I was a bit startled to learn from an LTHForum thread that Boka had opened in (late) 2004. I was thinking of it as one of the new restaurants; apparently it just slightly postdates Charcoal Oven. Nevertheless it is slightly newer than it looks thanks to the presence, and subsequent Food & Wine best new chefs anointment, of Giuseppe Tentori, who I guess has just been there a couple of years at most.

If, as was claimed at the time, Boka was once trying to be the new Blackbird, that’s clearly not Tentori’s aim. He’s clearly aiming for a delicate sort of Asian fusion in which main ingredients are paired with surprising new flavors, many of them citrus fruits or of a similar lightness. So it’s more like the new Yoshi’s, or the new Le Lan— or whatever the hot restaurant of Asian fusion circa 1991 was, it felt more like dining a decade-plus ago than the last several upscale meals I’ve had. Not that I object to a little time travel with my meal, any day.

The down side is that many of these novel flavor combinations just didn’t pan out; the meal was a frustrating mix of spot-on marvels and weird, who-thought-that-went-together moments. A starter of hamachi paired with a brightly grassy cilantro sauce and something called “young coconut-buddha hand vinaigrette” (I could look up what all that means, but really, it’s better as just pure poetry) was exquisitely light, a little shot of helium for the palate. Slices of duck breast in some combination that included a cornmeal sauce (however such a thing is possible) were savory and intensely satisfying. Sweet roasted beets with a tangy beet puree and little dicey bits of smoke flavor from Nueske’s bacon was a terrific salad.

But a scallop came with some odd combination of fruit and whatnot that tasted like banana next to it, doing no more to enhance the flavor of the scallop than dipping it in chocolate sauce would. And a baby squid accompanied by squid-ink tapioca (trying to be caviar, coming off more like a briny Jell-O pudding) was flat, it just needed another note to make it all zing. Nothing was so far off that I wanted to call in Gordon Ramsay to ask “Did you fookin’ taste this before you sent it out?”, but I would have sent a couple of them back for rethinking and simplifying. The fact that you can get an odd fruit this time of year does not mean you have to use it with the first piece of protein that comes along…

Dessert ended things on a high note; I really, really liked a crepe cake with cider sorbet, a perfect autumn dessert with great texture and flavors. The room is quite nice, romantically dark and cozy, sails that look like they came from Calatrava’s Milwaukee art museum make something dramatic out of a square box room. Service was pretty solid, a little young and overeager in its enthusiasm for chef’s cuisine, but capable and on top of things throughout (when my wife noted that her cocktail had been quite strong, the immediate response was to summon an extra round of bread service). All in all a good meal, but not one that made me feel like I was in the assured hands of a master; if I were to return it would be with more thought given to each thing before I ordered it, and whether I really believed that its four or five preciously described ingredients belonged together.

Boka
1729 N Halsted St
Chicago, IL 60614
312-337-6070
www.bokachicago.com

“Convey[s] the downright decency of all parties involved with a directness that’s difficult to achieve in prose. Listening to farmer Linda Derrickson talk from the heart about honoring and giving thanks for the happy lives of pigs is worth at least 100 pages of The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” —Martha Bayne

The phrase “farm to table” is used a lot in foodie circles. In this Sky Full of Bacon two-part podcast, I’ll show you what it really means— from the farm to the slaughterhouse to the kitchens of five of Chicago’s top restaurants.

Sky Full of Bacon 05: There Will Be Pork (pt. 1) 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. 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. Kahan in turn recruited chefs Jason Hammel (Lula Cafe), Paul Virant (Vie), Brian Huston (the newly opened The Publican) and Justin Large (Avec), as well as Blackbird executive chef Mike Sheerin and dessert chef Tim Dahl, to each prepare a course utilizing different parts of the whole animal.

But no meal begins with the restaurant. In Part 1, Mike Sula and I visit the farmers who’ve raised these mulefoot pigs in southern Wisconsin, and consider the paradox of why eating an endangered pig breed could be the key to saving it. And as preparations for the meal get underway, we talk to Huston and Virant about why raising pork humanely from farmers you know and using the whole animal matters to them. (Warning: video does contain vivid footage of meatcutting.) It’s an epic tale with as much meat (pun unavoidable) as two or three Sky Full of Bacon podcasts, which is why it’s broken into two parts, the first of which runs 19:57.  Next week, in Part 2, we’ll complete the story.

