Totto Ramen in New York.

For a long time I didn’t get why ramen was such an object of hype and obsession among foodies. It’s not that I associated it with the 50-cent packet kind— I’m not sure I’ve ever even had that. But to me it was soup, so it had noodles, and broth— and so do a lot of other things. Yet only ramen attracted the kind of mania that not only searches for perfection but, unfortunately, often uses food as a cudgel to lord it over someone else with—

“Think you know ramen, my droogies? You’ve never had the real horrorshow ramen from Vancouver, ya great stinking globs!”

But authentically-made ramen took off here last year and this year the way Neapolitan pizza did a few years ago, and ramen keeps forcing itself on me. And I guess I get why it’s such good material for obsession now— it’s super-simple, but each of its components can be debated to the end of time— is the broth porky enough? The noodles chewy enough, or not too chewy, or springy or wheaty or whatever you think the key attribute of noodles ought to be?

In New York I went to Totto Ramen, and its toothy noodles and deep, porky-funky broth seemed to establish themselves for me as at least one lodestar for what ramen ought to be— maybe you prize different virtues, but it gave me something to compare the others to. Next I had The Aviary’s ramen at an event I attended, and… well to be honest I’d tried too many Aviary cocktails by that point to be in full reviewer mode, but it seemed in the same ballpark. So from there, I was off and ramen, trying it wherever I could…

Can you believe I had never been to Ginza for sushi? (Oops, I still haven’t, actually.) I used to work in that area but frankly, sushi restaurant in skid row hotel scared the hell out of me in the 90s, before I was a Chowhound and fearless. I popped in there after a Key Ingredient shoot or something downtown and found it exactly the place I should have been going to all along, a 60s restaurant in Japanese Danish modern conjuring up a whole lost world of salarymen trying to push cheap Made in Japan gear at the Merchandise Mart, where the sushi chefs expertly prepare your fish while ignoring your gaijin ass and talking baseball in Japanese (you could recognize the occasional player name). The ramen wasn’t deep or profound, but it was like good diner food in its comforting reliableness. I’m going to have to go back for sushi now.

Back in the dotcom era, when I worked in the converted warehouses of River North, Cocoro Restaurant seemed a very sleek and chic modern Asian spot for lunch, specializing in shabu-shabu (hot pots in which you cook thinly sliced meat and vegetables yourself). Returning to it after a decade, it seemed much more homey and down-to-earth. So is that the inevitable fate of even today’s glitziest Asian spots? Will Japonais or Jellyfish someday seem as corner-diner easygoing as this place does now? Well, only if they get someone as warmly welcoming as owner Yuko here, who came by my table dispensing a warm smile every time; funny that I had not picked up on the place’s real attraction long ago. Anyway, ramen is good if not as deeply funky as the very best; pillow-soft tofu in a well-rounded udon was better.

All those ramenheads and their droogies have praised Santouka, the only Chicago outlet of a Japanese chain also on the west coast, located in the Mitsuwa Japanese shopping mall in Arlington Heights. I expected it to be the bee’s ne plus ultra, but I found the broth less rich than many of the above— which forced me to reconsider whether that was another model of ramen I should be respecting, and the deepest of the others had been too heavy-handed. Or maybe it’s just mall food court Japanese and I shouldn’t expect so much of it.

Whatever, this ramen has an ace in the hole that none of the others so far had. For a $3 upcharge they’d put slices of pork cheek in it. A lot of slices of pork cheek. Which was as soft and supple as something really soft and supple. This was one sensual bowl of ramen.

While there I wanted to try something else that’s comparatively (ie last year or two) new to Mitsuwa— Gabutto Burger. It’s a Chicago guy who set out to make, I guess, a Japanese burger. And it is, to be honest, something of a lesson in how you may, or may not, get what’s going on in some other culture’s classic dishes… like, say, ramen. There’s mayonnaise, not surprisingly in a Japanese dish, and also a kind of beef jus that is like what you’d get in a pot of braised beef or pot roast or something. Add that the patty is all kind of one texture, and to me this just misses what burgers are about to Americans— that unique contrast of crispy seared beef with the sweet and sour of ketchup and mustard.

