Back in the day, the cutting edge of foodiedom at Chowhound and, subsequently, LTHForum was the discovery and popularization of so-called secret menus at Asian, especially Thai, restaurants.

They weren’t so much secret in the sense of something exclusive, as they were menus of the foods the restaurants served their own countrymen, but felt us gringos would not be willing to accept, due to unusual ingredients and authentically strong and spicy flavors.  Slowly we were able to convince certain restaurants that non-Thais (or non-Chinese or whatever) would enjoy these foods and, even more importantly, not send them back without paying for them.

I say “we,” and that’s not entirely inaccurate since the numbers of folks who came into restaurants like Spoon Thai, TAC Quick and Sticky Rice ordering and enjoying these dishes was an important part of convincing these restaurateurs to serve their food the way they eat it, without fear of having to comp a lot of dinners to offended gringos.  But the heavy lifting was done by Erik M., who learned Thai to be able to translate Thai menus and provided these translations to a number of restaurants. His efforts paid off for dozens, maybe even hundreds of diners who took the download menus into restaurants and had food that completely turned their idea of Thai food around, offering at least a glimpse of the true depth and complexity of one of the world’s great cuisines, but one too often dumbed down and sugared up in America.

Erik has been in L.A. more than not lately, but recently he arranged a dinner at Spoon devoted to Thai drinking food, which like drinking food the world over fell into two main categories— salty spicy meats and nuts to get the palate ready for alcohol, and comfy carbs to soak up some of that alchohol.  Any resemblance to American drinking foods pretty much ends there, however, as you’ll see.  It was a fascinating introduction to a whole range of new dishes that took my appreciation of a favorite restaurant to a new level, and while a few were pretty much one-offs prepared as a courtesy for Erik, most are either available at the restaurant regularly or could be arranged with a few days’ notice.  So if you see something you like, try to order it, and help encourage one of Chicago’s best ethnic restaurants to add these outstanding and eye-opening flavors to the “secret” items which, in reality, need not be a secret to anyone who makes the effort to know about them.

Poo pia thawt—These are available if you make it clear you want the “little eggrolls”—filled with peppery ground meat, they were much more delectable and addictive than the usual big sloppy eggroll.

I thought this was garnishes at first, but it’s actually a tasty and charming salad— put a little of everything (including the dried shrimp in the back) in a carrot cup and munch away.

Hawy thawt—Fried mussels, “greasy on purpose” Erik says; I liked them this way a lot better than the big mussel pancake you can get here and at other Thai restaurants.

Naem sii-khrong muu—Fried ribs, first marinated in a sour (naem) powder.  You would be happy to see these at any bar on earth; we were very happy to see an extra plate arrive as an encore at the end of our meal.

Kung chae naam plaa—marinated (uncooked) shrimp.  I’ve had these before, either at Spoon or its downtown sibling Silver Spoon, and while the floppy uncooked shrimp is not my favorite texture, the garlicky, hot marinade is one of those perfect balances of pungent flavors that Thais seem to pull off better than anybody on earth.

Neua taet diaw—If I had to recommend one thing to go have right now, this Thai beef jerky would be it, hands down.  Beef, marinated in soy sauce and spices and both dried and deep fried, with the same tamarind-sweet/chile-hot dipping sauce (naam jiim jaew) as Thai fried chicken (which we also had, later, by the way, but no picture).  Every other beef jerky is this beef jerky’s bitch, it’s really a marvel (and it’s on the menu, so you could have it tonight!).

Kao-lao muu yaw—I seemed to be one of the few dissenters who wasn’t wild about this salad with enoki mushrooms and a Vietnamese-style pork loaf which was sort of mortadella-like.

Yam khaw muu yaang kap taeng kwaa—Grilled pork neck in a salad with cucumbers, but unlike the fresh grilled pork neck served at TAC Quick (which is a great dish), this was more like bacon, fried before grilling and unctuously fatty.  This was sort of engineered to Erik’s specs, as he says, “if you want the exact version, you should be clear about two things: a) request that the pork be “soft,” and b) request the addition of cucumber. It’s listed on the menu with cucumber, but most Thais order this without even looking at the menu, and they just ask for “yam khaw muu yaang,” which doesn’t have the cuke, tomato, etc.”

Miang plaa thuu—a one-bite salad with grilled mackerel and steamed rice noodles.  I might try a different version with a different meat, if there is such a thing.

Yam mama—Now here’s serious drunken-comfort food—supermarket ramen noodles (“Mama” brand) with minced pork.  Erik basically said this was like white trash Thai food, but it was aimed dead-on at the palate of people who’d been drinking for a few hours, and impossible not to like.

Naem khao tawt—this is an older Erik discovery that we’ve long had in our standard order at Spoon (although he says Thai Avenue’s is better), though I think it’s gotten hotter over the years and we need to start ordering it mild (at least for my wife to enjoy it).  The pink stuff is some pressed ham product, but what this dish is really about is crunchy bits of fried rice in lots of lime juice, a wonderful combination that makes this probably one of my last-meal dishes (hope the prison cooks include at least one Thai con).

