Hellacious rain Saturday morning meant that I was trying to think of something indoors to take the kids to. Unfortunately since it’s early September, that means we’re just coming off of visiting every kid-oriented museum for 60 miles around, so flailing desperately, I even checked the Museum of Contemporary Art. Bingo. A Jeff Koons show—I figured they’d at least like the giant chromed inflatable toys—and an Alexander Calder show, in case they hated the Koons show.

I’m pretty suspicious of Koons, I saw his last MCA show when I first moved here in 1988 and there’s nothing about basketballs in aquarium tanks or vacuum cleaners in fluorescent-lit display cases that has improved with age and the Saatchis’ money. That’s the kind of London art scene shock-stuff that can only be described with a blunt, pithy “shite”— cynical art for cynical buyers wishing to show off how completely free they are of boring old notions like quality and meaning.

That said, I’ve always thought the chromed inflatable bunny, turning the cheapest of all supermarket toys from the lamest of kid holidays (Easter) into a luxury good or even an idol, is one of the scariest, most brilliant bits of conceptual art ever made. There’s nothing Koons does that isn’t descended either from Duchamp putting a urinal in a gallery or Warhol/Rosenquist treating anonymous advertising graphics with the gravity and scale of the Sistine Chapel, but every once in a while he hits that joke so perfectly on the head that you can’t help but be wowed by the epic, lush irony. The bunny, the gilted-up lifesize porcelain figure of Michael Jackson and chimp, the statue of a policeman with a cartoon bear from some godawful public safety campaign of the 70s—I could show you pictures, if you haven’t seen them, but there’s no substitute for being in their awesomely beyond-taste presence. They’re like the lawn jockeys of the gods.

Then, like Mario’s ice after Al’s Italian beef, Calder’s innocent delight cleanses all of Koons’ art-biz cynicism away. The mobiles fill only two small alcoves, but everything in them is so light and cheering and buoyant that it instantly dissipates the mood set by Koons’ bombastic irony.  He’s downstairs clomping around like Frankenstein, and upstairs Nureyev is dancing.  There’s also an interesting bit of hand-drawn animation by a South African artist named William Kentridge, a darkly foreboding but never heavyhanded bit of nightmare about apartheid, that is well worth stopping in a small 3rd-floor screening room to see.  If you only go to see Koons, you’re missing the real show.

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To be honest, there has been a single, one-line mention of the Wolfgang Puck-managed cafe in the Museum of Contemporary Art at LTHForum, and under many circumstances I might think that that was all a concession like this deserved. (My last LTH experience with a Puck concession was mocking the closing of the one in the history museum.) But in fact it’s an estimable place, and deserves a serious take, so I’m going to mulligan it into my 50 restaurants previously (almost) entirely unwritten about at LTHForum.

After all that it was still raining heavily, so we gave up on my original plan to try Wow Bao and went into Puck’s cafe for lunch. One side is sandwiches, the overpriced lunch stuff I mocked at the Historical Society, but the other side has white tablecloths and a chichi lunch menu.

Service seemed a bit lackadaisacal— the very long room doesn’t help, at one point our waitress broke into a sprint to cover the distance to one of her tables— but I was impressed the moment the bread plate, with its side of goat cheese and tapenade, arrived.  Two of the four lunches we were served also impressed me that this was a serious place well beyond the needs of serving upscale food to tourists.

First, the downside.  I was impressed that a Caesar salad arrived with visible anchovy filets on top, but the dressing was bland and even a little sweet, way off for this iconic dish.  The kids’ menu probably serves a better burger or grilled cheese than the average, but that’s certainly stale thinking about what kids can/should eat in this kind of setting.

On the other hand, older son’s steak salad was elevated above the provenance of its standard greens or even its trendy purple fingerling potatoes by a housemade oregano-based vinaigrette that sang of fresh herbs:

Best of all was a striking quinoa-couscous salad, which seemed to have been plated by Donald Judd, full of vegetable surprises down its length (including those purple fingerlings) and a honey-mint-herb dressing that, again, sang of the freshness of the season (even if one of the hidden vegetables was locavore-disapproved September asparagus):

To judge by the tables around us, a lot of folks are taking the easy choice and having the burger (which looked very nice), but there’s a lot more to this menu than just standard museum cafe fare, and it deserves more than the high-profile anonymity it has enjoyed to date.  You’re no chromed supermarket bunny when you can make salad dressing dance brightly in the air like that.