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

____________________________________________________________________________________________
About Sky Full of Bacon
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.

Sunday, driving up Elston.  I spot that a perpetual, never especially interesting hot dog stand has suddenly become a taco place.  The name, Taqueria LP Express, seems generic, but they are touting their steak tacos.

I soon understand why: the LP stands for La Pasadita, the famous trio of steak taco joints on Ashland near Division.  The same family owns several places with various names (Las Asadas, for instance), and this is a slightly less hidden-in-plain-sight version, since signage and clippings are at some pains to establish that you’re getting the real La Pasadita deal.  Which you pretty much do; I’ve never thought La Pasadita’s were the greatest steak tacos on earth, but they’re certainly good, and they’re certainly better than anything else Mexican I know of on that stretch of Elston (not far from the supremely 1950s-looking Las Cazuelas).

Taqueria LP Express
4968 N. Elston
773-282-8226

Driving down Ashland, scouting out unknown sout’-side places.  I see what looks like it used to be a fast food place I can’t quite identify, advertising tacos, breakfast, rib tips, all kinds of stuff, but not actually bearing a name.  41st and Ashland.  It’s next to a pork processing plant so I make two quick assumptions: one, it’s their de facto cafeteria, two, order the pork.

Both seem correct to me.  I order a pork and a steak taco.  The steak is lame, overseasoned to make up for many manifest deficiencies.  But the roast pork seems pretty good and tasty, roast pig, what’s not to like.  I get a call from Pigmon on my cell (this stop was, I must admit, merely a recon stop for our real lunch to follow immediately) and tell him he should come have the carnitas, the pork.

Ten minutes later he orders the pork and the al pastor.  The pastor is lousy, mealy, kind of gross.  A moment later I notice he’s eating the pastor while avoiding the pork.  “You’re not eating the carnitas?”

“The pastor blows.  But it’s the best thing here.”

“I didn’t think the pork was so bad…” I say, suddenly my own opinion of the meal thrown in doubt, like a guy who was standing up for Franzia Rosé in front of a stranger who turns out to be Robert Parker.

“Worst I’ve ever had.  Totally tastes like ass.”

So I don’t know what I think now.  I mean, it’s not like I would have recommended this cafeteria-like place overall to begin with, but I did think the pork was okay, it’s roasted pork, a pretty simple pleasure that I was okay with.  I guess the only thing to do is to sum it up like Alpana on a Check, Please:

“And we tried carnitas at Kiki D’s Carnitas Family Restaurant in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.  Mike enjoyed the pictures of the soccer team they sponsor and the roast pork carnitas.  Pigmon thought everything tasted like ass, and wouldn’t feed that shit to a dying donkey.”

Kiki D’s Carnitas
4117 S. Ashland
773-254-3526

Academy award winner Sir Ben Kingsley as Kiki D, the ex-military soccer coach from Kazakhstan who turns a lovable gang of inner city kids into international champions in Carnitas! from Touchstone Pictures.

P.S. Chuck Sudo reviewed Kiki D’s once.  He agrees with Pigmon.

P.P.S. We finally had lunch here.

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

For my latest restaurant-not-widely-talked-about-on-LTHForum-or-anywhere-else, I was going to write about Amira’s Trio, a Cuban-Puerto Rican spot on Cicero a little north (on the other side of the street) of Sol de Mexico. But there was enough personality and pizazz in this little but attractive and friendly spot, especially given its owner, Vicky Amira, that I saw a chance to sell a piece on it— and so it appears this week in Time Out Chicago’s Save This Restaurant column.

So read it there, and then, believe me, you won’t regret a visit to Amira’s Trio, the archetypal welcoming family-run restaurant, clean and neat enough that you can even take people who don’t share your taste for ethnic dives, as long as they love good, hearty comfort food— and being fussed over by a warm, maternal owner.

