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

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Within every first-person food essay is a deeply buried lede, and that lede is, “God I love talking about myself.”

A well-known local food writer retweeted that yesterday (I’d say who it originally came from, but Twitter Is Over Capacity and so I can’t find out who the original author is). We would never wish to disappoint those looking for evidence of solipsism in blogging, so here is my fascinating life in food over the last few days…

That was last week’s Green City Market summed up in a photo. I made, it will come as no surprise, asparagus soup and strawberry-rhubarb pie that night.

One thing they’ve been working on at Green City is having more meat vendors, so it was exciting to see Dietzler Beef and Becker Lane Pork available there. Dietzler Beef is widely used in local restaurants (you’ll hear about it in the next Sky Full of Bacon video) and Jude Becker’s pork, of course, becomes La Quercia Acorn Edition pork, among other things. That said… the Dietzler prices were not insane ($7/lb. for beef… well, it’s really good beef) but Becker was charging $12/lb. for pork belly and into the $20s for some cuts. Sure, if you’re going to roast a little piece of belly, Blackbird style, it would be worth it for meat of this quality, but that’s way out of my range for making bacon, say. (I pay about $5— with shipping— from another Iowa producer, and am very happy with it.) I don’t fault them for this, and I’m happy to see more suppliers, but that’s just the reality of what I, for one, will spend.

Those were purple radishes from Kinnikinnick (which I’m finally spelling right). The next day I went to visit these radishes at their home— yes! I finally shot the last footage for the next video at Kinnikinnick Farm! Actually I took the boys along, and Dave Cleverdon’s granddaughter was visiting, so what started as a 15-minute stop to get some establishing shots and B-roll, turned into an afternoon of farm fun for the boys, including a picnic lunch on the farm. (There’s no such thing as visiting a farmer for 15 minutes and not eating anything, I’ve found.) So anyway, a really pleasant day on the farm, the rain held off until just as we were leaving, and you should see some of that footage very soon, I think.

Now then, here’s a test of how much of a Chicago foodie you are: how many of these backs of heads can you identify? You should be able to get at least three between the two photos:

I was invited, courtesy of Mr. Steve Dolinsky, to an event honoring Grant Achatz for Alinea placing #7 in the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants thing. (#7 makes it the highest-ranking restaurant in North America.) It was accompanied by a lunch at Everest. Given that the list tends to favor Old World places and virtues (though Dolinsky talked about working to change that), there was something oddly fitting about our most avant-garde four-star restaurant being feted at perhaps the most classical.

I’d only eaten at Everest once before, more than a decade ago. I think Chef Joho is one of our local heroes— pun intended; he was buying locally before local was cool— and I like Brasserie Jo a lot, where he gets down with the tarte a l’oignon and other Alsatian everyday food, but I have to admit that whenever I was going to drop an Everest-sized wad in the years since then, I was always more inclined to spend it on avant-garde novelty than classical French, however accomplished. Nothing against it, just not my sweet spot for where I’d spend my own money, I thought.

In my La Quercia video, Joho talks about the first time he tasted their prosciutto, and says, “It was the closest to perfection that you can do, even though perfection is nonexistent.” (I like that comment because the second part of it shows that he’s thinking seriously and discriminatingly in the first part, and not just handing out compliments casually.)

So you see that piece of halibut, poached in oil, with morels and asparagus and a butter sauce? I mean, morels and asparagus and butter, what could be more traditional, expected, breaking-no-paradigms French food, right?

Well, what Joho said.

So there, that wasn’t even me talking, let alone about me.

(By the way, the backs of heads you should have been able to ID were Tony Mantuano, Jean Joho, Steve Dolinsky, and Grant Achatz. And if you’d like to taste Joho’s food for free, he’ll be at Paulina Meat Market this Saturday.)

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

“How many more innings?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I like that you want to go,” I said.

Happy anniversary, my sweet…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pizzeria Serio
1708 W. Belmont
773-525-0600

A while back I was talking to a chef who had just been written about by a national publication, and one of his comments, not in anger but just in wonderment, was “They left out so much!”

Which is what we all do, no? Chefs or video-makers, we all leave lots of scraps behind. And nobody moreso than me, since a lot of times I just start shooting and wait to see if a subject will reveal itself. (A benefit of having no particular deadline, I suppose.)

Back around the beginning of the year, Mark Mendez, the executive chef of Carnivale, expressed interest in being involved in a Sky Full of Bacon in some way. I said sure and was on his doorstep almost immediately. I shot about four hours of video, most of it interview, and only over time did my subject appear— using a giant restaurant like Carnivale to explore how realistic a lot of the Michael Pollan-esque goals for reforming our food system are. Because if small farmers and better agricultural practices can’t serve a restaurant that seats 600, they’ll never serve a country of 300 million.

So four hours— and in the end his part will be ten minutes. (In the end it also meant I had to sit on his part for a few months, because there’s not really much point in talking to farmers for the other side of the story until you have something green to shoot for B roll. I’ll actually be shooting the last bits of that this week. UPDATE: Nope, probably next week if it rains a lot this week.) Along the way as Mark and I talked (and he’s a great talker), there were any number of other things that came up that didn’t fit into this narrative, and I decided to pull out one I really liked and put it up as a standalone outtake— and a little bit of a preview. It has to do with an experience that he found really inspiring, and a chef he respects: Roland Liccioni, who was then at Le Francais. It’s about 2-1/2 minutes, so enjoy— and watch for the final piece, soon.

Chef Mark Mendez talks about Le Francais from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

P.S. Speaking of chefs, the greatest meat market in the world, Paulina Meat Market, is continuing its spring-summer series of in-house demo/tastings, “Meat the Chef,” this Saturday with Carol Wallack of Sola. If I recall correctly, Jean Joho will be next month. It’s from 10 to 1, 3501 N. Lincoln at Cornelia (not Paulina).

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

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