Tom pret plaa lai—”Hungry ghost soup” (i.e., good enough to make even the dead hungry), with eel and a fearsome amount of chiles floating in it.  The eel was so-so, fishy in a not entirely pleasant way (and I, unlike a lot of people, have no weirdness about eating eel), but the broth—sour and pungent and subtly incandescent—was quite wonderful.

We ended with three variations on comfort foody fried rice dishes—khao phat kha-naa plaa khem (fried rice with Chinese broccoli and salty fish), khao phat plaa salid (fried rice with Gouramy fish), which was made by the great crispy and fishy fish, and best of all khao phat naam phrik kapi (fried rice with shrimp paste and Thai mackerel), given depth the others lacked by shrimp paste.  Also, someone had brought Erik a condiment for fried rice from Thailand, which was like sweet-salty dried shrimp crispies and definitely enhanced the milder versions.

Thanks to Erik and to Spoon Thai for revealing another fascinating side of this great cuisine.

Spoon Thai
4608 N. Western Ave.
Chicago, IL 60625
(773) 769 – 1173

The five course meal at Han 202, a new Chinese place in Bridgeport from the owners of Evanston’s former Restaurant Guan, costs an amazingly low $20 per person (plus whatever you BYOB), and at the end of it, a summit of the foodwriting intelligentsia was discussing how much we would be willing to pay for it and what we would think of it at different prices. At $28 (currently the magic price point for many restaurant entrees, since it’s just shy of breaking the $3X barrier), it would seem fairly priced. At $35 or $40, we might start to become critical about which parts of the meal were on and which were off: some things were really well balanced in their flavors, others were almost candy sweet; some were exquisitely plated, some seemed kind of like ordinary Chinese food.

All of which is to say, this may be an arty five course meal, but it isn’t Alinea, or even Schwa, in its level of accomplishment (or caliber of ingredients). Still, at the insanely low $20 or even a perfectly reasonable $30, this is a meal which delivers an impressive amount of fine dining experience for the bucks, in an atmosphere which feels hip and nice but is still pretty casual. If you’re a twentysomething guy looking for a nice place to take a hot date and feel like you took her somewhere fancy which you can’t really afford, there’s probably no better choice for you in town at the moment.

The meal started with an amuse-bouche of mushroom topped with a styrofoam-crunchy radish-like vegetable (which the waitress said was called bacha, though so far I’ve been unable to find any vegetable with a name like that).  [EDIT: Rene G at LTHForum identified it as bac ha, taro stem.] The textural contrast and presentation were a fitting statement of intent for the meal to follow— mainly, that this isn’t going to be the usual throw it all together in a wok delivery Chinese; that some of the precision and delicacy of Japanese food is coming.

You choose four of your five courses (the one dessert is a given).  The first course is a salad, and at least two of them are extremely pleasing in their simplicity: a mix of lettuce with wakame seaweed (and, in this season of strawberry bounty, topped with a slice of one) which is an inspired salad, mixing the ultrafamiliar with the gently exotic; and silky beef over a bed of sliced green apples:

The next course is miso, and is relatively dispensable (might as well get the spicy version with a dollop of real crab meat; we mostly ordered it to see if it really would be crab and not surimi, which happily it was).  But the course that followed, appetizers, was to my mind the clear highpoint, with three of four dishes standouts.  The simplest, but in many ways the one that impressed me the most precisely because it did so much so delicately with so little, was this creme brulee-soft tofu speared— oh, sign me up for that job— with tiny sprouts.

Another that impressed me was a substantial chunk of seared tuna with a lime accent to the soy-or-whatever sauce it was sitting in.  Mine was a level down from that— they called it walnut shrimp, after tasting its unsubtle blast of orange extract I dubbed it “Shrimp in Tang sauce”— but like the mayonnaise shrimp at Lao Sze Chuan, it was oddly likable in a white trash kind of way.

The main course that followed seemed pedestrian by comparison, like conventional Chinese food, different meats all cooked the same way in a wok, with the same vegetables out of the big foodservice bag of broccoli/green and red pepper/baby corn.  It was pretty good Chinese, the sauces were bright and light, little grease, but hey, I could say the same about P.F. Chang’s, basically.  All in all this course seemed the least novel, the least paradigm-shattering, and the one dish that was different from the others, a small rack of lamb, was prepared well but marred by a gloppy-sweet sauce.  Dessert, apparently, was winged out of commercial mochi and Italian cookies when they ran out of other stuff, my expectations for dessert in an Asian restaurant are always low and this… definitely beat a stale almond cookie.  The dried cherries at least demonstrated that they thought about it for more than two seconds.