Amira’s Trio
3047 N Cicero Ave.
773-205-6200

The Cuban-Rican, half Cubano, half Jibarito.

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

With the 800-lb. gorilla of Chicago restaurant cookbooks just hitting stores and an exquisitely rarefied seafood tasting menu earning the title of best new restaurant in America, it’s easy to see ours as a restaurant scene dominated by artifice, weird science, and great-brain chefs. But I think last night’s mulefoot pig dinner, initiated by the Reader as part of Mike Sula’s writings about this heritage breed and planned by Paul Kahan at Blackbird with the aid of five other chefs, ought to stand as an equally momentous occasion— the moment when a movement devoted to cooking rooted in the flavors of midwestern products reached a critical mass and a level of comprehensive achievement that needs no excuses or significant ringers from outside to make a good meal. Obviously there have been restaurants cooking midwestern products for a long time, and given that four of the chefs came from within Kahan’s company and a fifth was a longtime employee who went off on his own, you could argue how widespread the movement is on our scene— but on the other hand, given that those restaurants represent a pretty significant chunk of the most-admired restaurants in town, if they have a movement, there’s a movement.

More significant to me, and on a practical basis, isn’t the names of the chefs involved but of the farmers whose names I kept hearing as Mike Sula and I followed the progress of the dinner.* Gunthorp, Green Acres, Rasmussen, Nichols— this is where the critical mass has been reached, that the chefs support the quality farmers enough to keep them going, and the quality farmers produce consistently enough to keep the chefs supplied and satisfied with the level of their product. What we saw last night was that given a great ingredient— the clean, lushly fatty meat of the mulefoot pig— as a focus for the meal, these six chefs (actually more across all six restaurants) could produce a coherent meal reflective of a similar approach to showcasing the inherent flavors of the midwest’s products at their most heightened and refined, without artifice or gilded pork-lilies, but with plenty of good midwestern stuff like bacon or pickled onions.

And by “coherent” I mean “spectacularly good.” Around me I heard comments like “I feel like I’ve never tasted pork before,” and that more than once in relation to different dishes. The chefs had divvied up the meat to give different chefs different opportunities and places to focus, and so each course brought us a different view of what pork, that “wonderful, magical animal,” could be, from the organy funk of Vie’s cotechino (not as organy-funky as hoped, thanks to the USDA inspector flunking most of the offal at the processor, alas), to the simple clean flavor of a ham chop from Blackbird’s Mike Sheerin. For me there were two particular standouts: Vie’s cotechino, salty and strong, but leavened by the sweet note of a pickled plum, and the headcheese ravioli in a pork consomme from Avec’s Justin Large, the broth a marvelous, slightly lemony shot of concentrated pork savoriness. But there was revelation throughout the meal— I heard others say they were blown away by Lula’s pork belly, amazed at how delectable a cube of almost pure fat could be, or by the snow-white pork rinds that made up part of Blackbird’s cheese course, or the deeply comfy rosemary-scented roast-pork satisfaction of The Publican’s porchetta.

There was one spectacular dud, not a course but a wine pairing— an Indian (!) sirah which, evoking comparisons like “burnt soup” and “V-8 juice,” did not suggest that India will be replacing Chile or Australia just yet. But otherwise wine pairings (and in The Publican’s case, Goose Island Harvest Ale) were well-chosen and enjoyable, service was impeccable at a level of crowding even beyond the likely norm for Blackbird, and all in all, it was a wonderful, magical dinner, basking in the waves of enjoyment which outstanding pork provided, and knowing that just a few seats away were, for once, the farmers who had made our exquisite cityfied pleasures possible. Tremendous thanks to them and to Paul Kahan and all his team for creating an occasion which showcased and honored them and their contributions in so spectacular a fashion (and not least of the heartening aspects of the meal was getting to watch such a bunch of heavyhitters in the kitchen working together side by side and without ego).

* He will post reports on the Reader’s Food Chain blog, and eventually have a lengthy piece in the Reader, while I’ll have a Sky Full of Bacon podcast about the event at the same time.

