I have seen the future, and it works from home.

Or at least from a cute little sandwich shop in Roscoe Village.

So I read there was this new Hawaiian cafe in my neighborhood, Roscoe Village. Hawaiian? I realize that the stereotype, that the main ethnic type in Roscoe Village is Strollermom-American, is well founded, but there’s a reason nearly all the Turkish restaurants in town are within walking distance of me, too, to name one other socio-ethnic group, and so I guess I thought it was possible that there were Hawaiians with a hitherto unsuspected desire for Spam musabi in the vicinity. So I walked up, and saw the day’s special:

Uh, yeah, Hawaiian. Turns out the name was just chosen for its new-agey visualize-your-inner-beach qualities, and otherwise, this is a sandwich shop targeting, yes, Stroller Mom America. It’s attractive, it’s low-key (so no death metal will come on the iPod and wake Baby), the stuff is tame and fairly fresh… and the meats are all, Proudly, from Boar’s Head. Which is when I realized another thing: someone had posted something on LTHForum about a place in my hood selling charcuterie, which had picked up a fryer on the cheap from the late Kaze down the street.  And this was it.  At that moment, my visions of a Salumi-level charcuterie mecca disappeared down a Boar’s Head’s gullet; it’s not that Boar’s Head is bad, exactly, it’s a supermarket brand and it’s one of the better ones, but all that means is, it’s processed to still resemble what it came from, it’s not totally fakey. But it’s not fresh-roasted turkey from Paulina, either, and there are places, like Wicker Park’s Birchwood Kitchen, that don’t just settle for the obvious marketing support you get if you commit to a full Boar’s Head program, but insist on real, fresh (or in the case of La Quercia, cured) food.  And I didn’t just get one of those two minutes from my house.

That said, nothing says you have to eat the things that use Boar’s Head meat-like meat™, and so looking around the menu of fairly light, very white food, I spotted a chicken salad sandwich.  It had asparagus spears in it, which was a nice touch.  It had a lot of lettuce and mayo mixed in, it was clean-tasting rather than especially interesting, if not for the asparagus and the rosemary bread it would have been bland, but (this is the dirty secret of my life as a food explorer) there are plenty of days when I just have to grab something on my street, none of which is going to lead to shouting great discoveries from the rooftops.  So I will be happy just to have this place making fresh, decent food within walking distance.

In any case, what interested me most about this place, as I sat there, wasn’t the food.  Like a lot of people, I think my reaction to Apple’s announcement of the iPad last week was somewhat contradictory: on the one hand, it seems a bit underwhelming, but on the other… I can’t help but feel, and hope, that this oversized iPod Touch is an important first step toward whatever the next thing computing will be is.  It’s a little glimpse of the future, even if it doesn’t quite do much that’s new yet.

Across from me there was a large table.  Two women sat there, with laptops, working.  Next to them was a kid’s table.  Sunlight streamed in the window.  Soft music played overhead.  They nibbled at their food.  We imagine that the future will be shiny, metallic, vaguely fascist in a nice way.  We imagine a future in which all of life is sort of like the Air Force Academy, basically, modernist and hyperorganized:

But in reality, this is the future for which Steve Jobs is creating the iPad, and it’s already here: Mom sitting at a table, doing her work while somebody else is making her lunch, just as when she was a kid herself, and drew at a table while her mom made her lunch.  Or maybe she wasn’t drawing; maybe she was using an Etch-a-Sketch.

Aloha, 21st century.

Nohea Cafe
2142 W. Roscoe
(773) 935-7448
noheacafe.com

A jibarita at La Bombonera.

I haven’t posted one of my 50 Places Not Talked About on LTHForum for a while, because most of my new places in the last few months were those 14 supermercado taquerias I posted about the other day. And while there were probably enough new places on that list to get me to 50, it would have been boring to finish off the list in one post.

But that doesn’t mean I had my eyes shut all that time.  In fact, I noted a number of places as I was scouting out the supermercados, including several new Cuban or South American places on the northwest side.  One of them, I found interesting enough that it turned into a blog post at the Reader, so go read it there.

In the meantime, a quick followup to my Bolzano Meats post: take some thin slices of guanciale.  Heat in microwave for about a minute, to sweat some fat out.  Dice and place on pizza:

I don’t know if there was such a thing as guanciale pizza before, surely there was, but I was very happy with my possibly-not-original invention.  P.S. Just did a search, should have guessed.  Mozza, whose menu is visible in the entrance at La Quercia, has a LaQuercia guanciale pizza.

Back in the day, when the “auteur theory” stressing the director as the primary creator of a movie was a hot topic, film buffs squared off into two camps, the auteurists (or “Sarrisites,” named for Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice) and the anti-auteurists or Paulettes, named for Pauline Kael, who had made both herself and Sarris well known by attacking him in a lengthy essay. A story Kael told summed up the difference in their attitudes: an auteurist said to her “I can’t imagine Howard Hawks making a bad film!” to which Kael replied, “Go see Red Line 7000,” which was Hawks’ latest picture and playing at that moment in theaters. Kael was clearly sensitive to directors and the degree to which producer-directors like Hawks shaped their films; she certainly would have agreed with any discussion which focused on, say, the consistent role of strong women in Hawks’ films, from Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday to Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep to Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo, for instance, as evidence that there was such a thing as A Film By Howard Hawks.

But what she didn’t believe was that having a strong personality in filmmaking guaranteed that your next movie would be any good. Hawks made a number of movies which are clearly his but which simply don’t measure up, every artist does. Kael was a great resister of orthodoxy, of anyone telling her that she had to like something because she ought to like it, and for her, being told that you had to like a movie because it was a Douglas Sirk or an Otto Preminger was no better than being told you had to like it because it was about an important dogooder subject like race relations. Every movie was up for judgement on its own, to either please you or not by itself.

What prompted all this was a thread at LTHForum about Jimmy’s Red Hots, a kind of ratty, somewhat scary (the countermen are rumored to pack heat) hot dog stand on the west side that is undeniably full of character— they’re rabidly anti-ketchup (they don’t carry the stuff), food is served in whatever paper bags they got cheap (which may well mean Burger King bags, say), there are guys selling bootleg CDs and DVDs out front, and so on. Now, all this is charming as hell to us connoisseurs of urban decay, but I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone that a business that is ramshackle physically can also be inconsistent in the product it turns out.

Oh, but wait, it does surprise some, so much in fact that it’s unimaginable. Never mind the reports of overboiled, inferior skinless dogs at times, or flavorless fries at other times, not fried in the claimed beef tallow, all from respected posters (including myself). One could never imagine that a place using Chicken Delite bags that fell off a truck would ever use a lower grade of hot dog for a week or two because they got a deal! The Jimmy’s partisans, having declared what Jimmy’s should be, then insist that that is what it always is, who do you believe, me or your lying tastebuds, and go so far as to question the basic intelligence of the people who went to Jimmy’s as to whether they even went to the right place.

