I like the comfy, quiet neighborhood in which I live, Roscoe Village, except when I need to find food within a few dozen yards of my house, at which point my choice basically becomes, which of three bars do I want to 1) eat a hamburger at, 2) watch ESPN at (in the way I watch it, which is to say, I pretend to watch it so they never suspect I’m a Soviet infiltrator who could care less about sports) and 3) enjoy this month’s beer special of Bass or Shock Top or, if they’re really going cutting-edge, Goose Island 312. At that point I might as well be living in Moline in 1987, for all the blessings of culinary civilization at my disposal.

I understand that the good people of Logan Square have somewhat similar complaints, for a hip-and-happenin’ neighborhood they long seemed to be a magnet for places that looked like they should be interesting but weren’t, but at the moment they easily have me beat with two hot new gastropubs opening within a few months: Revolution Brewing and Longman & Eagle. I ignored both for a while, fearing crowds, hype, the long drive down Western from Belmont to Diversey, etc.  But then I was impressed by Longman & Eagle’s entry at Baconfest (dehydrated bacon on a waffle), and decided to check it out one night— liking it enough to return later in the week with a friend.

The English pub-y name (which sounds more like the heroes of a Japanese cartoon show to me, but never mind) goes with the usual cultural dissonance of the gastropub movement, which is to say the music was old-timey (I don’t mean Johnny Cash, I mean Charlie Poole), the beer was Belgian, and the food is eclectic comfy-chic-modern.  You could pick that apart sociologically, I suppose, but since it seemed a reasonable cross-section of my own psyche, I found it downright welcoming.

The menu is largely small plates-ish, so the first time I went I ordered a sausage I thought would be an appetizer portion.  Somehow I’d missed the the fact that it was actually listed under sandwiches, and so my plans to try multiple things went down in flames at the very beginning. The sausage (made in-house) was fine, the combination of sauerkraut and apple pleasant enough, but… I whimpered inwardly at the thought of all the fine things that might be mine, but wouldn’t now.  Finally I decided not to eat most of the bread (boring anyway) and then to ask the bartendress for a recommendation of a single dish, of modest size, which would redeem my evening.  She recommended the scallops served on braised oxtail— a classic combo and a delectable dish, perfectly tender scallops atop soothingly comfy and earthy shreds of beef.

That made me curious enough that when a multi-food-writer dinner planned for last Wednesday fell apart like a 70s band on Behind the Music, I grabbed David Hammond and we returned to L&E to work through more of the menu.  Basically we ordered everything that kind of sounded like the scallop dish— a lamb cotechino, a tete de cochon with quail egg, a duck egg with beef tongue hash, potato agnolotti in a bordelaise sauce.  And what we learned was… things that sound that much alike kind of taste that much alike, too.  It was largely our own fault, I’m sure, but there was a definite similarity of braised meat, savory glaze, egg, that made the dishes a little too much alike.  They all seemed fine, but by the time the last one arrived, it was a little hard to get excited.

For that reason, again hoping for a Hail Mary pass at the end of the meal, we tried to break out of the rut (our lamb cotechino, escargots and shaved foie gras rut) by ordering something out of left field— a wild boar sloppy joe, topped with fried sage.  It was the one thing from this meal that’s really stuck with me all week, although since the meat sort of tasted like bolognese sauce on a bun, you could argue that we still hadn’t managed to get very far from the braised meat in savory sauce paradigm.

Okay, so Longman & Eagle has a lot of representation of that one style of cooking on the menu.  As opposed to what, the place at the end of my block with eight different burgers?  That’s still a little more variety and a lot more adventurousness than I can walk to in five minutes in any direction, and the good news is, they seem to be kicking out specials and new ideas at a fairly prodigious rate, so it shouldn’t take too much effort to avoid monotonous ordering, even if I basically botched it twice.  The music is good, the atmosphere, though crowded, seems easygoing, the bartendress the first time and the waitress the second time were both personable and interactive (though I did wait ten minutes at the bar for my beer while a male bartender made the same overambitious artisanal cocktail twice for somebody, rather laboriously each time; not every place needs to be The Violet Hour).  I liked this place and the next time I’m thinking I’ll just grab a burger and a beer down the street, remind me to take five minutes and drive here instead.

*  *  *

Encouraged by my success in finding a likable, livable bar-restaurant in Longman & Eagle, I decided to give Revolution Brewing a try.  It’s a renovated vintage space, a big dark wood bar with an onsite brewery visible behind glass in the back, and it’s very quickly drawn a sports bar, baseball cap on backwards crowd, which has led to some carping that it’s no better than a suburban brewpub of the Rock Bottom type.  (We’ll leave aside the crushingly large ironies in an agent of Anglo gentrification like this filling a Latino neighborhood with revolutionary iconography.  At least there isn’t a big mural of Che behind the bar, like a chic bar in the tourist section of Playa del Carmen used to have.)

I tried exactly one beer, a Wit, so I can’t fairly judge the brewmaking skills, but like Rock Bottom’s beers, it seemed decently made but a little thin.  (I later saw someone get a tasting flight of the beers, which would have been ideal for blogging purposes, but if that’s on the menu, I never saw it.)  As far as food, I planned to try something with a little ambition to it, but looking at the menu, I just couldn’t get excited about any of the entrees— a Flemish stew was more braised food, salad nicoise just didn’t seem to fit the joint— and I wound up ordering, yes, a hamburger, off the list of Kuma’s-esque oddball burger creations.  In my case, it was the Farm Burger, which I ordered out of curiosity, possibly morbid, as to whether beets could really work as a hamburger topping.

The answer is a provisional yes, the horseradish sauce was a smart choice for counteracting the beets’ sweetness with some bite.  Still, before this hamburger was gone, I was already tired of it.  One, because the fried egg on top cooled to an unpleasant rubberiness before I was done.  Two, because the frozen hamburger patty was as bland as any beef I’ve put in my mouth.  I don’t expect every bar, even a gastropub, to serve something artisanal-farm-name-dropped-special, but this was so foodservice-truck-ordinary that it simply wasn’t up to the job of supporting exotic condiments and toppings.  A place like The Bad Apple can put subtle toppings like bernaise on burgers because the meat has such flavor of its own.  Not here.

It’s hard to say what makes one bar work as a welcoming, lively place with a personality of its own, and another not.  At first glance Revolution, with its onsite brewing capability, would seem to have the edge over Longman & Eagle, with its well-chosen list of craft beers du jour.  But partly because of the ambitious, restless food menu, partly because the room was more intimate, partly because they just seemed more excited about it all, I quickly found Longman & Eagle to be the one that was welcoming and intriguing, while Revolution already seemed to be settled into a check-off-the-list-of-requisite-c. 2010-menu-items, serve-the-tourists groove that sucked the life out of the room.  I’ll probably go back sometime to try more of the beers, and see if there’s a fine brewmaster being ill-served by the restaurant side here, but when I want a night out of the house in a comfy, interesting pub, Longman & Eagle is more likely to draw me.