A secret menu at Vie? What would that be, stuff they flew around the globe in the middle of winter to eat?

No, there’s no secret menu but there is one off-menu item that you might want to check out, available only in a very small quantity on Friday nights: a burger. Yeah, so? you ask. Well, it’s a burger that right now is being made from bits of the whole steer they dry-aged at Eickman’s in Seward, Illinois and butchered themselves.

Accompanied by fries fried in the tallow from the same or at least similar beasts, this is very much a Vie-style burger, the pure, dry-aged-beefy flavor of the meat front and center with only minimal accompaniments: some pickled onions and ramps and a ketchup made in house from some of the small sweetish tomatoes that were in the markets a few weeks ago. Frankly, given the sweetness of the ketchup, I’d have liked the meat more salted and seasoned for contrast, but that’s a minor cavil, the flavor of the high quality beef is what counts and it was terrific. The fries as dipped in that ketchup were mighty fine, too.

It was also my first time having the Vie salad, a simple but outstanding mix of greens with two kinds of hearts of palm— marinated chunks, like you remember from country club dining circa 1967, and shaved slices of fresh hearts of palm, nearly three inches across and more like daikon or something than canned HoP, all set off— or I should really say, all made— by shaved parmesan which just burst with bright and deep cheese flavor. Really, the best composed salad I’ve had in a restaurant in as long as I can remember, and I wasn’t surprised when Paul Virant told us that they keep trying to take it off the menu and replace it, but they can never seem to beat it, and so it’s lasted two years.

Finally, I talked for a bit with Nathan Sears, Vie’s sous and the charcuterie guy, about lardo, my own attempt at lardo-making having been somewhat less than satisfying. He brought out a few slices of theirs, which I found a little sweet— it comes from a pig called a Crawford Sweet, and they use sugar in the cure— but melted in the mouth giving off a complex mix of herbal and porky flavors. I am newly inspired, and may use the winter to attempt another go-round at lardoblogging myself.

Vie
4471 Lawn Ave.
Western Springs, IL 60558
708-246-2082

The craziness referred to in my previous post is this: I am shooting the steps leading up to the dinner at Blackbird on Sunday night where three mulefoot pigs, acquired by the Chicago Reader— no, not as part of the Creative Loafing deal, but in relation to the series of stories Mike Sula wrote about this rare breed— will be served to a bunch of people paying $150 $125 a plate and benefitting Slow Food.

What this has meant is, on Tuesday we drove up to Argyle, Wisconsin, a little southwest of Madison, met the farmers involved, and then helped load three pigs into a crate on the back of a pickup truck, a feat of slapstick comedy which the Three Stooges could not have done better at, and drove them to Eickman’s, a processor in Seward, Illinois, to spend their last night on this earth.

Wednesday we were met at Eickman’s by Jason Hammel, chef at Lula, and watched the slaughter process.  I was not allowed to film the moment of killing, which I’m not entirely sorry about, but believe me, I could make a plenty gory video out of what I did get.  However, the point is not to be shocking, but to deal honestly with the fact that not only do creatures die to provide meat for us, but breeds like the mulefoot won’t survive unless there’s a market for them and farmers willing to raise them as a business.

Wednesday Jason drove back with three iced pigs in a pickup truck and we delivered them to the side door of Blackbird, just as people in nice clothes were arriving at the front for dinner.  If anyone bothered to look down the alley, they should have had a perfect view of Hammel and Blackbird chef Mike Sheerin hoisting the fat pink pigs up into the freight elevator, like Scorsese characters preparing to dispose of a fellow mobster.  We returned around 11 as Hammel, Sheerin, Paul Kahan, and Paul Virant of Vie arrived for a late night butchering party.  Afterwards we went to the hot new Kahan place, The Publican, for Belgian beers after its closing hours; I’m sure we’ll be among the few ever to see it empty.  Or among the few to do so after having hacked three whole hogs into sections.

Today we’re visiting The Publican and Vie to see what they’re doing with their sections, and will hopefully do the same at Lula tomorrow.  Then Sunday I’ll get to shoot at least some part of the service, though I have no intention of being the annoying guy on the floor with a camcorder.

