I suddenly had a craving for Indian food, and not for Khan BBQ, which was the last Indian Indo-Pakistani place I went to… maybe the last two or three Indian South Asian places I went to. So my friend Wyatt and I went to Udupi Palace for first-rate vegetarian, fresh and brightly flavored. (They don’t have a buffet, so it helps to go with someone else so you can order at least two or three things. Not having a buffet is, otherwise, a benefit— things taste fresher and brighter.)

Two days later I still had a craving for Indian food food prepared in a style indigenous to or at least reflective of the Asian subcontinent, and had no one in tow to help me order, so I decided to fall back on a buffet. There’s a newish one… maybe… at 2525 W. Devon.

I say maybe because although the name is new— Punjabi Dhaba— the same location has been Sher-A-Punjab and Moti Mahal. And since the website says they’ve been serving for 15 years… well, they may be new, but you know that old joke about how all the moussaka in Greektown or won ton soup in Chinatown is cooked in one underground kitchen and trucked/piped/whatever to the various restaurants? It starts to look like less of a joke when the same restaurant has borne half the names you see on Devon, dishing up a more or less identical buffet of saag paneer and curry made from leftover tandoori chicken each time.

And that’s how things tasted— like something they’d made and I’d tasted too many times before. The dishes were okay— it was a cold day, they hit the spot, they assuaged my craving a little more— but the colors that had been bright at Udupi Palace were stewed to a muted pastel by comparison. LTHForum poster Zim, who is Indian (and deserves eternal thanks for being the one who kicked off the community’s exploration of Khan BBQ), once advanced the theory that you should only eat at an Indian buffet in its first six months, that’s when they’re likely to have new offerings you haven’t seen a million times and to be trying hardest to make flavors sparkle. Punjabi Dhaba, alas, manages the neat trick of being a new restaurant… whose first six months appear to have been many years ago.

Punjabi Dhaba
2525 W.Devon Avenue
Chicago, IL 60659
(773) 262 – 2080
http://punjabidhabaonline.com/

Udupi Palace
2543W,Devon Avenue
Chicago,IL 60618
773-338-2152
http://www.udupipalace.com

Tags: devon, indian

It sometimes seems as if there are no more food discoveries to be made in Chicago. The truth is, while it may be harder these days— though far from impossible— to find unknown places in Chicago, there are all kinds of unexplored suburbs around the city, especially in less-traveled-by-internet-users areas like the south suburbs. So don’t think it improbable if I say that as far as I am concerned, the best middle eastern food in Chicago is in an area that has gone almost entirely undiscovered (with one exception) until now— that at least half the times I’ve stopped for food there, I’ve had middle eastern food that for brightness of flavor, freshness of preparation, and the hospitality with which it was served handily surpassed almost any middle-eastern meal I’ve ever had within the city. After repeated middling experiences at what I’d long considered the best of them in the city— Salam— and adjusting my expectations for middle-eastern downward, the food in and around Bridgeview has given me new hope for the existence of an authentic, lively example of this cuisine in Chicago.  I chronicled these explorations and discoveries in my Time Out “Taste Quest” last week; this will offer some notes and further explication of that piece, which I would recommend as the primary, easily referenced primer for the explorer.

I had vaguely known for some time that there were middle eastern restaurants down in this area (which, to help set the scene, is located straight south of the city on Harlem avenue in the 80s and 90s, mostly; or in foodie terms, it’s about a mile southwest of Chuck’s). In fact Salam even had an outpost here at one time. The Arab community here— mainly Palestinian— originated in Chicago’s oldest middle eastern area, which was in the South Loop, and for many years they were the shopkeepers for the south side black community, both necessary and resented by the local population (a la Korean bodega owners in black neighborhoods today). The community moved over time to the area around 63rd and Pulaski, and there are still some remnants of it there; I took part in an event during the time between the abandonment of Chowhound and the launch of LTHForum in which several of us ate our way up and down 63rd, checking out the restaurants and shops that existed then. However, when the best known to us of these, Steve’s Shish Kabob, closed up around 2006 (eventually reopening somewhat to the southeast of Bridgeview), the whole south side Arab community kind of fell off the local foodie radar.

To get back to its history rather than mine, the community had started looking for a place to build a mosque as early as the 1950s, and a Bridgeview mosque was built in the 1970s. The Bridgeview mosque has inspired controversy which is best understood by perusing the Chicago Tribune’s series of articles on it from a few years ago, but whatever may be happening inside it, the commercial activity around it remains warmly welcoming to the outsider, if to judge by appearances, rarely seeing many from the Irish, Poles and Lithuanians who also live in the area.