P.S. Hammond has an interesting observation on the egginess of our choices here.

Longman & Eagle
2657 N. Kedzie
(773) 276-7110

Revolution Brewing
2323 North Milwaukee Avenue
(773) 227-2739

Devon is one of my favorite streets in Chicago not just because Indian/Pakistani food is one of my favorite cuisines, but because it’s one of the most dynamic places in Chicago; in the last few years especially it’s become obvious that a lot of money has been spent dressing it up, and the fashionable dress stores and jewelry shops are an obvious sign that this is no longer a fresh-off-the-boat immigrant community but one with considerable roots and prosperity (the increasing dominance of the medical profession by South Asians undoubtedly one source of capital). In the process, the South Asian community is pressing west, moving into what was formerly, and pretty firmly, the Russian-Jewish-Arab area beginning around California.

Which is how there is now a place to get Indo-Pak kabobs that’s actually west of the first place to get middle eastern kabobs; Uncle’s Kabob is an Assyrian restaurant at the start of the 2800 block, next to Eastern Breadstone bakery, which I think is also Assyrian Christian; and now, at the end of that block, there’s Anmol Barbeque Restaurant, whose menu proclaims that it uses Zabiha Halal meat in accordance with Shariah— and organic Amish chickens.

Amish chicken.

The interior is Amish plain, as well, though since it’s only been open a month, perhaps it will gain decoration over time. But the question was, not how did the place look, but how was the grillman’s hand with things over flame? I ordered a combination plate with five different meats to get a good survey of that question.

The bright red chicken, their version of chicken boti (though completely different from the much-loved dish of that name at Khan BBQ), was boneless chicken marinated and grilled pretty much perfectly to my taste— some actual char on the outside, yet plenty juicy on the inside. This was easily the best thing on the plate, and a real credit to someone back in the kitchen making sure the chicken came off at just the right moment. Behind it was chicken tikka, cooked in a tandoori, perfectly decent, but not as interestingly or brightly spiced as tikka I’ve had elsewhere.

In front of that were some chunks of seekh boti, chewy beef coated in a paste which was by far the hottest thing on the plate and, indeed, one of the hottest things I can remember eating in some time.  I ate them happily enough, to judge by my leftovers (which don’t include them at all), but there was a little too much of the sludgey paste atop somewhat tough beef, I’d have been happier with the same meat in a curry, I think.

Finally there was a ground beef and a ground chicken kabob (seekh kabob and reshmi kabob).  I’m usually underwhelmed by seekh kabob and try not to order it, it’s usually bland hamburger on a stick.  Both of these ground meats were spiced in a much more lively manner than is usual; that was the good news.  The bad news was that they didn’t have the char that the boti, say, had, and so as soon as they stopped being hot, they became fairly uninteresting blobs of mealy meat with no variety in texture and taste.

So a mixed result, though for $14.95 you couldn’t argue with the heaping plate of meat, and though I find myself saying “maybe over time they’ll work that out” a lot, in this case I think there’s hope that the grill skill displayed with the boti might transfer to other dishes.  One reason I think that is because of a clearly committed and concerned owner; service in Indo-Pak restaurants usually achieves a sort of formal, solicitous indifference, if that makes any sense, but Anmol’s owner came by several times to ask how I liked things and to make sure I had plenty of the unlimited naan, and so did the kid who refilled my water, a position that in other South Asian restaurants is usually given to the guy with no English.  Most surprising of all, there was a little xeroxed survey in with my check, asking me to rate the food and service, which has to be a first on Devon.  (You get the feeling that honor would forbid asking such things in other restaurants, lest an answer come back that would have to be avenged.)  For that reason alone I would wish the owner success, improvement, and prosperity.

Anmol Barbeque Restaurant
2858 W. Devon
773-508-5050

Chicago has been such a booming, wealthy city for so many decades that entire eras of its past have been almost wiped out— the wedding cake-Victorian Loop obliterated by the imperial classicism of the 1920s; the cheesy modernism of the 1960s hanging on only in ungentrified suburbs.  But just when I’m regretting the obliteration of great chunks of our past, I remember that there’s a city not far away where they survive unselfconsciously.  Milwaukee has been prosperous enough all these years that it hasn’t fallen into disrepair, like Detroit, yet at the same time it hasn’t boomed with the force of an atomic bomb, the way Chicago sometimes seems to have.  A trip last Saturday with a small group of LTHers to visit an artisanal meat-curing facility was also a chance to travel back in time to several pasts much harder to find traces of in Chicago.

The first stop was Bolzano Artisan Meats, who I’ve posted about before here. Bolzano is Wisconsin’s first cured whole-meat producer (ie., things like prosciutto, rather than sausages), and owner Scott Buer offers “Charcuterie School” to a small group each weekend, in which he explains the basics of how he makes his products.  (You can check it out here.)  Since we were, so to speak, advanced students who’ve mostly made charcuterie ourselves at some point, we skipped the class and went straight to the factory tour.

I knew Bolzano was located in the former home of Great Lakes Distillery, which I imagined to be some 19th century brick factory in a rapidly gentrifying area of lofts and nightclubs.  Turns out it was actually a streamlined 1950s facility in purest Industrial Moderne originally built as a Sealtest dairy, including the former laboratory, armored around with sturdy industrial tile:

—all of which gave “Charcuterie School” even more of a high school feel than I’d expected at first.  The refrigerator cases and smoker are all located in a larger, gleaming white room.  The first walk-in is for meat that’s been cut up and salted (or will be shortly):

while the second is for things hanging and drying out:

There’s also a little shop open on weekends, where you can pick up their goods.

Scott told us how the business has evolved since he sent me his first products some months back.  He’s now working with whole hogs, which since he doesn’t make sausage, has necessitated some creativity in terms of his product offerings; he’s invented some of the cured products he’s offering, such as Suslende, which means sweet loin and is simply a cured loin with some maple syrup added to the cure.  It also requires managing refrigerator space carefully, when you have a products, prosciutto, which takes nine months; it would be easy to fill the fridge with hams and then have nothing to sell for most of a year, at which point you would go bankrupt before anyone got to try any of those hams.

He also told us about the regulatory hurdles he had to overcome.  Fortunately for him, since he’s mostly dealing with the state, who are at least vaguely supportive of agriculture-related businesses, he was able to find at least a certain level of cooperation in exploring this uncharted territory, and wasn’t caught in the Catch-22 of “nobody’s doing it, therefore there are no rules, therefore it can’t be done,” as Chicago food businesses have been lately.