I’d love someday to see someone open a truly deluxe Chinese restaurant, like you hear they have in places like Vancouver, but until that happens, I’m happy to have a Chinese restaurant run by people who seem aware of things happening in the broader food scene and ambitious enough to try to offer a fine dining-like experience at barely above cheeseburger prices.  The price surely can’t last and the BYOB may be temporary too (there is a bar, left over from the previous Italian inhabitant according to Chuck Sudo of Chicagoist), so Han 202 is definitely one to try sooner, rather than later.  Like our new Indonesian entrant, with enough support it might be the harbinger of even more interesting and accomplished things to come.

Han 202
605 W. 31st
312-949-1314

Check out Michael Nagrant’s rave, which put Han 202 on the foodie radar, and Mike Sula adds some details in this week’s Reader, even though they totally missed the chance to make a Han Sula pun in the headline.

Anchovy crunchies, for snacking on while fighting your way through the media hordes at Angin Mamiri.

A couple of months ago I was taking my kids to a 4-H meeting and I saw a sign on Touhy announcing that a dead Filipino restaurant was about to become an Indonesian restaurant. Cool, I thought, that’ll make a nice little discovery on my part…

It is to laugh. The thought of Chicago finally getting a lone Indonesian restaurant again (after the closing of August Moon nearly a decade ago) inspired something of a frenzy in the foodie media community, summed up by this Twitter post a few days ago (I won’t say Tweet, I won’t) by Mike Sula of the Reader:

Foodmedia hordes descending on new Indonesian Angin Mamiri (http://tinyurl.com/q23q65) I was 1 of 3 sched interviews today. Hi @mmxdining

Mmxdining is a writer from Metromix, incidentally. As it happens, though, none of those places have actually put their review up yet that I can find, so thanks to the Sky Full of Bacon hyperefficient review generation and approval system, it looks like I’ll be going first after all, albeit probably only by hours.

Actually, media frenzy was not at all in evidence when I went in about 1:30; the three generations of Indonesian family (older parents, grown daughter, her teenage daughter) were scattered around the dining room doing odd jobs, as if it were their living room. They quickly packed up and got back into customer mode. The menu is relatively short— a few curries, a few noodle dishes, lots of sates— and I had to admit the brevity didn’t encourage me, it looked like a menu whose high points would be exhausted quickly. As soon as I asked DeeDee, the grown daughter, what she would recommend, though, she kind of brushed the menu aside and started talking up the special:

—and more to the point, the fact that they planned to have something special and different every day. The menu was much more of a starting point, she suggested. I wasn’t entirely sold by the sound of the special, which looked like fried with a side of more fried, but DeeDee was persuasive, so I went for it and another (fried) appetizer, risole.

I also tried the one Indonesian drink in the cooler, a very sweet, flowery tea:

In my limited experience Indonesian is sort of like Thai, but even more comfort-foody. That was certainly the case with the risole, which is sort of like an egg roll crossed with a chicken pot pie, and pretty damn indulgently delightful. The main dish was in the same vein:

Fried chicken (just about worthy of the Thai fried chicken at Spoon or TAC), potato croquettes (reminiscent of some of those Japanese potato dishes which seem like grandmother food from an alternative universe), and a spring roll, along with some rice topped with, and subtly tasting of, toasted coconut. A lot of fried stuff, but all done with a judicious hand, and the little hot pickle-chutney stuff at the side was tasty. Best of all, it really seemed homemade, and so I asked DeeDee when she came back about who did the cooking. She said her mom, Ida, is the main cook, does it all, even rolling the spring rolls and risole herself. They’re starting out with a basic menu but will have new specials all the time; they’re also thinking about how to do a rijstaffel, the traditional Indonesian banquet/buffet from Dutch colonial days, probably as a special dinner event using some sort of advance ticket system.

I asked DeeDee if they had had a restaurant before, somewhere else, and she said no, they’ve lived in Chicago for 25 years, and cooked things for Indonesian festivals, and people always asked where there was an Indonesian restaurant, and for years they said they were going to open one. (The name, incidentally, means “wind” or “breeze,” she said.) Now they finally have; and it’s a good one with potential to be a very good and culturally important one. Don’t just read the food media about it; support it now, and help it grow into what it could be.

Angin Mamiri
2739 W. Touhy
(773) 262-6646

An earlier, stranger experience with Indonesian food.

For me!  The first time I’ve ever been somewhere and the Reserved signs were not to keep me away, but to save a spot for me! Overlooking the city laid out before me.  I am Ozymandias, king of food bloggers!

Ahem.

When we last visited my conscience, I was expressing doubts about the need to have a formal code of ethics that foodbloggers signed onto (let alone wore a badge for).  When we visited it the time before that, I was debating whether or not to attend a PR event for a restaurant (as it turned out I couldn’t anyway).

And so Thursday night I went to a hoity-toity event arranged by a PR firm, ate and drank free and schmoozed.  Like a floozy!

