NOTE: Speaking of pizza, as this post will shortly, check out my color commentary and, more to the point, Dan Zemans’ definitive bestiary of Chicago pizza styles in this Serious Eats piece.

Almost is the saddest word in a food writer’s lexicon.  Of course, most often it’s saddest in the sense of “We almost like your idea enough to pay you to write it for us.” But it can also be in the sense of, a place that almost pulls it off, almost gets what it takes to go from okay to really good, but misses. Herewith, two recent examples.

Sanfratello’s
I first spotted Sanfratello’s a zillion years ago on, I think, the way south side ice cream tour on LTHForum. (Sadly, the photos aren’t linked any more.) The original Sanfratello’s is down in Glenwood, wherever that is, somewhere around Tinley Park or somewhere. And under Mike G’s rules, as a pizza place that’s been around since the 1960s, it deserved to be tried. But it’s also sprouted a half dozen other locations all on the Indiana side of the southeast side/Northwest Indiana region, in places like Highland, so when I took the boys over there for an event a while back, we spotted a Sanfratello’s and tried it for dinner. (Actually we spotted one and went in, turned out it was takeout only, so they told us how to find another a couple of miles away.)

In many ways it’s a typical Chicago thin crust, except for one eccentricity— which turns out to be of huge importance. Basically, this is fried pizza. Yes, fried. You heard it right.

It’s not as weird as it sounds. Basically it means you put the dough in a metal pan which has been very liberally greased, and the grease liquefies enough and fries it enough to crisp up the outside. It’s actually done with a lot of pan pizzas, producing a characteristic moonscape texture on the bottom where bubbles form, and so on. (Pizza Hut’s pan pizza is something of an example.)

But on a pan pizza, it helps fluff up the fast-rising, bready-spongey crust. Here, on a short dough, it hardens it like a popover, and fries the edges of the cheese that spill over. It’s a very different sensation, there’s something essentially un-pizza-like about this cookie-like crust and the caramelized grilled cheese edges, something that seems halfway to being pastry.

But I’d have liked it as an oddball outlier among south side thin crusts, except for one thing— well, two things: the toppings and the sauce just didn’t have that much flavor. Give me a tasty tomato sauce, even a sweet one like Aurelio’s (another south side chain), and give me Italian sausage with some real fennel-y kick and porky funk to it, and I could have loved it. Unfortunately, I felt both these things were kind of bland. They really did taste like a pizza place from the 1960s, and in a sense that’s no compliment.

Still, I almost liked this weird pizza enough to hunt it down again any time I’m in some farflung place on the southeast side. Almost.

Hacienda Los Torres
Is there a cuisine that breaks your heart by getting wrong what would be so easy to get right, more often than Mexican?

I spotted the word Birria on the sign for Hacienda Los Torres on the west side, and decided to give it a try. There were a lot of signs (literally in some cases) of potential greatness— pork on a pastor spit, this poster proudly advertising their birria, the promise of handmade tortillas. Maybe too many things for them to be good at all of them.

It was also dead at noon. Not a promising sign in this big a place. But I ordered a plate of birria, and a pastor taco on the side.

Sadly, I could see that they were flubbing the potential of the pastor taco the moment the cook went to make it. He could easily have flipped on the gyros-spit and made me a beautiful crisped-up taco; but instead he gathered up some meat that had been cut some time earlier from the greasy tray at the bottom of the spit, and put it into a pan to reheat it. Not surprisingly, the result was pastor jerky, pastor Hubba Bubba, and given the time that it had probably spent unrefrigerated… well, I know the rules at LTHForum are that you can’t know who gave you an upset stomach the next day with a definitiveness that would pass legal muster, but let’s just say that that pastor cone would be a key person of interest in the investigation.

The birria wasn’t much better. Okay, it was probably quite a bit better, without being good. The flavor was all right, but nothing great. But even for a gristly bony meat, this was a seriously fatty, cartilagenous plate of goat. I basically got one, maybe two tacos out of it for about $9; the rest was scrap.  I never understand the attitude that insists on dishing up a lousy plate in an empty house— you’ve got one customer for the whole lunch period, and you give him something as bad as this?  Shouldn’t you figure that a lot of it’s going in the trash at the end of the day anyway, you might as well dish your only customer up the best plate you can make?