One change that’s unfortunate, if understandable, is that he’s about to switch to only selling sliced product; he’s had too much trouble with people who buy chunks and then can’t cut them properly and come back, looking to get their product sliced.  But I like dicing the pancetta and guanciale from larger than the paper-thin slices, so I stocked up on those in chunk form during this trip, and recommend making your reservation for charcuterie school and picking up a little of everything at their store soon.

Our next stop was the new home of Great Lakes Distillery. They give tasting tours on the weekend, but since we arrived late and it’s all in one room anyway, we just listened to the tour and went straight to the tasting.  They’ve made everything from bourbon to pumpkin brandy, much of which has sold out quickly, so on this day we got to try a straight and flavored vodka, a very floral gin (not sure how this would mix— I guess there’s one way to find out!— but I liked it a lot), some fruit brandies (the pear, which has a really nice real-pear aftertaste, was by far the best), and finally, two absinthes:

One is a straight green absinthe, the other is called red from added hibiscus, though it’s actually clear.  This latter seemed odd to me, too floral, but I’m sure it has its uses.  The green absinthe seemed very good, and about half the price of others I’ve seen, so that’s what I came home with, though whether I’ll ever get to making it in the traditional way (as opposed to using in sazeracs, say) is questionable.  Anyway, another great and welcoming experience, I’d certainly recommend this as well.

Next up were a couple of abortive attempts to connect with Milwaukee’s old Italian heritage in the Brady street area.  We arrived at Glorioso’s, Milwaukee’s best-known Italian deli, just as they were closing, but did note that they’re about to move into a bigger building across the street, so will have to visit them before that happens.  Another more mysterious stop was Dentice Bros., an Italian sausage supplier which Peter Engler thinks may have gone out of business (the owners being quite elderly).  Yet when we found the shop, everything looked as if they had just closed up five minutes earlier— and really, it is often hard to tell between a 100-year-old business that’s still around or one that’s preserved in death like a museum display.  So who knows?

What was still in business after 100 years was Kegel’s, an old German bar and restaurant where it could easily be 1890.  There are others like this in Milwaukee, such as Mader’s and Karl Ratzsch’s, but they depend on the tourist trade to no small part; Kegel’s, on the other hand, feels like it’s still serving a thriving German neighborhood clientele, and the idea that it’s picturesque hasn’t really occurred to it.  We had a beer and two orders of pork shank rolls, another example (like Mader’s reuben rolls) of the odd Milwaukee tendency to take bits of Germanic meat and roll them up in eggroll wrappers and deep fry them.  I have to say, they went with the dark German beer very happily.

Kegel’s, however, was merely an appetizer before our main dining event, Maria’s, which comes close to the platonic ideal of the old school pizza joint— located in a building that looks like somebody’s 50s ranch house, decorated on the outside with world-class neon and plexi 60s signage, and on the inside with a mixture of paint-by-religious paintings and the usual sports geegaws, while a staff of mostly family do what they’ve been doing forever.

Zaffiro’s has a reputation on LTHForum as the Milwaukee old school pizza, and it’s a fine one, but Maria’s easily surpassed it as the one I’m jonesing to get back to right now; I loved the burnt-edged, crispy cracker crust, the simple tomato sauce topping, the sausage bright with fennel.  As far as I’m concerned, it’s about as good as an old school pizza joint experience gets (though I could tell the one Easterner in our group, still under the spell of Pepe’s in New Haven or whatever, was the less enchanted one among us).

We ended the night with another temple of neon, Leon’s, for custard.  Again, LTHForum has anointed Kopp’s among Milwaukee custard emporia, but Leon’s seemed just as good, and it certainly had the 70s-brutalist Kopp’s location in Brookfield beat.  By this hour it was quite chilly out, but that didn’t seem to have stopped anyone from standing in line for custard cones, and it was a fitting end to our travels through many pasts in Milwaukee.

When Hot Doug’s was closed for the better part of a year following a fire at its original location, I wondered why some other hot dog place didn’t make an effort to replicate its formula to some degree.  The city is full of dog joints, why didn’t one, just one, make the effort to start offering dogs with exotic ingredients at a significantly higher price point?

It finally happened, but not in the city— fRedhots in Glenview made its name with exotic dogs (most infamously, a reindeer sausage near Christmas) and interesting toppings.  I’m not totally wild about fRedhots but I absolutely give him credit for taking the Hot Doug’s paradigm and proving that it has room for distinct styles of topping a sausage; you wouldn’t mistake Fred’s dogs for Doug’s.  And the same now proves to be true for Franks ‘n’ Dawgs, the most ambitious artisanal-dog joint to open yet, featuring a bevy of housemade and quality-sourced sausages, lobster-roll style buns made by the Nicole’s Crackers people, and some genuinely innovative toppings.

I ran into LTHer Stevez there, so we split three dogs between us: the brat, topped with red cabbage, beer mustard and red pepper relish (top); the Tur-dawgen, a turkey sausage with duck confit and pickled carrots (above); and the Foss Hog, conceived in homage to chef Phillip Foss of Lockwood, a pork sausage topped with bacon and a fried egg (below).

I liked the sausages, and the butter-toasted buns, quite a bit, and the imagination and skill of owner Alexander Brunacci and sausagemaker Joe Doren are evident.  But as total dishes I felt like all three, certainly at least the brat and the Tur-dawgen, skewed a bit too much toward the gourmet and lost something of the traditional snap and street-food swagger of a sausage— I wanted a little more char from the grill, a little more bite from the mustard.  The toppings sometimes seemed a bit too genteel for a mouthful of sausage; that happens once in a while at Doug’s, especially when he overdoes the cheese on something, but on the whole, you still know you’re eating a juicy, salty-peppery sausage straight off the fire, which remains the best condiment a sausage can ask for.

So I’m not quite in love with Franks ‘n’ Dawgs yet, but it’s an estimable place, dedicated to its cuisine in all seriousness, and I’m eager to see how it develops its own style, one foot in world cuisine, one in the traditional satisfactions of a hot dog stand.

*  *  *

Meanwhile, another new dog place of note has opened on the north side— but compared to Franks’ radical dogs, it could hardly be more traditionalist.  It’s called Redhot Ranch, though it’s actually a spinoff of a venerable South Side dog joint, 35th Street Red Hots.  I discovered 35th Street Red Hots a few years ago while biking down the lakefront, and I have to say I’ve invalidated the benefits of my biking more than a few times in this humble shack, which serves the quintessential minimalist Chicago dog menu: hot dogs with your choice of mustard, relish, onion and peppers; fries; Italian ice in the summer.  I’d rank it with Gene’s and Jude’s as an exemplar of this type at its no-frills best, the mustard and onion subtly perfuming the fries they’re rolled up with in white paper (not entirely tongue in cheek, I’ve referred to the hot dog as merely a delivery vehicle for getting mustard and onion flavor into the fries).  Done right, it’s a meal whose balance of flavors is as subtle and perfect as anything at Alinea.

