G Wiv and D4v3 post at LTHForum about a generic Greek chicken place that has just opened in Rogers Park. This reminds me of my own recent, easily forgotten experience at such a place, which raises the question— why are all these Greek burger/chicken places in business if they’re all C-pluses at best?

Stanley’s Market on Elston, famous for the great signs of Stanley on a flying watermelon (one of the signs recently blew down and was replaced, but the other survives), and well worth a stop for value-priced fruit (some good quality, not so good, but smart shoppers can do all right there), some years ago spawned a burger/chicken place across the street.

It’s reasonably attractive, in a generic kind of way, nice bathrooms if you need such in that part of the world, but it’s exactly like every other Greek burger/chicken place. Maybe the chicken’s better, but the burger is the epitome of the kind of carelessly made food that these places specialize in. A frozen burger patty that tastes of barnyard more than beef. 8 times as much starchy white bun as beef, and three times as much iceberg lettuce and styrofoam tomato, between them extinguishing both the flavor and the temperature of the meat. Frozen fries, more starchy styrofoam.

But it’s all served on china, so you know it’s a class joint. Restaurant china, the kind you could play basketball with and not so much as chip it.

Places like this exist all over the city. To my mind they’ve crowded out the possibility of better burger joints run by displaced Okies (like in California) or old Germans (like in Milwaukee). Some of these joints at least have character (White Palace Grill), a very few rise above the pack foodwise (Dengeo’s in Skokie), but mostly they define an entire subset of diner dining which is mediocre enough to seriously make you appreciate fast food chains for the few things they do right by.

To me they’re the white noise on our dining scene, everywhere, mildly annoying but not rising to the level of offensiveness— because how can you get interested enough to be angry about something that has never once stirred the passions of the people who make it?

Stanley’s Grille
1543 N Elston Ave
Chicago, IL 60622
773-772-0004

So I’ve sort of been out of the business of trying to discover and write about new finds on the restaurant scene. A few years ago, I had vast stretches of the north side to myself, it seemed. But as Time Out and the Reader and various other publications got more serious about covering The Lands Beyond Yuppieville— partly, I believe, because of the influence of LTHForum in making ethnic food the happening part of the restaurant scene— I got less interested in trying to beat them to the new spots in my hood.

Well, times change and now I’m sort of bored with the same dozen places I seem to go to over and over (either quick bites in my immediate neighborhood, or very tried and true LTHForum faves). So I’m on the hunt again, kicked off, I suppose, by the fun of discovering and writing about P&P BBQ Soul Food for the Reader. And as you may have noticed, assuming there is a you out there reading this, I’ve posted a couple of recent reviews on places that are either completely off the radar (Taqueria Toro Grill, Pita Grill) or at least, if reviewed by some parts of the press, were new to me (Bull-Eh-Dias!) and not widely discussed to date on LTHForum.

So here, at last, is a reason for the blog to exist beyond facilitating the video podcasts. I’m going to try and post about 50 places meeting the above criteria (either completely unknown, or at least not discussed beyond bare mentions on LTHForum or anywhere else). These will be 50 discoveries, turned up by me and available exclusively here. (To find them easily, click the Restaurant Reviews link at the right.) Those were the first three, now here’s number four.

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Wauconda is one of those places somewhere out in the northwest burbs which has gone almost uncharted on LTHForum— only about three vague mentions. [EDIT: Cathy2 points out this full review, of a place right by where I went, don’t know how I missed it.]  Well, there’s not a lot there— it mostly surrounds a lake, and there’s the bare minimum of dining places on the water, nothing too fancy (this is the more blue collar/ethnic part of Lake County). But given the ethnicity, there might be things there— maybe one of the pizza places named things like Vince’s or Giuseppe’s is really good, who knows? Or the Polish deli, or one of the Mexican places.