It’s too bad because there were two things that came as part of the meal that were actually quite good. One was the handmade tortillas; though rewarmed, they were still freshly supple and heartily enjoyable. The other was the consomme de chivo (goat soup) that came with the birria:

Surprisingly, this had all the complexity and depth of flavor that the birria was lacking— and frankly, it had hardly any less usable meat than the woeful plate of birria, either. This was the only thing I might conceivably return to Hacienda Los Torres for. But as I was leaving the empty restaurant, I saw the cook was taking raw arrachera (skirt steak) and putting it on the grill, to cook it up ahead of time so that it would have the dry, greasy texture of reheated meat whenever a crowd actually came in to order tacos. A pity, almost— but one that suggests habits of convenience over excellence so ingrained there’s no hope of overcoming them.

Hacienda Los Torres
5245 W Fullerton Ave
Chicago, IL 60639

*  *  *

But to end on a happier, Mexican-flavored note, I went back to Chantico last week with my family, and it continued to be what it was, which is to say, a restaurant that has some impressively flavorful and well-made dishes (a special of caldo de res) and some that seem a little too blandly Ameri-Mex (the fish tacos, mole poblano that’s too chocolatey); but even the less authentic ones are always well prepared with good quality ingredients.  And just as pleasing, they are extremely friendly and welcoming, and thanked me for returning by bringing us out a complimentary dessert.  No almost about that.

So you’re Ruxbin and you’re riding the wave of good initial reviews, and seeing hour waits for a table between 6:30 and 8:30 on weeknights. But you need to work up a new menu for fall. So you… close down one of the hottest restaurants in town for a week.

Most people in the restaurant biz would call that crazy— would call it leaving money on the table, the way Grant Achatz apparently tried to get Michael Carlson to understand how much money he was leaving on the table by not having a wine program at Schwa. But Carlson is so focused on the food that he just couldn’t listen to that, and neither, apparently, can Edward Kim, the chef and co-owner (with his sister and another Korean friend named Kim) of this tiny, funky little restaurant on Ashland just north of Chicago Avenue. And it’s the kind of craziness that deserves cherishing, and championing.

Ruxbin is not another Schwa— it’s a more down-to-earth neighborhood restaurant, with dishes that sound like fairly plain American bistro food, with a touch of Asian fusion. With its thrift-shop look (like some Korean-American cross between Avec and Chicago Kalbi, with a little Amtrak sleeper coach thrown in), it looks more like the kind of place you’d find in a college town than in money-flashing 2010 Chicago. But besides the similarities to Schwa of being tiny, hard to get into and BYO on Ashland, you get the sense of a comparable degree of intensity, focus, and something like perfectionism in the food. According to Sula in the Reader, Kim “externed at [Thomas Keller’s] Per Se,” whatever that means; I think it means we don’t really know where he learned to cook, but we know who he admires, Mr. Obsessively Clear Broth himself. And as much as I have trouble with cooking totally Keller’s way myself, I’m fine when someone else feels they have to.

This was my second attempt to go to Ruxbin, and I’d learned from the first to be there by 6:30 at the latest, and to expect a wait. Ironic that in a restaurant decorated with book pages, it’s far too dark to read while waiting, but on the plus side, you get a front-row seat on the kitchen, which is Hong Kong-dense with cooks at work, yet surprisingly peaceful and purposeful, like everyone says Alinea’s is. That lack of the customary testosteronish bustle in the kitchen was perhaps the first clue that this place was professional beyond its years (or location, or budget).

Kim’s deftness with simple ingredients presented simply showed through in the first thing we had, a marvelous salad of sort of tempura-like eggplant slices, cucumber, golden beets and a yogurt sauce. The eggplant had a curious, nobody-can-eat-just-one texture (perhaps partly dehydrated before frying?), the yogurt sauce tasted of simple, honest dairy and herbs, the cucumber (milled into cylinders) and the surprising triangles of beets and the frisee made for new textural sensations with every bite.