Redhot Ranch, located in a former Las Asadas (which has moved across the street) expands ever so slightly on this paradigm— just to offer fried shrimp and to allow ketchup for your fries (something strictly verboten at Gene’s and Jude’s, for instance).  Otherwise, it’s seriously bare bones, not even any chairs, and this may be a problem in the long run, because here’s what we heard while we were standing there eating:

“You don’t have cheese dogs?”
“Do you have pickles? No?”
“You don’t have tacos no more?”
“I’ll have it with mustard, relish and cheese– what? No cheese?”
“No hamburgers?”

In the time that my kids and I stood there eating our canonically perfect, good-as-35th Street Chicago minimalist dogs and fries, five customers came in asking those questions, and only two of the five stayed to order something. The beyond-spartan lineup on the board may be admirable but I’m not sure it’s going to be sustainable as a business model; it will be a strange and ironic day indeed if the north side of Chicago proves incapable of supporting such a perfect example of a classic Chicago dog stand, while embracing one whose dogs would have sounded like a parody of yuppie dining just a short time ago.

Franks ‘n’ Dawgs
1863 N. Clybourn
(773) 248-0479
http://www.franksndawgs.com

Redhot Ranch
2072 N. Western
773-878-9898

There’s an early Disney cartoon, apropos with Easter right behind us, called Funny Little Bunnies, in which cartoon bunnies sing and dance while painting Easter eggs and making chocolates. Like so many of those early Disney cartoons, it’s kitsch, but of an order that’s beyond mockery; if you aren’t charmed on some level, you were never four. (Before you click, know that the song will stay with you for days.)  A number of these early Disney cartoons— with titles like Cookie Carnival— are about food dancing and singing its joy at being born to go in your mouth, which one can imagine was an especially delightful fantasy in the early years of the Depression.  (It’s also hard not to see Funny Little Bunnies as an allegory for the industrialized production of cartoons themselves, but set that aside.)

Anyway, as I was heading to the bathroom after a meal at Old Town Social, I was behind one of those twentysomethings who dresses like he’s still a toddler— T-shirt, shorts, ball cap, buzzcut, flipflops.  He was sort of the proportions of a little kid, just blown up.  And that just sort of confirmed for me that Old Town Social is a wonder like in a Disney cartoon— sausage!  Beer!  Pretty girls!  All appearing from big old-fashioned cartoonishly-colored machinery (well, not the girls), you could imagine Goofy turning the big crank on this one and salume just plopping itself neatly on your plate:

And then it comes to your table on the arm of a hot punk waitress and it’s full of salty meaty deliciousness and gets washed down with a hip, if not aggressively unusual, list of microbrews.  Love is in the air, and on the plate.  If you aren’t charmed on some level by Old Town Social, you were never twenty-four.

At this point I can imagine the restaurant objecting that that cartoonishly-colored slicer is a Berkel, which is to say a very serious European slicer (the last one I saw that close was at Herb [La Quercia] Eckhouse’s house), and they take their cured meats seriously.  Well, I took the food here seriously too, though I don’t know about the rest of their crowd— the gals at the table next to us hardly seemed to touch their flatbread, and “flatbreads” are pretty much a bullshit item to order anyway, especially in a place like this.  But basically I felt about Old Town Social the way others have felt about The Purple Pig— impressed that would could just be another bar hawking mozzarella sticks is doing serious charcuterie and well-thought-out, well-executed dishes.

My colleague, Dr. Morowitz, and I were there to try the charcuterie first and foremost, so we ordered a preset collection of five and asked our waitress to select five more.  In general, I’d say that the charcuterie doesn’t push the complexity of funkiness as far as some I’ve had in town— for instance, the toscano had a harsh lactic bite, which I liked, but it didn’t necessarily have three other things going on at the same time, depths of dark gnarled old world flavor, as some really outstanding salume I’ve had in town (eg, Avec) does.  But the pleasures of quality meat (the menu says it’s all heritage pork, grassfed beef, etc.) cured like this are considerable, and I’d happily try anything they make.  Particular standouts were the toscano and the sopressata (which claims to be spicy, though it wasn’t all that much), the chorizo (once you got past the smoked paprika, this was a really nice, multilayered sausage) and what they called pastrami, which didn’t particularly have a salty-pastrami taste but was instead a kind of delicate, lightly cured smoked brisket.  I’d love a sandwich of that.  I found mortadella and a grassfed beef pepperone kind of bland; lardo, bizarrely, was whipped into a spread, which to me made it less appetizing, a biology-class texture I didn’t especially want to eat, and I wasn’t wild at first about the chicken liver, too much oil and too fluffy, though I will say that I finished it off, using it for a little organ meat-palate cleanser after many of the other bites.

The rest of the menu is a mixed assortment, aiming to please both noshers and diners; we skipped the entree side and stuck to appetizers, and to our surprise, both of the things we ordered were at least as impressive as any of the charcuterie.  Actually, my favorite thing of the night was a dish called “sausage and waffles,” a big hunk of smoked sausage on top of maybe the best waffle I’ve ever had— the menu calls it a cornmeal-bacon waffle, it was robustly-flavored and with a nice tooth to it.  If somebody were doing a blog about waffling, these would be guys to talk to.

I was also surprised by something called “duck wings”— surprised that the duck wings had that much meat, that the sweet glaze was as well-composed as it was, that the creamy cucumber-mint raita that came with them for dipping was such a well-chosen variation on the usual creamy wing dip.

I’d have been fine with Old Town Social serving up good charcuterie and then taking it easy on the rest of the menu, but that’s not what happened at all.  The happy little sausages have many happy friends, and we were glad to have visited their happy land.

There’s a bit from that WBEZ chat the other day that has stuck with me. David Hammond was talking about how the hive mind of LTHForum is out there trying gazillions of places all the time, and Julia Kramer of Time Out Chicago said:

Julia Kramer: David, I think LTH has its limitations; sometimes it’s remarkable, other times I think it breeds group-think.
David Hammond: Julia, you’re right. There are sacred cows, even among an originally renegade group of foodies.
Mike Gebert: “other times I think it breeds group-think” Very true. But true of almost any single source to some degree, when did you last see any publication having a full-on feud between staffers?
Michael Nagrant: Julia, totally valid point. There is often this whole thing where people get really close to the owners and put a lot of validity on the “mom and pop” thing and over-rate.

