About a year ago, I decided to see if I could review 50 restaurants that had never been reviewed on LTHForum.  (A tangential mention didn’t count.)  This was largely in response to what I saw as LTHForum having grown a bit moribund as a discoverer of new things on the culinary scene.  It seemed like all anybody wanted to talk about was hamburger franchises like Five Guys and Sonic and the phone-answering deficiencies of Schwa; even the old pros seemed to be bringing us the latest breathless dispatch from their 900th visit to Salam or Patty’s Diner or Myron and Phil’s rather than trying anything new.

Since then, I have to say things have improved somewhat.  The burger chain threads haven’t totally vanished (and Schwa’s telephone habits just flared up again) but there have been good, wide-ranging and new-ground-breaking threads on things like carne asada tacos; and people have actually tried new restaurants like Taxim and Nightwood and Fianco and so on.  You’re just about ready to think it’s getting lively again when, suddenly, there’s a thread like this.

Brief recap: Mike Sula wrote about an illegal taqueria operating out of a garage on weekends.  Gary Wiviott posted about trying it.  Both concealed the address (though made it fairly easy to see how you could get it).  And then… LTHers got all hinky about somebody writing about a place and not telling you how to go there and try it for yourself!

Well, in the words of Brian…

The point isn’t that there’s one taco stand somewhere in somebody’s garage, that G Wiv found out about from Sula who found out about it from Rob Lopata, and now you can find out about it from him. The point is, there’s stuff like this all over if you go looking for it, and any of us can do that if we just make the effort. But you have to make the effort; complaining that a leading LTHer hasn’t spoonfed it to you is, well, as bad as talking about chain hamburgers. Get off your duff, roll down your windows, and start driving around Mexican neighborhoods till you smell something good! Then get out of your car, be friendly, eat something, take some pictures and post about it. It all starts with somebody going out and finding something that nobody had any idea was there until they went out and looked for it. Go out and find something that nobody’s seen before!

Or, like me, you finally could go try a place you’ve been driving by for 15 years.

* * *

Mr. V’s Pizza is in a strip mall on Elston, up in the far-northwest Forest Glen neighborhood.  It was the strip mall, I guess, that kept me from following Mike G’s Rule of Pizza (“Always try a pizza that dates back to the 1950s. There is always a small possibility that in the intervening 35+ years, they have NOT screwed it up by trying to make it more like Domino’s or something.”)  It looked like a lame slice place sticking generic toppings on premade crusts.  But somehow, my curiosity was finally piqued, and I went in.

There were a lot of good signs once I went inside.  It may not seem like a good sign that the menu has everything from Italian beef to ice cream, but it suggested to me that there was an old school Italian family restaurant concealed behind a pizza facade.  It was a good sign, too, that the menu mainly offered cheese and sausage pizza— there was a list of alternative toppings, but this was all about the Chicago classics, cheese and sausage.  It was a good sign that the slice rewarmer seemed to not be in use.

I ordered one of each, thin, and was told 20 minutes.  I went to walk around the immediate area, which was nondescript but suggested a thriving family neighborhood.  In the park next door, a family ate pizza while the kids played on the swings, and a little ways over I saw these guys:

There’s a funeral chapel with a 60s mansard roof next door; I peaked inside and saw, inexplicably, a merry-go-round goat:

And what’s up with this?  I started to feel like I was wandering the village in a Lovecraft story, and had stumbled on the portraits of the ancestors the locals don’t like to talk about:

20 minutes were up and I drove home.  I tore the paper cover open and:

Classic Chicago thin crust, not the best I ever had, but not bad at all— the crust is almost certainly prefab, which is a bummer but hardly unusual; but the cheese and sausage were of good quality, the tomato sauce had a little sweetness and a little tang, the whole thing was not too greasy, well-cooked.  A pizza to make you happy on a Friday night, and not make you regret it the next morning.  If I lived in Forest Glen and this was my local pizza, I’d have it on my speed dial.

And so the pace of discovery continues…

Mr. V’s Pizza
5285 N Elston Ave
(at Forest Glen Ave)
Chicago, IL 60630
(773) 736-9434

I’ve been sort of down on Chicago street festivals, whether it’s Koreanfest or Finnfest you somehow wind up seeing the same pork skewer vendors and insurance company booths at them, but I had a great time earlier this summer at Pierogifest and so that inspired me to finally take David Hammond’s advice and go to Taste of Melrose Park.

Meet famous Italian celebrities at Taste of Melrose Park.

I don’t know a lot about Melrose Park, but having bought a couch there once 15 years ago (since sent to my alley where couches often go to die), it’s definitely an old school Italian-American suburb, the New Joisey of Chicago. Taste of Melrose Park is full of families and church organizations running booths making their family specialty to sell at $2/serving, maybe $3 at most, and though a lot of them are old school pasta and red sauce type dishes (perfectly likable, nothing special), more than a few are much better than that, and the whole event is packed, lively and full of boisterous Chi-town energy.

We hooked up with Hammond and his wife Carolyn Berg, surprised that no other LTHers had taken him up on his posted offer, and he led us to several of the best choices— there were some hearty, enormous arancini (rice balls), and I really liked Melrose Park Peppers, apparently an old local specialty but hard to find now, basically Italian sausage and sauteed green pepper in a bun with marinara sauce.

Others, even if I wasn’t 100% wild about them, where else are you going to go to a street fest and find artichoke casserole in a styrofoam cup?  Try to get that on the north shore. I certainly liked it better than the bread bowl with pasti e fagioli, which threatened to take up way too much valuable stomach space for its fairly ordinary Italian restaurant flavor.

