her past place. And within the first three minutes of our arrival, she’s ordered him to rearrange how his bicycle is parked, we’ve had a battle of wills over whether we’re going to be squeezed into a tiny two-top in a largely empty restaurant (we win, but we’re denied the best choice of the available four-tops), and practically the instant we sit down, she’s on us to order already, dammit. (Oh, and she rearranged my paper menu to make sure it didn’t get wet from my water glass. Twice. Once while it was in my hand.)

We engage in passive resistance, ordering an appetizer while we consider our entrees despite her clear preference that we order everything now. The place does fill up on a Thursday night, though it’s never completely full (and the table we were denied is empty most of the evening), and as it does, the service goes from harriedly pushy to long delays between courses, negating whatever benefit might have come from pressing us to order quickly. But take a bemused approach to the service and you’ll understand the charms of this place, an open-air Mediterranean cafe on a strip full of packed, utterly boring suburban restaurants (Prairie Moon, Tommy Nevin’s Pub, some sushi place that seems to have been assembled from a Hipster Sushi Restaurant In a Box kit). Modest pricing, BYO, fresh air and a general feeling of realness make for a pleasantly unpretentious night in the burbs… for what my friend can’t help noticing is a decidely older, upscale North Shore crowd.

“Evanston is 20% black and 10% Latino, and I’ve seen one black person here all night,” he observes.

“They must all be at Tommy Nevin’s drinking Guinness,” I say.

So how was the food? It was fine, at this price. A grilled seafood salad at, I think, $11 delivered a heaping plate of a bunch of different things (baby octopus, calamari, scallops, shrimp), all cooked correctly with a hint of char, simple and exactly what you want. My friend had mahi mahi (salt crusted, they said, but filleted in the kitchen), which was also simple and exactly what it should be, except maybe for more exciting sides than a lump of spinach and a lump of green beans. I had linguine with lobster, with lots of properly cooked lobster but slightly boring pasta and rather oily sauce. My orange ricotta cake was minimalist and nicely light; his “vulcan” (a version of the chocolate gooey center cake) was rich and decadent. It’s kind of 1992 Italian food, but that’s fine in a neighborhood place. This is not a crowd desperately seeking the next new thing.

The only real downside, once you take the “charm” in stride, is the plastic cafe chairs, which would be fine for coffee and a croissant, but which I was ready to be out of long before our check for dinner came. If Donatella had said up front “Trust me, you’re going to wish you’d ordered quickly once you’ve sat in these chairs a while,” we might have been more willing to follow her orders.

Donatella’s Mediterranean Bistro
1512 Sherman Ave.
Evanston
(847) 328-7720

I liked the idea of Big Jones a little more than the reality of it, the first time I went.  That was almost two years ago and the restaurant was fairly new; it was a good enough meal for the price that I offered some qualified hope for the future:

The menu is still somewhat short and limited to pretty familiar things— gumbo, pulled pork, steak (!)— but maybe, over time, it will dig deeper into Southern traditions and become a Chicago equivalent of some of the innovative new Southern restaurants.

Actually, I feel like I do that too much— write that a place might turn into some other place, eventually. You should review the restaurant in front of you and not what it might become; generally speaking, restaurants get worse, not better. But there is some chance, at least, that one will get into a groove and sharpen their vision and, hey, just get better at competence. It happens.

I paid some attention to the ups and downs of Big Jones on LTHForum, but what really interested me in going again was reading chef Paul Fehribach’s blog, because he was doing exactly what I’ve been doing off and on for the last few years. Like me, he grew up in a midwestern state with just tinges of southern food around the edges, but it was enough to create a love for it as a deeper, richer heritage to explore than one’s own regional cuisine (and Midwest, I love ya, but we both know there’s just a lot more going on in the South). Like me, he’s dug into old cookbooks and adapted local produce to Southern recipes. Okay, he’s probably done about 1000 times more of it than I have, but the point is, I liked where he was coming from. Another chef whose blog was tasty enough to make me want to see if the food was, too.

And in short: yes, it pretty much is. I’m not sure how much more Southern it is than it was before. Sometimes it was, like the really tasty sweet-sour chow-chow in the picture at the top, which went with this head cheese:

Apart from the pickled okra and whatnot around it, though, the head cheese could have come from Mado or Old Town Social or The Purple Pig; there was nothing specifically Southern about it. But at the same time, hey, it could have come from Mado or Old Town Social or The Purple Pig; it tasted of superior meat and delicately exact seasoning, and with the combination of dijon mustard and sweet-vinegary chow chow, it was pretty terrific and a credit to any chef’s charcuterie skills.

So that’s kind of what I think about Big Jones now: the Southern thing varies from dish to dish, but the level of execution is plainly much higher than two years ago, taking very high quality, frequently local ingredients and doing as right by them as anybody in the same price range. I don’t think crawfish gnocchi is terribly common on the bayou, and jerk-seasoned skirt steak with chimmichurri sounded a lot like the kind of dishes you find in upscale Mexican restaurants, where Mexican flavors are forced into the a-steak-and-a-side format of American dining— but both were very tasty, the steak cooked perfectly and the heat and chimmichurri giving it a touch of the exotic, the gnocchi light and fluffy and serving as a great textural base for the slightly fishy red pepper sauce:

And when we did get something that was pretty much classic Southern, it was very well done. As C.J.’s Eatery has evidently closed, I will be in mourning and wearing black this weekend for their shrimp and grits, but it’s at least some consolation to know that Big Jones has a very good upscale version, creamy grits set off by a salty Tasso ham gravy, the grits actually made in-house. I don’t mean cooked in-house, I mean:

traditional grits are produced by soaking dried corn kernels in a solution of baking soda, lime, or wood ash (“lye water”) for a day or two. The kernel’s shell pops off, and the kernel swells to twice its size. Kernels are rinsed more than once, then dried, and finally ground into grits.