The challenge in all this will be that the slaughter section, no matter how tasteful and rationally presented, is bound to be uncomfortable— and to make everything else done with the meat seem barbaric.  We’re all so far from where our meat comes from that, like good Germans, we’ve successfully put the machinery of death out of mind and can pretend that it has nothing to do with us.  Seeing slaughter didn’t make an instant vegetarian out of me, but what I hope it has done is make me a little less of a hypocrite about the meat I eat.  If I’m going to demand an animal’s death, I should demand a decent life for it as well. Industrial food is very good at keeping unpleasant ways of raising animals out of sight of most of us who eat them; this video— or videos if it gets split into two parts— will be about confronting that and the challenge of making it humane.

Oh, and about some really great Chicago chefs making fantastic food.  You see why it almost has to be in two parts, as there’s way more than just one simple subject here….

So a few installments of my “restaurants that haven’t been talked about on LTHForum or all that much anywhere else” ago, I wrote about Al-Basha, a middle eastern restaurant in a south suburban strip mall where I found that a menu of familiar favorites was distinguished by unusually fresh and bright flavors, ranking among the best of such things as shawerma, falafel and baba ghanoush that I’ve had lately.

Today, in a change of pace, I present Al Bawadi Mediterranean Grill, a middle eastern restaurant in a south suburban strip mall where I found that a menu of familiar favorites was distinguished by unusually fresh and bright flavors, ranking among the best of such things as shawerma, falafel and baba ghanoush that I’ve had lately.

Actually, credit for finding this one goes to my wife.  Yes, I was the one who put us on 87th heading toward Harlem to look for middle eastern, but she was the one who spotted Al Bawadi’s sign and most critically, its promise of “Natural Fire Wood Grilled” meats, and fought her way through vicious traffic to land us in its parking lot.

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.

It is, let me say, a vast improvement, not only because of the much more pasha-decadent decor (I assume the paisley curtains and pillows are not Arby’s originals) but because the food was simply first-rate throughout.  Again, it’s not that anything was anything all that unusual— fattoush salad, hummus and baba ghanoush, falafel, a mixed grill platter with shawerma and kebabs— but it was all really well executed, bright spices, fresh as could be, chicken kebab perfectly cooked and so on.  (There are some grilled fish dishes and the like that seem a little beyond the usual.)  The only item I hadn’t really seen before was a freebie on the plate of nosh set on our table as we arrived; along with the usual pickled vegetables and some toasted pita, we got a pile of smooshed eggplant mixed with tomato and garlic, lots of garlic.  (The precise degree of smooshing was, less than baba ghanoush, but more than a chopped eggplant dish like the Turkish imam biyaldi.)  It wasn’t pretty (it sort of looked like brains or something) but it was really good, and I think I just stopped tasting the garlic about 20 minutes ago.

So the Bridgeview area is a big 2 for 2 on middle eastern places selected by pure random chance.  It won’t be the last time I explore down there, even if I no longer have a traffic court issue that compels me to visit that part of the world.

Al Bawadi Grill
7216 W. 87th St.
Bridgeview, IL
(708) 599-1999

You would think it would be impossible for a place on the hot Clark Street strip in Andersonville to go unnoticed on LTHForum or, indeed, in local food media generally. Well, except maybe for that little Asian-run pizza hole next to the McDonald’s. But you would be wrong; an Italian deli called Piatto Pronto has managed the feat. Only Yelpers have yipped about it.

It looks promising. Lots of deli meats of what I would call the higher supermarket brands in the cases— Columbus sopressata, Hilshire Farms ham, etc. Cuisine de France bread is baked on premises, which is a sign, I guess, of slightly misplaced ambition (there’s D’Amato foccacia in the store, why not their bread for subs?)

I ordered a Napolitano, which had some of the funkier meats on it, and a Tuscan white bean salad looked pretty good.

Alas, looks were, if not deceiving, at least somewhat cagey. I wish the $3.99 sub cost $4.99 and had more stuff on it. I wish while they were putting more stuff on it, they put less oil on it. With the soft Kleenex de France bread and all that gloop on it, the pretty good meats were done a disservice, buried in the mix. The sandwich needed more cowbell.