I took the kids up there for an exhibition of artwork by Jim Flora, who did cartoonishly surreal album covers back in the 50s, at the Lake County Discovery Center. The exhibit was okay— not that much original art seems to survive, so it was mostly prints (helpfully advertised as also being on sale in the gift shop, just like the Monets at the Art Institute)— but the museum offered enough of a grab bag to be mildly worth a trip, including a very nice exhibit on postcards (based on the collection of the Curt Teich company a few blocks from my house in Lakeview), and some nostalgic/historical stuff about Lake County back in the days of dances at Ray’s Diamond Palace dancehall on the Chain o’ Lakes and stuff like that, which had a certain charm but overall tended to reinforce the impression that people have always moved to Lake County in the expectation that nothing historic will ever happen there.

Anyway, we had to get lunch, and most of the places on the little Main Street looked pretty ordinary, but there was one called Frank’s Karma Cafe, the kind of name that’s either a sign of pretty good or godawful. I looked at the menu and it was a D.B. Kaplan-sized list of sandwiches, as well as soups and the like. I go inside and in addition to being the kind of place where the guy behind the counter (not Frank; neither of the owners is actually named Frank) seems to know everybody who comes in but us, he’s pushing homemade fruit drinks and a homemade “peach-nectarine-plum-synergy cobbler,” and even more impressively, warning regulars off the caramel cake which he isn’t all that happy with the results of.

I ask him what sandwich I should have that will blow me away, make me glad I drove from Chicago, and he recommends the Reuben, saying they make the corned beef themselves. You cure it yourself? I ask. No, we cook it ourselves, he says. It takes me a moment to realize that this is not as obvious as it sounds, there probably is microwavable precooked corned beef out there being used by 98% of sandwich shops, and for them to take the time to cook it themselves and slice it up is a cut above, no pun intended.

I tell him that I cure and cook my own corned beef and he says he wants to offer pastrami, can’t get it from his supplier, is thinking of making his own. I explain how easy it is and what the practical difference between corned beef and pastrami is, how I smoke it in my Weber Smokey Mountain. He seems intrigued, who knows if pastrami will ever make it onto the menu in Wauconda, but it might.

My Reuben was pretty darn good, nice black rye, good real corned beef, maybe a little gooey but certainly satisfying. The pickle that came with it was fresh and crunchy, the peach-nectarine-plum-synergy cobbler was really good. It’s a nice little place doing a lot of homemade things with a lot of heart. If you find yourself in Wauconda, now you have a recommendation.

Frank’s Karma Cafe
203 S Main St
Wauconda, IL 60084
(847) 487-2037

Don’t know how the eGulleteers enjoyed or didn’t their visit to the jostling madness of Maxwell Street, hardly saw them though I heard there were quite a few, but had a very pleasant time with LTHers Cathy2 and Mhays & family, shopping for Pokemon cards.

New to me: an African woman working spells with incense. Hammond said he’d only seen her once before.

Fishing poles were also new to me:

The stand with the fruit drinks was giving out samples of mamey, a sort of cross between a squash and a canteloupe. I’ve seen it listed as a flavor at ice cream stands, but never seen the fruit.

Not a meatball taco, it’s chicharron (pork skin/fat) on a taco. I passed on that, the better to concentrate on the steak, pastor, red mole and flor de calabaza at Manolo’s. For once I went there not having stuffed myself before reaching it, and was really able to enjoy all those things on superbly fresh tortillas.

Homemade noisemakers for every taste:

I thought this was the creepiest thing I saw (nothing says candy like wrinkly corpse-like flesh):

But the idea of owning a dozen R. Kelly bobbleheads probably beat it.

Not toro the sushi fish, toro the bull. I use this cliche for a heading because, driving on Armitage to what would ultimately be my lunch destination—

—I passed, first, a storage place whose sign said “Got stuff?,” and then an attorney whose sign said “Got lawyer?” Got lawyer? If I needed one, would I feel like being that flip about it? Would I want one who advertised himself that way? Jeez, got enough of cliche already?