The first place I visited, a bit to the south of the main area, was Al-Basha in Palos Heights, which seems to have been around for a number of years, to judge by both the slightly worn decor and the very relaxed air with which regulars were being served. First impressions were not promising— and it took long enough to get our order taken that they had a long time to sink in— but all doubts were swept away once food arrived. Everything— falafel, kifta, the bowl of complimentary pickles— just sparkled a little brighter than any I’d had locally for some time. Tastebuds that had been lulled into slumber woke up, ready for duty. The food was as jaunty as the chef in the window:

Al Basha
7216 W. College Rd.
Palos Heights
708-671-1440

A month or so later my wife and I were in that area again and I suggested we just pick and try another random unknown spot. She’s the one who found Albawadi Mediterranean Grill in a strip mall parking lot on 87th. If I had one knock against Al-Basha— besides the fact that smoking is still allowed in restaurants in Palos Heights, shock, horror!— it would be that the menu seemed to offer only the expected standards of middle eastern cuisine. Albawadi proved not only to be at least Al-Basha’s equal in flavor but to show more ambition with an extensive menu that includes everything from meat to seafood, and begins with a relish tray centered around a wonderful garlicky eggplant dip (something like the Turkish imam biyaldi). The grilled meats were outstanding, perfectly done, while the decor led to a rather amusing moment:

Al Bawadi is located in a former fast food building, which they are in the process of expanding so that they can have a nonsmoking original building and a separate hookah room. The building looked vaguely Alamo-like, but I couldn’t quite place it, so after our meal I asked our waiter if it had been a Mexican restaurant. He clearly thought I was asking if the meal we had eaten was Mexican food, and, eyes bulging in disbelief and dismay, carefully explained to the astonishingly stupid gringo (who somehow knew baba ghanoush and falafel by name, but apparently believed them to be salsa and chips), that the restaurant was Jordanian-Palestinian. Eventually I got out of him that the building had once been an Arby’s, but I’m not sure I ever convinced him that I hadn’t mistaken his place for Senor Sombrero’s.

Albawadi Grill
7216 W 87th Street
Bridgeview, IL 60455
708-599-1999

At this point, 2 for 2 on random picks having turned out to be pretty damn wonderful, I decided I had a mission to try every middle eastern place down here. As it turned out, Albawadi turned out to be the best by a comfortable margin, and indeed I would anoint it the best middle eastern restaurant in Chicagoland— and thus the one to visit if you feel inclined to make a trip down there and check the area out. And since the menus tend to be fairly similar from place to place, that’s not a bad strategy. All the same, there are several other worthy places worth noting, and without duplicating the Time Out article (which extends to groceries and sweet shops), here are a few more restaurants which warrant attention (and which I will number as part of my series of 50 places previously undiscovered by LTHForum and the local foodie community generally):

21. The Nile
This is a second outpost of a restaurant that still exists on the 63rd street strip (the similar-named place in Hyde Park may have been related once as well; or “The Nile” for a middle-eastern place may be “Great Wall” for Chinese restaurants). The cafeteria-like atmosphere is nothing to get excited about, but the bustle behind the counter suggests that they’re doing more than lazily serving up falafel— mensef was the special one day I came in here. (The specials board is in Arabic, so you have to ask.) I didn’t have the mensef, I wanted to just try the regular menu (and being on deadline, I had another lunch ahead of me that day, so I didn’t want to order big), but the shish taouk was grilled spot-on perfect and the falafel were bright and flavorful. It’d be worth checking out again.

The Nile Restaurant
7333 W 87th St
Bridgeview, IL 60455
(708) 237-0767

22. Baladi Restaurant
This was one I found by searching the internet, as it’d be easy to miss it on a side street off Harlem.  (I don’t have much use for Yelp generally, but it sometimes at least alerts you to the existence of places that locals have commented on that otherwise have gone unnoticed by the internet.)  The first time I went I had an absolutely fantastic grilled chicken off the specials board (again, in Arabic only), perfectly grilled (do we detect a theme?) and accompanied by a kind of red pepper sauce.  I had planned on a second lunch that day as well but the idea of not finishing that chicken while it was warm and crispy was unacceptable.  Baba ghanoush— not that I needed anything like that with this chicken— also impressed me as smoky and delectable.

I returned about a week later with LTHForum poster Gastro Gnome, who had agreed to accompany me to visit some of the groceries and markets and help me understand where the points of distinction were so I could include a few of those in the Time Out piece.  We started with lunch at Baladi, ordering off the regular menu, and… it was one of those times when the second visit completely fails to show your guest what had wowed you the first time.  Everything (shawerma, shish taouk, etc.) was okay, but nothing sparkled.  So I guess stick to the specials at Baladi; that chicken really was great.  I’m not imagining it.

Baladi Restaurant
7209 W 84th St
Bridgeview, IL 60455
708-233-1025

23. Lebanese Cuisine (menu says Lebanese Nights)
This is the only Bridgeview restaurant I tried that didn’t make the Time Out piece at all.  (Al-Basha didn’t make it because it was too far away from the others.) The location is actually where Salam’s outpost used to be, and it was something else in between (as my take-out bag indicated).  I ordered a Lebanese shawerma sandwich (shawerma inside a thin wrap with pickles and so on) and a side of foul, beans.  Running the place (seemingly singlehanded) was a sort of pepperpot lady in a full hijab.  She couldn’t have been more warm or welcoming, and I was ready to love this place… but the food just didn’t do it at all.  The shawerma was kind of mealy and tough, and the foul, despite giving off waves of garlic, was flavorless in that way that only bean dishes can be.  Too bad.