Puck’s at the MCA
220 E Chicago
Chicago, IL 60614
312.397.4034

(What’s the number in the title? This is #11 in my quest to visit 50 restaurants that haven’t been talked about on LTHForum and are generally little known in the Chicago food community/press. To find more, click on “Restaurant Reviews” in the right-hand bar.)

Tags: alexander calder, art, caesar, couscous, jeff koons, mca, museum, quinoa, salad

So foodie woodburning pizza places open here and there and get all the attention, Great Lakes in Andersonville is the latest one.  Meanwhile, plain old pizza parlors, slice places, dot the Chicago landscape like red splotches on a guy called “Pizzaface.”  And once in a while someone even opens one of those, new.  Or two of those, in fact, since I’ve noticed that two new ones toward the north end of Lincoln Ave. have opened in relatively recent times.  I decided to see if one of them was open for lunch, and see how the old standby slice pizza joint was faring in today’s chichi pizza environment.

The one that was open at lunch is called Pizzeria Calzone, promising, in slightly mangled English, Italian Delicious Pizza.  Guess what else is on the menu?  Hamburgers, hummus, and an entire category entitled “Mexican Food.”  Continuing our theme of dada randomness, guess what is NOT on the menu?  Calzones.

Partly because of the cross-cultural wackiness on the menu, I couldn’t really peg the nationality (nationalities?) involved.  The chef looked Mexican, the waitress could have been from anywhere between Baja and Afghanistan.  The card I picked up at the end had an owner’s name that is probably Turkish, or Bosnian, or an alias.  The atmosphere of the fairly attractive interior was certainly more that of a culture where people go to cafes to smoke and drink twelve cups of coffee, rather than one where they go for pizza and a beer.

Rather than devote a great deal of money or time to this increasingly improbable enterprise, I decided to try a couple of slices, and figure that it could only get better if cooked fresh.  Very much in the classic Chicago slice place style— a thin, grease-soaking dough— but by no means bad of its type.  The cheese was decent quality, not gluey-funky like cheap cheese; the sauce was actually spiced rather nicely, not too sweet, some flavor of fresh herbs.  If anything, it was the sauce that redeemed it, if it comes out of a can, at least they picked the right can, if they season it up themselves, so much the better.

Is this a notable new pizza place?  No, I wouldn’t say that.  Would it serve if you lived close by, following my old friend Sue Brichetto-Smith’s rule that everyone should have a delivery pizza place so close that at least its pizza, no matter how mediocre, will have the virtue of freshness?  Yes.  For somebody, that will be enough. You can look at the address and decide if it’s you.

Pizzeria Calzone
5858 N Lincoln
Chicago, IL
(773) 907-0917

(What’s the number in the title? This is #10 in my quest to visit 50 restaurants that haven’t been talked about on LTHForum and are generally little known in the Chicago food community/press. To find more, click on “Restaurant Reviews” in the right-hand bar.)

Tags: lincoln avenue, pizza

I haven’t had a favorite cheap sushi place for a while. I guess I always have Tampopo, but looking for some place that’s a little closer and, sushi being sushi, hipper, I had enjoyed T-Spot Sushi on Lincoln near Irving on a couple of visits, but then experienced one of my most expensively disastrous meals of last year:

G Wiv, Stevez and I had the Pluto Nash of lunches at T-Spot. Not the most expensive disaster any of us had faced— since all three of us were at the infamous Devon Seafood Grill dinner, to name one, it couldn’t be— but in terms of sheer money burned, $79 before tip, for absolute nothingness returned, this really could be the all-time, Matthew Modine as a whimsical pirate, Matthew McConnaughy as an Indiana Jones type, Eddie Murphy in space champ.

Read each of our takes at the link above; very different ways of saying it, but an unmistakable common message of suckage. This was so disastrous, in fact, that it pretty much put me off modest-priced sushi (I really don’t believe in cheap sushi) for a while.