Of our three appetizers, that was by far the best; calamari in a Korean chili sauce called bokkum was good, but would have been better still if the sauce had had more funk to it; it seemed like something I would have had at Ed’s Potsticker House, where it would have been half as much, twice as big and three times as funky. While an obligatory nod to the Korean taco-truck thing, an allegedly Korean empanada, was the one real dud of the meal; I might like these fine in a bar, they were fried nicely enough, but the pink goo inside had no particular character of note. If it was meant to be pureed kimchi, it was an argument for allowing kimchi to keep its original texture.

One great and one pretty good out of three is not that great a score, and I suspected that the appetizers would prove to be the highlights next to the almost defiantly plain sounding entrees, since they almost always are these days.  But again, the most drab-sounding entree proved to be the most remarkable.  I very much enjoyed the more inventive take on chicken and waffles, the most playful or deconstructionist item on the menu, which used a cumin-flavored waffle, slices of white meat chicken, “chicken carnitas” (a fancy, if presumptuous, name for pulled dark meat) and a “citrus gravy” (which didn’t add much).  The only downside was that it was the kind of dish that takes so long to assemble that it wasn’t all that warm by the time it got to us.

But in any case, it was bowled over by the trout, crisped to a slight char, sitting on surprisingly flavorful and robust bulgur wheat (cooked in something darkly wonderful), surrounded by basil sauce and topped with a few spears of asparagus and a couple of candied dates. It looks like hotel banquet food, but everything about it was just executed so well, was so full of rich, cold-weather flavor (yes, I know asparagus and basil are not fall produce, but the overall dish was autumnal just the same), that it was almost breathtakingly satisfying— comfort food at its most stimulatingly alert and intriguing.

We finished with one of the only two desserts, coconut-lychee panna cotta, and it was a perfect end, Asian-light yet bright and happy. I would have this dessert with every meal for the next six months.

So it’s a bit of a stealth restaurant, the exterior not all that imposing (the crowds came from the internet) and the best dishes hiding under unsexy descriptions. But the excellence in execution at this early stage will make me interested to see what’s next every time they overhaul the menu (whether or not they shut down to do it); I expect them, like Schwa, to evolve quickly and impressively.

Michael Morowitz has given up foodblogging, but he emailed what he liked about Ruxbin to me the next day, and gave me permission to quote from it:

I think this place really represents what’s exciting about the Chicago restaurant scene. While explosive mega-trends (BBQ, gastropubs) are flaming out there still exists a strain of creative, food-focused, simple places like Ruxbin. It’s a child of Schwa in a lot of ways and of Mado in others (arguably two of the most exciting things to happen to Chicago’s restaurant scene in the last 5 years).

Ruxbin is a tiny BYOB with a frontiersman’s attitude toward opening a restaurant. They’re standing apart from the crowded restaurant scene, figuratively and literally. They’re focusing on solid execution and a fair bit of innovation while still acknowledging some trends and classics. They are not boasting about their gargantuan beer list or re-creation of a specific style of eating: they’re a family business hanging their shingle outside a tiny storefront… In the great European family bistro/trattoria tradition, there is simply a kitchen, some tables, and some good food.

I don’t especially agree that gastropubs are flaming out— but then I know that he just ate at one that greatly disappointed him, so he has reason to be jaundiced about that trend this week. Still, even as admirable a place as Longman & Eagle— which was a safe bet for my favorite restaurant opening of the year until I ate at Ruxbin— seems to be a savvy commercial player next to the almost monk-like, heads-down devotion to making excellent food, and doing nothing that would distract from that goal, here.