I suppose there’s something to savor in the fact that this degree of orthodoxy is being established not to protect a Trotter or a Bayless but on behalf of something as lowly as a ghetto hot dog stand. Still, orthodoxy is the enemy of open minds, now and always, and never so much as in discussions of something as mutable as restaurants. There should never be untouchable restaurants, restaurants that, because you liked them in 1998, must still be good today— especially if you, personally, are no longer out there tasting as widely and knowledgeably as you once were. Set up a shelf of your favorite places that are untouchable, and you make it impossible for others to see new things that might well be better. If George Stevens is unquestionably a great director and Shane established forever as the great western, you keep people from seeing Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, who each made at least two or three greater westerns than Shane in the same decade.

And that’s antithetical in every way to the spirit of open inquiry. It’s like a reporter being on the take; he’s no longer capable of seeing and reporting things clearly. And The Untouchables knew what fate lay in store for reporters who don’t report on the level.

As for me, if I want a great hot dog and fries and real Chicago atmosphere, I go to 35th St. Red Hots. It’s always good, you can count on it. Trust me.

35th St. Red Hots
500 W 35th St
Chicago, IL
60616-3508
(773) 624-9866

So some years ago, a guy who had experience under one of the most respected chefs in town went out on his own and opened a comfort food restaurant, which I have expressed love for on many occasions.  It was in an unpretentious suburb (Burbank), had his name and a picture of a pig on its sign, and in general, it looked and felt like exactly the place in which you expect to get comfort food like chicken-fried chicken with mashed potatoes, sage gravy, and green beans with bacon bits for about $8.99.

Even if Chuck Pine occasionally shows his Bayless background by making artisanal-Mexican hybrid dishes like Mexican Pot Roast, he’s firmly within what we would call The Comfort Food Paradigm, which is to say, unpretentious, a little affectation of down hominess and honky tonk good times, easy to like flavors, modest prices— in short, nothing that Grandma wouldn’t recognize as food.

*  *  *

So two guys who had experience under some of the most respected chefs in the world, Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz to be specific, now turn up in a sleekly modern yet welcoming space in Lincoln Park, Kith & Kin.  And they start serving comfort food in something of a fine dining atmosphere, sometimes with French words or the names of pork breeds on the menu (though in general it’s very light on the ingredient-genealogy thing).  In some ways they’re fitting The Comfort Food Paradigm, in some ways they’re breaking it wide open.  A lot of people are loving it.

Me… some of it impressed me, some of it left me thinking, is that it?  Is comfort food enough when you’re performing on this stage, or should we expect more?  Does the mere fact of being in this fine dining atmosphere, in this neighborhood and with these resumes, oblige you to play at the more elaborate games of teasing and subverting expectations and expanding minds that seem to be de rigeur for fine dining these days?  Can you look like The Hot New Chicago Restaurant Paradigm and serve food like The Comfort Food Paradigm at the same time?

Or am I just asking questions that no else wants the answers to?

Before you answer that, let me walk through a couple of dishes.  One that’s received a lot of acclaim is the fried confit chicken thighs, and this is a good example of how a deceptively simple dish— fried chicken, dumplings, gravy— can have a lot of technique and work behind it which produce incrementally more wonderful results.  Doing chicken as confit produced dark meat that had reduced halfway to a jerky texture in some ways, yet still had the juiciness and crispiness of fried chicken, set off simultaneously by salty gravy and skin, the fluffy blandness of dumplings, and the bitterness of some brussels sprouts.  The technique and balance of this dish were impeccable, redefining the very idea of chicken and dumplings as a dish.

But if you’re redefining dishes, are you still in a comfort food zone?  At the very least, you’re pushing it to the edge of comfort, but with great success in this case.  At the same time, though, my wife had short ribs in a traditional veal stock-wine braise.  A classic dish, executed very well… and exactly as any nice French restaurant might make it, or would have made it in 1920, or indeed, as I’ve made it at home.  You got a problem with that?  Not exactly, but if I’m again expecting something as revelatory as the fried chicken thighs, I’m left waiting for the punchline.

Or is that just me?  Maybe.  But that’s how I felt about the meal— constantly wondering, should I just be happy to be comforted, or do I want my comfort nudged to the next level?  A salad was another good example— pecans and blue cheese and some poached pears could be in a salad anywhere, there’s one not entirely unlike it at California Pizza Kitchen, but not many places would use lightly grilled escarole, softening its texture and sharpening its taste; a wonderfully simple but refined touch.  But hardly safe or expected, if that’s supposed to go with the comfort territory.

On the other hand the pork “crock,” a spreadable pork pate, was pleasant enough (we ate it all) but it hardly seemed memorable as pate goes; here’s where Kith & Kin seemed timid next to the Mados and Bristols and Purple Pigs.  (The LTHer who damned it as being like Underwood deviled ham wasn’t being that cruel.)  Likewise, one dessert pulled off the highwire act with great success despite an executional error— an olive oil cake, served a little hard and cold, but beautifully balanced with a lush orange-vanilla ice cream; the other played it safe (fresh churros with a chocolate ganache to dip in) and was appropriately choco-decadent, but no more.  Again, the one that tickled the mind, too, made the one that merely pleased the belly look a little small.

It could be that Kith & Kin is exactly what it wants to be— sometimes ingeniously innovative, often simply a nicer version of Stanley’s Kitchen & Tap.  An audience for what it is has clearly found it, and so maybe everyone will just live happily ever after and not every meal has to be overthought like I’m doing right now.  But I liked the Kith & Kin that pushed my comfort zone so much more than the one that comforted me and no more, that I think it’s almost a shame if you have that ability and don’t use it to the fullest.  Enjoy your success, Kith & Kin— but don’t get comfortable.

Kith & Kin
1119 West Webster
Chicago, IL 60614
(773) 472-7070

HC Monterrey, Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

The tourist district of Playa del Carmen was just a few blocks behind me, but already I was in a different Mexico, dusty and built out of crumbling plaster. I couldn’t see it ahead, the place I’d heard about, but suddenly I could smell it, sizzling beef on the air. I walked into the butcher shop and there was a counter where they sold the goods— but mainly there was a grill, the size of a double bed, smoke rising from it as a couple of guys with tongs threw long, jagged pieces of meat onto the grill. The smell of arrachera, skirt steak, was manly and primal, and a few dollars’ worth of pesos bought me a hunk of still sizzling meat with the barest of accompaniments— a baked potato and some limes. It was maybe the greatest beef experience of my life.

*  *  *

Los Potrillos, Chicago.