Cafe Umaiya is a spartan but cozy little place in the block that includes hot new Mixteco Grill, hot semi-new Angel Food Bakery, a place where I took a Betamax player to get it repaired, a place where Tom Hanks sends his antique typewriters to be repaired, and the usual assortment of Mexican groceries and Pilates or Curves spots. It’s run by Thais, but covers the usual pan-Asian repertoire from pad Thai to salmon skin rolls. My guess was that the Thai-type dishes would be better than tarted-up sushi rolls with too much sweetness and mayo to them. I wasn’t exactly right, but I wasn’t far wrong, either— the sushi rolls did tend to be tarted up that way, but on the whole, purely Japanese things scored quite a bit better than Thai-leaning dishes.

Tako-Su, octopus seaweed salad, was delightfully fresh and simple.

Singapore noodles, alas, were a rather wan rendition, with the taste of canned curry powder and overcooked vegetables. The late Hi Ricky did better.

The Winter roll, white tuna and herbs topped with tomiko, was fresh and clean-tasting, one of the better rolls I’ve had.

The Thailand roll would probably please a lot of people who like gloppy mayo-y rolls with a sweet flavor (it’s rolled in toasted coconut). One bite was probably enough for me, but at least on its own terms, it seems reasonably well thought out and not overdone as more “creative” rolls so often are.

Service was very friendly, as it nearly always is in Thai places, and the price of about $40 with tip for all of the above was extremely reasonable. Cafe Umaiya isn’t a sushi mecca but I’d say it’s a pretty good and reasonable neighborhood spot— or alternative to Mixteco on a night when the line’s going out the door.

Cafe Umaiya
1605 W. Montrose Ave.
Chicago, IL 60613
773-404-1109

(What’s the number in the title? This is #9 in my quest to visit 50 restaurants that haven’t been talked about on LTHForum and are generally little known in the Chicago food community/press. To find more, click on “Restaurant Reviews” in the right-hand bar.)

Tags: montrose, sushi, thai

UPDATE: Helen at MenuPages has been blogging this deathmatch but Serious Eats actually responds in a shockingly reasonable way.  That’s no way to run a feud, guys!  Walter Winchell and Ben Bernie didn’t become famous by shaking hands and saying “Good game!”  (I realize you’ve probably never heard of at least one of those guys, but trust me, they were famous once.)  There’s somewhat more nasty fun to be had in the comments below.  

I will quibble a little with the idea that any list like this can be “authoritative”; I think any list like this is worthwhile only in that it gives you a strong selection of places to try for yourself, but the question of best can never be settled, should never, except personally.  That’s why the LTHForum Great Neighborhood Restaurant awards don’t pick the best Thai restaurant in Chicago, they give awards to four different ones (I think) which each represent a very high level of achievement above the pack.  I know which of those I think the best is, I named it below, but all that is is my choice.  So, we’ll look forward to what Serious Eats’ Chicago guy picks across the board… and we’ll maintain our private opinion that there would have been a lot more slagging on the idea of deep dish if we hadn’t called them on it in advance.  Take that, Winchell!

*  *  *

Ed Levine is a smart guy who loves New York pizza and food generally, and has a blog called Serious Eats which (MenuPages informs us) now intends to provide a guide to essential eating experiences in major cities. (You can see New York’s here.)

The problem is, Ed Levine hates Chicago pizza. No, perhaps it would be fairer to say Ed Levine has a blind spot for Chicago pizza. As in, Ed Levine, looking at a map of the United States, would not see anything between Brooklyn and Pizzeria Bianco in Phoenix, basically.

So Ed Levine writing about essential Chicago foods is going to be sort of like Sean Penn’s guide to Great Republican Secretaries of Defense. There are many things I would like to hear from Ed Levine, but I can’t see how this list is going to be anything other than tired old rehashings of tired old New York-Chicago rivalries. Anyway, in advance of Levine’s list, I’ll use his categories for New York (don’t know if his list will use the same ones, but whatever) and offer a non-jaundiced local’s alternative set. If anybody else wants to play the game, do so in comments, I’ll be happy to see your list too.