Lebanese Nights
9050 S Harlem Ave
Bridgeview, IL 60455
(708) 430-4377

24. Village Pita & Bakery
This small shop would have been easy to miss in the same strip mall as Albawadi, but I’m glad I didn’t.  They sell a variety of baked goods stuffed or topped with things like za’atar (a green spice of herbs and sesame) or mohamara (a spicy red pepper topping), dirt cheap and, if not mindblowing, totally easy to like.  Not surprisingly, it was the one place where I saw non-Arab customers— the Irish kid delivering Pepsi chimed in to urge me to try the potato filled one.  The owner (you can see his picture at Time Out’s site) clearly takes serious pride in his wares, as he was very insistent, almost worriedly so, that I not under any circumstances microwave the ones I took away (hey, I’d already had two lunches), but warm them on a cookie sheet in the oven.  I did, they made a great dinner that night.

Village Pita & Bakery
7378 W 87th St
Bridgeview, IL 60455
(708) 237-0020

25. Nablus Sweets
I tend to think of things like baklava in terms of David Mamet’s line that there’s no difference between good flan and bad flan, so I included a couple of sweets shops in the piece, but hell if I have any way to tell which is better than the other.  This place stood out for one offering I’ve never seen anywhere else— knafeh, a dish made of warmed white Nablus cheese, topped with orange shredded wheat (once saffron-colored, I imagine), ground pistachios and sweet syrup.  I could only get through half a piece, it was so rich and sweet, but I was assured on the weekends, they line up for it.

Nablus Sweets
8320 S. Harlem
Bridegview, IL
(708) 529-3911

Tags: bridgeview, grilled, hummus, knafeh, lebanese, middle eastern, palestinian, south suburbs

Whilst roaming Bridgeview and environs for my upcoming Time Out piece on the middle eastern food in that obscure suburb, which might be in this week’s issue, I spotted a highly promising sign:

The fact that it was on a former Pizza Hut might not be taken as so promising, but after all, the best middle eastern place I found down there was in a former Arby’s, so anything could happen. What was promising was the promise of “real charcoal.” A taco made of truly charcoal-cooked meat is a wonderful thing, full of charred edges and smoky beefy flavor, but I don’t know of any such place in Chicago, indeed one of the things I pine for here is a place like the one I visited in Playa del Carmen:

where incredibly fresh arrachera, skirt steak, was grilled over coals and served up by the ton.

This place may or may not be related to other places called Arturo’s around town, notably one near Milwaukee & Western, which I’ve never had a burning need to try, belonging somewhere in the middle, apparently, of local chains.  I suppose that’s an oversight, but there’s a lot of Mexican out there and Arturo’s gave off a Los Dos Sombreros vibe, seemed aimed squarely at the need-a-gutbomb-at-2-am crowd.

But we went in, and I ordered tacos, two steak and one pastor:

We can dispose of the pastor instantly, it sucked and certainly never came anywhere near a pastor cone.  The tacos tasted pretty good… I could almost believe in the charcoal cooking, there was definitely char and a smoky taste, but I kept waiting for it go beyond what you could produce on a good gas grill with juices dripping down and sizzling back up… and it just didn’t do it.  Maybe, I thought, it’s been reheated, which would be a major error with freshly grilled beef, but could dampen the flavor.  There was flank steak on the menu, maybe that would stand a better chance of being freshly cooked.

But I took the opportunity of visiting the bathroom so I could snoop on the kitchen.  And all I saw back there was a standard gas grill, no signs of charcoal grilling like actual flame, ashen grates, serious internal smoke ventilation systems, big bags labeled “hardwood lump,” whatever.  I tasted little and saw nothing to support the claims of the banner on the top of the building.  Maybe they’re grilling it out back on a barbecue and then holding it; that would reconcile the taste with the signage and with what I observed.  But I just don’t know.

Arturo’s isn’t bad by any means, but it isn’t the place I’d hoped it would be—and more importantly, that they said they were.  That’s a sin that makes it hard for me to want to go back, much as I’d love to have my suspicions overturned.

Arturo’s Mexican Restaurant
7260 W 79th St
Bridgeview, IL 60455
(708) 458-8004

To see more in this series, click Restaurant Reviews at right and look for the numbered reviews.

Tags: charcoal, mexican, taco

It’s ten best list time, so here (according to my personal rules) are the top ten things that were new to me this year, never had ‘em before, along with whatever other things I manage to sneak into the discussion to allow myself more than ten. A cynical person would note that many of them relate to my Sky Full of Bacon podcasts, and might ascribe sinister motives to my blowing their collective horn, but of course 1) I tend to make the podcasts about things I’m already enthusiastic about, and 2) spending so much time with something is likely to increase the meaning it holds for you, so it seems unsurprising to me that those subjects should figure prominently here. Anyway, here’s the list:

10. Cherry doughnut hole from Sweetwater’s in Kalamazoo, eaten (two or three of them, actually) at the Greater Midwest Foodways Alliance program on desserts, with a nod to the peach donut from Mel-O-Cream in Springfield, Illinois.

9. Beans at Mercat a la Planxa. What beans? Any beans, apparently— both times I went, I had a dish in which ham and beans had combined into something intense and magical, rich with deeply comfy porky flavor. The first time it was a side with the suckling pig; the second time it was a warm bean salad. Either way, wonderful, and hardly the most expensive thing on the menu, but certainly the most comforting.