What happened?  Several things.  One is, I’ve lately been to two freebie anniversary parties at restaurants where I knew, at least a little, the chef (Mado and Graham Elliott).  In both cases it just felt, I dunno, pretentious to even think about getting on the reviewer’s high horse and saying “Do not tempt me with the base gelt of charcuterie or buffalo wing sweetbreads, thou blackhearted chef thou, for I am… A REVIEWER!”  Partly because, well, I’m not.  (I write some capsule reviews for Time Out or the Reader on occasion, almost entirely of dives and taquerias and such.)  

But more than that, it’s not how the rest of Sky Full of Bacon works— I mean, I didn’t go to La Quercia to get their side of the story and then go talk to some critic to get his blistering attack on them.  I admire what they do so I made a movie about what I admire about it. The whole premise is personal and thus partisan in a way that a newspaper is not meant to be—which is why this is not a newspaper (among other reasons).  So really, all I aim to do here is be 1) hopefully, interesting and, 2) absolutely, straightforward about the circumstances, so you can judge for yourself how much I’ve been sucked in.  As I said before anyway:

the real temptations are not in gold or jewels but in flattery, in access, in the illusion of collegiality.

So anyway, the chichi places in a chichi new hotel:

had a meet and greet, or a Taste and Schmooze, and David Hammond invited me to come along on his invite from a PR firm.  Two more things that appealed to me about attending this were the fact that this is the sort of place I would never ever go on my own, I mean, the last place I’m going to go drinking normally is a posh bar next to the Leo Burnett building; and second, the opportunity to observe, anthropologically, the other members of the food media tribe.  For one thing I was just curious who actually comes out to things like this, since most of the food writers I know don’t.  For another, I was curious what the protocol was for such things, and how it would play out— would the PR people muscle me, flatter me, or stand back and let the chips fall for their client?

First stop was Roof, the bar at the top of the building. This is a very classy and glassy open space, some of it literally open to the outside, much of it modernist steel and glass, very white and cosmopolitan although I must admit, they may strike me off the PR schmooze list just for saying this, something about the high glass walls and the snaking colorful duct work and glass said… forgive me… McDonald’s Playland.  I was ready to take my shoes off and start climbing straight up the air duct, looking for a slide back down.

And no, it wasn’t the lamb burgers that made me think that, either. But hopefully for them, no one else will make that association (this very beautiful-people crowd looks mostly no-kids, or at least no trips to the McDonald’s Playland with their designer kids, anyway).  I had a couple of the signature cocktails— just a couple, hic— but I was fairly unimpressed with the design of either one— an allegedly peach one was more lemony-tart, an alleged tropical one (the Ipanema) was just orangey.  Still, I’m sure they make a fine gin and tonic or whatever the alcoholics at Leo are drinking these days.

The food, on the other hand, I found pretty good, definitely creditable for a bar.  The lamb burger was excellent, good strong lamb flavor mixed with a little herb butter or mayo.  Some thing involving cheese over an egg on bread— pretty much parmesan toad in the hole— was also quite tasty (though totally ill-suited for noshing at an event like this and arguably for any bar situation—going to be a lot of runny egg on little black dresses).  Some mozzarella cheese balls were heavy enough to use as buckshot, while some woodburning pizzas had nice toppings but the crust was fairly standard-issue.  Still, well above average overall for a bar, and I really might go back, as improbable as it might seem (or as I might seem to this crowd), for those lamb burgers.

Anthropological observation #1: food media know not to fill up on bread:

Afterwards we were summoned downstairs to State and Lake, the restaurant in the lobby of the hotel.  As with Roof, State and Lake is dressed to the nines, dark, leathery, techno:

Alas, if Roof managed to escape serving food that screamed “hotel,” State and Lake has not been so lucky.  Nice, pretty adventurous food for a hotel, but there was a little-of-this-little-of-that character to the menu that made it hard to see what it was aiming for, and most things were well executed but unmemorable (and I picked the one entree, pork shoulder, that was a little worse than that, although it’s not like I went hungry that night as a result).  Pretty much anything we had (short ribs, scallops, whatever), I could think of a tastier, more inventive and better conceived version I’d had recently somewhere else, like Avec, or The Bristol, or Avec.  And it usually came with some gloopy cheese-and-creamy side that was threatening to cross the line between Comfort Food and sheer Pander Food.

Again, within its genre it might be pretty good— though hotel dining has stepped up its game lately with places like Avenues and Mercat a la Planxa— and the desserts were very good (who knows where they’re made, though), but if someone asked me where to go eat that’s dark brown, hip and hopping, I’d be all over Sepia or Hot Chocolate long before I ever said this place.

So back to the anthropological stuff: how was the crowd?  How was being the target of PR?  I talked to several people from different kinds of food media—a magazine for chefs, for instance (she told me they did bacon last year and it’s so over; damn, I knew I should have called it Sky Full of Mangosteens), or a very nice lady who writes for a food mag aimed at the north shore (but was eager to hear about all our latest LTHForum city-divey discoveries).  That part was enjoyable and I did some PR-in-return by talking up Sky Full of Rainbow Chard (new logo coming soon).  As for the PR folks, they were friendly and easygoing, they know better than to push too hard for any one client, they’re in this for the long haul.  In the end, a restaurant has to stand on its own feet.  Roof does, State and Lake kind of doesn’t, at least to my standards and needs.  They can create the opportunity for a place to shine, but they won’t go nuts trying to convince you there’s starlight where there isn’t.  Or at least they didn’t.