Best Pizza: deep dish, Art of Pizza spinach. Thin, Vito & Nick’s sausage.
Best Burger: Top Notch Beefburger in Beverly.
Best Ice Cream: Scooter’s.
Best Late Night Eats: I dunno, I don’t eat out late. Kuma’s, since they didn’t make the burger spot?
Best Bar Food: Avec, in a walk.
Best Date Night: Surely this category says more about you than about the restaurant scene, depending on how you determine what makes an ideal date night, but I’m going to say that the most romantic place I can think of, good food in a great building, is North Pond Cafe. If you want energy and scene, though, you’ll want something else entirely.
Best Japanese Food: Katsu.
Best Cocktails: Just to be difficult, I’m going to skip the obvious choice (Violet Hour) and plug the surprisingly great natural-organicky cocktails at Crust (though it’s not much of a bar).
Best Market: Again, what do you want precisely? I suppose I’ll say Paulina Meat Market, a Germanic place being quintessentially Chicagoish.
Must Eat Before Leaving City: see Best Pizza.
Best Bagel: Ironically, NY Bagel & Bialy on Touhy. Or go have an apple fritter at Old-Fashioned Donuts.
Best Eating With a View: Long time since I ate with a view I paid much attention to. North Pond again? Mercat a la Planxa? (Though I’m not convinced you actually get that view from most of the tables; it’s best when you walk in.) Tank Noodle?
Best Chinese: Sun Wah! Well, for that style, anyway.
Best Old School [Chicago] Landmark: We’re kinda shy on those any more, there really isn’t a Peter Luger of Chicago (yeah, Gene & Georgetti, I did remember you and I still stand by it). Manny’s?
Best Deli: Manny’s. Gee, that was obvious.
Best Streetside Bargain Lunch: Humboldt Park vans.
Best Fancy-Pants Bargain Lunch: huh?  (EDIT: My wife suggests Trotter’s To Go, where she eats soup for lunch practically every day.  Makes sense to me.)
Best Brunch Without the Wait: Go early, sucker. Over Easy Cafe.
Best Bargain Italian Food: I’m not convinced there is one.
Best Barbecue: Uncle John’s.

I guess New York doesn’t have a Best Indian place. Too bad, Ed, maybe next time you can skip pizza you don’t like, and eat at Khan BBQ. Then have Best Thai at TAC (there’s something I have, if not before leaving city, certainly after spending any length of time in a Thai-deprived zone), and Best Mexican at Maxwell Street on Sunday morning. (I have to say, a New York list that’s focused so much on burgers, Italian and old school fancy pants dining seems a little fusty to me. That’s just not the food that keeps me prowling this burg. Here’s hoping Chicago isn’t forced to follow New York’s categories exactly, and can shine on its own in a few specific areas.)

Tags: best, best of, blog, ed levine, Media, new york

So the two halves of my belly are having an argument about Urban Belly, the new ultrahip pan-Asian place from some Charlie Trotter vets which is the hot lunch spot of the moment on LTHForum.

The Right Belly looks at dishes like these…

lamb with brandy dumplings…

shortribs with rice…

Chinese eggplant with Thai basil…

Porkbelly ramen… and admires the subtlety and cleanness of the flavors, the quality of the ingredients, the non-stinky pork, the crunch of the eggplant…

And then the Left Belly says “$41! For four little bowls? Are you freakin’ nuts?” (This was for two of us, by the way. So lunch would be a mere $20 or so if I was by myself.)

I’m not quite sure where I, as a whole person, come out on this. Part of me admires the miles-beyond-Penny’s, Korean-version-of-Avec ambition of this place, part of me thinks that people who came straight from Trotter have no freakin’ clue what things in a little strip mall on California ought to cost. On the other hand, they’re just down the street from another guy who’d serve a combination like lamb and brandy, and he’s doing land office business selling hot dogs for a lot more than the usual buck fifty, so who knows. I suppose the ultimate proof of where I come out on this will be whether (since it’s close to home) I get into the habit of popping in there once a month, price be damned and quality be praised, or if I find myself just unable to say “Swimming-pool sized bowl of soup at Tank Noodle, $5, little teeny bowl at Urban Belly, $13, I’ll take the $13 bowl please.”