Ruxbin
851 N. Ashland
312.624.8509
Note: BYO; no reservations

Before I attended the Taste of Melrose Park last year, I think I had been to that near-western suburb exactly once, to buy a couch.  I don’t remember how we wound up there, but we found this furniture store where everything looked like it was designed for one of two people: Joe Pesci in Goodfellas (remember those weird buttoned collars that went on the outside of the jacket?) or Joe Pesci in Casino.  (I don’t imply any sort of criminal connection, merely that Scorsese in those movies was such a fabulous anthropologist of 60s and 70s fashions among his people.)  Somehow, amid all this loud taste, there was one weirdly preppy-looking couch covered, as furniture sometimes was in the 80s, with blue pinstriped ticking material.  It was sedate enough— I later realized that between it and my oriental rug, basically I’d decorated my living room with a dress shirt and a tie— and so we came home with it.  The couch went away a decade ago but a similar chair, to give you an idea of how my tastes have changed, was subsequently reupholstered in vintage Tiki barkcloth.  Color me Pesci.

In any case, the Italian-ness, or rather the Italian-Americanness, of Melrose Park was etched in my mind.  (More specifically, Sicilian-ness; that seems to be where most of the people I talked to trace their ancestry to.)  And certainly visiting Taste of Melrose Park, which as a food event is basically 90% Italian-American, last year didn’t alter that point of view.  What did was shooting the next Sky Full of Bacon, shortly to appear, there.  As we drove there, I saw that there seemed to be more Mexican food businesses than Italian ones; but that’s true of all but the most concentrated Asian neighborhoods, any more.  Plenty of Poles are eating at taquerias in Avondale; that doesn’t mean Polish Chicago is over.

But as David Hammond and I interviewed the vendors at Taste of Melrose Park, I began to realize that for many of them, this was a nostalgic event.  Maybe even 20 years ago, when I was couch-shopping, Melrose Park was still the suburb that you moved to from the city.  But by now the Italian enclaves in the city are virtually extinct— Taylor Street is an Italian-themed drinking strip for UIC students; Noble Square and Heart of Italy are but shadows— and the first, visibly Italian suburb families moved to from the city is beginning to give way to the second suburb, where the Italian-American community assimilates… and disappears.  Melrose Park is “the old neighborhood” now, and the Taste of Melrose Park is where you come— from Naperville or Buffalo Grove or Bolingbrook— to see the people you grew up with and eat the food you grew up on.  Once a year.  Many of the vendors are of an age that you can imagine them moving as children to Melrose Park just after WWII; there are some adult kids working with their parents now who will likely carry it on, and there’s certainly many more happy years of this event to come, but the demographic handwriting is on a distant, but plainly readable, wall.

A little to my surprise, then, this video’s theme turns out to be strikingly parallel to my one about Lithuanian Chicago earlier this year.  Lithuanian Chicago was much further along the process, but basically, the story was the same— the immigrant community near the center of the city moved to the edge (in this case, Marquette Park within the city), then dispersed into the suburbs where it is only kept alive by organizations, not by an organic community with restaurants and other commercial activity.

If more Italian-ness survives than Lithuanian-ness, the reason will likely be because of Italy’s great contribution to American culture (well, along with Columbus and Marconi, I suppose): Italian food.  Lithuanian food is a very tiny specialty of food geeks like me, but Italian food’s contribution to American food is more in the nature of a wholesale takeover— not only that Italian foods are so common no one thinks of them as foreign any more, but that the Italian ethos— of seasonality and freshness and simplicity in preparation— has so influenced American dining.

That’s the thing that amazes me about Taste of Melrose Park, more than anything.  Though some of the vendors are restaurateurs, many must have normal jobs selling insurance or working at the Navistar factory or… well, there’s a hell of a lot of city workers who also happen to have booths.  Yet whatever they do the other 362 days a year, they seem to have almost a genetic capacity for dropping it and picking up running a high-capacity restaurant, by themselves, for three straight days in the hot sun.  I mean, my family cares about food a lot, I’m merely the most extreme, but I can’t imagine us doing this competently for half a day, let alone three.  Yet the Italian-Americans who run the 70+ stands at Taste of Melrose Park all seem to have a fanatic interest in food which translates into competency in serving it at this festival.  Bring food up at all, and twenty minutes later they’ll still be talking about it.  All of my videos are about the degree to which food matters culturally to somebody, but this one, mamma mia, it’s about a culture where it really matters, to everybody. And that intensity about food will keep restaurants alive, and the restaurants will keep the culture alive… if only as shtick in many cases, but still.