8. Copa, with a side of raw beets in a kind of mustardy sauce, at Mado. Yeah, I made a podcast about their headcheese, but this is the housecured meat that wowed me, and so did those crunchy-fresh oh-so-local beets.

7. Great Lake pizzeria calls it by its ingredients— prosciutto, onion, some cheese, I forget what all— but to me it’s a tarte flambee, the best one since the lost lamented Alsatian stand at the Christkindlmarkt a few years back, which arrives trailing a cloud of miraculous flavor hot from the oven.

6. Grapes from Klug Farms, Green City Market. There was that whole silly debate about local eating last fall, pose or pretension, and all you would have needed to get past it was one taste of the amazing tiny gooey wine-like, no, first-growth-Bordeaux-level, grape varieties they were selling, which were all the justification local eating could ever need, and made further argument superfluous.  Oh, and hey, as long as we’re talking locally grown, how about that arugula I grew in my Earthboxes? That was pretty wonderful too, delicately peppery, it grew like mad and we ate it with joy as long as it lasted.

5. The uchepos gratinados at Mixteco Grill, the dish we’ve ordered more than any other there, with its delicious combination of comfy cornmeal and sharp roasted corn…

And as long as we’re talking tamales, would it really be fair to let this list go by without mention of the fantastic ones, creamy and rich and delicious, served at Chuck’s BBQ during his monthlong Cinco de Mayo fest, which remains one of the greatest, least heralded culinary events of the year in Chicago?

4. Sauerkraut pierogi at Smak Tak, and the whole terrific feast that went with it and pleased my mom no end with its authentic evocation of the tart, comfy Ukrainian varenyky dished up by our Mennonite forebears in Kansas.

3. Peking duck at Sun Wah, the dish that heralded the ascension of an old favorite to new heights under the second generation.

 Photo by Eatchicago

2. Pulled pork at Neely’s in Memphis, the meal where I finally got why Memphis barbecue isn’t about unvarnished hunks o’ meat, like Texas barbecue, but about the interplay of pork, sweet cole slaw, fluffy bread, all playing off each other like the Guarneri String Quartet or Messrs. Howard, Howard and Fine.

And hey, while we’re talking my Tennessee trip, how about those amazing greens at Arnold’s in Nashville, huh?  What was it I said about them here— “it was the threes that made the leap toward greatness— especially the greens, whose pot likker was Bordeaux-complex in its depth of flavor, smoky, porky, cognac-y.”  (Whoops, I already used that analogy in this ten best.)

But as long as I’m saluting the greens at Arnold’s, fairness insists that I also mention the incredible greens at our own Chuck’s BBQ at the LTHForum holiday party, even at the risk of mentioning one amazingly versatile place twice.

1. The mulefoot pig dinner at Blackbird, particularly two outstanding dishes, Vie’s cotechino full of gamey meatiness, and Justin Large of Avec’s headcheese ravioli in an amazingly porky and lemony consomme, though that’s not at all to slight a meal that was absolutely top-notch all the way.  Obviously I had a somewhat unique perspective on this meal (well, unique to me and Sula), given the days and days I spent chronicling it and seeing it all behind the scenes, but besides being boundlessly impressed by the chefs I watched in action (and not a little jealous, frankly— I sure never saw people work together so well and at such a high level in any ad agency I was in), I came away convinced that for all that Chicago is a world capitol of conceptual dining and foams and gels, its real distinction is in a small collection of superb restaurants who source carefully and prepare in an Italian-inflected modern style that brings out the flavor inherent in a dish and then some.
________________________________________________________________________________________

I don’t have a worst this year; I don’t remember anything that really irritated me (well, other than the meal where my window was bashed in and my iPod stolen), indeed why dwell on mediocrity as if it were at all hard to find without my help?  (Thus no comment on the rash of outta-town burger chains which have opened in Chicago this year, and which uniformly underwhelmed.)  Let us salute the good things, which beyond the above would include another cotechino at Riccardo Trattoria, one bite of duck at Boka, the pork chop at Sepia, the deconstructed Caesar salad at Graham Elliott, the birria at Zaragoza, lamb rib from Southside Market, Elgin, Texas, grabbed between morning shoot at Louie Mueller’s and afternoon shoot at Taylor Cafe, the biscuits I learned to make for my Southern party, Tupelo honey picked up at Katzinger’s in Columbus, OH, the ginger vanilla ice cream I’ve been making (inspired by the one good part, dessert, of a lunch at Shikago), the intriguing lemon grass and clove cookies at Kan Pou, a root beer float at Scooter’s (such an obvious idea, lifted into the stratosphere by the combo of their custard and Sprecher’s Root Beer), tomato-goat cheese quiche and vanilla cannele from Floriole Bakery at the Green City Market, and the garlicky eggplant dip at Albawadi in Bridgeview— a suburb I will have more to say about shortly.