Lots of grocery stores have a place to grab a bite in them, whether it’s slice pizza at Dominick’s or the full-fledged food court at the Kingsbury Whole Foods. But there’s a unique character to the taquerias inside Mexican markets— partly it’s that you can tell they want to show off the meat counter’s goods in the best light to encourage sales, like that butcher shop in Mexico did; partly it’s the social side, the fact that a market is something of a community gathering place, like a Mexican town square, especially on weekends when they expand their menus to include specials like birria and menudo.  Whatever the reason, they’re only about a million times livelier than their wan equivalents in American groceries, and they make for an immersive experience in Chicago’s Mexican culture.  In some ways they’re about the most authentic Mexican eating experiences in town, at least in the sense that they’re making the fewest concessions to the gringo trade in terms of menu items or English on the signage.

Taqueria Ricardo.

Which is not to say they’re all the same— in fact, they have many different characters and feels.  Some are big bustling cafeterias with lines of guisados (stews) or gorditas frying; others are like corner diners, a few stools lined up in front of a grillman as he works in a cloud of meat smoke.  Although tacos de carne asada, steak tacos, are the universally standard menu item and seem to account for half the business at any taqueria, beyond that there are plenty of regional variations which seem to suggest that Chicago’s Latino neighborhoods are in turn reflecting Mexican regional differences.  For instance, on the northwest side (which besides Mexicans includes many South Americans) rotisserie or grilled chicken is an important item, and a cafeteria line of guisados is often found.  While on the south side, handpatted tortillas (tortillas heche a mano) and skilled tortilla-makers visibly at work on the line are the center of attention.

Los Potrillos.

For the last few months, I’ve been scouting out and sampling supermercado taquerias around town whenever lunchtime presented me with the desire for Mexican food.  To be honest, I felt like I had fallen into a bit of a rut in my Mexican dining, eating at the same few places, a not uncommon ailment even among foodies, and this gave me an entire new subcategory, largely uncharted, to use to compel myself to try new places.  Only one Mexican supermercado taqueria is widely known in the Chicago foodosphere: Wicker Park’s Tierra Caliente, formerly Carniceria Leon, famous for some of the best tacos al pastor (the real kind, on the gyros-style cone) in town.  My initial thought was, here was an opportunity to find a place that might even surpass Tierra Caliente at the thing it’s famous for.  Ironically, that’s the one thing I didn’t really do; as it turns out, only one of the other supermercado taquerias I found actually serves pastor on a cone at all, and though it’s every bit as good as Tierra Caliente’s, I’m still happy to say that if you want pastor, Tierra Caliente is the logical place to try first.

Pastor spit at Taqueria Ricardo.

But I found so many other interesting things that it hardly mattered.  What follows below is my notes on more than a dozen supermercado taquerias all around town.  Typically, I tried carne asada tacos on the first visit, because that seemed an easy standard for comparison between places that cared enough to try harder and places that didn’t; but if there was any reason to think they emphasized something else, I tried that instead, and aimed in general to sample the various restaurants’ strengths.  (As has been noted on LTHForum, one of the challenges for these places is that since they’re cranking out food in quantity rather than to order, you have to time your visit well for the peak experience— for instance, steak tacos are best at lunch rush, when turnover is high and you have the best odds for getting steak fresh off the fire; but tacos al pastor are better a little off peak hour, when your meat has time to really crisp up in the gyros machine.  And of course, if there isn’t a gyros machine, take a pass on pastor— fried in a pan is common, but nowhere near as good.)

Carne asada tacos, Los Potrillos.

*  *  *

After I had compiled a list of about a dozen places or so, I arranged an LTHForum event at three of the best, which took place this past Saturday.  Besides wanting to introduce my finds to more people, I was eager to visit some of them in a larger party that would allow me to explore their menus in greater detail.  So if you’re interested in checking some of these taquerias out, I’d recommend these three first as not only three of the best but offering a good cross-section of the scene and what’s to be had at different places.  Our first stop was Los Potrillos:

This is a small taco grill that really does first-rate steak tacos, cecina tacos, etc., thanks to an excellent grillman who serves good quality meat hot and juicy off the grill in big, tender chunks.  We also ordered the consomme de chivo which had impressed me on an earlier visit, though it was kind of watery and not as exciting this time— maybe it would have been better after cooking down for another hour or two.  (The pot on which Consomme de Chivo is painted in big letters was curiously missing as well.)

Next was Taqueria Ricardo. Besides the best atmosphere (you wouldn’t necessarily know you were in a supermercado at all, as it’s pretty separate), a ramshackle riot of tile that suggests the over-the-top exuberance of Mexico, this has such an extensive menu that we wound up really having a full (very full) lunch here.  Chicken grilled over live fire was a star here, but so were pastor tacos served at the peak of grilled crispiness, an excellent green salsa-poblano tamale, a lively caldo de siete mares (soup of the seven seas) with a big langoustine plopped right in it, a weekend special of barbacoa de res, and more.  (Though one I wouldn’t recommend was David Hammond’s choice of pickled pig’s feet, which proved that there is a lot of fat and not much meat on a pig’s foot.)  This is really a great Mexican restaurant in both food and atmosphere, which deserves wider attention and discovery.

Taqueria Ricardo; above: chicken over heater, below: caldo de siete mares, pickled pigs’ feet.

Finally we headed down to La Villita to Carniceria Aguascalientes, which has a large cafeteria-style area built on the handmade gorditas that are its star attraction.  Pork in red and green salsas and a poblano-cheese filling all proved to be worthy fillings for the wonderfully warm and nurturing freshly-fried gorditas.

Thanks to all who came along with me on Saturday and I hope many more will follow in our footsteps, discovering one of the last frontiers of ethnic food experience in Chicago.  Now here’s my list:

FAR NORTH

Chapala Taqueria
7117 N. Clark
An attractive modern grocery whose taqueria stresses pollo asado al carbon, char-grilled chicken. It was indeed first-rate, with a subtly seasoned outside (not just Goya Sazon) and cooked well; carne asada was fine if not first-tier. Weekend specials, including carnitas and menudo, would be worth checking out.

Chapala Taqueria.

Supermercado Carreta
6906 N. Clark
If you have an elderly aunt who wants to try a supermercado taqueria, this one is easily the spiffiest and most friendly to the hygiene-obsessed in its area, and the menu pictures on the wall looked promising. But a gordita with carne asada was fatally bland, flavorless masa and the meat smothered in lettuce, chese and crema. Deserves another try from another part of the menu, but disappointing.

Supermercado Almita
5957 N. Clark
This little grocery with a tin ceiling and wooden shelves has a 1927-in-amber decrepitude that will either charm you or creep you out; I was charmed by the two ladies running it, watching Mexican soaps as one of them made me a homey, but perfectly decent, steak taco.