Anyway, the video will be up next week.*  Unfortunately, you won’t be able to follow up on it and eat the food you see in it for about 11 more months, until the next Labor Day rolls around.  But in the meantime, there is one survivor of the old Italian Melrose Park still operating on Lake Street, which was once Italian row (and is now all taquerias).  It’s called Scudiero’s (they have a booth in the Taste, but I didn’t interview them).  It’s a little Italian deli, with subs and sheet pizza.  I stopped in on Tuesday while getting a few last establishing shots and grabbed a couple of slices; it’s not great pizza (the short crust— i.e., made with shortening— is a typical Italian-American touch that may turn off Neapolitan pizza purists, but it does last longer before getting hard in the case), but it’s simple and tastes of exactly what it is, bread, tomatoes and cheese.  What do you want for a buck fifty?

Scudiero’s
2113 W Lake St
Melrose Park, IL 60160
(708) 343-2976

* Yes, I know I said the next one would be about barbecue. But that one’s gotten more complex, and this one meanwhile was simple by comparison— the shortest shoot I’ve ever done, in fact. (Two days, 4 hours of raw footage. It’s no trick to get Italians to talk.) So it got done first.

Crispy pig ear.

Izakayas suddenly came out of the woodwork this year, like everyone was issued the latest trends and this was near the top of the list. What’s an izakaya? It’s basically a kind of Japanese restaurant built around drinking foods. Or to put it in American restaurant-ese, it means small plates rather than entrees, along with your beer or whiskey. It’s the same appeal that had tapas restaurants popping up all over a couple of years ago— for the diner, you get the fun parts of dinner (meat, spicy stuff) in small portions that let you try a lot of things at fairly low prices per item; for the restaurant, you get to sell lots of little things alongside alcohol, and it’s entirely possible that lots of little things will result in a higher ticket than a few bigger things. Or at least higher margins, since the small stuff is often fairly cheap cuts.

One of the friends I dined with last night said New York has 30 of these places by now, but they’ve been slower to take root here. There’s some place downtown that has the name (Izakaya Hapa— is everyboda hapa?) but hasn’t seemed to impress anybody, and there was the short-lived Masu Izakaya, which seems to have picked too stodgy a part of Lincoln Park to open in and closed way too quickly. Now, accidentally riding a crest of sympathy for Masu dying too soon, comes Chizakaya, a little up the street on Lincoln in a very 70s building that used to house a Mexican wedding cake bakery.

Well, I’ve eaten tapas in Spain and though I liked a number of the places here that served what they called tapas, I thought they rarely rose above a metaphorical resemblance to anything I saw in Spain. I haven’t eaten at izakayas (or anything else) in Japan, but I did eat at one in Columbus, Ohio, a few months back, and before you laugh at that unlikely claim of authenticity, know that Columbus has a big Honda plant and a small subculture of fairly authentic Japanese places for Japanese businessmen visiting or working in the area. I can’t tell you how authentic to Japan Kihachi truly was, but it was certainly at the more authentic end of any Japanese dining experience I’ve had in the U.S., and I’m not the only one who was impressed by it.

And Chizakaya’s resemblance to anything I had at Kihachi is mainly metaphorical. If Chizakaya is authentic to anything, it’s the present gastropub trend with its emphasis on oddball meats, salty fatty things that make drinking that much easier; it’s an Asian-themed version of The Purple Pig or something, basically. And on that level, I had some very tasty things, greasy and easy to like. But I had something else in my head, a place where deep-fried lotus root or pickled plums or such unexpected, alien-looking things would challenge me during my meal. And I’m still kind of eager to go eat at that place, which isn’t what Chizakaya turned out to be.