Finally, let me end the year with thanks to you, dear Blog-Reader and Podcast-Viewer, whomever you are.  My exit from my previous primary role in shaping and managing LTHForum left me determined to use the opportunity— of a little name within the food community, of the videomaking technology I would have killed for when I was making super 8 movies when I was 15, of this perilous but pregnant moment in media history— to invent something new, to approach the subject of food in this great city in new ways and not just write about going to Khan BBQ or Burt’s Pizza for the umpteenth time (much as they are justly loved).  I’m just beginning to make that happen on the level of print media— let’s hope there are still print media this time next year— but the thousands of views my podcasts have enjoyed at Vimeo and iTunes has been greatly encouraging and gratifying. Thanks for that, and see you next year.

Ten best for: 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003

Almost four years ago, I had a stunningly good meal at Avenues under its then-chef Graham Elliott Bowles (two-thirds of whom is now his own restaurant). And as was my wont then, I posted a course-by-course description of the meal with pictures.

Well, it’s a different world now.  Avenues has a new chef, Curtis Duffy late of Alinea, who has had some raves and some pans.  I don’t feel like taking picture by picture accounts of dinners, or writing plate by plate ones; in fact I often don’t feel like reading such things, for fear of losing the novelty which is certainly a big part of what you’re paying for in a “conceptual dining” restaurant (as I called them the other day).

But if I can find a treatise on Communism in a place that simply hadn’t gotten up to speed one Sunday morning, surely I can find some big picture thoughts on a meal this elaborate, right?  Let’s scan our experience for a theme:

1) The tasting course menu is so over. Well, the novelty is somewhat gone, but the basic Thomas Keller theory behind it— that you only really enjoy 1 or 2 bites of something, so why serve more— still holds true for this kind of food (I’d like to see him sell that idea in a Texas bbq joint, though).  I have to say I enjoyed the progression of things (which, incidentally, came fast and furious, good for them)…

2) The tasting menu is the dominant paradigm for chefs today. Maybe.  But after having 20-some things at Avenues, a certain sameness crept in.  Nearly every plate involved little dabs of this which looked like one thing but turned out to be another (eg, “wasabi” made out of some green, pureed), and least appealingly, something turned into a sandy powder.  Looking back it’s hard to remember specific things that stood out because there were just so many flavors in such tiny quantities.  In fact…

3. Molecular gastronomy may aim too low. I felt like too often, dishes had gone below the integrity of the ingredient, I wanted more things to be enhanced by the dibs and dabs around them, and fewer deconstructed.  The best things I had were anchored in some ingredient that delivered lushness and delight on its own— Faroe Island salmon belly, golden osetra caviar, a simple carrot (below)— and could just be flavored or filigreed a little by the powders and goos on the plate.

Looking back on this menu after two weeks— and even with a printed menu in my hand— it has all blurred together in a way that makes it hard for me to remember individual dishes; my memory, somewhat unfairly, is more of grit on a plate than of something that opened my eyes to new wonders.  I definitely came away with less of a sense of a few marvels, a few wonderfully new combinations, than I did from Duffy’s old boss Achatz’s meal at Trio or even from a rather mixed meal at Bowles’ Graham Elliott.  Now, I should point out that one of our dining companions found the meal more appealing than his recent meal at Alinea, precisely because it didn’t seem to be working him over so hard to make him go “Wow!”  In general we were reasonably satisfied with things, liked things pretty well as they happened, but it’s taken me two weeks to post about this meal because the more I think about it, the less I know what I think.

Service was extremely friendly and conscientious; bread service is excellent, but a champagne offering early on, though generous with tastes, proved really to me to be a chance for them to add a substantial amount to the bill while proving that if there’s a difference between pretty good and great champagne, I don’t know what it is.  (Somebody here tasted all kinds of notes that flew by me.)  We had a very pleasant evening with our fellow diners, and that may have contributed to my not examining this meal with the microattention I have devoted to others in the past, but as capable as Curtis Duffy clearly is— and much of this stuff is the kind of thing only someone with remarkable skills can pull off— I can’t say I feel like he’s yet capable of conceptualizing from beginning to end a 20-course meal on quite the auteurist level that other top directors, I mean chefs, like Achatz or Michael Carlson have achieved.

Tags: alinea, avenues, curtis duffy, graham elliott bowles

One of the lasting testaments to the awfulness of the Soviet system is the fact that so many countries in that part of the world are now identified with a gray, cheerless inhospitality. If you want to describe the experience somewhere as being utterly without charm, grace or initiative, as truly not caring whether the customer lived or died, few adjectives can improve on “East German” or “Bulgarian” or “Albanian.”

This may not seem as terrible a charge to lay at Communism’s feet as, say, the gulags, but I would argue that destroying the natural impulse toward hospitality in the peoples who wound up under Soviet domination is as striking an example of the soul-killing aspect of totalitarianism as anything you could name. Consider some of the countries not far beyond the USSR’s borders—Sweden, Austria, Italy, Turkey, Lebanon, India, Thailand, Japan; nations where the pleasures of the table and the profession of hospitality have been raised to the highest level of warmth and conviviality. And then there’s Albania. A country that ought to be a second Italy spent half a century eating gray mystery meat in sullen silence, and its natural tendencies toward producing good food and good times were wrecked.