NORTHWEST

Taqueria Ricardo
4429 W. Diversey
Easily my favorite find to date; I can’t think of another Mexican restaurant in Chicago that so captures the ramshackle charm of Mexico itself, from the over the top tilework to the grill haphazardly stacked on top of its burning wood. The menu is wildly diverse, ranging from seafood to grilled chicken adobo and rabbit. Carne asada is good and the pastor is flavorful with lots of pineapple dripping down. Wood smoke means the chicken is outstandingly flavorful, and the presentation of a whole chicken on a metal stand is impressive. A milanesa torta was freshly fried and the bread was toasted, both good signs. Though the guisados were hit (chicken in green salsa) and miss (chicharron), a weekend special of barbacoa de res was excellent, and so was a tamale of poblano and cheese. Among the seafood items, the caldo de siete mares was very nice, impressively decked with a whole langoustine, but a shrimp cocktail, though the shrimp were of nice quality, was way too sweet. In summer I’ve also seen them grilling in the parking lot.

Los Potrillos
3624 W. Belmont
With religious iconography on the walls, this tiny taqueria has a real step-out-of-Chicago feel.  Good quality beef, cooked to be tender and juicy by an expert grillman, makes the carne asada tacos and cecina tacos some of the best in the city.  But my favorite find on my first visit was the weekend special of consomme de chivo, goat soup, which had big chunks of goat in a great ancho broth.

Carniceria Jimenez
3840 W. Fullerton/others
I can’t speak to other outposts of this grocery chain, but with its decor of old radios and vintage Mexican movie stars like Pedro Infante, this taqueria bizarrely comes off like the Burt’s Pizza of supermercado taquerias. For some odd reason I ordered a torta milanesa, which looked textbook-correct but was kind of less than the sum of its parts; the better looking things are the guisados.

Guisados at Carniceria Jimenez.

El Gigante
2500 N. Laramie
Not gigante at all, but this small market with a new taqueria has neon in the window to announce Barbacoa and Carnitas on weekends, which is promising. A weekday steak taco had good, tender beef, but was undercut by rubbery tortillas…

Carniceria y Taqueria La Loma
2535 N. Laramie
…while infinitely better tortillas were a strong point across the street; the steak seemed slightly cheaper (and cut to tiny bits) but it was greasy and salty in all the right ways. Pastor was given pride of place on the menu, so even though no cone was visible, I fell for it, and was reminded once again: If you don’t see a cone, leave the pastor alone!

El Gigante.

NEAR NORTH

Carniceria Guanajuato
Multiple locations
This grocery chain is one of the easiest supermercado taquerias to find, but I’ve never had anything at the taqueria I thought was better than okay, though I’m sure quality varies by location. Still, in the case of the 1436 N. Ashland location, it would be a shame to come here over Tierra Caliente.

Tierra Caliente
1402 N. Ashland
The former Carniceria Leon is the one supermercado taqueria widely known to gringo foodies, complete with Dolinsky icon.  It also has the highest ratio of taqueria to grocery, suggesting where their attention really lies.  The star attraction is unquestionably the pastor, which if you get it at the right moment (a little after lunch rush) is a perfect blend of crispiness and juiciness, and a contender for best in the city.  But LTHers have identified other notable items such as the gordita de chivo and weekend carnitas.

Danny’s Fresh Market
2140 N. Western
You’d think proximity to possibly the best steak tacos in the city, Las Asadas, would step up your game, but everything about Danny’s was dingy and tired; a pork guisado had the taste of seasonings that expired in 2005, and a steak taco came with purple (!) onion, lettuce tomato and mayo, giving it an unmistakable eau de Whopper.

Huarache at Laura.

Carniceria y Taqueria Laura
1051 N. Ashland
The enormous huarache I got, piled high with lettuce, starchy winter tomato, avocado and crema, looked like a monstrosity, and the fact that both meat and huarache were reheated seemed a second strike. Then I bit into it— and was surprised how good it was.  The steak was full of flavor and the huarache toothsome and comforting.  This place is surely overlooked due to the three La Pasaditas being just up the street (though Vital Info praised it in a long-ago Pasaditathon on Chowhound), but it deserves more attention and a return from me.

SOUTH SIDE

Carniceria Aguascalientes
3132 W. 26th St.
This meat market located near the La Villita gate has a large open dining and cooking area in 50s diner white tile, which serves to point attention to the main attraction: a woman hand-patting gordita shells and laying them out in neat rows.  Everything benefits from the toothsome, comfort-foody appeal of the piping hot masa shell, but that’s not to slight well-grilled steak or the complex spiciness of a pork guisado, only two of many choices.

La Chiquita
3555 W. 26th St./2637 S. Pulaski/others
Big, bustling supermarkets on the south side and in suburbs like Cicero and Aurora, these have functional-looking taquerias inside whose main attraction is handmade gorditas, sopas, etc. (Pulaski’s is much nicer, but seemed deader, than 26th St.’s 70s throwback.) Fresh masa made for a very good gordita with pork in red sauce at the 26th street location, though I’d still choose Carniceria Aguascalientes for that first.

Jerry’s Certified
4524 S. Ashland
I came here at off-peak hours, so it was kind of dead like a coffeeshop at three in the afternoon, but I have a feeling that at prime time on weekends, this is an exciting place. There are lots of good signs (literally), with weekend specials like chile rellenos and caldo de siete mares (seafood soup). The emphasis of the everyday menu seems to be on the tortas, and the torta milanesa I had was exemplary; on the other hand, it was one of the only places where I got gringo’d on a steak taco and it arrived with lettuce, tomato and cheese.

Carniceria y Taqueria La Loma.

“Good morning,” the hostess said.

A second later, “Good morning,” a waiter said.

I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve gotten two good mornings at a breakfast place.  The hostess should say “good morning,” that’s her job, but the other one was a completely unbidden freebie.  It’s almost as if they wanted my business!  Were happy to be serving food and see customers!

Things were off to a good start at Nana, the newish breakfast place in Bridgeport (just down the street from the newly-closed Healthy Food, of whom more in the not too distant future).  The place had an attractive combination of blond wood, white paint and sunlight.  It was not crowded at 8:30.  They were friendly.  These are not small things, in the world of Sunday breakfast.

Nana is a modern Ameri-yuppie breakfast place with a Mexican slant to the menu— chilaquiles, huevos rancheros, etc.  My wife had their take on eggs benedict (pictured above), eggs on housemade chorizo on top of a cheese pupusa, with a poblano cream.  This would have been great if the pupusa weren’t cooked hard enough to have to saw through it.  I really liked the flavors of the bite I had, the earthiness of the masa crossed with the creaminess of eggs benedict; but the texture would benefit from a dialing up on the Fluffiometer.  I had something named Benicio, a potato fritter with housemade pancetta on it.  (So if in-house charcuterie is reaching breakfast places, does that mean it’s over as a trend?  Because I’d be just fine with it lasting another century or two as one.)  This had a chipotle cream with a lot of heat, and it was fine, but not as interesting as the Nanadict.  The kids had sweet stuff, and one of them had buttermilk pancakes with spiced apples on it, which was pretty simple and pretty great.