And whether a whole lot of other people do, too.

UrbanBelly
3053 N. California
Chicago, IL 60618
773.583.0500
website

P.S. Two small comments. What’s with the whole edamame? How are you supposed to eat those? And the spritzing of one end of the table with Windex while the other end is still eating is a seriously bad idea. At least get some froufy natural cleanser that smells like Meyer lemon or something.

Tags: asian, dumpling, edamame, korean, logan square, ramen

I have a little bit of a qualm about the idea of upscale Southern, I think there was upscale Southern dining which is largely extinct and there is downscale Southern which is wildly popular in many forms and then there is an attempt to take the latter and serve it like the former. This is a bad thing if it just means charging more for a tamed version, like upscale barbecue or Cajun, but a good thing if it means taking the produce and flavors of the region and treating them with the respect we now pay other regions— using them freshly and seasonally and with respect for time-tested traditions. On the whole Big Jones, a “coastal Southern” restaurant in Andersonville, seems to be oriented to that better sense of upscale Southern dining, and with at least the start of some sophistication in that direction. The menu is still somewhat short and limited to pretty familiar things— gumbo, pulled pork, steak (!)— but maybe, over time, it will dig deeper into Southern traditions and become a Chicago equivalent of some of the innovative new Southern restaurants.

Very traditional start (because it started the same way as my recent Southern party!)— pimento cheese spread on a cheese biscuit.

This was the best dish of the night– a really tasty wilted salad with tasso ham, and pickled yellow beans. Fresh, tart, full of flavor, this is the sort of dish I imagined I would have (and didn’t, really) when I went to Vie some months back.

I doubt this pulled pork ever saw anything resembling a smoker, but very good when you combined it with the rather vaguely-named “Carolina sauce,” a green dressing that might have been Green Goddess, or perhaps something with mirliton, which appears multiple times elsewhere on the menu). The slaw that came with it was missing some oomph, though, needed mustard or vinegar or something:

I was a little surprised that a Southern menu offered little that would have flown with the younger son, and the presence of a stereotypical kids’ menu (chicken tenders!) was not the help to this parent that was intended. At least the mac and cheese was freshly and impressively made.

Fried chicken salad, untried by me.

A nice, authentic if not exactly world-changing gumbo, plated artfully with a pyramid of rice topped by an okrapus.

The bill was a very reasonable $60ish (the mac and cheese was comped, not for any fault that we saw, possibly for the fact that they saw me taking pictures….)

Big Jones
5347 N. Clark
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 275-5725

Tags: andersonville, big jones, southern

Director’s cut version of post starts here.  So here’s a dilemma. (If the following seems too woolly/inside-basebally for you, skip to the picture and the shorter version of the post.)

If you’re reading this you probably know about LTHForum (Chicago food chat site I co-founded) and the Great Neighborhood Restaurants awards (also started mostly by me), which are designed to call attention to, well, any kind of good restaurant, but with a special love for the little ethnic place that tries harder than the other 3 places just like it within a block, and produces something really special.

For instance, Cemitas Puebla, formerly Taqueria Puebla, on North Ave. In fact it figured rather prominently in philosophical discussions we had about the awards, especially in regards to whether we should apply tougher standards on places the more money they charged, or whether there was some absolute standard of deliciousness and that was all that mattered, money or class didn’t enter into it. Me, I took the practical argument that if Rick Bayless makes a Mexican sandwich (which is what a cemitas is) and charges $13.50 for it, you expect it to be made freshly of the highest quality ingredients, and so that’s merely the baseline for him, but if a neighborhood place charges $5 and yet manages to import its cheese and roast its chipotles and cook everything up fresh (as Cemitas Puebla does), then it gets credit for all that going-the-extra-mile-ness compared to the other places serving the same stuff in a more careless fashion. So yeah, Cemitas Puebla stands out for doing all that…

And then today I go to another cemitas place from Puebla, and they do it all too. In fact, better than the last meal I had at Cemitas Puebla, not that it’s not still an estimable place. It’s striking, in fact, how similar the two places are, not just the cemitas but the other things they have, like chalupas and Tacos Arabes, all of which must be typical for Pueblo. But now I wonder, did we give a lot of credit to Cemitas Puebla for doing things freshly and getting the right ingredients from back home, when in fact that’s what any respectable place of this kind would do? Did we give it extra credit… for our ignorance?