All this is rather a heavy and possibly unkind way of setting up some comments about a new bakery and cafe in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood, a rare example of an actual Ukrainian business opening new in a neighborhood otherwise turning hipster-generic. There are clearly some good things happening here—desserts in the case looked innovative and interesting, and the list of Ukrainian specialties would excite my mom’s Mennonite-heritage-bug (our branch, though German in origin, lived in the Ukraine before coming to the US and picked up a lot of dishes like pelmeny and varenyky, basically pierogi). There aren’t many cafes advertising both free wifi, and a roasted goose leg dinner special.

But at the same time, breakfast on Sunday morning was a frustrating experience because the service just didn’t have the warmth and consideration that comes naturally to non-Soviet peoples. It’s a little thing to have to ask for coffee, after a life spent watching waitresses at breakfast come at you coffee pot in hand or at least asking you first, but add an item never arriving despite two requests, having to shut the ajar front door ourselves several times, watching the waitress catch up on the things that should have been done before opening before she takes our order, and dealing with blank-stared mutual incomprehension over a simple matter of ordering a side of hash browns (we nearly ended up with potatoes in my son’s chocolate-banana crepes, I’m certain), and, well, let’s just say it wasn’t exactly like our breakfast at this place.

Still, it’s an ambitious place, as new ethnic joints go, and breakfast was, if a little monotonously sweet, reasonably tasty and well-prepared. I will probably give Shokolad another chance, and hope that this Sunday morning was just an unfortunate reversion to Soviet type, in an atmosphere otherwise of unbridled, customer-pleasing American entrepreneurship.

Shokolad
2524 W Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60622
(773) 276-6402

UPDATE: Shokolad is featured in the “Save This Restaurant” column in this week’s Time Out.

Way back when I reviewed Cemitas China Poblana in my series of restaurants not yet talked about on LTHForum or elsewhere, I made note of a roasted chicken place across the street…

Now, just the other day I had fantastic grilled chicken, one of the best things I ate all year, at a place I will write about shortly, so I had high hopes that lightning might strike again.  Did it?  It did not.  The first time what strikes you may be lightning, but the second time it’s usually just an ’88 Pontiac with a lot of rust damage.

Restaurante El Campestre is a spiffy looking place, almost chain-like in its bright, clean interior and slick signage.  (Nevertheless, there only seems to be the one.)  It has one dish, roasted chicken, which you can have plain or adobado, that is, marinated in a bright red adobo.  Sides are, well, what you’d expect— beans, rice, fries, cole slaw (clearly aiming beyond the Mexican crowd alone), mashed potatoes, etc.

For about $9 I got a half a chicken with two sides, plus chips, salsa, and tortillas.  A moment later, another $2 got me a limeade; there’s a nice-looking fruit stand in the back where they make jugos, although as I would later note, probably the one they don’t make out of fresh fruit is the limeade.  (So of course they’re promoting it.)

The salsas were a bit odd; the one in front was almost bubbly, like it’d just been pureed at a very high speed, sort of applesauce texture.  The one in back, a little better, had a slight citrusy tang to it.  Not sure what style either was aiming for, they were okay.  (A lot of the population in this area seems to be from Zacatecas, maybe this is one of their styles.)

Got my chicken.  It was cooked decently— white meat a little dry, but dark meat dead on, which is pretty much how you usually get chicken like this.  But it didn’t sing.  It didn’t have that fresh-off-the-grill charcoaly sharpness, the adobo didn’t have the zing of fresh spices.  It immediately brought to mind a picture of a 10-gallon drum of institutional adobo sauce.  No freshness, no life.  Washed out.

The limeade was a refreshing choice, but it too had the flattened flavor profile of something from a jug, not a living fruit or vegetable.

Incidentally, I noticed a sign on Cemitas China Poblana that it had moved as of the end of November— it’s now, apparently, at 3138 W. 47th St.  Maybe someday someone else will check it out— for all the crowds now visiting Cemitas Puebla, no one seems to be burning to try another example.  There’s still a lot happening on this block— a carne en su jugo place, a store window full of boxers’ photos, an old nickelodeon becoming a massage parlor.  A colorful slice of the city, worth checking out— though I can’t really recommend the chicken.

Restaurante El Campestre
4226 S Archer Ave.
Chicago, IL 60632
(773) 927-1333

Tags: adobo, chicken, mexican

Note: I’m often aware, as I film these podcasts, that there are aspects of the story that I can’t easily work into a finished video; they need to be told in words, not images (and certainly not in words yakking over images). In the case of my most recent podcasts, I thought it would be interesting to zero in on one or two of the chefs I observed at work and offer some observations beyond what made the final cut. Here’s a little portrait of one, Paul Kahan, chef-owner of Blackbird, Avec and The Publican.  The videos this goes with, of course, are There Will Be Pork parts 1 and 2.)

Paul Kahan is trying to explain how a chef from another restaurant botched the preparation of some meat from a farmer who supplies Kahan’s restaurant, Blackbird. The first problem is that he’s aware that I’m capturing the conversation on video, so he doesn’t want to say something that the other chef might take too much offense at. Kahan is a savvy operator in Chicago’s restaurant world, he knows better than to tick off, even in my obscure form of media, someone you’re bound to run into again.