Even more disserved was the bean salad, by an excess of oil— it was really gloopy— and refrigeration, which killed the flavor of the visible herbs. Call it heresy, but for dine-in orders, I’d stick a salad like this in the microwave for 30 seconds or something.

I liked the look of Piatto Pronto enough that I’m inclined to give it another shot. There’s all kinds of interesting things, seafood salads, whatnot. But it just didn’t happen for me today.

And for all that the commercial product is fairly well chosen, it still makes me wonder, where’s the housemade salume shop in Chicago to rival Armandino’s Salumi in Seattle, etc.?

Piatto Pronto
5624 N Clark St
Chicago, IL 60660
(773) 334-5688
www.piattopronto.net

After spending a number of hours in Mado’s kitchen shooting an upcoming Sky Full of Bacon, I finally ate there last night with a few others involved in the production. (The following is just a standard meal review, but trust me, the precise subject of the podcast will be much more exotic.)

For me, Mado is the place that people were looking for in a place like Bonsoiree, which got a lot of hype last year for its (increasingly pricey) underground dinners but largely underwhelmed me— but does so at the price point that makes experimentation and hits-or-misses an acceptable part of the journey. All over town now entrees start with a 3, and at that price they damn well better come off perfectly. At Mado, I think every entree (or at least nearly so) started with a 1— a price at which one can happily go for the ride with a couple of chefs who are making their menu up new, constantly, based on what’s in the markets. Rapid-response cooking like that is going to be better some times than others, by its nature, but rooted in classic skills, you should be able to keep that average pretty high– and that’s exactly what I think Mado has done. Superior ingredients and some classic techniques produced an outstanding value for the price (barely $20 per person before tip) and compared favorably with any meal I’ve had lately— Sepia, Graham Elliott, Mercat a la Planxa, etc.

The in-house charcuterie is certainly one of the big reasons to go. We tried three different head cheeses, including the pork which will star in the podcast, although I think my favorite (don’t tell Triska) was lamb, just a subtle lamb flavor shining through the texture of head cheese (which, at least the way they make it, isn’t a gooey gelatinous loaf but somewhat akin to chunks of leftover Thanksgiving turkey bound with a little cold gravy). Even better than any of them, though, was the copa, cured pork shoulder somewhat like prosciutto, which had the beautiful deep red color and winey complexity of the best charcuterie anywhere I’ve had it.

Antipasti consisted of a number of simply dressed plates, mostly fresh vegetables, and a selection of pickled items. I really liked the pickled watermelon slices and zucchini bits (there’s what to do with all your zucchini!), a beet salad with pistachios and a slightly spicy yogurt dressing was superbly fresh and bright, and a little tuna and potato dish poached in olive oil was like a great, simple tapas. I was less wild about uncooked brussel sprouts tossed with shaved parmesan, I would have liked them both softer and warmer, I think.

Although I liked the housemade pasta itself, I agree with those who find the pasta dishes a little too minimalist, even by authentic-Italian standards. But two entrees were really great. One, which chef/co-owner Rob Levitt had urged us to try, was calves’ liver in a reduction with bits of their homemade bacon— this was surprisingly easy to love even for someone who’s not wild about liver, the preparation gave the liver a steak-like richness. And a dish of little fried perch on top of a cauliflower puree with a saffron sauce was wonderfully light and fresh.

Mado has instantly climbed onto my recommend-to-people list for offering really well-made and interesting food in a comfortable setting at comfortable prices. I asked Rob during the shoot why he thought that some people had a negative perception of the value and the portion size and he said some of them seem to expect to leave with a big bag of leftover food. If that’s so, then they should be eating at Rosebud or something; the value here, of extremely high quality meat that’s raised and used in a responsible way, and served at a reasonable size for a reasonable price, seems like a very good deal to me. You get what you’re paying for here on the plate, not in a bag afterwards.

Mado
1647 N. Milwaukee Ave.
Chicago, IL 60647
773-342-2340