Yow, that’s some dedication, compared to simply calling Anson Mills to place an order.  I was less excited by tea-brined pork, which was pleasantly cooked pork, but didn’t get anything from the tea that I particularly tasted; and I wasn’t wild about dessert. We had a couple of some kind of doughnut made with rice flour, which was pretty good, but it came accompanied by frozen cherries, which I think was supposed to make them refreshing but made them sort of like chewing erasers. And a cherry pie with benne (sesame seed) ice cream had good flavor, but not much delicacy.  (It was also a freebie from the chef, I should point out.)  This is a region that likes its sweets, I know there’s more interesting and better things out there. Still, when we tallied up the meal, the several standouts easily outweighed the few others.

At the end of the meal Fehribach came out to talk to us and confirmed much of what I came to feel over the course of it— that he has worked steadily to improve the restaurant since its opening, buying better ingredients, working on more authentic recipes, getting better at his job. One thing he said— it could have been flattery, but I’m gonna take it and run with it— is that he was inspired to try to use only sustainable seafood after attending the Supreme Lobster event at the Shedd and seeing my video about sustainable seafood.

Sure enough, those were Laughing Bird shrimp in the grits, talked about in the video.  Frankly, there’s something a little bland about them, but this is what you want to use them for, something that has plenty of other flavor that would overwhelm delicate shrimp flavor anyway. If you’re paying that much attention to the shrimp, there’s not enough cream or cheese in your grits. That was not a problem Big Jones’ grits had.

Two ideologies, one American and individualist, the other rooted in a pitiless foreign dogma, challenging one another not via arms, but through a peaceful competition, to achieve a dream that mankind had known since its earliest days…

…I refer, of course, to online debates as to whether plain American road food made by democratic ordinary joe cooks can be considered fine cuisine, or if that honor is to be reserved for the products of severe, hierarchical French kitchens.  Not long ago Steve Plotnicki, that up-to-the-minute bellwether of the state of hoity-toitiness in America, fired a Sputnik of absolutism across the night sky of LTHForum by stating:

Fact. Hamburgers and steaks aren’t art. The closest you can get to a hamburger being art is the DB Burger as it is a composed dish. Toppings on a hamburger just don’t rise to the level of being an actual culinary composition.

In short, a hamburger can’t be art unless it’s so Frenchified that it’s no longer recognizable as itself.  On the contrary, I believe that a well-made hamburger and fries is as perfectly constructed and balanced a peasant meal as any product of rustic French tradition— combining the rich pagan satisfactions of beef over fire with a delicate combination of sweetness (ketchup), salty vinegariness (mustard, pickle), umami (ketchup again), onion bite and dairy lushness (cheese).  Add potatoes (more saltiness, more friedness, more ketchup) and you have the meal which rightly defines America.

Which is not to say that its virtues aren’t often observed in the breach.  Last year we drove the Family Truckster to Wyoming, a state where lunch could be summed up with the single phrase “Where are we going to eat a hamburger today?”  Without exception, the hamburgers were as indistinguishably functional as the gas we bought at the gas stations, sheer fuel made with frozen patties and served with a side of pale blond foodservice potato-stubs.

The first three days we were in Kansas, we also ate hamburgers— but this time it was by choice, and what a difference it was to be in a state where frying a hamburger is a noble calling.  Kansas and Wyoming are both cattle country, but for whatever reason, it’s the beef states of the midwest which take the hamburger most seriously.  60 years of fast food has taken its toll; you wouldn’t say that every small town still has a drive-in where the meat is ground fresh and patted by hand.  But a lot of them do.

When I was growing up in Wichita, my two favorites, arrived at by a long process of sampling, were Bill’s Big 6 and Livingston’s Diner.  Bill was a survivor of the Bataan Death March, which earned him indulgence for whatever racist or crackpot stuff came out of his mouth in later years, not to mention the unbelievable jet black toupee perched atop his head; it was his place and if you didn’t like it, you were free to go somewhere else.  Bill and Mary Lamb retired some time back and, in all likelihood, Bill has joined his band of brothers in Valhalla; Livingston’s is still around, but I didn’t make it there and, if I did, it would probably be for a chicken fried steak anyway (for me, the standard by which every one in the 30 years since has fallen short).  Instead, my first visit was to a mini-chain which first appeared while I was in high school, Bionic Burger, and quickly formed the third of the great burger triumvirate of my youth.

Bionic Burger actually had its origins in Oklahoma, the rude and untutored wilderness to civilized Kansas’ south, and its Okie origins showed in those days in the sketchily ramshackle restaurant on the dirt-road south side of town where the fat, overalled cook would sit rolling balls of meat and setting them on squares of paper.  When a burger was ordered, he would slap the paper onto the grill with his hand, and peel it back to reveal a jagged-edge patty on the grill.