But the other problem is, the person he’s telling the story to is also a chef, Jason Hammel of Lula Cafe, his guest in the basement of Blackbird as the two of them butcher a trio of heritage breed mulefoot pigs for a dinner later in the week. And so it’s important to Kahan to get this point across to Hammel in a truthful and exact way. It would have been easy to just say anything, to bullshit slightly in a way that would have saved the other chef’s face but allowed Hammel to read between the lines. But Kahan is not a bullshitter. He’s a joker; he laid in a special supply of camo-design Miller High Life for tonight’s butchering party, clearly tickled at the idea of turning the basement of one of America’s chicest restaurants into a Wisconsin lodge party after a day of hunting. But it is important to him, you can see him struggling with the self-imposed responsibility of it, to find the right word that somehow skates the line between mortally offending that other chef and being truthful to Jason Hammel about what was done to the meat. It is important to be precise about food. To tell the truth of it. It’s food, you owe it honesty.

“He overmanipulated it,” Kahan finally says.

* * *

At this culinary moment, Chicago is very close to being the global capitol of overmanipulation. The hot cookbook of this Christmas season is a gorgeously thick tribute to what’s often called molecular gastronomy, but might better be called conceptual dining. Or simply: art food.

But Kahan has carved out a place at the very top of Chicago’s dining, with Blackbird and its siblings Avec and The Publican, while rejecting that kind of food for art’s sake. Rejecting the idea of treating an ingredient as mere paint on some larger canvas that exists in your mind.

Kahan’s father owned a smokehouse and a delicatessen, so quality ingredients have never had the sort of theoretical nature for him that would allow you to treat them with such abstraction. He grew up among the kind of customers who gave each piece of meat or fish the gimlet eye before begrudgingly accepting it, and he still has relationships with some of his father’s contemporaries that are rooted not in being a James Beard Award-winning, Food & Wine 10 Best chef, but in being “Bobby Kahan’s kid.”

When he first started offering pork belly, the dish he’s most associated with, it was the kind of cut you wouldn’t have even thought of offering in a high end restaurant unless you had his comfort level with the gritty reality of the wholesale meat business. Now it’s trendy, and Kahan will talk the same environmental-local-family farm talk that other chefs do when they talk about using the “whole animal.” He’s obviously sincere about it (the dinner he’s preparing the mulefoots for is a benefit for Slow Food he’s arranged); but all the same, when other chefs talk about this stuff, they can sound like they’re auditioning to be the next Dalai Lama. When Kahan talks about it, you hear, somewhere in the background, a guy from Randolph Street who can’t believe what these schmuck chefs are paying for loin when pork belly is such a deal.

“Pork belly is something that we’ve always served here. I don’t think I invented serving it, obviously I didn’t,” he says. But he’s proud that he’s served nearly every part of the animal on his regular menu, and that his newly opened The Publican is doing so right now, when playing it safer might have been a smart opening gambit. “I think we’ve educated people, and we’ve never shied away from doing exactly the food we wanted to do.”

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

Rather than the chef as artist, Kahan is the chef as showman, delivering all the surefire elements of blockbuster entertainment that the dining public wants and that he knows work. This has become especially clear with the opening of The Publican, the most obviously concepted of Kahan’s restaurants to date, an American beer hall that tries (not entirely successfully, to judge by the reviews to date) to combine Blackbird’s chic minimalism with old world gemütlichkeit. But all of his restaurants, in retrospect, had a high concept; as in Hollywood, it’s the quality of the execution that makes you forget the concoctedness of the concept and get lost in the story.

*  *  *

I see this executional prowess at work in the last few hours before the mulefoot dinner. Kahan has chosen and trained his people well, and though he probes here and there, he’s not going to tear down their six-course meal and remake it in his image at the last minute (as a creative director in advertising might do). When Justin Large of Avec, who’s preparing ravioli, announces his intention to pan-fry them, Kahan pushes back a little, but when Large seems confident in his decision, he lets him go ahead without further question. (He was right to do so; Large’s dish was possibly the best of a stellar night.)

But without ever appearing anxious, Kahan steadily ramps up his level of activity, coordinating the choice of glassware from storage across the street, the description of wines on the menu, the arrangement of tables, the placement of dessert on the plate, making sure everyone had a chance to grab a bite of staff meal before the night ahead. By the end he’s so active he seems capable of turning up in multiple places at once, yet he never raises his voice, he never has to tell someone how to do their job. Kahan can be street-kid blunt— when I asked him a deliberately unspecific question, “What does pork mean to you?”, the first response out of his mouth was “That’s a really stupid question”— but he isn’t like that with his people tonight, because his approach, his commitment to honest flavor, is something they already share and believe in.  They have his principles to follow, and if they’re true to them, the truth of the food will come out.

I’m surprised to find that Tiztal Cafe hasn’t registered on LTHForum yet, even if the board is kind of in revisiting-greatest-hits mode these days, few new discoveries being talked up unless they’re hamburger franchises from out of town. But it’s cute-little-cafe-Mexican in Uptown just shy of Andersonville, so you’d think somebody would have stumbled on it; this is one case where the press has been decidedly ahead of LTHForumites.