No writer, or institution, is free of certain settled notions which may go unexamined after a certain point. But groupthink is a different issue, because someone may have more current information, yet they can’t get through, or fear doing so. (The basis for fear is tiny— someone might not speak to me at the holiday party— but of course, so are the stakes and rewards, so it’s easy enough to think, why bother?)

I was involved in an example of that this week, during the Great Neighborhood Restaurant renewal process. It struck me that many of the endorsements for Prairie Grass Cafe in Northbrook were notably halfhearted— it’s a better choice that a Lettuce Entertain You mall restaurant— and the “community-wide” enthusiasm for the restaurant in fact comes from one or two people. So I posted something trying to flush out alternative opinions— and instead of fostering other viewpoints, fostered a bunch of online hostility from the usual partisans of the place, insisting that I must have some vendetta against the place just for asking the question. In fact, I’ve heard LTHers knock the place in private— one memorably described it in a PM to me as reminding him/her of Applebee’s— but you’ll look in vain for much of that on the board… especially after they landed on me like a Chicago cop wrestling a 14-year-old Puerto Rican kid to the sidewalk.

So that’s an extreme example of groupthink outright suppressing contrary opinion, but one could certainly think of others where an LTH orthodoxy is challenged but rarely, starting with the reverence for its namesake, the fairly mediocre “Little” Three Happiness. There’s La Pasadita as the best steak taco in town (it’s not a patch on Las Asadas, Zacateca’s, or others), Patty’s Diner (Patty’s a sweetheart, and the only cook I know who can cook a burger to well done at one end and raw at the other), Poochies (not even the best hot dog joint on that Skokie strip, which is far from where I’d go looking for a great dog anyway), Myron and Phil’s (a tired old alter kocker restaurant in every sense), and so on. Not to mention broader received notions— try arguing the case for Carson’s-style baked ribs over chewy smoked rib tips at Honey 1, for instance, and you won’t make many friends.

Of course, in the macro sense the fact that we’re arguing over Patty’s or La Pasadita at all is a victory for the ethnic dive-focused LTH viewpoint; and if the price of that is that one guy manages to slip in his neighborhood joint where they know how to make his drink, and thinks the rest of us will love it as much as he does without those benefits, well, that’s not that high a price. Still, the unexamined food life is not worth eating, it never hurts, if we are serious food adventurers, to reconsider our views, think out of our box, push our envelope and try a new taco. So here are four recent ventures out of the safety zone of known and approved LTHForum joints:

My Alternative Choice: Zebda Deli
Instead of This LTHForum Favorite: Salam
Salam’s recent history has been odd.  I’ve been noting that this stalwart of the Kedzie middle-eastern scene had gone downhill for almost two years, its decline as the default choice for falafel and shawerma was a motivator of my Bridgeview explorations and Time Out piece.  Then they remodeled and the longtime employees took over from the current manager (who had this short-lived restaurant), and there have been a number of complaints on LTH that it’s been inconsistent, poor service, falafel grown cold before serving, etc.  Yet my experiences since then have been pretty good.

Still, it’s hardly the only middle-eastern place in town, and meanwhile, there’s Zebda, the deli run by one side of the divorce of the former Mundial Cocina Mestizo couple along with the owner of the Algerian restaurant Tassili.  I’m pretty much the only LTHer who ever wrote about Tassili, and not that many more have tried Zebda’s despite praise from folks like Mike Sula.  Yet the freshly handmade sandwiches and salads make for an excellent, modest-priced lunch full of bright flavor.  I really liked a lamb sandwich (served on an open-faced flatbread) and a chicken curry one (I was less enchanted by a merguez one), and among the sides, potato salad and couscous with golden raisins and bits of squash were both light and delicious.  When I’ve been there, I’ve been practically the only customer, so give it some love, quick.

Zebda Deli
4344 North Elston Avenue
Chicago, IL 60641
(773) 545-7000

My Alternative Choice: Chicago Kalbi
Instead of These LTHForum Favorites: Hae Woon Dae or San Soo Gab San
One could easily imagine an alternative universe in which the Korean BBQ place Chicago Kalbi would be an LTH favorite. It has authentic character and it’s obviously known to old-time LTHers (since it came up frequently in regards to Matsumoto), but for whatever vagaries of who ate where when, it has been largely overlooked while San Soo Gap San and Hae Woon Dae have been anointed as the Korean barbecue places of choice.  (And we won’t even go into the egregious Cho Jung, winner of the Tew Kewl 4 You prize for 2009.)

Part of the reason is that it’s actually a Japanese Korean barbecue place, and so the panchan, the little Korean dishes served before the meal, are fairly routine; and there are certain posters who seem to judge a Korean meal by the quality of the appetizers, essentially. But I don’t really go to a Korean BBQ place for panchan anyway, except as counterpoint. The point is the meat and the meat was fairly beautiful, nicely marbled kalbi, tender bulgogi. Or the real point is, the kids got into cooking it, they really dug having the live coals right there and watching the meat cook and trying to learn how to judge when to turn it. And all in all, I was charmed by the decor— I can’t think of another place that so much feels like Korea, or Japan, or most likely of all, the mix of Asian neighborhood joints in my head from movies. It’s one of those great step-into-another-culture places— and though San Soo Gab San is too, here they seem happy to see me and my kids.

Chicago Kalbi
3752 West Lawrence Avenue
Chicago, IL 60625-5726
(773) 604-8183

My Alternative Choice: Barbakan
Instead of This LTHForum Favorite: Smak Tak
Sometimes a place just does what it does so well it renders other restaurants superfluous. The Polish restaurant Smak Tak has fluffy, filling pierogi and other Polish delights, it’s cute and cozy, and the people are nice… and so it’s easy to fall into the habit of regarding it as the only Polish restaurant you’ll ever need.

But this is a bad habit, and anyway, I did need another Polish restaurant— because I was writing a piece for Time Out on Easter traditions, and I had already mentioned Smak Tak in one on Christmas traditions. So I did a little online recon and found Barbakan, located on the far west side. It’s an attractive looking place, done in that sort of 90s distressed-paint Italian coffeebar look that is starting to say “Eastern European” more than “doppio espresso.” And I liked the food quite a bit— a robust goulash tucked inside a peppery, hot-off-the-griddle potato pancake, accompanied by some especially fresh and tart salads— cucumber that could have come from a Thai restaurant, puckeringly tart sauerkraut, red cabbage kissed with a hint of garlic.