Oiistar is a hip new place in Wicker Park, the inside is done in blocks of raw wood (uncomfortably, in the case of the one you sit on) like a Bill Kim belly joint, and unconventionally in terms of what the ramen is like. Which is to say, there isn’t a normal bowl of ramen to be had here— the simplest one (the Oiimen) is still dressed up with fried garlic and chili oil, and that’s before you get to things like the Pozolmen with its jalapeño and tomato. Spice is often used to cover up inferior quality, but I managed to dredge up an un-chili oiled spoonful with the comically large spoon they give you, and it seemed a thoroughly respectable broth with good porky flavor; the noodles, thin and as curly as a phone cord, were good enough but I like a little thicker and chewier noodle. Entirely decent in an Americanized-concepted way— though for what it’s worth, at $14 it was also surely the most expensive as well. Even without strips of pork cheek. Oii vey!

* * *

This looks like a bad flash picture, but actually the dish was sitting right under the spotlight that shines brightly on the middle of your table at Au Cheval, apparently in case you have to suddenly perform open heart surgery on a hamster during your meal.

I remain, to judge by its regular appearances in my Twitter feed, the only person who doesn’t love the Au Cheval burger. I’ve meant to go back to give other things a try and see if I liked the restaurant as much as, say, Michael Nagrant, who found the duck heart gravy hash one of the greatest things ever… but it can be a little harder to motivate yourself for an experiment confirmation rather than a meal. I wound up there one Sunday morning when I drove by Little Goat Diner, saw no big line waiting, went and paid a bunch of money to park, walked over to it with my son… and was promptly told there was an hour and a half wait. How could the six people in the entry way add up to that? Then I remembered a vague mention of buzzers. The other 60 people in front of me must be on the Little Goat Bread side, sipping coffee and waiting for their buzzer to go off.

With so much money sunk into parking, I tried to find somewhere else to go in the area— and what did you know but we were 2 minutes from Au Cheval opening for brunch. Unlike last time, when they seemed vaguely baffled by my presence as a customer, they were friendly as could be, albeit, there was still a slight sense that they believed that they were not so much servers as people who were playing servers on TV, or possibly in a department store window. In sunlight, the dark bar was still dark and hardly diner-y, but it was at least possible to see one end from the other. It was quiet enough, at least at first, that I could actually hear the music playing from the reel to reel tape player in the front. Was there an audio difference? It did seem quite clear and rounded, natural in its tones….

I took Nagrant’s advice and ordered the thing I had planned to eat the next time I went there, the duck heart hash, luckily on the breakfast menu. Which is to say, I ordered mounds of potatoes, a peppery gravy studded with braised duck heart, and egg, while my son had their aptly-named Simple Breakfast. Again, excess was the order of the day— his eggs were Scrambled Butter— but this time I could see expertise and skill and something of a guiding hand making composed dishes, not merely piling it on. The sweet, thick-cut bacon was terrific, the gravy was deep with flavor; the hash was fried perfectly into too-neat perfect squares, the egg was exactly at the runny point it should be. On its own terms, nailed.

Yet I have to say that I still can’t fully buy into Au Cheval’s indulgent, eat-like-a-teenager ethos (which is also, at least partly, that of sister restaurant Maude’s Liquor Bar as well). I loved a vegetable I had at Maude’s (brussel sprouts), yet the idea behind all of this food seems to be to allow you to gorge on the fun stuff with no balancing from any other food group— and ultimately that’s a lifestyle too one-dimensional for me, at least very often. There’s some of that relive-your-childhood-way-of-eating at another popular new restaurant, The Trenchermen, what with pickled tater tots and so on, but somehow it always takes a turn there that acknowledges you can’t go home again and you are an adult who expects tastes of adult complexity. There’s nothing complex about Au Cheval; it plays all its cards up front. The first bite tastes indulgently, belly-rubbingly pleasurable, and thirty bites later, you’re still eating the exact same thing and experiencing the exact same feelings from it, a lot fuller.

* * *

The short life of an Andersonville restaurant called Premise, which took place within a few months of 2012, prompted media question-raising about whether modernist or exotically nose-to-tailish food could ever make it in the neighborhoods rather than downtown (even though, presumably, it’s pretty much the same people eating it in both places). What no one seemed to notice was that Storefront Company, which opened around the same time, was buzzing along fairly successfully doing just those things in Wicker Park without much hype or angst.