Bionic Burger has cleaned things up a bit since then; the one I went to, besides being located in an old Long John Silver’s on the tonier northeast side, now puts the burger-making process out of sight (and to judge by the results, uses some kind of patty-forming device).  Still, this is an exemplary burger by every standard, fresh-ground meat with a bright taste of salt and pepper. the right kind of white bun (springy top but not so much bread that it interferes with the meat; few bakeries seem to get this right in Chicago), and thick fresh-cut fries which came out with a little too much vegetable oil sticking to them, and in much too big a quantity (word of advice: almost anywhere in Wichita, a regular order for one is enough fries for two), but still better than a Five Guys’ franchise’s best day.  Though Kansas and Oklahoma may be distinct political ecosystems (Kansas is libertarian Great Plains, Oklahoma Bible-belt Southern), on burgers they are of one mind.

The next day we went to Hutchinson, about 45 minutes to Wichita’s north.  For being the closest town of any consequence, it’s surprising how rarely I ever went to Hutch in my childhood, but it didn’t take long to see why: it’s a pretty depressed place, dusty and out-of-date looking like a lot of Rust Belt towns in Indiana or Michigan.  But then you’re driving in a neighborhood of modest houses and beatup cars, and suddenly come upon this:

Believe it or not, obscure and rather down-at-heel Hutchinson is home to the second or third best collection of space stuff in the world, ranking with the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  How, you ask?  Well, back in the 60s the director of the local planetarium started collecting stuff that NASA had discarded, and consulting for space movies and TV programs (often in exchange for the props after they were done with them), and later, as the Soviet Union crumbled, he began wheeler-dealing with the Soviet space program, too.  Sadly, he eventually went to jail for mixing his official and personal space junk dealings, but the result is a museum you’ve never heard of that has both a genuine German V-1 and V-2, the exact replica of Chuck Yeager’s Glamorous Glennis from The Right Stuff, a full size lunar lander they helped build for NBC’s space coverage, spacesuit and camera replicas from Apollo 13, a Soviet Vostok space capsule (used), Gus Grissom’s Mercury capsule that sank when the hatch blew and was recovered 30 years later, and much more, a surprisingly comprehensive tribute to the greatest battlefield of the Cold War.  Really, it’s astonishing how good a museum this is for being in the middle of nowhere (quite literally, given that we’re talking central Kansas), I can’t recommend a detour here highly enough for anyone crossing the US on I-70, say.

Along the way, Hutch decided to make an attraction out of its only other point of note, the massive salt mines located 650 feet below the surface which, besides providing road salt to Chicago for decades, are also used for safe underground storage by Hollywood of treasures like the negatives of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.  The only thing more improbable than finding a Vostok space capsule in Hutchinson, then, is to find the Batman suit with nipples from the George Clooney Batman movie 650 feet below it:

The kids, frankly, loved the subterranean creepiness of the salt mine even more than the space stuff. Anyway, back to burgers.  In between Bruce Wayne and Yuri Gagarin, we came into town along an industrial strip, and were immediately smitten by a place called Oliver’s Burger and Bait:

This was no cutesy cracker-humor name, either; the actual bait shop is located in a shed out back, and at one point during service the waitress had to go open it for a customer.

I wouldn’t say Oliver’s was a great burger (I actually had a chili burger, for variety; the chili was canned), but it was a perfectly decent one, and more than that, it was a demonstration of what is so appealing about the midwest.  From the moment we walked in, city slickers all, and found the staff and the regulars joking good-naturedly, we were made at home, inquired after (“Didn’t think I’d seen y’all in here before”) and quickly included in the friendly joshing by which they pass the day.  In the end, we walked out not only cheerfully fed, but in possession of the gift of a T-shirt for my 8-year-old (“Burger and Bait: If we’re not cookin’ we’re hookin’”), last one in stock, on the house.  Thanks, guys, for making us feel at home.

The last burger I tried while in the greater Wichita-Hutch area was one that apparently has been around for decades, but which I had never heard of.  As the name suggests, Bomber Burger is located way down south in the heart of Wichita’s military-industrial complex, near the Boeing military plant that’s the city’s largest employer, and McConnell Air Force Base, no doubt serving burgers and brewskis to the crews who literally built and flew the bombers that were the other side of the aeronautical struggle with the Russkies.  Well, someone growing up on the white collar east side of town had little enough reason to ever go to that part of town, though I might have recognized one or two of the old roadhouses (the kind with dancers) down on K-15.  (For more information see my friend Scott Phillips’ crime novel set in the 70s Wichita demimonde, The Ice Harvest.) If the Cold War comes dressed in noble aspirations at the Cosmosphere, here’s the Kansas blue collar democratic ethos in its most raucously independent-minded mode:

Spangles, incidentally, is a local burger chain of no particular distinction.  Not sure why Bomber Burger should have chosen them as an enemy to replace the Soviets, but it’s so typical of the redneck-libertarian Kansas spirit to do something like that, and if you were going to be offended by Bill’s Big 6, you really don’t want to go to Bomber Burger and start reading the walls, where ex-wives, non-Phillies fans (maybe the owner’s from there originally?) and President Obama come in for equally sardonic treatment. Me, I had a great old time, not least because I dragged my sons and their girl cousin there and sat them at the bar (“Now children, this is what we call a ‘shitkicker’ bar”).  Much of the conversation, rougher (note the “no guns” symbol above my son’s head there) but still in its own way as welcoming as at Oliver’s, had to do with how the fellow seated next to me had acquired the nickname “Dirty Amish Hippie.”  (Somebody called him that in a fight in a bar, and he laughed for ten minutes straight, ending the fight.)

Ah, to be back among my people.