Nana is a long ways from me, and it’s probably a long ways from you, but it’s about 10 minutes on 90/94 from me on a Sunday morning, which is no more than a lot of other breakfast places.  Anyway, I’ll happily drive it for this warm welcome with no waiting.

3267 South Halsted Street
Chicago, IL 60608-6618
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Post about Lockwood deleted. See here for details (Facebook registration required).

My conversation with fellow food writer Michael Nagrant about the last year in Chicago restaurant openings and trends continues (from here):

MICHAEL NAGRANT: I don’t know if the recession prevented Town and Country from happening, or Dale Levitski prevented Town and Country from happening.  I mean I feel for the dude losing his mom, and I can see how the anguish would be crippling, but that being said, I also have a lot of suspicion about someone who’d rather accrue $4,000 in back rent and squat than leverage the reputation he has and get a job to pay the bills while he gets his ideal thing going.

But, yeah I hear you and agree.  The 2008 Brasserie Ruhlman/Trump Tower explosion etc was a total Michael Milken/Gorden Gekko/Edward Lewis (Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman) corporate raid by New York restauranteurs and chefs trying to leverage the reputation our homeboy chefs earned on the cover of every magazine in 2005-2007.  The cool thing is instead of Julia Roberts getting screwed, the economy screwed the carpetbaggers.

Speaking of the eighties, your fervor for these high low concepts has sort of a Roman Polanski reporting on his five minutes looking through the peephole to the girl’s locker room at the local junior high feel.  Well, ok, maybe more like you just did a couple lines of coke from Jack Nicholson’s golden bowl-type enthusiasm (I kid), but still, I’m not sure I’m as positive about the actual execution.

I agree with the theory and ideal you outline, about the possibility of exploring authentic culture deeper and offering value in the process.  However, I feel like the general reality has been that those folks practicing this new form of restaurant ownership are subconsciously or otherwise using the low part of it as an excuse to lower their expectations.

Bill Kim worked at Charlie Trotters for a while.  I can’t believe he got by without tasting his food on a nightly basis.   And yet, there’s this wild inconsistency of plates served at Belly Shack and Urban Belly in terms of salt, mouthfeel, and balance.  Thing is, when it’s on, it’s really something.

But, where’s the discipline?  I feel like the real value of these high level chefs opening lower end concepts up is in their ability to enforce the discipline from the high level at the low level.  The most remarkable thing about places like Blackbird, Trotter’s, Alinea, irrespective of how you feel about the powders or the close tables and loud music or the relatively now old school fusion (guess which is which) is that the food experience is military precision consistent.  The dish that goes out unsalted or underseasoned at these spots in my experience is a very rare thing.  You may not agree with the flavor combinations or may dislike the intellectual underpinnings, but rarely have I disagreed with the technical execution at these spots.

Then again, Big Star gets that right, in fact, again I agree with you, pork belly taco, nice fusion of the worlds, though I’ll quibble that that since a pork belly McGriddle is pretty much a fait accompli at this point, maybe it’s not so impressive. Also, Paul Kahan’s tacos are a lot tastier than Wolfgang Puck’s pizzas, and soup for that matter.  I’ve never understood it, but while I respect Puck as one of the most innovative chefs of his time and a back upon which many stand, he has a Kevin Costner like ability to suck it up when unveiling mass-market concepts.    But, look past the food at Big Star and you start focusing on the vinyl stools and fake rough hewn pine look or whatever and ache for the real character one really would have found in Bakersfield in the 50’s.

If Merle Haggard walked in to Big Star, the record player would screech to a stop and a group of hipsters in Ryan Adam’s t-shirts would converge on him and beat his ass.  The sleek unfinished comforting womb off Avec has somehow given way to the concrete and Home Depot factory second finishes that look like a cold unfinished family basement.

Interesting on Powerhouse….as I said then, the place looked like a steakhouse as imagined by the Ramada Inn interior design team.  However foodwise, and I’m not sure if you ate there when John Peters was in the kitchen or when he’d left, but while it was very straightforward, it was a technically precise elevated level of comfort food I was really excited by.  In that same vein, my new foodie fan boy obsession right now is Kith and Kin – David Carrier’s of Trio, French Laundry and Andrew Brochu’s of Alinea, Pops new spot.  The only thing revolutionary about it is that they’re serving what you want to eat every day seasoned at incredibly perfect levels, aka Michelin chop mom food.   It’s sort of this perfect marriage of what I’ve been looking for from Bill Kim, Blackbird team etc…I mean you even get a sort of reinvention of form in that you get what seems like your everyday Montreal Poutine augmented by French Laundry quality gravy, all for like $6.   Of course, the disclaimer for those who don’t know, I had an essay in the Alinea book, and so maybe I’m prone to liking Alinea shoot-off dudes, though I never knew or met John Peters or David Carrier – they were before my time.

The culture guy friend of yours who doesn’t know about Alinea, yeah, I mean talk about humbling.  I’d say 9 out of the last 10 people I’ve mentioned the word Alinea cookbook or restaurant to, look at me like I’m from Mars, including a person who lived two blocks from the place. Again, I don’t know if this is the entrée to the media discussion or discussion about how food journos make a living in the next decade.  But when Gourmet Mag’s best restaurant in America isn’t on people’s radars, can we even expect to make a living talking about food that doesn’t involve me getting a surf punk color and cut and wearing sunglasses on the back of my head?

MICHAEL GEBERT: To answer a few of these things in not too long a manner: the unfortunate thing about these high/low joints, and now I’ve been to Xoco too, is that they all seem to be struggling to hit half the menu being worth a damn.  (For instance, I think the potstickers at Urban Belly were one of the most egregious cases of critical— and LTHForum— emperor’s-clothesism this side of Cho Jung.  Honestly, I could buy a bag of shu mai from Trader Joe’s, stick ’em in freshly made ginger soy sauce, and claim they were Slagel Farm organic goat-testa potstickers from Urban Belly, and nobody would call me on it. It’s mainly the soups that wowed me there.)  At Trotter prices, that failure rate would be unacceptable.  But the point is, they’re not at Trotter prices (although they’re not necessarily so revolutionary in pricing, either; I wouldn’t say that Xoco is any cheaper than Frontera, really, and if Avec dished you up three tacos, I don’t think it would be that much more than $6).

Maybe a lot of the difference in our outlooks is that so much of my food adventuring happens at lunchtime.  I’m pretty damn grateful for Belly Shack existing, ready to serve me something interesting and with a certain affected chicness at 12:30 on Tuesday.  You are, of course, right about the inauthenticity of Big Star’s interior, which is about as honky-tonk as a dorm room at Brown, but again, that’s a complaint about the execution, not the philosophical issues involved in being a Baudrillardian simulacrum of a Texas roadhouse by way of Sprockets.  Anyway, I hope we get ten more of them this year, and five will have something worth going back for, and two will, hopefully, be really good.  Let a thousand pork belly tacos bloom.