That was the upside. The downside was the feel of the place, which radiated Soviet-era indifference. Staticky music came from the kitchen, loud enough to bother, not loud enough to hum along. A fire alarm chirped its desire for a new battery once a minute. Other customers got soup and bread with their entree, but not me. I sat with a dirty plate for ten minutes, waiting in vain for the not-that-swamped waitress to quit chatting with walk-in regulars and drop off my check. In the end, I never even investigated whether this place did anything special for Easter or not, because I just couldn’t see recommending Barbakan to budding food adventurers— the cold shoulder here might discourage them for good. So look for a different alternative to Smak Tak in the magazine this week… and as for me, Smak Tak is still the Polish restaurant of choice, offering a warm welcome to all.

Barbakan
3143 North Central Avenue
Chicago, IL 60634
(773) 202-8181

My Alternative Choice: Aroy Thai
Instead of This LTHForum Favorite: Spoon Thai
Aroy has always hovered just outside the holy trinity of Thai restaurants on LTHForum, Spoon, TAC Quick and Sticky Rice, and there had been some exploration of its menu by Erik M. and others, and a translated menu by Erik M. which you can read here. But even though it’s just up Damen from my house a mile or so, I’d never been there; the pull of what I knew to be good at Spoon or TAC discouraged me from trying another place from scratch, or scratch assisted by some guidance from old threads.

Finally Seth Zurer, one of the organizers of Baconfest among many other things, and I met there for dinner, using the menu from this long-ago dinner as a guide to some particularly strong dishes. And you know what? It’s a great restaurant! I was blown away by a beef soup, tôm yam lûuk chín néua pèuay, all the pungency I expect from tom yam but also lots of deep bottom of beefy robustness; and I loved their pork neck nam tok, the same grilled juiciness as TAC’s. Also good were papaya salad and phàt nàw mái náam phrík nùm, mouth-puckering pickled bamboo shoots. It made me realize that as good as Spoon and TAC remain, it’s been a while since I’ve been surprised there, ordering the same classics every time; this brought back the heady days of discovery a few years ago when every week seemed to bring a new, mind-expanding Thai dish on LTHForum. Which makes it a reminder that the truest LTHForum spirit is not to settle for what everybody thinks to be good already, but to always be looking outside the familiar and the accepted for something new.

Aroy Thai
4656 N. Damen
773.275.8360

“My other piece of advice, Copperfield,” said Mr. Micawber, “you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and— and in short you are for ever floored. As I am!”

Small amounts can make all the difference. I had two meals recently at places which have enjoyed considerable praise, and found myself a bit of the exception to the chorus of delight. Yet when I totaled up the experience, I found myself tipped back toward praise by the fact that the prices at both were so reasonable, on average about two bucks less per item than I might have expected. This not only meant I could order more (which gave them more of a chance to wow me with at least one thing), but that I didn’t feel screwed on the way out, my grumbles given time to ferment into a full-fledged pan by the time I sat down here. Instead, I felt inclined to give both the benefit of the doubt— and so I will.

The Purple Pig has enjoyed rapturous reviews for its quality bar food, or perhaps its quality food in an after-work bar atmosphere, to be more precise. Certainly by the standards of Michigan Avenue, it’s a huge gastropubonomic advance; I actually worked in that building, eons ago, so the idea of anything better than a Fluky’s franchise in that area seems fairly miraculous to me.

That said, after my interview at Crain’s I popped in there for lunch and had three things, all of which were good, none of which rose to the sort of praise lavished on it by, say, Steve Dolinsky, who tweeted that no opening since Avec had excited him as much. I had one of the housemade salamis, a bowl of salt-cured beets with whipped goat cheese, and the widely-praised neck bones in red gravy. (No actual bones, just some tender pork shoulder.) The salami was pleasant, but didn’t merit comparison with some of the real excellent and funky salami around town; the beets were just absurdly rich, like a beet sundae, and almost too salty to enjoy; the neck bones were the most simply satisfying, like Iberico’s queso de cabra, but simple is the operative word. In short, three things I thought were pretty good, very good for after work bar food perhaps, but nothing that made my eyes open wide with the magic of what I’d just tasted, as I’ve experienced at Avec, The Bristol, Mado, and other places with a fairly similar culinary orientation.

Now, admittedly, maybe I just didn’t have a large enough sample— if one thing wowed me on a typical visit to Avec, say, it was probably one out of six or seven things ordered. Three may not have been enough candy bars to get a golden ticket. Or maybe The Purple Pig is happy where it’s aiming, straight for hearty (and plenty salty to encourage drinking) with a dollop of culinary aspiration, for that after work drinking crowd. The redeeming factor, certainly, is that I walked out of there, after three such quality dishes, with change from a twenty. That is what will encourage me to give it another try— and see if there’s more to it than simply outclassing mozzarella cheese sticks as a spicy, carb-heavy nosh to go with your beer.

* * *

Does it matter to a nice meal if your feeling about the meal is that it reminds you of what you were eating around 1992? I mean, if you enjoyed it in 1992— and I was a working adult in 1992, this is not a matter of an immature palate— shouldn’t you enjoy it again now? Food styles don’t age like hair styles, do they?

Maybe not, but Ceres’ Table felt like a meal I’d have eaten at, say, Oo-La-La 15 or 20 years ago; it had that sort of Northern Italian-influenced feel that was all the thing in the 90s, but now seems very American next to the more authentic Italian food one can find around town. We started with a country pate which was slightly more interesting than a bologna sandwich (the best thing about it was the jam on the plate), and a dull salad with woody bits of shaved artichoke, a dressing crying out for some black pepper bite, and pencil-eraser bits of enoki mushroom. I wouldn’t call it disastrous, simply because I couldn’t get that worked up about it. (There was also a bit of service awkwardness starting with them bringing much too large plates for the pate; since there wasn’t room for that plate and my salad, I, who’d actually ordered the pate, was the one who didn’t get a plate for it.)

Dinner could only go up from there but thankfully, it did— a lot. I ordered spaghetti carbonara made with duck egg, and it was a beautiful, silky rendition of this classic dish. My mom ordered a braised lamb shank, which was also textbook-perfect (if exactly how this dish would turn out at any restaurant, or, indeed, at my house), accompanied by horseradish-tinged mashed potatoes— which is what prompted these thoughts of 1992, back when garlicking or horseradishing up your mashed potatoes was de rigueur. Even if it seemed like a dated touch, though, I suppose you shouldn’t argue with a dish that turns out very well and makes its purchaser happy, which this one certainly did. Would it really have been better if it had been 2010’s trendy sunchokes or turnips instead? That’s heading toward the territory of the movie mogul Sam Goldwyn’s famous line, “I’m tired of the old clichés! Let’s have some new clichés!”

As at Purple Pig, what made one feel tolerant toward a 50-50 meal at this point was the fact that everything was so reasonable; even the lamb shank was, I think, only $18, which is halfway to a 1992 price for a 1992 dish. At higher prices I’d have been ready to quit gambling after entrees, but when the dessert card came out with the magic words “All desserts $5,” which is at least $2 less than I might have expected, I gave in to my kids and let them order a couple of things.