Hammond had more of an adventurous palate than myself, he tried both the clams:

and a stand offering, curiously, soul food-style neckbones, which were pretty rank, he couldn’t get anybody else to try a bite.

We tried other stuff— one kid nursed a pizza slice for about a half hour until a fried Twinkie came his way— but the two things we were really out to try were the famous sfingi, eggy donuts made by an order of nuns, which had at least an hour’s worth of line waiting for the sisters to get each batch out of the fryer:

And the famous fried bologna sandwiches, showcased in Hammond’s article linked above.  He and I stopped by their stand as the others waited for sfingi and he was embraced as a celebrity for having driven traffic to their booth from as far as Glenview.  They also said they wanted to meet his wife (read the article, you’ll see why) and so we relayed that news as we took bologna sandwiches back to our line-bound compatriots.  I was really surprised how good the bologna sandwich was— the combination of fried, slightly blackened and crispy bologna, mustard and sweet caramelized onion, and white bread was great, like a minimalist Chicago hot dog flattened out.

Once we had our sfingi— likewise wonderful, the egginess making them like something between a donut and French toast—

—we made our way back to the bologna booth and Carolyn was embraced as a long lost sister.  In gratitude to Hammond for the article, they invited all of us into the back of their booth for a slice of homemade cheesecake.

As much fun as the fest itself is, as true as it is to the warmly outgoing Italian-American spirit, it quickly became clear that the real fun, the real neighborliness, the real spirit of the fest is in what goes on in the back alleys of the booth rows, where the different stands— mostly amateurs— trade food and recipes and goodnatured jokes back and forth.  And that cheesecake!  It might not have been the best one I ever had in my life, maybe only in the last 20 years, light and creamy and made with love.  I couldn’t have been prouder of my younger son when she asked him how he liked it and his eyes rolled back in his head and he just said, “Soooo gooooood.”  Right answer, Liam, if you want to be invited back next year.  Seriously, I don’t know how you swing an invitation into the vendors’ social lives, but Hammond did so on our behalf, and it was one of the highlights of my summer.

Better photos than mine of much of the food can be found in this LTHForum post.

The biggest “premiere” I ever had for one of my videos was when I showed Raccoon Stories to a dozen guests at one of my Southern parties.  Monday night, the venue was a little bigger than that:

But let me back up.  So as you could either tell or guess from my last two, fish-oriented videos, A Better Fish and In the Land of Whitefish, my involvement with fish came about, first, because Carl Galvan of Supreme Lobster invited me to poke around their place, and second, because during the making of the first one, he said “Hey, you wanna go on a whitefish boat?” and set it up for me to go out with one of their suppliers, Susie Q Fish Co.

Supreme is certainly the biggest company I’ve dealt with in any of these, many times larger than La Quercia, for instance, and initially I wondered if there might be some hesitation or sensitivity about a guy running around with a camera in their company.  I wondered, in fact, if they’d demand some sort of editorial control.  (Which on a formal level I wouldn’t agree to, though I’d certainly listen to any comments, just as I gave La Quercia an opportunity to watch the final cut and tell me if there was anything proprietary they didn’t want shown, which as it turned out there wasn’t.)

But his bosses trusted Carl and he trusted me not to do some kind of hatchet job, and I think I honestly portrayed what they are— a big, efficient and busy company where sustainability is on their radar, and they’re moving things in that direction where they can, but change doesn’t happen overnight either, and so much of it depends on the consciousness of their customers and their customers’ customers as well.  That’s a realistic picture of how progress happens, each piece in the supply chain— fishermen, brokers like Cleanfish, distributors like Supreme, restaurants like Vie and Chaise Lounge, diners like me— helping nudge the others along, making it economically possible to do what’s better.  That’s especially why I was so happy to be able to include Cleanfish, who are really committed to market rather than governmental solutions, protecting non-sustainable fish by driving the market toward other more sustainable fish; and I think it’s obvious that their commitment has had a pretty rapid and direct ripple effect through to distributors and then to chefs and diners (as shown in my Reader piece on their Nunavut arctic char).

Anyway, after they saw the first one and felt it was a good picture of their operation (even if it did reveal that their sales reps sometimes use bad words!), they had the idea of planning an event to raise awareness of the quality and versatility of Great Lakes fish and sustainability more generally, built around a screening of the first video and the (at that point, unfinished) one about whitefish.  And, well it was quite an event— they got the Shedd on board as a venue (and it doesn’t get much snazzier than that):

and Paul Virant of Vie and Troy Graves of Eve, plus the Shedd’s own in house team, cooking with fresh and smoked whitefish and smelts, alongside Goose Island beer.  The invite list included over 200 chefs and media folks, and I talked to many of them, Paul and Troy of course, Jean Joho, Todd Stein, Cary Taylor, Radhika Desai, etc., though they were just as many I missed (I never did catch Geno Bahena, who was there with the madonna of moles, Clementina Flores; or Michael McDonald of One Sixty Blue, Bruno Abate of Follia/Tocco, etc.).

I think that one’s going to be an ad for Goose Island, or maybe Colt .45 Malt Liquor.  (Photos, by the way, are by Supreme’s Reed Shallenberger if they’re any good, and were taken with my camera if they’re not.)  Here’s Carl working on the playlist for the party at the Shedd’s loading dock:

The food really showed the versatility that Great Lakes fish can have, with the biggest eyeopener being Troy’s surprisingly flavorful whitefish cake, which didn’t miss crab a bit.  Here’s Paul bringing in some escabeche:

After about an hour of mingling (and me running around checking on the AV) we gathered in one of the  exhibit rooms as a repurposed screening room.  The president of Supreme and a couple of folks from the Shedd talked about the fish biz and how Shedd works to promote sustainability (including as a big buyer of seafood for its own animals to eat), and then, this guy got up there:

Since I try not to yak-yak in my movies, I tried not to do so before them for too long, either.