Anyway, the Bomber Burger is a real bomber, a fat 1/2 pound or so compared to the thin patties typically served in the area, but it was made with the same automatic, why-would-you-do-it-any-other-way freshness and handmadeness of the other burgers we ate, and the burger and fries were every bit as good as the atmosphere.  After three days of burgers, there wasn’t time or stomach to try Walt’s or Takhoma Burger or Ty’s or Livingston’s or West Street, here’s a guy with a whole list of burger joints which I mostly haven’t tried yet, but at least I was certain that the iconic American meal continued to be in very good hands in my hometown— and, whether or not it was art, to certainly represent a high level of craft.

Thanks for the burgers, and the welcome.  Dos vedanya until next time, y’all.

Bionic Burger
6121 East 21st Street
Wichita, KS 67208
other locations

Oliver’s Carry Out: Burgers and Bait
228 E 4th Ave
Hutchinson, KS 67501

Bomber Burger
4860 South Clifton Avenue
Wichita, KS 67216-3066

Thanks to Serious Eats for mentioning the new podcast. Watch it above if you’re at the main page, or here!  UPDATE: Thanks to Chicagoist, too!  AND: Grub Street! AND: Gapers Block, who did it weekend before last but I missed it, being on the road.

*  *  *

Not too long ago I stirred the pot at LTHForum by making an impassioned plea to people who were talking about Burger King pork tenderloins, the impending openings of Culver’ses and Chick-Fil-A’s and Sonics, etc. to stop posting about fast food and go try a neighborhood joint that nobody had written about. I won’t rehash it, or recommend you waste 20 minutes there, but Wendy Aeschlimann summed up the argument just fine:

People can post about anything they want. That said, I find it exceedingly odd that the food that is “capturing the imagination” of this board lately is mass-produced, of inferior quality, involves CAFO meat, “prepared” by a teenager trained by corporate, and available on every toll road. I don’t get it. One of the reasons we all live in a big city is precisely so we don’t have to regularly eat that stuff — much less discuss it.

Along the way I noted that far from the woods being picked clean, there were new places to try all over the area— for instance, I had just spotted two unposted-about Italian beef places on Mannheim Road near Bellwood and Melrose Park the other day.

A couple of weeks later I was coming back from a business meeting in a western suburb and rather than face the under-construction Ike, I decided to try one of these places. I actually meant to try Mickey’s in Bellwood, which has the more 50s-hot dog stand look (and is apparently mainly a hot dog rather than a beef joint). But I must have missed it and spotted Jack & Lou’s first, in a nondescript building next to an adult book store (rather typical of that commercial stretch, actually). So I popped in. To the former.

Jack & Lou’s feels like the kind of restaurant you find attached to a bowling alley. It’s not— it seems to be attached to more of a cocktail lounge— but it has that feel, I guess because it’s been shoehorned into a funny, nondescript, deeply beige space off of a larger, emptier room, whose vast nothingness makes the restaurant seem rather forlorn. Making the restaurant seem even more quixotic as a venture, though, was the notice posted prominently by the front— Restaurant Closed Friday and Saturday Night. The mind reeled at what mysterious economic logic could make sense out of this policy— did the cavernously vacant lounge fill up so much on those nights that they could barely keep up the flow of gin and tonics, and didn’t have time to make hot dogs or subs then? (The menu is quite elaborate, taking in everything from pizza to weeknight specials like Baked Lasagna.) Was all their business concentrated at lunchtime because of some nearby factory? (Hard to believe that, based on the traffic while I was there.) Was there some other activity that took over the place on those nights? That wouldn’t be out of character for this part of Chicago, I suppose, but it was hard to believe of the friendly woman (probably not Jack, possibly Lou) manning the counter and calling me “hon.”  So no, probably not something dubious, just some decent folks who got a deal on a location with some curious preconditions, I guess.

What wasn’t so mysterious was the Italian beef combo I ordered, which was quite good. Actually, I should say that the Italian beef was good, and the sausage was very good. The beef was good quality, the broth had a nice flavor to it, it was a creditable if not life-changing beef. But the sausage had some real character, a little organ meat-y tang to it, clearly the product of a good local butcher shop or meat company with genuine Italian-American roots, and it lifted this sandwich above the crowd. If you’re ever in… well, you’ll never be on Mannheim Road looking for lunch, and even if you were Jack & Lou’s is one of those places that seems like it won’t be there the next time you go, or will be a completely different business, or something. Here it is, noted on the internet for one brief moment, to prove that it actually happened, even if I’m not exactly sure why.

Jack & Lou’s
2001 N. Mannheim Rd.
Melrose Park, IL 60614
847-451-0074

P.S. Inspired by this post, Da Beef posted about a visit to Mickey’s Drive-In on LTHforum; check it out.

The game was 13-3. My son Myles was upbeat about it, though. His team is used to getting pounded by bigger, more experienced teams. They take their victories where they can find them, and at one point they had it tied up. Which considering that the other team’s pitcher looks like he’s 25, isn’t bad for 11-year-olds. (Then they pretty much blew it in one series of bungles, but hey, at one point they had it tied up.)

“How many more innings?” I asked.

“We can go after my next time at bat,” Myles said. Baseball is one thing, but we don’t let it get in the way of a new restaurant.

My younger son and my wife were out of town together on his 2nd grade camping trip. That left Myles and me to fend for ourselves, and one of the things I decided we were going to do was try a nice restaurant and try to teach Myles better table manners, without his brother’s influence at table dragging him back to kid antics and behavior. Surprisingly, he was game for this, and didn’t find it an annoying adult imposition on his lifestyle.