But let us answer a more serious question, namely, “where’s the beef?” A place called Taqueria Toro Grill would seem to be a promising answer to that question. I spotted it by my patented new awning technique, and pulled the kids over to check it out. Taqueria Toro Grill is new management in a place that’s been around a while, but it seems clean and welcoming at first glance. The kids wanted to sit at the counter, so we did and chatted with the main guy (owner or not, I wasn’t sure). The first thing we spotted sitting there was this:

Real pastor, complete with pineapple on top, turning and roasting away. I knew what I was going to have to have:

I also had a carne asada taco, and a carnitas sope, big chunks of pork:

This isn’t a great place but it’s an above average one, gaining bonus points for a commitment to keeping the pastor running all the time, and for generally friendly demeanor. Maybe with time (they’ve been open a month) it’ll get really good. I wished for more crispy edges on the pastor and steak, but at least I was impressed by the high quality meat used in all three cases, not the frequent low-grade gristle-y beef. Carnitas was a little dry, but brightened right up with the addition of the red salsa. A nice place, worth a visit.

Taqueria Toro Grill
3561 W. Armitage
773-486-8229 

Retroactively declared #3 in my 50 new restaurants challenge.

Now, now, no snark. It’s inevitable that Sun Wah’s Peking duck would get attention from others besides myself… right as the Beijing Olympics start. Good for Sun Wah.

(I didn’t even think of the Olympics thing, initially— I just wanted an ethnic restaurant where they spoke English well enough to make good interview subjects, and Kelly had already demonstrated that at an LTHForum lunch. And I didn’t explicitly reference the Olympics because that kind of timely tie-in seems like exactly the sort of thing a TV station would do. My show’s about food, I don’t need a timely tie-in to give me a reason to cover something.)

Anyway, it’s interesting to me to see how they shot the exact same stuff. (I’m not sure where that big blue burner is, though; I wonder if that’s simply one of the grills without a wok pan sitting on it, in which case it has nothing to do with the Peking duck.)

Today was my first chance this summer to take my kids to do what they’d been doing nearly every day at camp— play in the gentle waters of Albion Beach in Rogers Park, where a sandbar keeps the water at a kid-friendly height. An idyllic day, the sort of day you think you would pick if you were given the challenge of the film Afterlife— in which the deceased are forced to pick a single memory to hold for all eternity.

The kids played in utter happiness; but the adult mind is never at rest, and I couldn’t help laying there on the beach, wishing I had a book, an iPod, wifi. Sad, I know.

I had my one moment of satisfaction of an adult interest when we went for lunch. The kids love Chipotle, who knows why, but they could do worse than the simple bean and cheese burritos I get them (and pay dearly for). I, however, had my eye on a newly-opened place next door, Pita Grill.

There were both promising and unpromising signs. Unpromising, hot dogs and hamburgers figuring prominently. Promising, a cake display full of mucver, the fried zucchini fritters available at a few of the local Turkish restaurants, such as Nazarlik (where I think they’re the best thing to be had there, frankly). Unfortunately it was impossible to get kebab meat of any sort and not get great heaps of fries or rice, I wanted hummus or something like that as a side, so the eager counterman, seemingly happy that someone was asking him for something that wasn’t all-American, pointed to a falafel and hummus special. I was sold.

It was okay. The hummus was fine but nothing special, the falafel was a little rubbery, somewhere in between fresh and not-fresh. Pita Grill seems like a place that wishes it could be better but has already been beaten down by the reality of its location in a hot dog-eating neighborhood.

The kids were happy with everything— their burritos, their day at the beach with Dad, the bottle caps they found on the street, which they evaluate in terms of perceived rarity (Dad has to avoid laughing when they pronounce that a Miller Light cap is “really rare”). Their simple, complete happiness is the most contentment I can wish for, some days.

Pita Grill
6604 N. Sheridan
773-465-3466

Retroactively declared #2 in my 50 new restaurants challenge.

Bull-Eh-Dias! is a Spanish tapas restaurant named, apparently, for a mispelling or mispronunciation of “bulerias,” which D. Hammond says is a flamenco rhythm. All I know is, it doesn’t have the most awkward and inappropriate name on Southport, because that prize has already been sewn up by La Poupée, which may mean “The Doll” in French, but which reduced my sons to hysterics (“They called their restaurant The Poopy!”)