I went there early on and found it a little more squiggles than substance, like a hotel restaurant’s version of trendy food, but with some strong points (a very good cheese program for a neighborhood spot, a terrific savory-sweet dessert based around parsnips which could have come from Schwa). But by around the one-year mark chef Bryan Moscatello seems to have grown into his own comfort level with modernist food, making use of everything in a matter-of-fact way so that it doesn’t scare off the locals when a slice of pickled rabbit heart decorates a neat plate of geometric bits of food, in all its biology-textbook detail. Nothing is too out there, which maybe means it never quite scales the highest heights either, but for a relatively affordable, comfortably chic spot alongside pizza parlors and nail salons, it demonstrates a lot of confidence with the direct flavors of house-butchered whole animals. (Vegetables seem rather an afterthought— but dessert is not.)

Disclosure: Storefront Company was a media dinner; the Aviary ramen was part of an event I attended as a media guest; everything else was eaten like a normal person.

Hanging with the makers of Chicago’s modest ethnic cuisines.

This is my tenth ten best list (links to all are at the end of the post) and one that marks a significant change. When I started compiling them a decade ago, it was very much with an eye to advocating the little joints, the ethnic spots, the finds to be found in the urban wilderness (or on trips to areas of regional specialties like Austin). I praised fine dining when it was excellent— Trio under a young fellow named Achatz, Avenues under Bowles, Spring, Moto, Schwa, Blackbird, Vie, beloved departed Mado, Longman & Eagle and Ruxbin all have turned up over the years, among others. But the real point was to call out the wonders of everything from TAC Quick to Burt’s Pizza to Smoque to Sun Wah to Taqueria Ricardo to Taza Bakery to Khan BBQ to Pleasant House… all those little places that everybody knows, now, as part of the fabric of the city.

And now I have a job which is primarily engaged with the world of fine-ish dining, or “chef-driven restaurants” in the too-precious but somehow unimproved-upon phrase, and I get to go to a lot of fine dining places… and guess what, there’s a lot of that on my list. Okay, so I guess that means, middle age happens, you go from one side of the political spectrum to another, from being current with music to satisfied with the oldies, you eat at fewer hot dog stands and more white tablecloth places, right?

Some of that, probably, but I don’t think it’s that easy. The thing that happened to fine dining in this same decade was that it got funkier, realer, more attuned to the things that made that ethnic food great. And the places I really loved this year and thus made this list bridge those two opposites— they make straightforward food rooted in tradition, but because they’re from people with more formal training and expertise, who shop at farmer’s markets and all that stuff, they are faster than the mom and pops to reach the sublime. (Not always— it remains true that a $1.50 taco is nearly always better than a $3 taco in this town— but in the best cases, yes.) So here’s my list, no longer mostly cheap but still, I think, mostly funky; as always, this is stuff new to me this year, don’t assume that I don’t still love Butcher & Larder or whomever:

10. Grilled langoustines, brussel sprout salad, merguez empanada, seafood moqueca, La Sirena Clandestina. I’ve been surprised to see middling reviews for John Manion’s South American place, which scored 4 out of 6 dishes for terrific funky, get-down flavor for me. Maybe there’s some inconsistent execution in a new place, maybe it helped that Manion told me what to order (the middling reviews had none of the above in them except the risotto-like moqueca, which they all praised), but order the list above and if it doesn’t make you happy from the inside out, I don’t know what would. The next night at L2O, as exquisite as some of those seafood creations were… Manion’s charred, funky langoustines kept popping into my head.

9. Bacon bread, brussels sprouts with kielbasa, Allium. I’ve had other plenty good things at Kevin Hickey’s reinvention of the restaurant in the Four Seasons into a high-end tribute to his south side origins, but these two seem the most iconic because they show off the remarkable trick he pulled off, bringing a pure shot of authentic Chicago (the bacon buns inspired by Bridgeport Bakery, the coarse, porky Polish kielbasa tossed with charred crispy brussels sprouts) into the most generic of environments, the international hotel dining room, and appointing himself the south side’s culinary cultural ambassador in the process.