While you contemplate that deep question, I’ll let you feast on a picture of the cemitas from Cemitas China Poblana:

Shorter version of post starts here. This is a milanesa, that is, a very thin breaded steak, cooked up fresh as I sat there, in a particular kind of crusty Mexican bun (quite nice), with Pueblan cheese, avocado, roasted chipotle, grilled onions, and— the little leaf— a distinctly floral-medicinal herb called papalo, which they told me is actually grown locally during this time of the year, imported from Mexico in other seasons. They (or rather the woman there; I never heard the male cook say a word) said they also change the weekend specials based on seasonality as well— for instance, making chile en nogada, aka stuffed chiles in walnut sauce (a dish that RST once rhapsodized about when it was made at a now-closed Oaxacan place), in the fall when they have fresh peaches. (I didn’t ask why they weren’t making it right now with fresh peaches, and where it is exactly that peaches are in season in October.)

What’s with the China in the name? The menu explains it, there’s some historical tale of a baby kidnapped by pirates, of Asian descent, who wound up being raised in Puebla, circa 1600-1700, and so the place is named for her and her good works.

So here’s a place that looks like nothin’, it’s about six feet wide and 20 feet long, half a dozen cheap little booths, enough heavy-duty tile on the wall to be a bus station bathroom, and yet the people in there— a couple? Not sure— are in there sweating their butts off making not only the freshest, tastiest cemitas they can, but using local produce and changing their weekend menu with the seasons. Wow. If I had an award to give, I’d give them one. They deserve it as much as Cemitas Puebla, not to take anything away from them. But will a hole in the wall like this in an invisible neighborhood like Brighton Park ever make it onto anybody’s radar, the way a place like Cemitas Puebla, which is soon to be on Diners, Dives & Drive-Ins, just barely has thanks to the attention paid it on LTHForum? Hard to imagine, but if you’re ever anywhere near 42nd and Archer, check ’em out. You won’t be sorry, though you may be lonely there.

Cemitas China Poblana
4231B S. Archer
Chicago IL
773-847-8048

Incidentally, the awning says they’re also in Los Angeles, so presumably the Chicago folks are related to somebody who has a similar cemitas business out there.

(The number refers to my pledge to write about 50 restaurants largely untalked-about on food sites to date. Others are accessible by clicking on the Restaurant Reviews button at right.)

Middle-eastern restaurants fall into two categories for me. Dives and “pillow of rice” places. Dives, like Salam or Alma Pita, have tasty authentic food in a dineresque no-atmosphere atmosphere. Pillow of rice places, like Reza’s, have a dressier atmosphere and serve grilled meats atop a pillow of rice which would feed five. Pillow of rice places may seem of good quality at first, but they inevitably bore the spit out of you long before you’ve eaten even a quarter of all that rice. Spare me the massive, flavor-extinguishing pillow of rice.

Habibi is a newish Egyptian place in Rogers Park which has definite pillow of rice tendencies— it’s done in a style that might be called Restrained Garish, photomurals of Egyptian archeological treasures around the walls, a fountain in the middle of the room, neon in the floor. The food is of high quality and often had bright fresh-spice flavors that can be missing in other middle eastern spots, but it’s a bit undercut by some pillow of rice-isms.

One son had falafel, which were freshly made and had a fresh-garlic bite; another had a beef shawarma sandwich which tasted of good meat and a little dash of something (cumin? sumac?) I had maklouba, said to be a kind of vegetable stew, though it was more like some freshly sauteed vegetables atop a pillow of rice, covered in turn with some pretty good, slightly overdone by fine restaurant standards slices of lamb. The maklouba would have been better not overwhelmed by a pillow of flavor-reducing rice, just as the hummus we had for a starter would have been better if it hadn’t been counteracted by day-old pita.