I ate at Powerhouse at what should have been John Peters’ highpoint, but I thought it was a well-executed, largely unmemorable meal, like dining in the best non-Disney-property restaurant in Orlando (which I also did, some years ago).  I have more hopes for the comfort food at Kith & Kin, even if it does sound like a tea shop opened by two lesbians with lots of cats.  As for your future career tasting 20-gallon tubs of slop and going “Whoa, now THAT’S what I’m talkin’ about,” perhaps that is the segue to our food media discussion….

TOMORROW: The Food Reviewer, Dinosaur or Last Man Standing?

This year food writers in Chicago seemed to do as much writing about the act of writing about food in backchannel places like Twitter and blogs as they did actual writing about food.  Those discussions were lively, fun and not entirely closed to outsiders, but even those participating in them often felt that important pieces of the conversation were happening just out of sight.  So I invited the published-everywhere, tireless Michael Nagrant to kick some of this stuff back and forth with me here, in a more coherent form than a stream of tweets.  Also unlike on Twitter, the discussion quickly ran very long, so all this week I’ll be running it as a series of back and forths.  We start with the subject of how the year looked from the point of view of new restaurants; one of us thought it was a bad year, one of us, surprise, thought the very opposite:

MICHAEL GEBERT: Welcome to Baconland, sir. Despite the recession, it seems like we had no shortage of openings this year and really, not that many closings of places that weren’t on life support already.  If anything, we had fewer big boom and busts, like the way the year before we suddenly had a bunch of places with “brasserie” in their name, then quickly had a bunch of closed brasseries.  How did the year look to you as far as the food scene goes in Chicago?

MICHAEL NAGRANT: Yeah, I mean last January, I think everyone was all doomsday about the death of dining out etc. I can’t say I was any different. It just seemed like there was a big shake-up coming.

However, as someone who cooks at home a lot, I made the mistake of thinking everyone else does too. I think I’ve underestimated the general public’s frequency of dining out, which is to say despite the proliferation of Food Network, artisanal this and that blah blah blah, people more than ever don’t know how to cook, and thus, eat out a ton. Constrained by a bad economy, they may do it less, but they still do it. Eating out at the really high end may still be a luxury, but I’m not totally convinced eating out in general is a luxury anymore as much as it’s become a way of life and pseudo-survival. The chefs who understood that, scaled down, offered $2 tacos or $8 gourmet burgers etc and captured that market on its way down to some extent.

I also think what ended up happening, or why we didn’t see a big boom bust, is that the class most responsible for such cycles, i.e. all the foodie dilettantes with extra money, the surgeons or lawyers or investment bankers who think opening a restaurant is all about having a club house to party at or that it’s like throwing their annual dinner party stayed out of the market. They were either scared away or they just didn’t have the liquid cash for such ventures.

The folks who ended up opening anything last year were opening up second or third restaurant launches. They were established groups, who knew what they were getting in to, and thus understood how to manage a restaurant, the importance of being well capitalized, and were poised to take advantage of some of the real estate deals being offered in a depressed economy. Last year was the year of Bill Kim, the Blackbird team, the Lula team, the Frontera team, Mia Francesca folks, well-funded hotels launching restaurants, Michael Kornick, and Hearty Boys.

I do think super high-end dining was impacted to some extent. Rumors were everywhere about the empty tables at Charlie Trotters and L20 on Friday and Saturday nights. Laurent Gras told me they were down 33% a year ago. The thing is, more than any other segment, these are the best funded of restaurants and probably those most likely to survive a downturn, at least in the short term because they actually have operating capital on hand.

I also saw some of the most marvelous PR campaigns of my life last year. I mean late 2008, early 2009 was the year of L20 – Gras was everywhere, NYT, Wall Street, Esquire etc etc…when the chips were down, some people got super-creative.

That being said, there was a real thread of conservatism and a general lack of innovation in what happened. 2009 was the least inspiring year of restaurant openings in the last seven or eight for me. Not that it matters in the final equation to me much, but I wasn’t inspired by any dining room architecture, save the ceiling fresco at Cibo Matto. When the most innovative part of a new Paul Kahan restaurant is the dulce de leche milkshake, it just doesn’t feel right.

Also, the biggest thing to suffer as a result of this economy is service. Service just seems to get worse and worse, which I find counterintuitive. I mean, with the glut of out of work folks, you figure restaurants have some hungry competition for top notch servers, and yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. I mean this, no irony…when I’ve gone back to Detroit to visit my folks and ended up in a chain restaurant, I’ve generally gotten much better attentive sincere and knowledgeable service than I have at fine dining spots in Chicago. Not sure why that is.

What did you think? Excited, not excited?

GEBERT: Well, I’m pretty excited by the high/low combinations popping up.  Not that I think any of them is perfect, but I guess I felt like some of the high end openings of last year (say, Brasserie Ruhlmann) were like a repeat of the 80s, from the Donald Trump feeding Nancy Reagan’s social set with decor by Mario Buatta era of moneyed glitz— literally, of course, in the case of Sixteen, which actually is in a Trump property.  And as a devoted subscriber to Spy back in the day, been there done that.  (That also may reflect my own increasing unwillingness to drop the wad on $400 meals of dribbles and powders, in favor of the let’s-cook-every-frickin’-thing-on-a-naturally-raised-pig school of Vie, Mado, The Bristol, etc.)  I mean, we nearly had a restaurant with the ultimate stuck-up-WASP name, Town and Country.  If nothing else, the recession prevented that.

So anyway, even if Belly Shack has the phoniest graffiti in town, and charges a lot (relatively) for a kogi sandwich I compared to the future kogi pizza at California Pizza Kitchen, there’s something really appealing about guys from that world descending to earth and battling Subway and a million bar burgers and pizza deliverers for a place in the hearts of people who want change back from a $20.  As I commented on your most-important-restaurants-of-the-decade piece, I see this as the real area of excitement over the next couple of decades, young Asian entrepreneurs creating Asian fast food concepts that reflect their own cultures much more deeply than Panda Express or La Choy canned chop suey does, yet with a Disney/Blade Runner-esque feel to them that cannot be called authentic in any traditional sense.  Like Beard Papa, that opened last week— I mean, who knew we were lacking a national cream puff chain?  I’m not sure I’m even sure what a cream puff is, exactly.  Yet go read how CrazyC salivates over the first dozen she bought at LTHForum.