Paul Virant, Mike Sheerin (Blackbird) and Jean Joho watching the videos.  I have to say, it was a real gift to finally get to see some of my work with an audience, like a real movie, not just because of the ego boost (though that was certainly gratifying) but also because, I think I know where the laughs are, where the “Hmm, never thought about that”s are, and so on, but you don’t really know until you can hear and feel a whole audience reacting.  It was really great to hear that everybody else found Robert Schuffler as delightful a character as I did, or roared at why lawyer fish are called that.

Afterwards Carl, who had really made everything possible, was thanked by his boss for his dedication and passion to the business of selling fish, and got a big round of applause, well-deserved, for making the event happen.  I really hope that some of our city’s best chefs came away thinking of new ways to make use of Great Lakes fish, and sustainable fish generally, in a way that’s better for the oceans and lakes and for all of us.

Flub-A-Dub Chub.

Suddenly everybody is talking cheeseburgers, and making lists of them.  Okay, as with the bacon fad (which I’ve already been told is over), part of that is the media making a game of pretending to discover… that which was never gone in the first place.  “America’s Love Affair With Ice Water,” that sort of thing.  But people like cheeseburgers, Kevin Pang has said that his whole Cheeseburger Show thing is rooted in the fact that if he posted about fancy food, it drew a snooze, but if he posted about burgers, he immediately got 250 comments.  So it is cheeseburger season— Helen Rosner did this roundup of local burgers (note: a few photos in there are mine), then Jeff Ruby at Chicago mag did this one, Pang is back with a fresh discovery from the wilds of… Oakbrook’s plastic Butterfield Road shopping and dining strip?  And there’s the ur-list, at least among recent burgerology, Time Out’s 55 Best Burgers issue from a couple of years ago.

Rosebud Steakhouse.

This is all well and good, and there is undoubtedly much happy eating to be had on this list, but I have an issue, which is why I feel I can make another goddam burger post and not merely be wasting your reading time, much.  My issue, as I said on the occasion of Time Out’s issue at LTHForum, is that I actually don’t think Chicago is a great burger town:

That we aren’t may surprise some, especially coming off Time Out’s 55 Best Burgers issue, which indeed found many fine burgers in Chicago’s hipper precincts. That is, it found many fine burgers in the vicinity of $8.95 or higher…

But lop $7 off that price and it becomes much harder to find a burger that’s more than serviceable. The cheap burger in this town is mainly what I’ve come to call the Greek joint burger, even though they’re as likely to be run by Koreans or even Indians (beef taboo aside) these days. It’s a frozen patty, grilled on a gas grill or griddled, and then stuck in a bun with (like the Chicago hot dog) a full meal’s worth of condiments– thick slices of pickle, tomato, lettuce, and onion. To be honest, it’s not a bad burger, but it tastes mainly of char-grilling, first, and then of pickle and salad.

I was a bit too kind; it often is a bad burger, in the sense that it’s put together carelessly in ways that make the ingredients work against each other, as in this example. I have an historical theory why this might be:

It’s that lack of fresh beef (and the restraint in condimentation that it all but mandates) that keeps so many Chicago burgers from achieving greatness… Perhaps it was our place as the final processing point for cattle that facilitated the rise of an industrial product— the frozen hockey puck of beef— over the handformed patty of freshly ground chuck popular in farm country.

Kuma’s.  The patty is even bigger now.

Whatever the reason, we have the situation that there are lots of bars and restaurants making very good upscale burgers out of fresh, good quality meat, and then there are lots and lots of burger joints, or generic burger-hot dog-gyros joints, making mediocre burgers out of frozen hamburger pucks.  Which is the problem I have with so many of these lists; they’re comparing a big fat $10 bar burger and a skinny little $2 clamshell burger as if they were the same thing, when they’re certainly as different as thin crust and deep dish pizza.  Like the pizzas, they may start from the same ingredients, but the effect is totally different.

Not surprisingly, all these lists are heavy on the big bar burgers, and logically, they should be— better ingredients, better preparation.  The only problem is… I don’t like that style better.  Okay, I must like it because I’ve eaten entirely too many of them, but my real fondness is for an old-fashionedly proletarian burger of the sort I’ve dubbed “30s-style.”  As I described it long ago (you can tell I’ve been thinking about this stuff for a while):

The focus with such a burger is the harmonious blending of multiple elements— a soft white bun, mustard, pickle slices, and onion (raw dice or grilled rings), cheese optional. They are then wrapped inside a sheet or sleeve of white paper, where the heat of the meat patty will warm up the other ingredients and give off steam which will blend the whole into more than the sum of its parts. The impression given by such a burger is not of a thick slab of beef slightly restrained by a wimpy, quickly juice-dissolved bun, or worse yet made into a kind of beef salad with lettuce and tomato— it’s of a kind of meat pastry, sweet white bun and savory mustard and pickles and meat all at once.

Bill’s, Evanston.

That description is nothing like the burger at the top of this post, Flub-A-Dub Chub, one of Jeff Ruby’s discoveries, a little subterranean joint on Broadway presided over by an efficiently friendly grandma and turning out, well, a pretty damn good imitation of the Kuma’s burger.  They have the pretzel roll, the egg on top (though it was cooked hard, which somewhat spoiled the effect) and a big slab of pretty good quality beef.  I should be impressed (although the fact that it was cooked well was another drawback)… but after having consumed that huge thing for lunch, I felt like a man who’d swallowed an entire gopher.  It was just too, too much.