8. Phil’s Last Stand. Phil’s imitation In-N-Out burger is my favorite burger of the moment, but most of what else he does is dead-on (char dogs, crispy fries)— while I admire that his media-savvy doesn’t extend to irony. This isn’t a reinvented stand, or a take on a stand; it’s just a stand, and glad to have it. (Curious note: I wrote the foregoing, then a few days later had a chef say almost exactly the same thing to me about a completely different kind of place.)

7. Steelhead trout, Kai Zan. Okay, so when I finished Next Kyoto, I was pretty sure it would be on this list. Beautifully crafted, well-researched, full of interesting surprises… and I have to think about it to recall something from it. But mention Kai Zan and I instantly see this suggestively silky and supple square of fish, dressed with admirable restraint. Not only see it, but remember what it was like to put in my mouth. If I’m still thinking about something two months later, how can it not be on my list?

6. Manila clams with merguez broth and other things, The Purple Pig. The first couple of times I ate at The Purple Pig, I found it a clever downtown imitation of a real pork-lovin’ place a la Vie or Mado or Avec. Seemed like a nice job by some sharp guys of concepting up a restaurant for the Michigan Avenue crowd, much like all our new diner places. Slowly, each time I’ve returned, The Purple Pig has labored to convince me it’s the real deal, and I accept that now. Did it get better, or did I get better at ordering from it? Maybe both; I kind of ignore the charcuterie, for instance, and pay more attention to vegetables or seafood, and that great not-too-sweet dessert of faro in a mascarpone-like cream. This clam dish was a marvel, porky and briny at the same time, and it is not alone on this menu in being wonderful.

5. Kentucky Bourbon dinner at Big Jones. I’ve always liked Big Jones but, you know, it’s easy to like southern food, doesn’t mean you think it’s great great. Where chef Paul Fehribach soars is in his regular historical dinners, which recreate recipes from specific places and eras— doing what Next does in a single night. This 1830s Kentucky bourbon dinner was fascinating for serving things people would be afraid to eat now (calves’ foot jelly, which was pretty wonderful, actually), things that tasted more like honest home food than restaurant food (mutton barbecue), a door opened into another world that was completely unlike anything else on our food scene this year.

4. Anise hyssop and others at EL Ideas: “I gathered that this is a problem he’s had with some local critics, too— not being sure his restaurant is real enough and serious enough to be worth the investment, of time or money… Let me cut to the chase and say that you have nothing to fear and a lot to anticipate excitedly from EL Ideas. If it’s not a “real” restaurant, then too bad for real restaurants, because in so many ways it’s a warm and engaging experience like fine dining has often forgotten to be. I didn’t entirely buy Foss’s line of patter about the setup overlooking the kitchen space being cozier and more welcoming and erasing the barriers between the chefs and the diners, but that was, in fact, pretty much exactly what it was, and what it did; even if you don’t leave your seat and wander into the kitchen while they’re working, you have no more distance from the chefs, physically and otherwise, than you do from a friend throwing a barbecue in his backyard.”

3. Nathan Myhrvold’s dishes at the Charlie Trotter 25th anniversary dinner. Well, here’s the exception to my general theme. As much as I’ve enjoyed molecular tricks in the past, Myhrvold’s ultrascientific approach took it to a new level— as in the centrifuge-spun caprese salad which was only a tiny shooter of tomato water and separated whey… yet tasted like the most amazing caprese salad you ever ate with an actual fork. It was a real mind bender, to have so much real flavor in such a disembodied form— but it’s not just about tricks; Myhrvold’s pastrami, which happened by some process too complicated for me to recall after a couple of glasses of wine, was utterly delectable as, unmistakably, meat.

2. Publican Quality Meats. Given what’s going on here with housemade sausage and bread and so on, I wanted to love the first round of sandwiches, and I… liked them. None was as good or rich or multidimensional as the one bite of the cocido I had one day, which had the benefit of that more deeply flavorful sausagemaking downstairs. I’m not saying I didn’t go back there a lot, but it wasn’t with quite the rapture that others felt for this place, based on the sandwiches. Then came the chicken parm, and then the PB&L (a pork belly and lamb sausage), and for me PQM hit the magic sweet spot of blue collar food made with artisanal care… and now I would tell anyone that PQM is on the short list of true must-visits in Chicago.