I think this is a heartening development not least because, as you say, the high end foodie world isn’t even the tip of the iceberg, it’s the ice cube on the top of the tip, and the iceberg is still megaboxes of frozen crap from Costco or Jewel.  I was surprised, but not really, some months back when I mentioned Alinea to another dad from my son’s class, and he’d never heard of it.  Big deal, except this guy does marketing research for arts organizations, he’s as versed on high culture in town as anybody, he’d be astonished if I’d never heard of Barenboim, yet high food culture just isn’t on his radar in the same way.

I don’t want to jump ahead to the media discussion portion, but for me so many of these issues are interlinked— the importance (or not) of four-star dining, the importance (or not) of reviewers for Establishment media, the increased attention paid to the diversity of ethnic dining, the increased attention I pay to bloggers and food sites where they talk about low-end dining.  They’re all part of a broadening of how people look at dining, forged initially by people like Calvin Trillin and the Sterns and then greatly accelerated by the internet.  And to me that’s had a huge influence on everything, from once hoity-toity media deigning to acknowledge that such dining exists, to chefs being unafraid to play around in low-end genres.  Ten years ago, Wolfgang Puck started selling pizzas in airports, he was a whore.  Now Paul Kahan starts selling tacos in a dive bar, and it’s the cutting edge.  And, not coincidentally, it’s accessible to a lot wider swath of Chicago than Blackbird is.

Even though I felt like a lot of Big Star was No Big Deal, there’s one thing there that absolutely shows the value of high end chefs entering a low end genre, and that’s the pork belly taco.  There are ten million taquerias in Chicago, but it took Kahan and Co. to put pork belly on one.  (Yes, I expect it happens at carnitas places all the time, but I don’t know of a place specifically selling pork belly tacos.)  That’s because small Mexican businesses are all conservative, they’re all about hewing to tradition.  The great ones are the ones that hew to tradition without crappy American foodservice compromises.  But it took chefs from high end dining, where novelty is a selling point, to shake it up and innovate something like the pork belly taco.  So that intersection of high and low is, again, the place for me where the real excitement is happening.

I’m less concerned about architecture, though I enjoy that and, in general, think it’s an upscale restaurant’s job to put on a show from the moment you walk in.  I can’t think of a place where I’ve walked in and found the room boring that I didn’t find the food boring too. (Powerhouse, for instance, was one recent failure where an underexciting meal started with prophetically bland decor.)  But I’ll go along with you that we didn’t see much excitement at the high end, but I’m okay with that.  Broadway was safer than ever, but Off-Broadway and Off-Off Broadway were pretty damn exciting.

TOMORROW: Nagrant explains why I’m crazy

I seem to go back and forth on what kind of thing makes my top 10 (restricted to things I had for the first time during this year); some years I’m down on fine dining and all my pleasures were down-homey, other years I have good luck and encounter some great chefs working in ways I really like. This year tended toward the latter; I really, really like what Allie Levitt of Mado called “The Green Market bunch,” chefs who are interested in finding the best ingredients at local markets or from regional producers and bringing out their flavors to the fullest. Nearly all of my best fine dining experiences— and even some a few rungs down from that— fell into that category, the master manipulators and molecular gastroenterologists did not do nearly as much for me this year (not that they got as many chances, since I tended to go to the locavorish places in the first place).

As for down-home dining, it wasn’t a year of many great new discoveries, though old favorites continued to please (and Sun Wah in particular has really blossomed in so many ways this year).  But as I went through the year, I found more than I expected.  So here’s a top ten:

10. Grilled sable liver at Taxim, with a nod to its melitzanosalata, duck gyros, some dish or other with lentils and Greek yogurt, etc. I’ve always liked the comfiness of Turkish food, which is really a closer description for what this Greek restaurant serves than anything that suggests the party food of Greektown. Others have my same level of enthusiasm (e.g., Mike Sula) while many, including a lot of LTHers, seemed underwhelmed by the relatively restrained approach of Chef David Schneider. I might agree that Taxim still lands slightly more on the potential than the achievement side as yet, but still, I liked the best of what I ate there an awful lot.

9. Cucumber cocktail at Graham Elliot. Though I had some very good dishes on two visits to Graham Elliot, the best thing I had there was a terrific summer cocktail from mixologist Lynn House, using her housemade cucumber soda, vodka and a little egg froth on top. It’s called Almost Paradise, and it’s too modestly titled.

8. Fried bologna at Taste of Melrose Park. Okay, this one was a total package deal from a pretty magical night, but really, it’s surprising how good that fried bologna was. With a nod to Pierogi Fest in Whiting, for also helping redeem my faith in street fests.

7. Steak tacos at Las Asadas and Tacos el Jaliciense, and pastor at Tierra y Caliente: Two of these are sort of ringers, since I ate at the old Las Asadas on Western and elsewhere before they opened a new one on Western, and Tierra y Caliente is the former, and widely praised, Carniceria Leon on Ashland north of Division.  So I’d been to both in previous incarnations, but both hit new peaks— I ate at both the old and the new Las Asadas within a short time, and the latter blew the former away for sheer juicy beeferifficness.  And maybe I just timed Tierra y Caliente perfectly one Saturday afternoon, but it was pretty much the pastor poster child that day, crispy and tart.  As for Jaliciense, that’s a nice little stand on a triangle of land near Grand and California that also can turn out a heck of a nice steak taco.  I have more Mexican delights coming in a longterm project I’ve been working on, but those should do for now.

6. Edzo’s. Oh yeah, baby:

5. Black-eyed pea cassoulet at Chaise Lounge. Cary Taylor and this glitzy-rowdy Wicker Park spot were in my sustainable fish video, and seafood is the focus there, but I have to say, as terrific as some other things were— lobster pot pie, scallops in beet schmear, an unexpectedly good almond cake at dessert— it was this amazing blend of Franco-Southern comfort food that I could just curl up with right now. If there’s a relatively undiscovered front-rank chef in town, Cary has quickly become it.

4. Hoosier Mama. Too many contenders for the best thing I had from there— could it be the savory pork, apple and sage pie, the best bang for your pork buck in town at $4 a slice? The Southern-sweet simplicity of discoveries like Hoosier Sugar Cream pie or oatmeal pie? Apple quince, cranberry chess (okay, not as wild about that one, but it looks nice below), maple pecan? Luckily, one doesn’t have to choose— even if Hoosier Mama is pricier than supermarket pie, it’s still luxury on a budget compared to ordering dessert out, and a much surer bet.

3. Mado. What do I look back and think of first from several meals at Mado?  Rabbit agnolotti, I guess— because they’ve completely turned me around on their spare approach to pasta (partly, I hasten to add, because they’re better at it now).  But austerity has rarely had so much flavor as when Mado tosses housemade pasta with the bare minimum of stuff.  Unless, of course, it’s when Mado simply dresses a few vegetables, or simply roasts a fish in their woodburning oven, or simply does any number of things so perfectly.