So it may be quixotic to do so, the sentiment is clearly on the side of the bar burger, the monster burger, and there’s no denying that the average of that style is much, much higher than the average of the burger stand burger.  Nevertheless, I am going to offer my list of what I think are the best burger stand burgers, the best modest burgers, the best burgers that evoke the constraints of the 1930s rather than the caloric excess of today.  It’s not that hard to make a pretty good burger when you have $10 to play with; I want to pay tribute to the proletarian burgers that can impress at $2.25 and with just a thin 6-to-the-pound patty having to harmonize with all its fellows, rather than a Sherman tank of meat to mow down your palate with the beefy beefiness of overwhelming beefpower.  Not all of them use fresh meat, but they’re all true in some way to the 30s style paradigm and better than your average “Greek joint” puckburger.

1. Schoop’s. Thin, fresh meat patties are hard to find in Chicago but suddenly reappear right near the Chicago-Indiana border; this mini-chain mostly in Indiana does a beautiful job of frying them to a lacy crispness.  It’s what Steak and Shake ought to be.

2. Top-Notch Beefburger. Fresh meat is ground everyday for this Beverly/Oak Lawn institution, though rather than fried to a crispy edge, these burgers stew in lots of juice, picking up even more flavor; the fries (fried in beef tallow) and shakes are great too.

3. Johnsen’s Blue Top. Another Indiana joint (Highland), in a way over the top Googie-style drive-in building.  Here’s more.

4. Superdawg. It’s an open secret among foodies that the iconic dog place actually makes a pretty mean burger, with a crispy exterior and lots of diced onions.

5. Handburgers. South side (Roseland) spot puts the good word right on the sign, baby.

6. Bill’s. The frozen meat patties are nothing special, but otherwise, this place offers a more authentic version of the classic 30s style burger than almost anywhere around.  Order two if you’re at all hungry.  (See photo above.)

7. Man-Jo-Vin’s. The good quality patty is wider and probably frozen, but the proportions and the use of grilled onions give this burger a classic taste, and the fresh-cut fries are excellent too.

8. Muskies. I’m pretty sure they use a frozen patty, too, but grilled over gas fire, and moderately proportioned, it’s quite good.

9. Diner Grill. To be honest I kind of think diner burgers are pretty much the same, and if Two Way or Johnnie’s or Kevin’s is closer to you, go have that, but there are few things that make you feel more American than eating a burger and fries on a stool with your fellow diner denizens reading the Sun-Times and soaking up a hangover.

10. The Choo-Choo. Okay, the fact that this is a kid-themed burger place in Des Plaines with birthday music blaring like FAO Schwarz on a speed jag will knock it out of consideration for many people, but damn, they actually turn out a first rate burger.

One of the amusingly fluky things that happened right after I started doing all this was that I got caught in an internet-wide sweep of freelance writers by Maxim magazine, looking for people to nominate things for the 2008 Maxim Food Awards. I suggested 14 possible candidates, of which they used precisely one (Khan BBQ). Whether or not I made good money at this depends on whether you judge it by the dollars per word published (pretty damn nice) or the hours spent generating the other 13 unused ideas (suddenly not so hot).

They asked again in 2009, and I offered suggestions in two categories they said they were looking for. One was, “Places you should eat before you die,” which I took to mean extraordinary culinary experiences. The other was, “Places to eat before they die,” which means places full of history and culture and flavor. I suggested five of each. Their cover touts 77 total. They used… zero of mine. (Actually at least one is mentioned in the magazine; some guy named Achatz writes about Schwa.)

Since they’re not using them, I thought you might be interested to see what I submitted. If you want, you can compare to what they actually published, and see if you think they really did give their readers the hyper-edgy, super-authentic culinary insight promised.

* * *

Places to eat at before you die:

1) Schwa, Chicago

Like an indie band that refuses to sell out to a big label, Schwa serves some of the most fearsomely accomplished haute cuisine in Chicago from a fixed-up storefront where the cooks not only serve as waitstaff but the chef himself answers the phone (when you can get through). Also like an indie band, they broke up in a drug-fueled haze once, but back together and apparently cleaned up, they’re dishing up their greatest hits like the blatantly sexual quail egg ravioli alongside new material like pad thai made with velvety slivers of jellyfish.

2) Hot Doug’s, Chicago

There are ten million average hot dog stands in Chicago and then there is one and only one Hot Doug’s, the “encased-meat emporium” where whatever sausage Doug Sohn can get his hands is done up however he feels like it. The standard Vienna Beef char dog stands side by side with the likes of wild boar, alligator and elk sausage topped with truffle creme fraiche, bleu cheese, or even foie gras– Doug was the only actual perp busted under Chicago’s short-lived foie gras ban. Some are great, others not so great, but it’s always worth checking to see what he’s concocted this week (and you can always fall back on the thuringer with caramelized onion and brown mustard, which cognoscenti know is one of the best things to eat in Chicago).

3) Apple fritter at Old-Fashioned Donuts, Chicago

A hundred blocks south of the Michigan Avenue tourists see, in the black Roseland neighborhood, a donut shop that looks like nothing turns out catcher’s-mitt-sized fritters so unspeakably indulgent, so addictive in their perfect fried sugariness, that they can only be the product of the same CIA plot that created crack cocaine.

4) Cemitas Atomica at Cemitas Puebla, Chicago

Mexican sandwiches are mostly gutbombs, and God knows the fact that this one contains ham, pork, AND fried breaded steak suggests that the name Atomica was chosen with its fallout in mind. But El Dios is in the details and the specially baked cemitas roll, the Pueblan cheese imported by the owners from their hometown, the hand-roasted chipotle, the schmear of avocado and the medicinal hint of the papalo herb make this one a superbly balanced sandwich that will light your lunch up without a prolonged half-life.