I thanked them for inviting me and then took the train back home to return to my life, not as a mover and shaker, not Vettel 2.0, but just a guy.  Who has a food blog.

Roof/State and Lake
The Wit Hotel
201 N. State, Chicago

The theory is that Taxim, the new Greek restaurant in Wicker Park, is kind of the Greek equivalent of the early new Italian restaurants that helped get Italian food out of the meatball-and-red-sauce rut. That’s what Mike Sula reported in the Reader:

If a single historical figure could be blamed for that orthodoxy—the one that upholds the ideal of Greek food as bechamel-blanketed pastichio and high-viscosity avgolemono soup—it would be European-trained Greek chef Nicholas Tselementes, who in the early part of the last century sparked a culinary revolution in his homeland, exiling simple, fresh ingredient-driven dishes made with olive oil, garlic, and native herbs in favor of a French-influenced hybrid employing butter, cream, and flour. Tselementes wanted to purge Greek cuisine of Turkish and other influences… Since then a kind of collective denial of eastern Mediterranean Greek cuisine has persisted in Greece and abroad, while Frenchified Greek cuisine, aided and abetted by the tourist trade, has been exported all over the world.

I tried this theory on Stevez of LTHForum, and he didn’t quite buy it; his wife is Greek-American and he says the Greektown classics are what all the old ladies make when they’re cooking for themselves, too. It’s not just Greek food for tourists, in other words. But he did buy that it might at least be similar to Greek regional foods unknown in the US, but similar in many ways to Turkish and other neighboring foods (not that you’ll make any friends in Greece saying their food is like Turkish).

Whatever the provenance of its style, Taxim is the first new Greek restaurant in Chicago to get excited about in a long, long time. Chef David Schneider came from places like Green Zebra, not The Parthenon or Santorini, so he’s blessedly free of the Greek orthodoxy that insists on all the flamingly cheesy cliches of the cuisine; he’s broken Greek food back down to first principles, and even something as simple as the baba ghanoush-like melitzanosalata feels reinvented back into the fresh and distinct flavors— charcoal-grilled eggplant, olive oil, garlic, toasted pine nuts— that are usually blended into a gray mush.

We mainly worked our way through the appetizers because, well, that’s pretty much what you should do in almost any restaurant these days, and it paid off.  A “rampopita”— spanakopita made with ramps— was exponentially more flavorful than spinach would have been.  A stew of lamb, fava beans and housemade yogurt was deeply comfy.  Most exotic was a special, urged on us in no uncertain terms by our James Spader-circa-Tuff Turf waiter, of grilled sable liver with grilled zucchini; the funky, slightly fishy liver, the pita crisps and the soft zucchini melded beautifully, lushly magnetic-repellent.

We were fairly full after these four dishes and split our only entree, the duck gyros, which has been (understandably) the most talked-about dish to date.  Duck, prepared basturma style (basturma is basically pastrami; I’m not sure what it means in this context as it’s certainly not nearly so salted or dry as pastrami) is then grilled on a gyros spit and served inside a flatbread with pomegranate sauce and the housemade yogurt (again):

It makes for probably the best wrap you’ll have this year, although I must admit I ate about half of my share by simply picking the roasted duck out of the wrap and gnoshing on it directly; it was delicious enough to not strictly need anything more than that.

The wine list is mostly Greek and following our waiter’s guidance we variously ordered (or were given a glass of) white, rose and red Greek wine; all of it was pretty good, none of it said “minor wine-producing nation.”  To our surprise, the restaurant was empty when we arrived at 6, but by 7:30 or so it was getting pretty full; it is Wicker Park, after all, 8 pm is the early bird special (and as we were leaving even The Violet Hour didn’t have a line yet).

It’s not quite as modest-priced, and it’s more upscale in appearance, but in many ways Taxim seems to me like this year’s Mixteco Grill, the place that catches fire for a fresh and appealing take on a familiar cuisine.  It should be packed soon, go now so you’ll want to go later, when it’s harder to get into.

Taxim
1558 N. Milwaukee
773-252-1558

Here’s Mike Sula’s video of chef David Schneider preparing the flatbread which wraps the duck gyros above:

Making Pontian satz bread at Chicago’s Taxim Restaurant from mike sula on Vimeo.