Octopus salad.

That said, we were pretty happy with the first wave of stuff we ordered from the various parts of the menu (whose distinctions between different kinds of small plates, frankly, I can’t reconstruct the next morning). A skewer with beef cheek on it was terrific, tender, soul-filling beefiness; I liked the brightness of an octopus salad and some marinated vegetables and fruits, though the octopus was diced to the limits of my ability to manipulate chopsticks; there’s a small choice of sashimi and one of hamachi lightly touched with citrus and a little bit of intoxicatingly fatty bone marrow was really beautiful.

For that matter, the simplest thing of the night, little grilled turnips, was pretty wonderful too (and the closest, perhaps, to what I had in my head going in, The Japanese Delicate Touch With Vegetables I’d Rarely Eat Otherwise):

As one friend said about the crispy pig ears (shown at top), “It’s a potato chip that’s chewy,” and the vinegary sauce you were supposed to dip them in was too harsh. Another fish, marinated in kombu, overdid the citrus thing, and some clams in a beer broth seemed to have been sent over from the Hopleaf or something, they just seemed out of place and the broth was one-dimensional and harsh. I liked the delicate frying of the chicken thighs (with a BP-spill of mayo on the plate), but likewise couldn’t entirely shake the feeling that they belonged at a different restaurant, a bright cartoony Asian fast food place.

All in all, we were fairly happy at that point. What we weren’t, was full, and so we kept ordering, and our success average went steadily down as we dug into our second and third tier choices off the menu. The best were some gyoza stuffed with duck (and foie gras, supposedly, of which there was the tiniest livery hint). They were well made, well fried, well worth it. Beef tongue was tough and no comparison to the beef cheek, a chicken skin skewer was all right in a trashy, there’s nothing good for you here kind of way, but the tininess of the portions was really driven home here— yeah, at $3 I don’t expect much, but on the other hand, chicken skin, you’d be throwing that away if you couldn’t put it on a stick and grill it, there’s no reason to parcel it out like it’s jamon iberico. Pork belly was more generously portioned, but I’ve had a lot of pork belly by now, and a lot of things with egg on them, and this only scored about a 60 on the 100-point pork belly salty-sweet-unctuousness meter.

I don’t really have that much complaint about the pricing or the portions. It’s fairly remarkable to see “$3” on a menu in an upscale-ish place at all. But our total tab for three (with a couple of drinks for each) was $138 before tax & tip, which seemed high to some of us for what we had (though I pointed out that if we hadn’t ordered the three somewhat more expensive fish/clam plates, or had managed only to order the one good one, the total would barely have broken $100, which seems pretty fair). Speaking of drinks, they have a few beers, some Asian-tinged cocktail creations which seemed okay (but mostly on the sweet side), and a very nice sake list put together by the former sommelier of L2O; I ordered one (which they have exclusively, apparently) called Azumaichi, which was like good wine instead of the usual lighter-fluid-mixed-with-chalk burn of standard big brand sake; both of my friends tasted it and ended up ordering it for themselves. Not that I have anything against a nice tall Hitachino beer, but I’d say play to their strength and check out the sake list.

In the end, I had a number of things I liked quite a bit— almost all at the start of the meal. But in the end, I was hoping for a new kind of experience, surprises of flavor and texture like I had in Columbus. Instead I went to a bar-restaurant kind of place and I ate a lot of meat… not that unusual an experience for me on a Tuesday night in Chicago. Chizakaya is a better than average addition to the scene, but I’m still waiting for an izakaya in Chicago.

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

Graham Elliott Bowles beams down from the Muthaship to bring some funk to the food at Lollapalooza.

Everybody loves to hate on Taste of Chicago, me as much as anybody, but if it has one legacy that runs deeper than $6 cheesecake on a stick, it’s the wave of festivals and events that have blossomed in recent years to bring the diversity of Chicago’s cuisine to the outdoors and a party crowd…

…on a stick.