5) Arnold’s, Nashville

Southern “meat and threes” cafeterias are often more about meat and dessert than the soggy vegetables served alongside. But the meats at Arnold’s, even the ham and the garlic-studded roast beef, take second place to the Bordeaux-like profundity of the pot likker in which the turnip greens stew, which proves that vegetables can be great art.

Places to eat at before THEY die:

1) Burt’s Place, Morton Grove, Illinois

Imagine a pizza place tucked on a side street in an obscure suburb, which nevertheless is so busy that you have to call ahead to reserve your dough and find out what time you’ll be expected to be there. Oh and by the way, the phone number is unlisted. But Burt’s isn’t some insane too-hip-for-you joint, it’s just that Burt has started and sold half a dozen pizza places, and now he’s 70+, and in his place he does it his way, and if you don’t like it, or if he gets any more customers, he may just up and retire. The reward for doing it his way, besides basking in his stoner-grandpa presence, is an impeccably balanced and brightly-flavored pan pizza, not thin but not the phone-book-thick deep dish you find all over Chicago either.

2) Klas, Cicero, Illinois

Al Capone’s name is to Chicago joints what “George Washington Slept Here” used to be to New England country inns. And most of the time, well, the connection is probably exaggerated at best. One of the few surviving places that really can claim a Capone connection is this Czech cuckoo-clock of a restaurant in what was long a Mob-run suburb, though the decor suggests Castle Dracula as much as Roaring Twenties. All the same, go upstairs and you can still see the back room where Al would play gin rummy with owner Adolph Klas while “hostesses” entertained the boys in the private alcoves.

3) Hollyhock Hill, Indianapolis

“Like eating at Grandma’s” is not necessarily the compliment that people think it is. But this place, which started in the 1920s as a country inn and is now well within the suburbs of Indy, shows just what simple but spot-on cooking chops midwestern grandmas had back in the 20s– perfectly crisp and golden pan-fried chicken, flaky hot rolls, iceberg lettuce with old school vinegary-sweet dressing, and ice cream with your choice of toppings to end every meal. There’s no irony to the retro here, just pure rib-sticking midwestern hospitality.

4) Calumet Fisheries, Chicago

When steel mills dotted the south side of Chicago, every bend in the river had a shrimp joint to serve working men a fried lunch that went well with a beer or three. The mills are gone and so are most of the fish shacks, but one of the few survivors sits in the shadow of the bridge the Blues Brothers jumped, frying shrimp and smelts and best of all, smoking chubs and other fish in its riverside smokehouse.

5) Taylor Cafe, Taylor, Texas

When Bobby Mueller of the legendary Louie Mueller’s passed away last year, it made his rival in this tiny town with more great barbecue joints than people, Vencil Mares, that much more of a living legend. At 83, Vencil still wrestles his briskets into his smoker himself, though most of his day is spent holding court in his bar/cafe, telling anybody who stops by about the cottonpickers’ brawls he used to break up with his fists or how he integrated his place by taking out one of the two jukeboxes and forcing blacks and whites to listen to each others’ music. The barbecue’s pretty darn good, but an afternoon listening to Vencil’s stories as the trains go by is the real treat.

Years ago, when LTHForum was new and time was infinite and I had nothing better to do than go on for 1500 words bringing up Georges Bernanos in a pizza review, I posted something about a thin crust pizza place way up in Mundelein:

Every once in a while I think of what must be, without doubt, the most obscure book I have ever read. I found it in the library of my Catholic high school, was perversely attracted to it by the fact that it had not been checked out since 1958 or something, and read it– or more likely only part of it– for a religion class book report.

Alas, I don’t remember the precise name, and I’m sure it’s unretrievable by the usual means. The title was something like “Unknown Saints of Rural France,” by Father Somebody or other, S.J. And basically it was an effort in ecclesiastical expense account justifying; shortly after WWII this priest had had a bicycling vacation in France, and to make more than a holiday out of what he was doing, he spent part of it going from village to village, tracking down tales of especially pious people who had been mentioned to him by someone else a village or two over.

Most of them were farmwives, the long-suffering women who are the mainstay of every church, and there was little enough remarkable in the story of any of them– no unsuspected Bernadette Soubirouses or Therese Martins having visions among them, just hardworking peasant mothers. Had the good father been more of an artist, he might have made something of his theme, that in the devotions of these unremarkable women, often half-ignored even by their families, was to be found the truest sainthood and love. This was, after all, the time and countryside of Bernanos’ Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (and Bresson’s masterful film of it), about saintly grace going unnoticed and even despised by the world. But he wasn’t an artist, and I was a high school punk amused by the book’s flimsiness as a vacation document rather than touched by the artistic portrayal of grace, and so here we are, 25 years later, probably more of us reading this now than ever read the book in the first place, using it merely as a device for a review of a pizza place in Mundelein.

* * *

What made me think of Father whoever and his forgotten book was the fact that I had had to go up to Gurnee Mills, of all ultra-worldly places (though the Bass Pro Shop is certainly worth a visit), and then decided to take some meandering old-school road back rather than zip back on boring 94, the idea being– like Father bicycling from village to village– to see what unknown historic or culinary curiosities might be revealed along the former highways now shoved aside by the giant expressways and the chains they draw like magnets. I wound up on Route 45, whose supply of old road houses and such things was none too plentiful except perhaps around Gages Lake– but I only needed one, and at Diamond Lake Road and 45, I found it. A handsome vintage neon sign announcing a little hot dog and pizza stand called Bill’s, next to which sat a larger, hunting-lodge-like establishment called Bill’s Pub.