Four years ago I posted a long and pretty much rapturous ode to a meal at Avenues under Graham Elliott Bowles, then newly appointed and acclaimed and also, as it turned out, an LTHForum visitor (with one real discovery claim to fame, the much-loved but ill-starred Cafe Salamera, which he was the first to call attention to). Last year Bowles took his molecular gastronomy-tinged show down the street to a more casual venue, his bustling, loud-music-blaring River North spot Graham Elliott. Like a lot of people, I had mixed feelings. The price point didn’t really mesh with the claims that it was making that kind of food less expensive and more accessible; and some of the dishes were just too jokey (haute imitations of junk food) and didn’t work, although certainly the meal had at least some real high spots. Basically, Graham Elliott seemed a work in progress that needed more time to find its precise niche and even out some of the rough spots. Which is fine, except when you have to do it in the full glare of a highly publicized opening.

I haven’t been back since then, but I’ve meant to, so it was a real pleasure to be invited to Graham Elliott’s first anniversary party. (Yes, you should take that as admission of all the impartiality-voiding issues; we were his guests, of course I wasn’t anonymous, etc. There, are you happy John Mariani?) It was an eclectic crowd, less strategically chosen (not all that much in the way of local food media that I could see, though I did meet Janet Fuller of the Sun-Times), lots of old work colleagues or chefs he likes, and mainly just folks who seemed to have been appreciative of his food at some point.

The cocktail hour included a few hors d’oeuvres, of which a little cup of pea soup was by far the best, bursting with springy pea flavors (and a little crispy pork note in there somewhere, I believe). But the best thing during this time— maybe the best thing all night— was a cocktail, called Almost Paradise, built on vodka, cucumber and a teasing hint of steeped rosemary, with some egg white froth at the top. As David Hammond said while urging one on me, “The perfect summer drink.”

The interesting thing Bowles did for this menu was list some items that were on the menu a year ago and then serve us updated versions of the same concept a year later:

I had had one of these, the deconstructed Caesar salad. Last night’s version was less deconstructed than dada, the crouton having grown into an enormous cheese-filled brioche (amusingly called a brioche Twinkie) looming over the now tiny and defenseless bits of lettuce with the anchovies draped over it like melted clocks. This was a Caesar salad’s nightmare, and though parts of it were tasty, I tended to agree with Hammond that this business of taking apart a Caesar tends to lose what a Caesar is.

The second was the latest iteration of a play on buffalo chicken wings, with a beer foam. Then it was chicken and Budweiser; by now it’s sweetbreads with a roquefort gelato, “celery 5x” (five different forms), and a foam from Goose Island’s Matilda beer. I’m no fan of the basic buffalo wing flavor, so I was more entranced with the stuff around it, especially the celery and roquefort together.

The third dish was my favorite and, I think, most peoples’ out of the dinner courses—a scallop with Spanish flavorings including olive, almond and a chorizo vinaigrette. This was really a great dish, exotic and pungent yet accessible, and considering that fish dishes had impressed me the most last time out, I continue to think his adventurous but not overbearing hand with fish is one of the restaurant’s main strengths.

The last course was a variation on last year’s beef stroganoff, which I think I had had a taste of; now it was a cube of steak atop some spaetzles and some onion marmalade (which I’m always happy to see), with a little salt and pepper “station” on the plate. This was a satisfying dish for folks who wanted to see some red meat at that point. Where the dinner courses had been petite tastes of different things the kitchen can do, the dessert was a blowout with a gooey-center chocolate-peanut butter cake, a dab of ice cream, a little milkshake and a sugar-topped bruleed banana.

So where do I think Graham Elliott lands at this point? I don’t think it’s been radically transformed, but it seems to have grown into its skin as a place offering a certain degree of the experimental art cuisine you get at Alinea/Moto/etc., but in a more casual, nightclubby atmosphere. It seems like a good niche and while see-and-be-seen restaurants are often more flash than substance, that’s obviously not the case here. In general, the things I thought had been especially weak a year ago (cocktails and dessert) were far better, and the main courses probably batted a little higher overall.

Graham Elliott is very much a reflection of Bowles’ personality, which is less mad scientist and more puckishly playful than his molecular peers. One thing that was really charming about this evening was Bowles’ mom going around from table to table; she talked with us for quite a bit and had obvious pride in her son’s accomplishments. After dinner, he invited us back into the kitchen and showed off the modest space* from which they’d fed 130 people more or less on schedule (they were thrown off by some special requests, which seems vaguely appalling to me when you’ve been invited to a free dinner). I liked seeing the row of jars of pickled stuff, not nearly so much as Vie’s, but some interesting things (hot peppers mixed in with fruit, etc.)  It was an interesting capper to a gracious event which I very much appreciated having had the opportunity to attend.  Happy anniversary, Graham Elliott Bowles.

* Though to be honest, if there’s any Chicago restaurant with a vast and spacious kitchen, I haven’t seen it yet.