I chose LM, which I’ve wanted to try for a while. Partly because of their $22 prix fixe menu, but as soon as we got there, I could see that it had things that wouldn’t fly with Myles. So he ordered what he wanted: which turned out to be roasted duck breast, and a salad with blue cheese and pears. I ordered a fresh pea soup with mint and creme fraiche and monkfish with littleneck clams in a greenish broth.

“So what do fancy people do when they’re waiting for their food?” he asked.

“They talk,” I said. So we talked about stuff. Like his baseball team. I don’t think we got onto the other popular subjects of the moment, his current hero, the Zulu warrior Shaka, or World War II, which I seem to be explaining different aspects of all the time. (We had a good discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and whether or not using the atomic bomb was unavoidable given Japan’s militarism, the other day. But I’m glad we didn’t get into that over French food.)

The salad came. He tried the blue cheese (St. Agur), didn’t like it. Still, he tried it, and he ate the rest of the salad fine. I loved the pea soup, I don’t know where spring peas are coming from yet but this was pure spring in a bowl. The entrees came and he was very happy with his duck, less interested in the roasted turnips alongside it. The monkfish was very simple, very light, nicely done. It didn’t wow me (like my sturgeon at Blackbird a few nights later) but this isn’t so much a wow place as a very French, do it exactly right like it should be done place. For one of those, it’s very good.

Myles tasted my monkfish, and one of the littleneck clams. “So that’s three new things I tried tonight,” he said, proudly. At his age you keep a lot of lists like that in your head.

I was proud of him, he behaved well, he was adventurous. So we ordered dessert, but I don’t think they’re made in-house. I could be wrong on that, but they seemed sturdy and very precise, like the stuff from a place like Rolf’s Patisserie, which always looks to me like it’s built first to survive the trucking around town. Not delicate like its only travel is from an oven to a rack. Still, they tasted good enough. He’s not picky, like me, when sweet stuff arrives at the end of a meal. Yet. [UPDATE: Michael Nagrant says they come from Vanille Patisserie.]

We were walking back to the car. He was proud of having gotten to do something his brother hasn’t. He was proud of being 11 and old enough to do stuff like this. “I like that you take me to interesting places like French restaurants,” he said.

“I like that you want to go,” I said.

Happy anniversary, my sweet…

…and thank you, good friends, for the champagne with which to toast it.

Since the first time I went to Blackbird, which was between my ceasing to post on Chowhound and the launching of LTHForum, and is therefore a meal tragically lost to history, the only time I had been there to eat (as opposed to, say, butcher hogs in the basement) was for the mulefoot pig dinner. Mike Sheerin, the chef Paul Kahan brought in from WD-50 in New York to take over primary chef duties as his empire expanded with The Publican, had only been on the job a few months, and of the five main courses at the mulefoot dinner, his was the one that I was least excited by, which I took to mean nothing more about his abilities than that it was built on enoki mushrooms, which don’t do anything for me.  But even with complaints about other parts of the Kahan empire possibly getting stretched thin talent-wise as Big Star opened, the word about Blackbird remained rock-solid, its perch at the top of see-and-be-seen downtown dining undisturbed.  So it was time to check out what Sheerin was up to.  When my 20th wedding anniversary began looming, knowing that it would fall as it always does during the National Restaurant Association show (when tables are at a premium), I decided early on to go to Blackbird, and planned to book a table the next day.

The next morning, Sheerin became Chicago’s only representative among the 2010 Food & Wine Best New Chefs.

Ivar the World’s Greatest Waiter recommended this bottle from a producer “in the family,” as he put it.

But I snagged a table, just in time, and we went with David Hammond and his wife last Saturday.  And as impressed as I’ve been in the past with Kahan & co. as an operation, I think the thing that maybe impresses the most about him now is that he’s hired someone who has reinvented his flagship restaurant right under his nose, and seems to be fine with it.  (And it’s not like it’s because he’s not around, either; Kahan was on the floor in stained chef’s whites for much of our meal, a perfect symbol of Blackbird’s chic-meets-meatpacking-district ethos.)

I summarized what I thought was Kahan’s approach to food in something I wrote a year and a half ago (based, admittedly, on more experience with Avec than with Blackbird, and on what he and others said about The Publican’s intended approach):

What Kahan wants to do is serve food that tastes like the best example of that food you’ve ever had, and his restaurants aren’t shy about using every trick in the professional chef’s handbook to make that happen. Dishes are heavily salted (though rarely obviously salty), and you often hear the chefs talking about adding acid to a dish, both techniques for delivering a trumpet blast of flavor in your mouth that seems more intense and dramatic than you could produce at home. Still, there’s a line they don’t cross, the point at which a flavorful meat ceases to be itself; dishes are never dressed up with extraneous flavors, weird combinations for combination’s sake.

That still seems like a decent summary of the sensibility at work at Avec and The Publican, say. Salty, porky, bright and snappy deliciousness that invites you to order another beer or glass of wine and makes you full and happy. But Blackbird under Sheerin seems to be taking a subtler, more delicate turn. Even when you ate something cured or brined or pickled, it was balanced with something else, so it wasn’t a trumpet blast on its own. A couple of times, it even approached the level of playfulness with food that you associate with places like Alinea or Graham Elliott, which would be in line with Sheerin’s training at WD-50— though only a couple of times (and it is worth noting, the most extreme example was the very first course of the tasting menu, as if to get that over with quickly and get back to Blackbirdian no-nonsense-ness as quickly as possible). Overall, though, what you mainly take away is a sense that although Blackbird didn’t need wholesale reinvention, it did need sharper differentiation from its siblings Avec and The Publican, and that’s where it’s gone under Sheerin— a little less mad pork love, a little more elegance and refinement.