You can tell Bull-Eh-Dias is a tapas restaurant because, like Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba! and Azucar! it ends in an exclamation point. Helen at Menu Pages had sage words on this topic the other day:

we also would like to say, as an aside, that we deeply deeply love the Broadway musical punctuation in [Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!’s] name, and the inferred obliviousness on the part of whoever came up with it to the fact that it is the dumbest thing ever

More interesting to me was the fact that it turns out to occupy the space that was one of my early Chicago foodie revelations. As Tony Soprano said, “Remember when is the lowest form of conversation,” but I’ll just indulge in it long enough to note that when I moved here in ’88 and saw a promotion at The Music Box for a long-forgotten restaurant down the street called Chezz Chazz, I felt like I had done something so big city cool, finding an edgy neighborhood place not in the guidebooks and trying it myself. A couple of years later the same space was Tamales, run by John Terczak (whose brother Dennis had the much-acclaimed Sole Mio on Armitage), and I had pumpkin tamales there, the very concept of which expanded my Mexican food mind substantially.

Now it’s 15 or even 20 years later and Southport isn’t the frontier, it’s a Trixie and Chad neighborhood. This doesn’t promise much for the Tapas joint with the goofy name. But if no great revelation, Spanish food-wise, Bull-Eh-Dias! managed to pull off a bunch of by now fairly standard items with reasonable success for a reasonable price. Patatas bravas came with a weak tomato sauce, but a bright and searingly garlicky mayo. Grilled chorizo tasted like the real thing that we ate at Maceiras in Madrid, and was satisfying. A tortilla was poor, mainly because it was freshly cooked— so it tasted like an omelet (clearly the sitting out on the bar under plastic wrap is an essential part of its comfy deliciousness); but grilled calamari, tossed with some sauteed onion, was quite nice. Bacon-wrapped, goat cheese stuffed dates were delectable if not quite as good as ones I’ve had elsewhere (including the surprisingly decent Twist Tapas, even further inside the Trixie Nexus).

There’s one exceptional Spanish restaurant in town now, Mercat a la Planxa, and everything else exists on a plane well below it, but that’s not to say that at its modest pricepoint and with its easygoing vibe, a place like Bull-Eh-Dias isn’t perfectly capable of giving you a satisfying meal which will, from time to time, vaguely remind you of meals actually eaten in Spain.

Bull-Eh-Dias Tapas Bar
3651 N. Southport, Chicago
(773) 404-2855

Retroactively declared #1 in my 50 new restaurants challenge.

* * *

P.S. As this thread on LTHForum approached the point of going to its second page having said nothing about woodburning barbecue but a vast amount about whether “Chicago” commonly includes or excludes the suburbs (and how incensed suburbanites should get about this kind of city snob slur), I posted the image below:

With Chowhound-like alacrity, my bon snarque was quickly pulled. Look forward to many more, fascinating revelations on this topic. Meanwhile, if there’s anyone who actually wants to try a new, good woodsmoked barbecue place conveniently located to the north side of Chicago, I suggest this one. So far, it has gone unnoticed on LTHForum, which is, simply, a damned shame.

P.S. Different animal, same sentiment.

One of the more popular things a few years back at Green City Market were the hamburgers made from farmer-vendor meat and grilled by cooks from Campagnola/Bistro Campagne. Eventually, though, Campagnola chef Michael Altenberg shut down the burger operation in order to concentrate on the opening of Crust.

I learned today, though, that Sunday Dinner/Eat Green Foods (which I’ve never paid that much attention to and am not entirely sure what they offer) is cooking up burgers again. They’re a real Green City collaboration, too— Bennison’s makes the buns, Brunkow cheese is on top, the meat is Heartland’s terrific Piedmontese beef, and there are some greens on it which I assume did not come from Costco. Being a GCM special, it’s expensive— $9 for the cheeseburger, $8 for the hamburger, both of them kind of on the small side (if fat)— but it is, in the immortal words of Samuel Jackson, a real tasty burger! Certainly more satisfying to me than the not-all-that-exciting Epic burger. And you can’t argue with how directly your princely sum is being shared among the real producers without any middlemen, at least.