The little buggers were right. Pastry chef Leticia Zenteno has figured in much of the praise Ceres’ Table has received so far, including the only nomination it got in the Time Out Chicago Eat Out Awards, and it’s absolutely deserved, she’s a star.  To reach that $5 price point, the desserts are on the smallish side, but I have no problem with them not being Cheesecake Factory-huge; what matters is that they were brightly flavored, well-balanced and beautiful to look at (and if you get three for $15 instead of two for $14, then surely you came out ahead in every way possible). A nectarine tart, however out of season, was sunny in the mouth, a banana bread pudding light and fluffy.

Lower prices are a bonus, but in the end, the food has to be worth spending money on at all.  Zenteno’s desserts would tip you back toward happiness at a restaurant that charged considerably more for each dish than Ceres’ Table does.

Kati Rolls in Chicago? asked this LTHForum thread. What are Kati Rolls? Well, you take something every Indian restaurant has, like paratha (a flatbread), and you roll up whatever else you have in it, and suddenly you have a Kati Roll. So in theory, most of the Indian restaurants in town serve something fitting the profile of a Kati Roll. But as the thread points out, in some places, you have specifically Kati Roll fast food joints, which people are evidently pining for, to judge by that thread. I guess it’s a little bit like the difference between a place that has a hamburger on the menu, and a hamburger joint; and certainly I’m in no position to judge anyone else for waxing nostalgic about hamburger joints, so I guess the answer is… Chicago has plenty of places to get things that are functionally Kati Rolls, but we don’t really have a Kati Roll fast food joint in that sense, as apparently New York does.

One suggestion for a place that comes somewhat close to a Kati Roll joint is a place called J.K. Kabab House on Rockwell just north of Devon. I’ve noticed it over the years but never actually eaten there, so Wednesday, I popped in and chatted with the proprietor for a few minutes; my first inclination was to order a chicken boti roll, but he steered me toward the day’s special of a lamb kebob instead:

Roll it up and, voila, a Kati Roll, I guess. It wasn’t the most profound Indian meal I ever ate, but it was surprisingly light (paratha can be a grease sponge, but this wasn’t), fresh and tasty hot off the grill, all in all happily satisfying. There was something kind of fast foody about it— a little insubstantial; like the paratha mix came from the Indian equivalent of Bisquick, perhaps, or maybe it was the obvious high fructose corn syrup in the raita (a yogurt-based dip), which made it more like Kraft creamy Italian or something. But somehow I didn’t mind that, it was like getting an authentic taste of what the teens at a mall in Delhi or Chandigarh are eating. If these started popping up in American malls, I’d be happy.

So while I was looking for J.K.’s, I saw a new sign I hadn’t noticed before, for a place called Afghan Grill Kabob. And I knew where I’d be eating the next day.

Afghan Grill Kabob is fairly posh as Afghan restaurants go, well-coordinated decor with a small stage set up for nighttime performances (a soundcheck suddenly blared middle-eastern hiphop at one point in our meal). Afghan food, in my experience, is like Turkish food— some dishes are essentially identical (eggplant dip with a tart yogurt sauce on top) but even if they’re not, the pleasures are subtle ones, it’s comfy earthy food, not blow your socks off with either bold flavor or aggressive spicing.

So to see a pair of spicy condiments, one green with jalapeno, the other red with chilis, set on the table was a surprise. We started with an eggplant dip, a salad similar to Jerusalem salad (chopped finely enough that one of my co-diners called it “Jerusalem salsa”), and some beef mantu, which seemed bland and a bit wan next to examples I’ve had at other Afghan restaurants. We had two main courses; one was lamb kebobs, a bit overcooked (which, to be fair, seems to be the middle-eastern norm) but a perfectly decent rendition of the usual kebobs on a giant mound of rice dish, and one which they called chicken biryani, though the hostess took pains to explain that it was not Indian-style biryani. Instead it was quite large chunks of chicken tossed with rice in a tomatoey sauce which made it look something like a middle-American baked spaghetti dinner. It also had surprising heat for Afghan food— and we were told that there was a level of heat up from that that we could ask for.

It wasn’t the best Afghan meal I’ve ever had, but it had its moments; I’d check back in the place in a few months or so, see how it’s coming along. It did make me think a bit, though, about the preconceptions we food adventurers come to places like this with. Of the two new places I just tried on Devon, Afghan Grill Kabob was clearly the more authentic restaurant of the two in a sense, and its food gave off all the attributes of homemade-ness that I’m supposed to treasure. But I have to say, as I write about the two meals, it’s the fast food version— the Kati Roll— that’s calling my name right now. I don’t think it’s because there’s a part of my brain that’s been sucker-trained by the fast food industry; after all, the most obviously fast-foody part of the meal (the raita) was the part that turned me off. But I do think there is something naturally appealing about something light and quick that is well-executed and satisfying, and on the rare occasions fast food achieves the well-executed part and avoids the “sugared-up crap” part, we’re not wrong to like it. Anyway, I’ll try Afghan Grill Kabob, but I have a feeling my next Kati Roll could be next week. Or sooner.

J.K. Kabab House
6412 North Rockwell
Chicago, IL 60645
(773) 761-6089

Afghan Grill Kabob
2657 W Devon Ave
Chicago, IL 60659

“It’s a Southern Big Star,” was my first thought upon entering the revamped, de-glitzified Chaise Lounge, now renamed The Southern.  I shot footage of chef Cary Taylor there last summer, then went to eat there in December, and while we were there I could see the way its multiple identities were running smack into each other: the glitzy, Miami-nightclub-inspired look attracted a young, hard-drinking but not terribly sophisticated crowd who weren’t going for the upscale food (other than the Dietzler beef hamburger), while the Pimp My Ride vibe was scaring off the Wicker Park diners who should have been championing Cary’s food (a point confirmed by owner Jim Lasky, who said, ruefully, that one of the things he’s heard the most since redoing the place was “Now I can actually come in here!”)

So they ripped out the glitz downstairs and made it into a rough-edged bar-restaurant with some tall tables, and revamped the menu to favor smaller plates to nosh on while drinking.  It seems paradoxical but somehow becoming more of a bar actually makes it easier to see The Southern as a restaurant, maybe because you don’t have to choose between dinner or drinking, but can just nibble as you go.  And as at Big Star or Avec or The Bristol, go in for a drink and you’ll soon find yourself tempted to just get a few plates, and then a few more.