Tiztal is a breakfast joint with a twist: it’s open 24 hours on weekends, serving that crucial Lakeview demographic of people who don’t get up till 2 pm, or need a lot of carbs at 2 am. There may not seem like there’s going to be much call for waffles at 8 at night from people over 10 and under 90, but things tend toward the spicy and savory, so it makes a reasonable comfort food dinner. If you’re hammered.

Me, I went there with the family at 9 am on Sunday, and the place didn’t look any the worse for having been open 36 hours straight by that point. The menu is short, some omelettes, waffles, a couple of savory crepes and yesterday, at least, chilaquiles were on special. I ordered them, stupidly since I’ve been battling a stomach bug, which took the opportunity to remind me that I wasn’t over it yet, so I lived on crackers and Jell-O the rest of the day. I’m not going to say they were worth that; I’m not going to say anything would be, not even if Grant Achatz had deconstructed them by making a puffy chip and squirting salsa and cream into its middle personally. But they were quite good, and better yet were the potatoes which were roasted (and actually cooked all the way through, which is a surprise at breakfast places) with garlic and parmesan, and eminently scarfable. (They come with nearly everything, which is very smart from a marketing standpoint.) Youngest son had a waffle with strawberries, bananas, and a strawberry crema, which is a nice novelty change from syrup alone (I tasted it, a little too Nestle Quik-ish for me, but he liked it which is all that matters).

Better than anything we had, though, the thing that really makes me want to give them some love and send you there next weekend, was the hospitality. It’s run by a woman who used to be at Zephyr Cafe for a million years, and assuming she’s the one who came by first thing to check on us, she’s got that kindly, welcoming earth-mama thing down pat. I had just been reading Yelp reviews of a couple of obscurish Sunday brunch places where people complained in both about indifferent bordering on hostile service, and this could not have been further from that; the warmth of her welcome trumped the food, entirely enjoyable as it was. To think that she was able to muster that after her place has been open serving drunks for the previous 36 hours is pretty remarkable. And the staff generally exhibited the same level of warmth and helpfulness, on top of things throughout (mind you, they weren’t slammed like most breakfast places on Sunday at 9, so that undoubtedly helped).

So, Tiztal, come for the gentle easing into your Sunday morning, stay for the pretty darn good food.

Tiztal Cafe
4631 N Clark St
Chicago, IL 60613
(773) 271-4631

To see more in this series, click Restaurant Reviews at right and look for the numbered reviews.

The phrase “farm to table” is used a lot in foodie circles. In the second half of this Sky Full of Bacon two-part podcast, I’ll complete the picture of what that really means with visits to restaurant kitchens… and to a slaughterhouse.

Sky Full of Bacon 06: There Will Be Pork (pt. 2) from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

Mike Sula of the Chicago Reader has been writing about the rare mulefoot pig for the last year and a half (see here). Now the Reader has enlisted award-winning chef Paul Kahan, of Chicago’s Blackbird, to plan an elaborate six-course dinner showcasing the meat of these pigs and the sustainable, humane way in which they’re raised, as a benefit for Slow Food.

In Part 2, Mike Sula and I watch as Kahan and chefs Jason Hammel (Lula Cafe), Justin Large (Avec), Mike Sheerin (Blackbird) and Tim Dahl (Blackbird) prepare for the big night and talk about why supporting and promoting good pork matters to them. And we go to the rural slaughterhouse with Jason Hammel to gain a better understanding of what really lies behind the meat we eat. (Warning: although we were not allowed to film the kill itself, the video does contain frank footage of everything else that goes on in a slaughterhouse.) (19:56)

Mike Sula’s account of the same events
Recipes from the dinner
The Chicago Reader’s complete “Whole Hog Project” archive
LTHforum posts on the dinner, and Chuck Sudo’s account at Chicagoist
Monica Eng of the Chi-Trib wrote a really great piece about her experiences at various slaughterhouses here

P.S. Originally I felt like this one needed some kind of summing-up at the end expressing how I felt after watching my dinner live and die. In the end, as I usually do, I preferred to let the subjects and the images speak, not listen to me yak. But here, if anyone’s curious, is what I wrote and recorded but left on the cutting room floor:

It was an amazing meal. Was it worth the price?

We all joked, before we went to Eickman’s, that we’d come out vegetarian converts.

But in the end, I found myself affected less by the moment of these animals’ deaths… than by the day I spent seeing their lives at Valerie’s farm, free and happy and living naturally.

And I was impressed by the thoughtfulness, even reverence with which all of the chefs approached the meat we brought them.

It’s easy to say meat is bad. It’s just as easy to buy industrial meat without thinking about where it comes from. The hard thing is raising, cooking and eating meat in a way that’s good for the land, pigs and people. That’s what I feel like I’ve seen on this journey… from farm to table.

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About Sky Full of Bacon
Sky Full of Bacon #5: There Will Be Pork (pt. 1)
Sky Full of Bacon #4: A Head’s Tale
Sky Full of Bacon #3: The Last Brisket Show
Sky Full of Bacon #2: Duck School
Sky Full of Bacon #1: How Local Can You Go?

Please feel free to comment here or to email me here.

Tags: avec, blackbird, Eickman's, Jason Hammel, lula, Paul Kahan, pigs, slaughterhouse