The two weeks and a day I spent on jury duty at the Daley Center are the longest stretch I’ve done of daily work in the Loop since March First (or as they spelled it in those wacky dotcom days, marchFIRST, or as we sometimes anagramatized it, crramhFIST) blew up in late 2000. One thing that quickly became apparent is, the Loop’s choices are a LOT better than they were in my daily work day. I mean, even if you’re stuck eating lame sandwiches, there’s no way that Cosi isn’t a big improvement on Wall Street Deli or Subway. And since I was trying to go vegetarian part of the time— figuring I’d end up grabbing fast food for the kids too often in the evening— I found the choices there surprisingly decent. So here are my notes on things I grabbed in my relatively few moments away from courtroom 2811, the Daley Center:

Cosi— I hit this three times the first week. After having their tomato-and-mozzarella sandwich on Monday,I was kind of craving it the next day, it’s so simple and tasty despite the fact that the mozzarella is nothing special and fairly flavorless. The second time, though, I forced myself to try the pizza. It’s simple, that’s for sure, but somehow I wasn’t that wild about its mere mix of crushed tomatoes and cheese on Cosi bread; it was fresh and basic without making the jump to interesting. I went back Thursday or Friday, I forget, and had the tomato-and-mozz sandwich again. That was a mistake, never eat the same thing twice in one week, that’s just being boring. Anyway, Cosi isn’t free of plasticness, to be sure, but it’s pretty good and real for a sandwich chain.

Sopraffina— This was a real food alternative back in the day, and the grilled veggie sandwich was more imaginative and restauranty than Cosi’s, but I don’t know that I’d travel that far for it now, as I once did. Or maybe didn’t, I think I mainly only ate there when it was straight downstairs at the Amoco/Aon building.

McDonald’s— got dragged to the one in the Theater District one day. How can things not be fresh at lunchtime in the Loop? Yet a QP was dried out and lukewarm. Lame.

Lavazza— I got coffee a couple of days at this Italian coffee chain, but the one time I tried something for breakfast, a raisin roll kind of thing, it was way over the hill and dried out.

California Pizza Kitchen ASAP— their basic vegetarian pizza is really unimaginative, same things you’d find on a veggie pizza at Chuck E. Cheese— green pepper, black olive, onion, oh boy. I was splitting it with someone else or I would have tried to get something better.

Oasis— Did I dare go home again to the middle eastern restaurant I had eaten at at least weekly all through my Leo years (1991-5) and much of the rest of that decade? Knowing that it had just reopened in its old place, I had to, even as I suspected my tastebuds for middle eastern food had grown far more sophisticated in the interim. Well, they had, and I’m not going to claim Oasis is great ME food, but it’s not bad, and for the Loop, it’s a nice slice of ethnic realness that gets you away from the chains— just as it was in the 90s.

Caffe Baci— Grabbed coffee here a couple of times, too, and one time I had a pain aux chocolate that was first-rate, it really was. However, this place also has the concession for lunches brought in to people who can’t go out (such as juries on deliberations), and the stuff that was made to the county’s spec was pretty lousy, and didn’t make me want to check out lunch there on my own dime.

Indian Buffet— I can’t remember if this place had an actual name; I think it’s just an Indian buffet being offered by the 7-11 downstairs. Anyway, as noted in the LTHForum thread, there’s an assortment of entirely decent Indian food which you can get either by paying $10.99 to load up your plate, or $6.99 a pound. I went the former way because I couldn’t decide if Indian food would tend to be heavier than average.

Hannah’s Bretzels— I tried this well-liked upscale sandwich place once a year or so ago and wasn’t that excited by what I had. This time, though, I ordered a Spanish ham and cheese sandwich— and it was terrific, honestly, good enough to be considered for my ten best list, what with the flavorful jamon serrano, a sweet-citrusy spread and thin slices of onion that tasted like they’d been soaked in something (red wine vinegar?) All in all, a remarkably good sandwich for lunchtime in the Loop.

Having been found fully compliant with Apple’s strictures against using iTunes to produce a weapon of mass destruction, Sky Full of Bacon is now available at iTunes here.

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