Here’s what’s on the tasting menu right now. I’ve stopped routinely taking photos when fine-dining out, because so many people do it better than me, especially in low-light conditions. In this case, an early table and placement near the window provided the perfect circumstances for my abilities, so I’m happy to stop talking and revel in food porn to give you the best idea of where this seminal restaurant is now.

Cuttlefish “noodles” with strawberries and a bit of candied olive.  (The menu also says rhubarb, though I defy you to find it.)  This was the most playful, tricky thing, reminding me of Schwa’s jellyfish pad thai; but I just didn’t really like the fish-and-strawberries combo.  The candied olive was more interesting, though so tiny a piece in this tasting portion that I can’t say I entirely got to taste it.

Peanut gazpacho with cured hiramasa, rhubarb (this time, visible), pine, peanut brittle and green peppercorn.  This was a gorgeous cold soup, creamy and complex yet easy to like.

Swan Creek suckling pig with apricots stewed in Lillet, a little relish of snow peas and water chestnuts, and beer vinaigrette.  So far as I’ve seen, Kahan’s restaurants don’t seem to have much use for Asian flavors, but Sheerin seems to like sneaking Asian vegetables in and letting them just be themselves.  The pork was deeply satisfying, unctuous meat and crispy skin, and the winey apricots a perfect accompaniment, although this was one dish where you really felt like a tasting portion was cruel torment, it cried for a softball-sized hunk to tear into.

Foie gras torchon with black garlic dip, green strawberry, and shrimp salt (whatever that means), served with a glass of Sauternes.  Interesting, using the tar-strong black garlic to challenge the more familiar fatty pleasures of foie gras; not the most likable thing we ate, but points for thinking hard and not taking the easy route.

Wood-grilled sturgeon, garlic-braised snail, smoked fresh pickles and napa cabbage.  I think this was my favorite thing of the evening, and I’m someone who often finds fish entrees nice but no more; the firm sturgeon was grilled perfectly with just the right degree of smokiness, and the snail was very well done too, but what made this dish at least as much as the fish were the pickles, lightly briny and sweet (was rice vinegar involved in the brine? I suspect so), and the napa cabbage, with its crunch and slightly brusque flavor.  The contrast of all of these was so much more than the sum of their parts.

Another fine fish dish, a delicate golden trout with shaved asparagus, ground ivy (!), white sesame, and a little banana puree which was subtle and liqueur-y, plus an unbilled cameo by lavender, I guess.  Interestingly, if you ate the shaved asparagus on its own, you didn’t really get an asparagus flavor, it could have been zucchini or something.

Duck breast with porcini, favas, Worcestershire brown butter and cinnamon crisps; now we were into the savory meats part of the tasting menu, and I liked this a lot although the cinnamon thing seemed out of place, like French toast at the wrong meal.

While the accompaniments for this little chunk of wagyu beef could have stayed home, this was all about the deeply flavored, mineral-y beef.  Interestingly, the description mentioned marrow here, but we were mystified where it could be in the dish; we finally decided it must be holding the “caraway crumble” together.

This was also my first exposure to Blackbird’s new pastry chef, Patrick Fahy (aspiring pastry chefs, go read Fahy’s bio at the Blackbird site; the answer to How to Get a Job at Blackbird is, apparently, work everywhere, usually two or three at once).  I loved the first two, “fruit of the cocoa sorbet” (tasted more like citrus to me, but what do I know), with great little candied cocoa nibs (and having tasted uncandied nibs, trust me, they need candying), cilantro allegedly somewhere in there, and a banana sauce which, again, managed to avoid being too banana-y; this was a wonderful palate cleanser dressed up to go out.

Even more impressive, not to mention playful, was this construction.  The sponge at left is a spongecake, apparently cooked in the microwave so it explodes (“Three minutes ago this was batter,” said Ivar the World’s Greatest Waiter); the white square is a white honey parfait with wonderfully tart and gooey passion fruit in the center, and the spiral is caramelized white chocolate.  This was a mindblower, lots of textures and flavors that went beyond expectations, a total delight.

I’m not a great fan of coffee desserts, or coffee anything besides a hot cup first thing in the morning, so I just kind of admired this last one technically; Fahy’s experience at Lutz here in Chicago comes out in the classic-looking hazelnut dacquoise with espresso and chicory flavorings, but it was the apricot kernel sorbet, with its little crunchies of something (don’t know what the kernels actually were), that I liked best.

And finally, a little plate of, I think, apricot jellies (really wonderful) and dark chocolates with a liqueur center of some sort (not my thing, usually).  We also finished with teas from Roderick Markus; I skipped the $150 pu-erh and had a simple, but really quite impressive and three-dimensional, Japanese green-tea sencha.

(Now, one question: should you do the tasting menu?  Clearly it’s less something that Blackbird developed organically (as it is at a place like Alinea, where the entire evening is carefully structured as a series of novel experiences in small portions) than something they started offering in response to customer expectations that every restaurant have one.  And everything on it (except maybe the cuttlefish) can stand up to being a full portion.  So at the very least I don’t think doing so is essential to the experience, well, unless your vision of the experience involves writing and posting a lot of tasty photos, as mine inextricably does.  If you’d rather just tear into a big hunk of that pork or the sturgeon, I wouldn’t blame you.)