The Pub was not open but in the window of Bill’s the stand, they promised “Fabulous Hot Dogs.” I was prepared to try them but secretly I had my heart set on pizza, because I saw a box which said “Since 1957,” and one of my rules is, always try a pizza that dates back to the 1950s. There is always a small possibility that in the intervening 35+ years, they have NOT screwed it up by trying to make it more like Domino’s or something.

I asked the young lady behind the counter which I should have, the hot dog or the pizza. At first she answered with the answer that always shows a lack of imagination, “They’re both good,” but then, warming to her theme, she said that she has gladly come in on her days off to have the hot dogs, and she has gladly come in on her days off to have the pizza, and that I couldn’t go wrong either way. And so, bowing to her enthusiasm, I ordered a small thin pizza.

Fifteen minutes later the box was perched on the hood of my car. The verdict? This pizza, unknown and unheralded in Mundelein, was worthy of the same devotion given to any cracker-crust thin pizza to be had in Chicago– not better, perhaps, than Vito & Nick’s, Candlelite, Zaffiro’s, etc., but undoubtedly comparable in its paper-thin crackliness, its foldability, its boldly spicy tomato sauce and thin layer of quality mozzarella. Given its location off the beaten path in a far northern suburb, it is unlikely ever to be known to the greater world; it is unlikely pilgrimages will be made to it from Chicago; but I can only say that I hope it is appreciated by its family and friends, that they are grateful to have its example among them, providing warmth and sustenance night after night, and that I have been encouraged to continue my quest by the fact of having found this example of pizza grace toiling in obscurity.

Bill’s Pizza & Pub
Diamond Lake Road and Route 45
Mundelein, IL 60060
847-566-5380

I revive this ancient palimpsest mainly because attending the Lake County Fair in its new fairgrounds gave me my first chance to try Bill’s again, indeed, to dine inside. And you know what? I really do think this is one of the best thin crust pizzas in Chicagoland, right up there with Vito & Nick’s, Marie’s, Pat’s, Candlelite as it was a few years ago, D’Agostino’s or Zaffiro’s of Milwaukee for that matter. The crust is cracker-thin, yet it doesn’t just soak up grease like Pat’s does; there’s a little more kick to the sauce and sausage than at D’Agostino’s, though it’s still definitely on the mild side; really, this is an admirable old school thin crust in every way that deserves to be better known. And as for the place itself— oh man, it is a trip. Northwoods hunting lodge on acid, with goofy stuffed animal displays, peanuts on the floor, and gaudy stained glass images of Disneyesque deer. It must be seen to be beyond belief.

Oddly enough, when I wrote my original review it enraged a northwest suburban LTHer who thought I was mocking his part of the world with city condescension. So make no mistake: I am sincere when I say this is one of the best pizzas in Chicagoland and you should make a considerable drive to go have it. Maybe not all the way from home, but certainly worth a 15 mile detour in the northern reaches.

There was a time when you could just open a new neighborhood restaurant and let the broader world discover you, slowly.  That time is not now; now a place like Browntrout is hyped in between the week’s other debuts (Nightwood! Cibo Matto! Rootstock!) in media the whole world can read.  Even a fish has to sink or swim, it appears; there are no more little neighborhood finds.

Even so, I’d like to create a little protected habitat where Browntrout has a chance to get bigger before it’s devoured.  There’s some real promise here, in a year this could be the Mado of fish, and yet my meal also went seriously off rails at a certain point.  What was good was good enough that I’d like to see it mature a little, find its footing (which is obviously even harder if you’re a fish), and become what’s in its chef’s head.

Browntrout (BYO at this point) aims to only offer sustainable, high quality and organic ingredients; it divides the menu into sharable small plates and bigger entrees which, once you get into sustainable, high end fish, are not cheap. I stuck mainly to the small plates in order to have more to try.

What was good— very good— is the plate shown above, a trio of small servings of fish meant to be nibbled as nosh.  At the top was a housecured, orange-scented golden trout, which was served lox-style with bagel chips and as delicate and rich as very good lox.  The middle was a smoked trout salad, and the bottom a piece of yellow perch, fried with a sort of remoulade/tartar sauce accompaniment.  The first two of these were really wonderful, showcasing the delicacy of good fish beautifully; the perch was more ordinary, and the remoulade or whatever it was could have used more bite, more body, more oomph.  Still, for $13 this was a substantial (and substantially terrific) plate which Avec or The Bristol would be proud to serve up.

We ordered this as an appetizer, and were grilled fairly extensively about the precise order of the other dishes we wanted; our waiter seemed very concerned that the order and timing be precisely calibrated, somewhat beyond the easygoing vibe of the restaurant (which, that night, had several of Bin 36-vet chef Sean Sanders’ relatives wandering about).  The reason for the jarring appearance of a control freak note to our experience only gradually revealed itself as we waited… and waited… and waited.  The night grew dark, my opportunity for picture taking vanished, we found ourselves making faces we recognized from the “before” parts of a Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, we were apologized to enough times that we were ready to say “Stop apologizing and just go kick somebody’s ass in the kitchen!”

They handled it very nicely, we wound up with both a salad comped and some free cookies, can’t complain, but still, given the simplicity of the items involved, it was hard to imagine how the kitchen— not at all overstressed on Sunday night— could have possibly taken so long to produce these items.  I’d be nervous about Browntrout for pre-theater dining (we’ll be late for Cornservatory!) or even for the lunch which has gotten some attention lately.