I wouldn’t have paid any attention to Amelia’s if Martha Bayne hadn’t reviewed it for the Reader. First off, that’s because I would have mistaken it for this Amelia’s, a onetime blight on the Mexican food landscape which (in a victory for truth in advertising, I suppose) now has an even more blatantly inauthentic name like Fiesta Sombrero or Cantina Cucaracha. David Hammond reviewed that Amelia’s thusly:

I’m awe-struck, however, by the transcendently sensation-free salsas. I’m bummed by the Disney-version of mole negro – tasting as though squeezed from a bottle of Bosco. I take a scoop of beans but can barely believe it: there’s weight on my tongue, I feel it, I know there’s something there and yet…there’s just about no flavor, there’s barely even a hint of grease, there’s no there there.

This new no-relation Amelia’s has a far more promising, if also somewhat checkered, Mexican food pedigree: the couple who owned Mundial Cocina Mestizo, an upscale restaurant in Pilsen, divorced, selling it to the third partner in the business; now they are each opening separate businesses. The ex-wife plans to open a bakery, the ex-husband has opened this attractive restaurant in… Canaryville.

And that’s the second reason I would never have noticed this restaurant: it’s in the middle of freakin’ nowhere. This may have seemed like a repeat of the successful urban pioneer strategy Mundial employed, the first high-end joint in Pilsen just as it gentrified. But Pilsen was at least full of life if not entrees over $8; this is in an attractive building facing a vast empty lot that was once stockyards, with next to no housing in its immediate vicinity. You’re going to have to want to go to Amelia’s.

So do you want to go to Amelia’s?  You do, I think.  Chef Eusebio Garcia worked at MK before opening Mundial, and his thing has been high-end Mex tinged with Mediterranean flavors.  My feeling is that the former are much, much more promising than the latter.  Oysters topped with spinach, hot sauce and Asiago cheese reminded me that Asiago cheese should be banished to Panera by now, and it didn’t help that no two seemed to have the same proportion of those ingredients.  A gorgonzola polenta on the side of a ribeye was a bowl of warm blue cheese goo, like baby food for gourmet babies.

But the straight-up Mexican things were quite good, especially scallops in a chipotle sauce with onion marmalade and some grilled vegetables.  And the steaming homemade tortillas were impossible not to want to instantly grab and wrap anything at hand in. Generally, in most of the upscale Mex places I think you’re better off ordering off the appetizer menu, where you’ll find simpler and more authentic things like tamales rather than entrees consisting of a large hunk of protein in a sauce with vegetables on the side, which is not really the way Mexicans tend to eat; and Amelia’s is no exception to this rule.

So the next time you’re facing the prospect of a long line at Mixteco, Frontera, or whatever Geno Bahena’s opened this week, consider being a real food adventurer and making the hike to Amelia’s.  Since there’s basically no traffic for a mile in any direction, it’s an easy shot down the Ryan to 43rd from the north side; the neighborhood is no scarier than, say, Humboldt Park and probably safer just by virtue of being so empty.  You’ll get the personal, relaxed attention those other places are too busy to provide, and you’ll help sustain, for at least a little while longer, a very attractive and pleasant restaurant which probably made the mistake of opening at the end of the universe.

Amelia’s Mexican Cafe
4559 S Halsted St
Chicago, IL 60609
(773) 538-8200

P.S. Chuck Sudo has reviewed it here for Chicagoist.  Note that he had exactly the same things I had!  (Yes, I was his extra ordering power.)

Just in time for a recession in which Starbucks gets used as a primary example of the kind of luxury people will no longer be willing to shell out for, coffee joints have started getting fancier, and more expensive, about the way they brew coffee.  Intelligentsia got some press and grief (see a response here) for laying in a supply of $11,000 Clover machines and using them to make $4 cups of coffee that take seven minutes.  Just as I was reading about that, a vegetarian coffeehouse opened on Lincoln near Martyrs, bearing the name De.li.cious (which comes awfully close to del.icio.us, the former impossible-to-spell-right name of a “social bookmarking” service now just called Delicious) and offering, in the $3-4 range, cups of coffee brewed in a thing called a Chemex.

From the name I expected a big fancy machine, gleaming steel and chrome, spitting steam like a Raymond Loewy train engine.  The reality proved to be simple enough to do for yourself; a glass carafe with a funnel mouth into which you set a filter and slowly pour hot water around the edges, thus getting roughly even amounts of water to pass through all the beans, rather than extracting most of your coffee from the ones at the bottom of the filter:

So did it live up to the hype?  Actually, yes, at first anyway.  The cup was subtler, more floral, almost creamy (possibly a projection of the name of the coffee I chose, kurimi); you could taste the point about getting the best flavor from all the coffee in the filter versus overextracting acids from the stuff at the bottom.  Within 20 minutes of going on my way with my paper cup, however, it was just another cup of coffee.  So if you do feel the need to spend $3+ and carefully watch as owner/professional BMX racer Kevin Porter hand-assembles your coffee drip by drip, drink it while you’re there, and fairly quickly, to savor the difference.  Or if you use a French press, you might consider switching to a Chemex of your own (they have them in stock), as it’s no harder to make a cup in your office this way and for me it’s a less oily, more well-rounded cup.