My camera went away on a school camping trip with my wife and younger son, so let me just paint a couple of pictures in your head:

• A middle-aged Latina in her restaurant’s kitchen, posing proudly in front of a whole roasted pork leg, its skin gleaming brown and stretched over a heaping arch of meat like the Thanksgiving turkey in a Norman Rockwell painting, the warm scents of pig and island spices in the air.

• A crowd of people jammed into a tiny corner grocery on a summer Saturday night… to listen to Paraguayan folk songs, belted out by a sweating singer and accompanied on guitar with the easy confidence of old friends who’ve played together for many, many years.

Actually, I only saw one of these on a Wednesday afternoon at lunch. But the other one will be coming up soon, at the same place.

But let me back up, because as the headline suggests, this post is actually about two places. I needed to meet with my friend Wyatt about the upcoming redesign of this website. He suggested Panera, because they have wi-fi. This seemed heretical to me— talking about Sky Full of Bacon at a chain restaurant!— so instead I checked an LTHForum thread about places with wifi that aren’t Panera, and found Macondo, a place in my neighborhood I’d been meaning to try (and which, surprisingly, had had no other mention on LTHForum, though plenty of other press).

Basically, when Las Tablas, a South American restaurant long resident on Lincoln and in a couple of other spots around town, built a newer restaurant down the street, they turned their old location into a coffeehouse serving empanadas, bunuelos and other light-ish breakfast and lunch items. Now, I’ve never been that excited about Las Tablas, it seems to me the most gringo-friendly, tamed down of the various South American places I know (not the downtown steak-on-a-sword places, which are pure gringo bait, but neighborhood places like El Llano, where you might actually see a South American dining). I wouldn’t say Macondo exactly breaks with that tradition; the empanadas are pretty much exactly what you’d expect, basic stuff like ground beef or cheese with chipotle spread, deep fried. The frying is done well, the inside tastes exactly like you think it will, and no more. But it’s a pleasant place, the service is very friendly, the wifi is free, they have some books and CDs and stuff for sale which suggests a certain earnest desire to spread their home culture to the gringos of Lakeview. A South American alternative to Starbucks or Caribou in my neighborhood. Cool.

* * *

But that tempered enthusiasm did remind me of something more intriguing I’d seen a while back, while I was out scouting Supermercado Taquerias. It was a Latin American grocery, on Laramie in the middle of nowhere in particular, which seemed to have at least a few menu items for sitdown service as well.

I’m not sure at first why I thought it might be South American; the menu pretty quickly revealed itself to be mainly Cuban and Puerto Rican. But I had had decent luck with that combination not too long before at La Bombonera, so I went inside and found the proprietor sitting at one of her tables with some papers and a shiny aluminum MacBook pro. Behind her was a kitchen, which took up nearly half of the room; the grocery part was limited to only a few shelves of Puerto Rican packaged goods. With few things to choose from (and little enthusiasm for Hamburguesa or Hot Dogs con Fritas), I ordered a Cuban sandwich.

While she was making it, I poked around a little. There was a warmer case with a few empanadas and some round fried things in it. I asked what they all were and she pointed to one which she called alcapurria, basically a kind of fritter made of starchy green plantains with ground beef on the inside. Now, the eating of flavorless starches (like yucca) is one of those things that sometimes deters me from eating non-Mexican Latin American food, and filling it with unseasoned ground beef seems only a modest improvement, but she seemed enthused about it, so I gave it a try.

It was surprisingly flavorful, the hint of banana mixing provocatively with the fried-ness and the meat. More than that, it was exotic, maybe even soulful, two things you could not say the textbook-perfect empanadas I’d had a couple of days earlier had been. A moment later my Cuban sandwich came out; now, no Cubano in Chicago is textbook-perfect, there’s always a compromise on what kind of bread you use and so on (nobody bakes the authentic lard-based roll, apparently), so in judging Chicago Cubanos, it’s not a matter of how closely they approach a Miami ideal but how well they succeed despite obvious heresies. And this, well, I kind of think this was the best Cubano I’ve ever had in Chicago, right up there anyway, maybe a long ways from the best example of a Cubano (try La Unica for that, probably), but that roasted pork was so good, moist and full of roasted and well-seasoned flavors, that even as there was too much of it, as there was too much cheese, as the supermarket French bread it was on was significantly off the model, it was just a great sandwich. (You could skip all my existential angst and just have the lechon sandwich, and enjoy the pork qua pork.)

So this modest little grocery, easy to drive by (I might not have ever noticed it if I hadn’t parked to try the taqueria across the street), had proven to be a real find— but there was still more to it than I realized. The owner, Palmira, was happy to chat (posed proudly behind her roast pork leg); she was Puerto-Rican, her husband Paraguayan, and they had owned a restaurant called El Arpa on Peterson for some years.  Like Ramon Delgado of La Bombonera, having gotten out, they wanted back in, but without the responsibilities of managing a large place and staff. So they started this grocery to cater to Puerto Rican and South American customers missing the authentic taste of this or that product they grew up with. Fairly quickly, however, the few prepared foods blossomed into a kitchen that largely overtook the grocery, and now she roasts a fresh pork leg nearly every day, presumably mostly for evening takeout (since I was the only customer at lunch).