Nor did the items we have entirely justify the wait on a flavor basis.  Best, by far, was a burger made from Tallgrass beef.  I’ve only had one Tallgrass steak, at the Harry Caray’s by O’Hare, which was bad enough that I wanted Bill Kurtis to narrate it like a crime scene (“But when he cut into the steak… what he found was not the juicy, flavorful steak he’d hoped for… but a gnarled and gray nightmare that had only just begun”).  This was, let me estimate, one frazillion times better, maybe oversalted a tad but a richly flavorful burger that was like meaty meatiness all wrapped in meat.  I was just tvetching (kvetching on Twitter) about the popularity of the very good, but at that price it should be, Rosebud Steakhouse burger; here’s one in the same ballpark pricewise which to me beat it for depth of flavor.

Less exciting was a pea salad, “peas three ways,” which mainly revealed that the actual peas are the only parts of a pea that have much flavor; eating the shoots and leaves was kind of like munching ivy off the side of your house, and the salty dressing did little to bring it all to life, being desperately in need of a sweet note, or any note that would have made the leaves and branches palatable.  While the final dish, a special of an escargot “tart” in a veal demiglace, was executed perfectly well for something assembled out of foodservice ingredients (puff pastry tart shell, demiglace in a jar), but seemed a dining-in-1955 dish that was way out of step with the rest of the restaurant and the approach promised by the fish trio at the beginning; it might have strolled over from Lutz’s a few blocks away.

Still, the things that were good, especially that fish plate, were very good indeed.  If Browntrout can build on that kind of treatment of excellent fish, get more confident and coherent in what it’s offering, and not least, get that kitchen working at “After Gordon” speed, it could become a really impressive restaurant, truly a fish Mado (or whatever it is they actually hope to become).  For that to happen, maybe it needs to be ignored for a bit by the whole planet, and just serve its neighbors for the time being as it finds its footing.  So if you’re a neighbor, check it out, enjoy it, get to know its obviously committed husband and wife owners; but if you’re the kind who hops from hotspot to hotspot, delivering quick and permanent judgements, maybe you should let Browntrout go for a little while, and see what it’s grown into a season or two from now.

Browntrout
4111 N Lincoln Ave
Chicago, IL 60618-3027
(773) 472-4111

Followup to this post.

Taxim, the back-to-basics Greek restaurant which I reviewed very favorably a few weeks back, has taken a bit of a turn in its relationship to internet food posters.  A number of posters at LTHForum have basically said, ennh, what’s the big deal?  Ronnie Suburban was moderately positive but didn’t agree with the Taxim good, Greektown bad tack many supporters have taken:

I am a big fan of Greektown (the opposite side of the dining universe from Taxim) and have learned over the years how to order for maximum satisfaction when I’m in that part of town. What I’m used to with Greek food is gigantic bold flavors, immaculate freshness and not a hint of daintiness. When I was in Seattle last year, I had a really great meal at Lola (Tom Douglas’ contemporary Greek cafe), so I know I can appreciate this cuisine on a more refined basis. But upon first glance, perhaps Taxim is too distilled for me.

Kennyz was considerably harsher:

…it was with enthusiasm, after having read such wonderful praise here and in the Chicago Reader, that I entered this evening’s meal at Taxim. When I left, my enthusiasm balloon had pretty much completely deflated. Taxim bored me to tears.

You can read all that here.

So I went to Taxim for lunch the other day with another blogger and it was interesting that we came down again on the same two sides of the divide as this thread.  What I found the subtle complexity of down to earth Greek ingredients, he found boring next to the mouth fireworks of Greektown.  What’s odd about that is that we’re each usually a bit toward the other camp– he’s big on the quality of underlying local ingredients, I’m more likely to ding a place for failing to put enough pizzazz into a dish.  But in this case he was the one underwhelmed as I often am, and I was the one admiring the simplicity of earthy cooked lentils and bits of tart Greek cheese, say.

I joked to another food writer that as Greek restaurants go, Taxim was the best Turkish restaurant in town.  I think that’s not so much a joke because chef David Schneider frankly admits the strong Turkish influence (not to mention that Taxim is a district in Istanbul), or the hearkening back to a pre-French-influenced Greek cuisine more like other Mediterranean cuisines.  I’ve always liked Turkish cuisine, but part of what I like about it is that it is mostly comfort food, it’s not aiming for the spice of other cuisines even in the nearby middle east (not to mention a little to the east like Indian).  A really good Turkish dish is usually just simple and clean-tasting– like the spinach and yogurt dish at Cafe Orchid— and I find that really satisfying; I loved the “hummus,” for instance, with its flavors of fresh chickpeas and bright, good quality olive oil, and found both it and the pita a cut above the norm.  But if you’re expecting your dish to come flaming to your table, either actually or metaphorically, Taxim is going to seem muted and quite possibly dull by comparison.

I’m sure it’s a total cliche to say that the annual BBQ to benefit Chicago’s chichiest farmer’s market, the Green City Market, is the real Taste of Chicago.  But it is what you wish that massive event could be— the best chefs in town knocking out inventive picnic food and drinks on a gorgeous (okay, slightly rainy) summer night by the lake. Of course, even at a few hundred folks this event had its share of things served lukewarm and so on, so multiply it to the Taste’s million or so milling munchers of pizza on a stick and you can only imagine how impossible it would get. At the size it was, things managed to move well, only a couple of booths had significant lines (Rick Bayless’s is so popular no one goes there), and I tried lots of wonderful stuff (and happily, the chefs I knew all acquitted themselves well).

Here are some highlights from early on, I stopped taking pictures after the sunlight disappeared:

Philip Foss of Lockwood cooked this brisket sous vide for 40 hours or something. It also spent some time on a grill, because I definitely got a burnt end, which was yummy.

Naha’s elk, really nicely put together though you did lose the game meatishness a little in the salad. The salad was terrific, though.