But for me, the real point of this is that when I walk into De.li.cious with my son, who was instantly smitten by their cupcakes baked in ice cream cones, the Chemex process gives me something to shoot the breeze about with Porter or his staff for a few minutes, enjoying the earnest vibe of people who opened a vegetarian coffeehouse in their neighborhood because having one seemed like the most important thing in the world.  $3 or so will get you that and a first-rate cup of coffee, which seems eminently fair to me.

De.li.cious
3827 N. Lincoln Ave.
Chicago IL 60613
773-477-9840
www.deliciouscafechicago.com 

Here’s one way of describing the  “pre-industrial pig” dinner held in Humboldt Park Saturday night— a secret underground dinner, limited to foodies in the know, in celebration of the pre-industrial pig, showcasing the meat of heritage red wattle pigs raised by farmer Henry Morren, including two-year-cured prosciutto and other meats.

Here’s another way to describe it: some caterers from Wisconsin held a dinner in some guy’s apartment for $65 a head.

The whole secret restaurant, underground supper club movement was irresistible for a moment among foodies (especially on the coasts) for whom restaurants couldn’t open fast enough to satisfy their urge for the next new thing, for knowing about something before anyone else did.  The Wall Street Journal declared them dead over two years ago, but they keep chugging along, and as Mike Sula in the Reader (who was the main publicist of this one) noted, the proprietors of the one I attended, Madison’s Underground Food Collective, “have continued staging these events in their hometown and beyond, such as a recent set of sold-out pig dinners that rendered the NYC food media gobsmacked.”

The idea of a secret restaurant operating outside the law, appearing and vanishing in a single night, has obvious cachet for a certain sort of foodie.  But the reality is, every event like this that I’ve heard of in Chicago has been by licensed caterers; they may be skirting an occasional law (eg., if someone were to serve homebrew along with their food, I doubt that would be legal) but basically, it’s no closer to being a food-speakeasy than your cousin Berniece’s wedding at the Elks Club.

More importantly, if a meal like this really struck New Yorkers with the force of the new, then New York must be well behind Chicago in its appreciation for heritage breeds, local produce and the like.  It’s certainly nice to attend a meal where the farmer is one of your servers and happy to talk about what he does as you eat the food he raised, but it’s not radically different in that sense from two recent events I’ve been to at Mado, or the mulefoot dinner at Blackbird last November.  Many chefs in Chicago work intimately with farmers, base their menus on what’s new and good at the farmer’s market, and so on.  Many of them dabble in charcuterie, homebrewing, or similar artisanal techniques.  It’s great that these guys do all that, but it’s not redefining the whole dining experience in some way that only an underground restaurant would dare.  The underground dining experience turns out to be not terribly different from the above-ground one.

Which brings us, finally, to the food.  And, well, I’d say on the whole it came out like food from really high quality and thoughtful caterers, but a bit shy of the precision displayed by top-flight restaurant owners who have the discipline born of knocking it out, six nights a week 52 weeks a year.  The food was intelligently thought through, some dishes were very good, but there were also executional errors here and there (chewy white beans, overcooked sausage, a too-liquid pate which, it was reported, had to be rescued at the last minute when it fell apart) that you wouldn’t expect to see in a restaurant.  In many ways it was more like attending a dinner party by a highly skilled home cook (like me!) than it was like the utterly proficient family dinner I attended a week ago at Mado.

In particular, although the red wattle pig meat was of nice quality and generally prepared fairly well, I never quite felt that any one dish took it to an exceptional height, as two or three of the half dozen dishes at the mulefoot dinner did.  Closest perhaps was a very simple lardo (only salt-cured) served with black walnuts, an excellent combination.  The pate and rillettes were quite good, but both masking the flavor of the meat with a bit too much eager-to-please sweetness.  Pork belly with black radishes worked much better together, thanks to the strikingly bitter radishes, than the rather plain pork belly did by itself; same for the ham.  There was an odd thing about some bacon (served in a salad) being cured for 18 months, which seems 17 too many by any standard to me, and certainly didn’t manifest itself in a particularly prosciutto-like flavor or any other sign that the extra time had produced extraordinary results beyond very good bacon.  And a two-year-old prosciutto was served in such tiny dice in a salad that it was impossible to come to a judgement about how it compared to the La Quercia I’ve recently gorged myself on for an upcoming podcast.

In the end, I had a nice meal with some old friends, enjoyed the atmosphere somewhere between dinner party and dining out, and had several things that I thought were quite good.  But the outsider mythology that underground dinners evoke— that outlaw chefs might offer experiences beyond what workaday chefs would dare— proves to be a bit of oversell.  At least in Chicago, where the good things Underground Food Collective stands for are shared by a goodly number of restaurants serving nightly.

So a guy posted this video about his visit to Alinea at LTHForum:

Which, he proudly pointed out, attracted attention (here and here) on Grant Achatz’s Twitter feed.

I just couldn’t resist:

Please don’t take the quality of this video as indicative of anything about Sky Full of Bacon videos… which can be found here.