The Green City Market Chef’s BBQ last week was one example, and this week’s is the food that Graham Elliott Bowles (of, as you surely know if you’re reading this, Graham Elliott) coordinated for Lollapalooza.  Last year he cooked for the band Jane’s Addiction, whose frontman Perry Farrell is also the organizer/big cheese of Lollapalooza, and sold a few of his signature dishes (like the lobster corn dog above) at a stand for festivalgoers.  That inspired a bigger idea this year, of trying to replace the Connie’s Pizza and other standard mass-produced fare entirely with food of a level of creativity comparable to the music on stage.  Considering that the music on stage includes Lady Gaga, that’s a tall and possibly too bizarre to be appetizing order, but nonetheless, he made some calls to fellow chefs, got the band back together and will have food including:

pork bao from Sunda…

tacos from Big Star…

Kuma’s burgers (since this was a sample size for this event, it used quail eggs)…

…and shrimp with a mango salsa from The Southern.  (I didn’t have a good picture of that, so here’s one of Nick from Grub Street Chicago trying to capture the ineffable essence of the Kuma’s burger.  If he runs a picture of one showing the egg, it’ll actually be of my burger, seen above.)  It’s hard to judge which was my favorite when one is something I’ve had several times before (the Kuma’s burger), and they’re all in a league above standard festival fare, but I really liked Sunda’s bao, no, it’s not as authentically funky as something you’d get in Chinatown, but the delicacy of the bao, sweet pork flavor and crunchy fresh vegetable toppings evoked happy thoughts of the Peking duck at Sun Wah.

But wait, there’s More… cupcakes from More.

Here are my homies Elliott, Perry and Hammond.  Farrell, alarmingly fit, is seemingly not built for foodieism, but he plainly cares about that stuff all the same, and far from maintaining rock star distance, came up to Hammond and me to preach the gospel of festival food that doesn’t suck.  As he put it, you take a girl to Lolla to listen to the music, you’re not going to impress her with a hot dog. It’s hard to argue with the rock and roll logic of that.

I also talked with Cary Taylor (SFOB #11) of The Southern, who said it represented a financial risk for his restaurant— between the seven places providing food, they’d spent $7 G’s on licenses alone, thank you Mayor Daley— but the opportunity to get known to 90,000 festival attendees was just too much for his restaurant to resist.

People talk about “rock star chefs” but there’s something that still strikes you as funny at first about mixing rock and roll and haute cuisine.  Or me, anyway, as I try to imagine how ZZ Top keep their beards from getting stuck in the custom-made utensils at Alinea.  But obviously to a generation that grew up with both rock and the food culture of the 80s and 90s, they’re all just part of America today, so why should your music be chained to bad baseball park food, or the clout-connected institutional food choices you associate with the Auto Show?  Why shouldn’t food go up to 11, too?  Grab a spatula and go my son, and rock.

P.S. Here’s Nick’s piece on the preview at Grub Street, and yes, that’s my hand Vanna Whiting a couple of the food items.  I like his picture of Bowles about to bust into Jailhouse Rock, too.

P.S. Well, and now here’s Audarshia’s account of the dustup that followed, and an LTHForum thread about how corrupt we all are for attending this party.

I was trying to explain to my wife what the Green City Market BBQ was like and after several analogies of varying effectiveness, I finally said “It’s like the food prom.” Which is about as good a way as any to describe what happens when all these chefs come out, their food duded to the nines, for an awesome summer party. This year they raised the prices‚ doubled them in fact, and still not only sold out (though it took to the last day this time) but seemed to pack this section of Lincoln Park more fully than last year. (Disclosure: my wife and I went on press passes.)

It’s a great event, besides supporting the city’s most influential farmer’s market, the one that does the most in establishing connections between chefs and farmers (hey, somebody ought to make a video about that), it’s a fantastic buffet of mostly astoundingly superior food, nearly every dish of which makes some use of things available at the market. Why can’t they set up something like this every Thursday during Happy Hour, and serve food of this caliber each week? Because then, what would we have to look forward to in eternity.