A couple of things on the menu when we went in December are still on it— the duck orleans, aka cassoulet, and the mahi fish tacos, for instance— but the left side of the menu has been reconfigured for carb-driven bar snacks, starting with the authentically ubiquitous Southern nosh cheese straws, and the equally ubiquitous Chicago restaurant trendy pigout food of the moment, poutine.  We started with delicate hush puppies accompanied by a comfy smoked trout dip (smoked trout from Susie-Q Fisheries, seen in Sky Full of Bacon #12):

This was very good, and okay, despite my repeated Twitter attacks on that gloppy mess poutine, I have to admit that the version here was pretty hard to resist while it was hot (though our dining companions said they gave the edge to the version at The Gage).  I still don’t think poutine is quite grownup food, but I guess someone who loves biscuits and gravy really has no standing to attack it.

But there was one dish that was really beyond reproach, that we all just instantly fell in love with, and when Lasky boasted that he thought it was the best dish in the city at the moment, well, you’d give the notion some serious consideration.  It’s called johnny cakes on the menu (though the jonnycakes were eggier and more crepe-like than the classic form; Cary said the change was made to make them easier to get out of the kitchen at their peak of freshness, I presume since it means they can be fried much more quickly).  Anyway, it starts with some wonderful pulled pork, lightly but definitely smoky, and then you put it on the johnny-crepe and add a little sweet-sour note from Cary’s housemade chow chow:

I’ve noticed some recent comments from local chefs about how the pork thing has been done to death on the Chicago restaurant scene, but pork ain’t over as long as dishes this good keep popping up.

Cary sent us a few dishes to give us a picture of other sides of the menu.  I liked his fried green tomatoes quite a bit; he salt-cures the tomatoes for an hour or two before frying them with a cornmeal batter, and they were served with thin slices of goat cheese and and a sprinkling of a lemon-caper-parsley garnish; a handsomely elegant twist on an iconic dish.  Shrimp and grits we were just fair on; the grits (from an artisanal supplier that was not Anson Mills) had a great texture but the dish seemed overwhelmed by red and bell pepper; I prefer gooey creamy grits with a splash of heat, this seemed almost the reverse.  The roast oysters were an interesting version, not that I’m much of an oyster afficionado, but he did a nice job of giving them some heat and a saltine crumble topping while keeping the integrity of the briny oyster itself.

Oh, and we had the hamburger, too.  Which is pretty great, I have to admit; that Dietzler beef is sheer concentrated beefpower.  Finally we got to a couple of entrees— the much praised duck orleans, or black-eyed-pea cassoulet, and a special of striped bass with bits of salty Virginia ham and deep-fried and steamed okra around it.  All of that was good, but their show might have been stolen by the collard greens, which also had the salty country ham in its vigorous pot likker.

Collard greens, in Wicker Park. I just want to point that out— somehow we don’t blink when an upscale taco bar or an upscale Greek place opens in Wicker Park, but a Southern place— I think that may strike some people as the most exotic thing to happen on Wicker Park’s culinary scene since Baccala was serving lamb tongue.  But I love Cary’s approach— highly authentic in some cases, respectfully upscaling classic dishes without pushing them till they break in others— and I loved an awful lot of this food.  I don’t know if it will be an easy sell or not, but to my mind The Southern is easily the most accomplished upscale Southern restaurant this town has had, and if you’d line up at Big Star for a taco shell with some pork on it, you need to discover what The Southern can do with roughly the same idea just a few blocks away.

The Southern
1840 W. North Ave.
773-342-1840
www.thesouthernchicago.com

There have been so many interesting openings lately that I’ve been trying new spots every chance I get, but when my wife’s sister (the one who lived in France, the one to whom we sent my first course-by-course description of a meal— a postcard detailing everything we had at L’Esperance in Vezelay, the one now exiled to the provinces of teaching in West Virginia) was coming to town for a conference, I knew where we wanted to go to give her a guaranteed knockout Chicago meal in non-stuffy circumstances: Mado.  It’s the closer of Chicago neighborhood restaurants.

Taking her made me think freshly about the ways in which a meal at Mado is different from the usual fine dining experience.  Appetizers at so many restaurants are the most creative parts of the meal, which is appealing, but it also means they’re often the richest, which unbalances the flow of the meal— you’ve had a bunch of butter and frying and rich meats such as crab up front, making the main course seem heavier and duller.  At Mado, though, the combination of the charcuterie platter and a few simply dressed seasonal vegetables from the antipasti plate has a light and clean feel that segues perfectly into richer main courses.  Some of that, of course, is simply the Italian way of doing things, but kudos to Mado for internalizing it so thoroughly that it has become their natural way of pacing a meal even when the dishes themselves don’t seem Italian in any way.

The charcuterie platter had three things on it— our old favorite testa, housemade ham (a touch boring, frankly, and quick to dry out; the same meat would probably be better served some other way) and ciccioli.  I couldn’t particularly explain how the ciccioli differs from testa but it was the best of the three, a wonderfully nourishing mix of cold meat and subtle spices.  In the dead of winter, I wondered if the antipasti would amount to much, but both a sweet carrot dish with a touch of middle eastern spicing, and beets with, I believe, sheep cheese were as good as any antipasti I’ve had there.  We also enjoyed the brandade (though I’d say Cary Taylor’s at Chaise Lounge was better) and a crock of velvety chicken liver as well.

Well fed by this point, we only ordered two mains, though one was a double portion: the shepherd’s pie, a Valentine’s special for two, and a porchetta with white beans.  Of the two, the shepherd’s pie was the revelation— nothing unusual about it, God knows nothing deconstructed, but so rich with deep braised lamb shoulder flavor and root vegetables and fresh rosemary scent throughout the potato top; great ingredients (even turnip chunks sang!) prepared to bring out their all.  It was as comforting and as profound as comfort food gets, and so too the creamy polenta (ordered only because it seemed like something the youngest son would eat if he ate nothing else), simplicity itself but sharpened up with something grownup like parmesan to transcend its gooey, fit-for-babies texture.  The mascarpone grits (basically the same thing) at Kith & Kin seemed especially diminished after this.

It’s a shame to only order one dessert for yourself at Mado, because they tend to be on the subtle side, low on sugar and avoiding the pyrotechnics that make dessert an easy way to send everybody out happy.  You are much more likely to like dessert at Mado if you can try several things at once and, again, get an appreciation for how good they are at letting ingredients stand out on their own without cheap tricks that aim straight for the sweet tooth, bypassing the brain.  We had a sour cherry pie with chocolate creme fraiche, an almond cornmeal cake with spiced apples, and rice pudding with golden raisins and nuts, along with a bit of the migas bark, and going back and forth between all of them was far more than the sum of their seemingly modest parts.  As we finished up, amid a happily full house, I could see that we’d done right by a guest in her one shot at a big city meal before returning to her college town.  Mado closed the deal.