They brought us not one, but two freebies to try— mint tea (which the kids didn’t really touch, alas) and a fattoush salad which was very fresh-tasting and nicely made. They’re trying hard, and overall the food seemed a cut above, but some pillow of rice-isms are holding it back a little, and would make it a little hard for me to race back here when there are dives not far away offering tasty food without starchy impediments.

Habibi
1225 W. Devon Ave., Chicago
(773) 465-9318

Let’s see how long it is before these two appear in the same article anywhere again.

A few months back I went to a dinner at Mercat a la Planxa, the celebrity-chef-spawned Spanish restaurant in the revived Blackstone Hotel, and came away convinced that it was the most authentic Spanish restaurant Chicago had seen by a country mile. Where most Spanish restaurants dabble in a sort of Spanish-American which is like Mexican-American was in the 60s, a stock set of dishes which you might or might not see in Spain, made “Spanish” by the use of certain spices identified as Spanish, food in Spain is actually often very simple and unseasoned, a matter of eating a spectacularly tasty pork skewer, a bunch of sauteed sea creatures you simply can’t get here, or a roasted pimiento de padron garnished with coarse salt. Trying to replicate that doesn’t mean taking Cisco meat and seasoning it from a big jar of “Spanish” spices, it means getting pork that actually tastes like pork. And needless to say, that’s a lot harder and more expensive.

Mercat is only about half or maybe 2/3 of the way there, but it’s far closer than any other restaurant I’ve eaten at in the US. The primary piece of evidence for that was the centerpiece of the meal, a roasted baby pig ($55 per person, several people required, large box of leftovers provided). The pig was indeed sourced from an Indiana farm where they’re raised naturally, and it had a clean, delicious flavor which needed no heavy sauce to hide any industrial-pig funkiness— or make it seem Spanish.

That said, I’m just not the sort who likes to make an entire meal of one hunk of meat, and I vaguely regretted that we only got to dabble in the rest of the menu, because the best thing we had wasn’t the pig at all— it was a simple plate of white beans, deep with porky jamony flavor, that came on the side. Simple and profound. So I have been eager to get back and try some of the regular dishes on the menu.

My chance came when Santander announced an LTHForum event at the downstairs bar at Mercat. Said “event” proving to consist of three of us standing there, enjoying a first-rate caipirinha from the Brazilian bartender Ricardo, and sampling the tapas menu in three waves.

The first wave included pimientos de padron— rather, an acceptable-but-no-more imitation of them with some local pepper; tocino con cidra, slow-cooked pork belly served with foam of cider and truffle, which was more silly than tasty, and patatas bravas, which came out looking disturbingly like the fake-food version at the late, lamentable Del Toro, six cones of potato topped with a red pepper sauce. They tasted better than Del Toro’s Potato Poppers, but still, simpler, cheaper and better could be had at several places within a reasonable distance. None of this suggested that Mercat was a stellar Spanish spot.

The second wave was far more successful than the first, and restored Mercat’s position in my mind. Squid ink pasta, rabbit agnolotti, and grilled morcilla sausage were all impressively delicate and tasty, and a warm salad of fava and white beans, tossed with some herbs and jamon serrano, was magnificent in its simplicity— interesting, that the two most awe-inspiring dishes of my two meals were both basically beans and ham. We concluded with two desserts— a peach cobbler-y thing with Pop Rocks (the trend du jour, I guess) and some tiny salty balls (RIP Isaac) of melon, which wasn’t bad, though only the second best peach cobbler of my week, and a really nice, very arty row of six little chocolate balls, in a rosemary-flavored sauce with a tiny piece of banana marshmallow. Visually it’s the sort of dessert you find next to the word effete in the dictionary, but it was a nice, light ending to the meal, the rosemary reminding me of one of the desserts I made from a Spanish party I had last year.