But food isn’t the only cultural taste of home they’re keeping alive; a couple of Saturday nights a month, they move the tables out of the way and local musicians play, not so much in performance for an audience but in the kind of gathering, like in a pub in rural Ireland, where anyone in the community can join in and play or sing. There will be one of these this Saturday, the 22nd, of Argentinian music, from 7 to 12, and another on June 12 featuring Palmira’s husband and a Paraguayan friend who will be visiting.

So there’s a lot going on inside this tiny grocery with an unpronounceable name. I asked Palmira where that came from; she said the Tainos are the native Americans of Puerto Rican, and she has a granddaughter born around the same time she opened the store, who’s half Puerto Rican-Paraguayan— and half Irish. So Palmira calls her Tainayri, the little Indian, to encourage her to know all her different ethnic heritages. Not bad advice for any of us living in a place where a whole vibrant culture can be hidden behind the signs of the bodega on the corner.

Macondo
2965 N. Lincoln Ave.
(773) 698-6847
www.macondochicago.com

Tainayri’s Bodega
2525 N. Laramie
773-385-9985

Pizzeria Serio, a new Neapolitan-style pizza place on Belmont promising “serious brick-oven pizza,” has a promising look, brick walls, a dark wood bar (not licensed yet), fire glowing in the back and flatscreen glowing in the front. Promise starts being dashed, though, the moment you look at the short menu and its list of pizza choices. How can you claim with a straight face to be seriously devoted to authentic Neapolitan styles of pizza-making when your only toppings are the exact same ones that would have been offered at Fat Joe’s Pizza & Subs in Spearfish, South Dakota in 1967?

Enjoy your pizza with such typical fruits of the Italian countryside as presliced foodservice mushrooms, rubber-tire black olives and styrofoam-crunchy green pepper slices! Close your eyes and catch a hint of the Naples waterfront as you order a meat lover’s special consisting of pepperoni, Canadian bacon and sausage! That’s less old country than Old Country Buffet.

It’s not that every woodburning pizza place needs to break new ground in exotic ingredients. But Pizzeria Serio’s location is within a circle bounded by Spacca Napoli, Frasca and Sapore de Napoli, all of which make at least creditable brick oven pizza in a variety of styles. Frasca’s pretty much a sports bar dressed up as an Italian restaurant, and you can get a plain old pepperoni pizza there, but they also do white pizzas with rosemary and pistachios and so on; they are aware that such things exist and adroitly balance their menu between foodie and conventional tastes. Pizzeria Serio seems not to know that such things are possible on a pizza— let alone that they exist all around it, serving the same neighbors whose willingness to order such things has been amply demonstrated for a good five years now.

And because the frame of reference is so American, the pizzas come out in an unmistakably American style that wrecks the balance of the Neapolitan pie.  The crust really is pretty decent, clearly made with 00-style flour for that chewy-airy effect. I could wish that it had been cooked harder, or higher, or whatever it would take to produce some bits of char, which to me is the point of Neapolitan pizza, but then I’m a char-head and if that’s not what you’re aiming for, fine. But then every pie, even the margherita which is otherwise the one authentic-seeming item, is covered with easily twice as much acidic tomato sauce as a Neapolitan pie would have, a blast of harsh tomatoeyness that tips the balance of taste away from Naples and toward Little Caesar’s.  (Technically, it’s apparently supposed to be a “New York-Neapolitan hybrid,” which I can only take to mean, “we know we’re putting too much tomato sauce on for a Neapolitan pie.”)

At that, though, the pizzas were far better than the salad my wife ordered, which was the one thing that really lived up to the name of opera serio by being tragic. If you’re going to serve salad out of the same box of Earthbound Farms baby lettuce that all your customers buy at Whole Foods two blocks away, you ought to know what they know by now, which is that the dark purple lettuce with the ruffled edges wilts and turns black first, when the rest of the box looks fine. Pieces of this sodden black seaweed were all over the healthier greens in this salad, making it a nasty eating experience even if it hadn’t had all the other signs of indifferent salad making (too-large chunks of too-hot onion and a mound of eraser-rubber foodservice mushrooms tossed in a harsh vinaigrette). It’s the sort of wan contemporary salad that makes you appreciate the indestructability of the old Italian-American restaurant salad, crisp white iceberg and oil and vinegar adjusted by the patron, with a basket of crackers and breadsticks to nosh on if all else failed.

What’s unfortunate is that Pizzeria Serio has the equipment in place to do so much better, so why it should be aiming so squarely at a somewhat humdrum conventional American style topped with firmly mediocre Sysco truck ingredients is a mystery. Again, set aside a place aiming for true artisanship, like Spacca Napoli, and look at a place like Frasca, which is run by a restaurant group with various bars in their portfolio. One of their pizzas, the Capone, is like the platonic ideal of a Pizza Hut supreme, the ingredients are merely sausage and onion and tomato sauce and cheese, and yet the sausage is bright with fennel and the sauce is well-seasoned and for what it is, it sparkles. Nobody’s going to name Frasca one of the best Italian restaurants in town, but it understands the scene it competes on and makes a respectable, contemporary showing with flavorful, well-crafted food. Nothing at Pizzeria Serio reached even that mid-tier level of bright flavors or quality. If they’re going to make it in an area with this kind of competition, they need to get serious about what they put on that crust.

Pizzeria Serio
1708 W. Belmont
773-525-0600