My first stop, mainly because they were near the entrance, was Mado. True to their reputation for aggressively whole animal cooking, their dish was barbecued beef heart, in a chipotle-ish sauce. Rob Levitt admitted he didn’t expect it to be hugely popular, but when we checked back toward the end, he was happy to tell us it was all gone.

One of the great reasons to go, of course, is to try food from chefs you don’t know if you want to go pay for a full dinner from. I ripped into Andrew Zimmerman pretty good when he was at Del Toro (and Rob Levitt was one of his cooks), but he’s at Sepia now, and this pulled duck sandwich with duck skin cracklins was mighty tasty, one of my top three for the night, and enough to make me want to check that place out again under his command.

Phillip Foss of Lockwood was serving up a sample of the kind of thing he might do in a food truck if the ordinance ever passes. It was a sloppy joe served on his Israeli-born wife’s recipe for a kind of puffy bread:

Here’s someone from NoMi making beer can chicken:

I’m not sure who was responsible for this out of the BOKA Group restaurants, since four of them including The Girl & The Goat were credited, but these two came off the grill just as we walked by and so we grabbed them. Pork belly skewers with cherry tomato and grilled melon, another of my top three, simple and wonderful.

Then we saw Tony Priolo of Piccolo Sogno making these chilled beet soup shooters— just the cold non-pork item we needed at that moment, and delightful:

And right after that we saw this peach and honey panna cotta with sprinkles of La Quercia prosciutto on top, from Bin 36. The fresh peach flavor was really nice.

Pat Sheerin of The Signature Room had the freakiest looking dish of the night:

The description bills the grilled beef shoulder first, but anyone getting it couldn’t help but notice the bright green tongue coated with salsa verde.

By comparison this grilled lamb from Balsan and Ria with a corn sauce and a dab of pesto was rather plain-looking, which is probably why someone was out promoting it in front of their stand. The lamb was beautifully tender, I’m glad I tried it, though my wife ate it, then asked what it was, and when she heard it was lamb, was sorry she’d eaten lamb during the time period that the kids are raising a lamb in 4-H.

Here’s Barry Sorkin of Smoque slicing up a Santa Maria tri-tip:

And Mark Mendez of Carnivale with his meatball:

Another chef whose food I was curious to try without spending a big wad yet was John Des Rosiers, of the suburban avant-garde restaurant Inovasi, in Lake Bluff. I was quite impressed with this unusual dish, which started with some long-brined and smoked pork topped with cherries and other fruit, and then included a kind of very light tortilla made in some fashion with cheese incorporated into it which he calls an “Inorito.” Weird (and a little soggy in this humid heat) but very interesting, I may have been impressed enough to make the trek up there some time.

If I had to pick a favorite of the evening, though, it was probably one that came just as I was about out of stomach for meats, Jared Van Camp of Old Town Social’s sausage with Brunkow cheese mixed into it and homemade sauerkraut on top. Yeah, sure, it’s an easy crowd-pleaser, a cheesy hot dog, but it was really well done.

Another chef I approached with some skepticism was Dale Levitski, hard at work here on his dish:

I know people have been impressed with Sprout but what I hear always sounds like weird combinations that, even if they worked, would leave me wishing for a cheesy hot dog after. But I tried Levitski’s herb salad with beef carpaccio:

And it was really a fine thing, beautifully balanced. Okay, I might still need the cheesy hot dog after a whole meal of such light and delicate things, but I was impressed nonetheless.

The evening wound down, the guy from NoMI was down to his last beer can chicken…

There weren’t as many dessert choices as last year, and many of them ran out by the time we were seriously hunting sweets to finish off the meal. MK showed up with an actual ice cream truck, but what they were serving was actually cherry slushies (alcoholic slushies, I should point out), and my wife staked out the first position:

A most refreshing end to a long evening of eating. Because you didn’t think that was everything we tried, did you? I didn’t even have a chance to mention the Dietzler Beef Italian beef from Vie, or the pork belly slider with peach chutney from Blue 13, or the blueberry lemonade from North Shore Distillery….

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.