Prairie Grass’s crostini with grilled portabellos and goat cheese, worth giving up precious pork stomach space for.

That’s Stephanie Izard back there smiling her 1000-watt smile (even out of focus, good for 300 watts) behind her excellent goat and goat cheese combo, the first public taste of her impending, someday The Drunken Goat restaurant.

Crofton on Wells’ rabbit dog with apple cider ice. One of my top 3.

Three Floyds brewery guys cranking out what was billed as “pork fat hot dogs.”

Paul Kahan of Blackbird dishing up the most daring dish of the night– the blood sausage corn dog– which was a surprising and total success, another of my top 3 (and same for nearly everyone I talked to).

Bill Kim of Urban Belly making something like bulgogi on sope-like pieces of masa; the Asian flavors were good (and hot) but the masa was so hard it hurt my tooth.

Guys from Tru putting truffle foam on a sausage-cracker combo.

Mado made a Memphis pulled pork sandwich… except they used tongue (and, incidentally, baked their own white bread).

Nathan Sears of Vie serving…

…barbecue turkey with pickled greens and stuff on it. This was the other of my top 3, probably my favorite in fact, certainly the one that dazzled the most despite unexciting-sounding meat. Basically it was like soul food, and really likable.

A few other things I really liked but no pics: Cary Taylor of Chaise Lounge’s smoked blueberry pannacotta, no I didn’t taste the smoke either but it was just what I needed after Bill Kim’s spicy dish; a blueberry-ginger Maker’s Mark cocktail which I think was from the folks at Sola; Lula/Nightwood’s white gazpacho with sweetish beets and bits of bacon in it; and, though I didn’t taste it till well after I was stuffed, Fig’s grilled trout (one of the very few fish items).

So I was talking with a couple of friends about Great Lake, and though all admirers of the pizza, we agreed that it being named the best pizza in America by Alan Richman in GQ had more to do with a magazine’s need for the kind of buzz that you get from “owning” the discovery of a great new food spot that nobody else has found yet. Great Lake— artisanal pizza of very high quality from a hot food city, yet so new that it wasn’t really on the national radar yet— fit the bill perfectly; and so did Snow’s, the improbable Saturdays-only barbecue joint that Texas Monthly plucked from obscurity and anointed the best BBQ in Texas a couple of years ago, shaking up a competition whose top ten had been so fixed for so long it could be recited by most Texas schoolchildren.

So that was the mindset I was in when I read this in Time Out barely 12 hours later, about a hitherto unheralded Italian spot on the Sex and the City Southport strip:

Who the hell is Matt Troost, and why haven’t I heard his name before? More to the point, why hadn’t I eaten his food until a recent meal at Fianco?… It’s surprising, to say the least, that a chef with no reputation, in a restaurant on a notoriously generic strip, would be putting out such a dish. Yet with each subsequent plate, Troost proved this was no coincidence. This is a guy who clearly knows how to manipulate flavor….

Admittedly, David Tamarkin stopped short of any “best Italian restaurant in Chicago” hype. Still, he was doing a pretty good job of trying to elevate this neighborhood obscurity into the ranks of, at least, the top neighborhood Italian spots, with all the bragging rights that would accrue to the first guy to find a place. So I packed up the family and we set off to see if this really was the marvel he said— or if he’d been carried away by his excitement and wishful thinking.

It was still fairly empty at almost 6, though perhaps by 7:30 or 8 it isn’t. Later, I heard someone congratulate the chef (for reasons I didn’t catch); that was the only possible sign that Time Out’s praise was being felt here, there definitely weren’t hordes of trendy Time Out-clutching twentysomethings fresh from buying new shoes and artisanal absinthe on Southport.

We started with the chicken liver pate, creamy pate well paired with “strawberry preserves” (well, some preserved strawberries, anyway). It was every bit as nice and flavorful as you would hope it would be.

Two of us had pasta dishes. The winner of the night, pretty comfortably, was this ravioli with mint and peas in cream sauce. The ravioli were delicate and velvety, the sauce sang of bright spring flavors, cheerful and distinct; as good an Italian dish as I’ve had anywhere in recent memory.

More conventional was this bowl of canned tomatoes, some shaped pasta, and lamb sausage; what lifted it above the perfectly decent was the lamb sausage, zingy with the contrast of fennel.

The star among meat entrees was the (enormous) portion of braised and grilled pork with a salad of beans and greens. I liked my taste of this, but I felt like it was only 3/4ths of the way toward what it could be; it needed a sharper contrast from the grilling, some acidic bite in the comfy bean-salad atop it. I felt it was too understated, and only a couple of steps away from really popping.

Perfectly acceptable, but more ordinary, were some grilled scallops, again huge, in a nicely bright pea puree. This too seemed understated and would have benefited from something on the plate that offered some real contrast, like an onion marmalade or something.

Banana-chocolate bread pudding, shared four ways, made a nice conclusion, though overall I didn’t find the dessert list all that interesting.

So we were not quite as dazzled as Tamarkin. But still, take 20% off the top and his assessment was largely right— on a strip where Italian has meant suburbanite-safe places like Strega Nona, here was a neighborhood spot, of simple decor straight out of the exposed-brick-urban-restaurant kit, which at least was off to a start of making some things to rival the best neighborhood contemporary Italian spots in town, the Riccardo Trattorias and Merlos. Give the chef some time to push the envelope of a Southport restaurant located between a Potbelly’s and a Homemade Pizza, and everything he makes might be about as good as the best things we had. In the meantime, peas won’t be on the menu for very long, so go have those ravioli.

Fianco
3440 N. Southport Ave.
(773) 327-6400