2. My country ham, tied with green label organic prosciutto and speck from La Quercia. Read all about the former here; as for the latter, I’ve never even gotten to try the creme de la ham at La Quercia, the acorn-fed Berkshire, but noshing on a variety of hams at the Eckhouse’s home during the shoot for Sky Full of Bacon #10, the green label organic clearly seemed a level or two above their already excellent product, and as good as anything I ate in Spain (not that it’s the same style, exactly, but close enough). Meanwhile, the hint of smoke applied to the speck, light as it is, lifts this German style into its own special dimension.

1. Vie. As I wrote then: “As much as I admire what’s happening at the very high end, my soul likes a little funk in the mix, and I find the precious arrangement of things into little cubes to get sterile sometimes, however exquisite it may be. For me, then, in my experience there’s no Chicago restaurant at work right now better than the meal I had last Saturday night, for its dedication to getting the best, richest, most purely satisfying flavor out of the best ingredients. And if you can think of other things a restaurant should be doing first, well, we just have different priorities, I guess.”

Since everybody’s writing insanely long lists these days, here are some more from the short list I kept through the year: the sublimely weird, weirdly sublime pad thai using jellyfish for noodles at Schwa; Thai beef jerky at Spoon Thai; pork shu mai at Shui Wah; chicken soup at Belly Shack, and my own hummus soup for Soup and Bread at the Hideout; classic American breakfast at Nancy’s in Columbus OH, which is no more, and a best-in-ten-years Denver omelet at the unjustly underappreciated Palace Grill; pork shoulder at Avec, Paul Kahan’s blood sausage corn dog at the Green City Market BBQ, and pork belly tacos, if nothing else yet, at Big Star; more pork belly, with quince, at Boka; consomme chivo at the Los Potrillos grocery on Belmont, and shrimp ceviche at El Abuelo y Yo; duck egg in an orange-scented pesto at The Bristol; the velvety pasta at Fianco, and the pork orrechiete, which is NOT the one from John Coletta’s book, at Quartino; my own strawberry mint sorbet; Lithuanian bread from Ideal Pastry on Milwaukee Avenue; juicy grilled kebaps from Coach’s Corner in Whiting or Hammond, I forget which; brats and other sausages from Ream’s Market in Elburn, Ilinois; bacon-gorgonzola-venison sausage at Brand BBQ; cured, lox-like trout at Browntrout; Saxon Creamery’s Green Field cheese; Elizabeth Dahl’s concord grape sorbet at Landmark; raccoon; and our honey.

And as always, I end the year grateful for you, dear reader-viewer, whoever you are who finds charm in these random dispatches and, hopefully, something a little closer to art in the videos by which I chronicle my love for those who make beautiful food.  Happy New Year!

Ten best for: 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003

It’s ironic, after all the years I spent working in Chicago’s downtown, that it’s now the one place in Chicago I’m afraid to go. I’ll brave bad neighborhoods or farflung suburbs heedlessly, but… $20 parking? Tourist hordes? Hard Rock and Rainforest? Now that’s scary. So it took me some months to finally try Rick Bayless’ new sandwich/soup spot, Xoco, but when my wife made me an ophthalmologist appointment, I knew it was my chance to lead the family down there for that and another putative delight I’d heard about.

We arrived at Xoco at 11:15 and a line was already forming; because we were a party of four, we were put into a holding pattern before being given our number for seating.  (Though mildly irritating, the degree of organization is pretty impressive and obviously necessary— Hot Doug can manage his whole floor by sight but the seating here snakes around the tiny space, making it impossible to survey from the kitchen.)

Also mildly irritating is the fact that the soup menu is not served until 3:00, meaning that the whole menu here is about ten sandwiches.  (One soup was available in a small size, so we ordered it.)  Of the sandwiches, we got cochinita pibil (slow-roasted pork), a chicken one and a beef shortrib one; there was really nothing to appeal to an 8-year-old, so he got churros and chips and salsa to eat, which automatically made him the one most likely to love his lunch.

Basically: loved the crusty toasted bread, baked specially for Xoco by Labriola, which puts these sandwiches instantly in a category far above most of the sandwiches in town.  Loved the soup, hearty and with deep flavor.  Churros were pretty much the best ever.  But… we felt the sandwiches were a very mixed bag.  Easily the best, and not coincidentally also the simplest and most traditional, was the cochinita pibil, with its standard accompaniments of pickled onions and habanero sauce.  The other two both seemed overcomplicated, too many flavors (hot sauce, beans, avocado) and textures undercutting the natural good flavors of the very nice, name-brand natural meats Bayless is buying.  It didn’t help that the woodsmoked chicken was just above cold, and far too drowned in red chile sauce to taste of woodsmoke, or that the short ribs, conversely, seemed bland and gummy.

As many have noted, this is an expensive lunch— we spent just shy of $50 for four.  Now, compared not to other Mexican torta joints but to other downtown options, it’s not out of line; I doubt you’d get out of a plastic meal at the likes of Buca di Beppo for less.  What was disappointing wasn’t paying so much for things that didn’t work, but just that they didn’t work, dammit.  Xoco has so much obvious potential, and much of it is good enough to make the parts that aren’t seem that much more inexplicable.  Me, the next time I go back, it’ll either be for breakfast before 11, or for soup after 3.

Next we trudged up north for something I’d heard about— that Nomi was making and selling exquisitely beautiful authentic French macarons.  What I read conjured up the image of a cute little shop popping up for Christmas, with a perky young woman who looked like Martha Quinn in a demure yet fetching elf costume* selling colorful cookies to people who gratefully popped them into their mouths on the spot and lit up with delight.  It was a lovely Christmas shopping fantasy, holiday commercialism on the Mag Mile at its most charming.

Unfortunately, it proved to exist only in my head.  The reality was that we entered the forbiddingly quiet Park Hyatt and looked around for macarons; not seeing any, we asked for Nomi, and rode the elevator to the 7th floor, where Nomi at lunchtime was as lively as a law library.  Once there, we asked for the macaron shop, and it was explained to us that there was no shop, but they sold them at the desk in the lobby.  We were, kindly, escorted back down and shown the very pretty display of macarons above, and we saw the price, which was, a dozen for $36.  A quick calculation ran through my head:

• These could be the best macarons in the world
• On the other hand, the best macarons in the world are probably in Paris
• And I’m sure not getting back to Paris any sooner by spending $36 for twelve cookies right now

Besides the price, there was just something dead about buying a dozen macarons from the hushed marble lobby of the Park Hyatt, like it was the Tomb of the Unknown Macaron, that seemed the ultimate buzzkill to my charming Christmas fantasy.  So we thanked them, and took a pass, and went on our way.

Maybe I’ll learn to make macarons sometime.

* If you don’t think Martha Quinn was by far the hotter of the two original female MTV veejays, I have nothing to say to you.