So a meal at Mercat seems to be struggling with the problem of Spanish authenticity rather than entirely solving it, but there is much to admire in it, and I continue to regard it as easily the best Spanish restaurant in town. The only knock I have against the place is that, having been started by a celebrity chef, Jose Garces, it’s now in the hands of his executive chef, and as a result… the menu has not changed one jot that I could see since that first visit in April. Which is not the worst thing, especially for a place that seems to be drawing on the tourist trade to a considerable extent, but I have to admit it dampens my excitement for a place slightly, or maybe denies it a spot in the first rank, if there isn’t the sense of someone at the top tinkering and evolving the menu, but merely executing dishes (however expertly) placed there by someone else. Nevertheless, what virtues Mercat a la Planxa has are very real and considerable, and if Spanish food interests you (and it must interest a lot of people to judge by the rate at which Spanish restaurants are opening lately), a visit is essential.

Mercat a la Planxa
638 South Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL, 60605
312-765-0524

My report on visiting Spain.

* * *

I went back to P&P BBQ Soul Food with the kids and saw that they offered a 1/2 slab of ribs on the menu. I ordered it sauce on the side, but was somewhat surprised to find that the ribs had no smoke ring; they were a uniform gray and had, at best, only a hint of smoky flavor, even though some speckles did suggest time in the smoker. Not at all like the rib tips which even before being coated in candy-red sauce:

had the unmistakable pinkish hue of true BBQ. After I ate them I asked Keith Archibald, the pitman, if they had been cooked in the smoker or an oven. He assured me the smoker, but then explained that because of ribs’ tendency to dry out, they were only cooked for so long, compared to the tips, and then held or rewarmed or something.

Well, that’s a new one on me, and certainly contrary to my own experience, but hey, I guess all it means from a practical basis is, be sure and get the rib tips, which have plenty of real smoky flavor.

Meanwhile, Myles ordered the smothered pork chop. And frankly, it’s a reason to go there and not even worry about barbecue. A catcher’s mitt-sized hunk of pork– Myles, no slouch, barely made a dent in it– it is not merely smothered but downright drowned in thick, greasy, peppery gravy, and is absolutely wonderful.

Toss in a nice homemade cole slaw, real mashed potatoes, some candied yams, a peach cobbler for dessert… and nice folks.

P&P BBQ Soul Food
3734 W. Division
773-276-7756

My Reader piece on P&P

Tags: bbq, mercat a la planxa, p&p bbq soul food, spanish

Normally, no doubt at the cost of my advancement in the foodblogosphere, I try not to suck up to local fellow writers. (Someday I’ll find a WordPress template that actually shows the damn blogroll, I promise.) But today has been International Michael Nagrant Day and homage must be paid.

In the Sun-Times, he does a piece on Ming whoever, that chef guy with that TV show on PBS, which contains a perfect little precis of how and why FoodTV stopped being for people who can cook, and started being for people who can’t:

A 10-year veteran of food television and a former personality of the burgeoning Food Network, Tsai made his move to PBS because it allowed him more control over the end product.

“Back in the day, we [at Food Network] were all really boring. Emeril was horrible. Bobby [Flay], Sara [Moulton], we all admit this, we jumped on Emeril’s train,” Tsai says. “When ‘Emeril Live’ took off, it brought us to the next level. We could do whatever we wanted. I was making foie gras shumai, roasting whole duck and whole fish. But then, it [Food Network] became such a big business all based on Nielsen ratings and all on advertisers. Some of those advertisers don’t want to see the head of a duck or foie gras because of PETA activists. You started getting boxed in.

“There’s like two chefs left. No one cooks. It is opening cans of this or that … and it’s ‘yummy’ that. Look, that’s fine, their Nielsen ratings are high as hell, and that’s what middle America kind of wants. But that’s not for me…”

Nailed, it’s as simple as that. But the nail gun is set aside for a chainsaw in New City, as he rips into a ghastly-sounding Cajun chain import from Indianapolis, which I predict will come close to this year’s open/close record after this London restaurant reviewer-style evisceration. I hate that kind of thing when it’s routine, like it usually is in London, but when someone who’s normally thoughtful and fairly generous sees fit to get his Old Testament Prophet on, it’s always a worthy read.

(BTW, I saw the first on my own when I picked up a Sun-Times to ignore my kids with at Johnny’s Grill this morning, but I didn’t see the second until Helen linked to it and was similarly impressed at MJN’s righteousness.)