1. Vera. People ask me if I have a favorite restaurant. I don’t, really, because I have to always try new places; I’m not a guy who has a place that he goes back to over and over. But I had a favorite restaurant, once: Rob and Allie Levitt’s Mado. I loved the freshness and simplicity of how they treated things from the farmer’s markets. I loved the spirit of adventure in the air. I knew them and trusted them, and I mourned Mado not being in my life even as I admire what they’ve done next (The Butcher & Larder). And the closest I’ve come since then to feeling the same about a place has been Vera, Mark and Liz Mendez’s restaurant, which is officially a Spanish tapas bar, but to me is just a place that does kind of Mediterranean stuff with whatever’s at the farmer’s market, sometimes makes great things, sometimes makes just pretty good ones, but the great ones are terrific (boquerones, grilled tongue, and whatnot) and everything speaks of simplicity and honesty and directness in its path from the soil (or the sea) to my mouth. It’s my favorite restaurant. I think.

Other things I thought seriously about putting on here, besides Next Kyoto: Next El Bulli (at least what I had of it); Nellcôte for rabbit sausage and Taleggio with green onions and grapes and speck pizza; L2O for the earliest, most delicate courses, like the cauliflower mousse; crispy tripas at La Chapparita; chicken soup with crispy rice at Lao Shanghai; pizza from Armitage Pizzeria; braised escarole at Eataly; fried pickle salad at Stout Barrel House; polenta with pork belly and schweinekopf at Table, Donkey and Stick; fried dino-chicken wing, Golden Palace.

Best Things Eaten in Late 2012 List (click Best Things I’ve Eaten Lately under Categories to see all these lists):

• Grilled langoustines, brussel sprout salad, merguez empanada, seafood moqueca, La Sirena Clandestina
• Red skin mashed potatoes, The Southern
• Fried chicken, Macarthur’s
• Pollo tinga, La Catrina (3658 W. Diversey)
• Maultaschen with chicken consommé, schweinekopf, polenta with roasted bacon, Table, Donkey & Stick
• Mussels with coconut broth, Libertad
• Pastrami hash, Eggy’s Diner
• Doner, Iskender doner, falafel, Zizi’s
• Edwards Surryano ham, both by itself and at Avec
• Lots of things at L2O, almost all on the delicate small piece of fish side, but the desserts are pretty great too
• Greens at Pecking Order
• Grilled sardine, African chicken, Fat Rice
• Gyros, Covo Market
• Ramen at The Aviary
• Ramen at Ginza

Ten best for: 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003

Let me end with a toast to using the internet to share the delight of food and good company; I raise a new Chicago brew I can’t wait to try with Thai food…

A corn husk broth, simple and remarkably satisfying.

If Michelin ever actually wrote a review of Next, which it apparently refuses to do, it would say less about Grant Achatz and chef Dave Beran’s ever-changing dining experience than the fact that Next seems to make Michelin’s head explode does. If Michelin is all about adhering to a rigid set of standards, Next is all about doing it new every time— and about a virtuosity that mocks the claims of authenticity that are at the heart of Michelin’s traveler’s guide mission. The guidebook to what to eat there meets the restaurant that brings every there to here.

But having eaten Next two and a half times— the half was noshing about half the El Bulli menu in the kitchen while it was being photographed on opening night— I think it’s not hard at all to see the consistent restaurant under the changing themes. Sourcing is more diligent and far-reaching than anywhere in town, technique is extremely refined and precise, though sometimes too much of it can be applied— pastas seem to be a problem and the chicken noodle (made mostly of meat glue) in the Childhood menu was an example of a trick that was better to contemplate than to actually eat.

Each meal is essentially theatrical as much as culinary, though the danger of coming off like EPCOT is always in their minds. So the menus, even when they follow a traditional format like kaiseki, also function as a kind of wordless narrative which takes us through the moods of the cuisine in question, with certain evocative tropes— like scattered leaves— which obviously have meaning to Achatz and Beran (both small town Michigan-raised) reappearing across wildly different themes. You’re dining within someone else’s dream of a culture.

In contrast to the kitchen’s exacting, if unspoken, vision, the atmosphere at Next still has some of the casualness of the relatively low-priced adventure that it started as (but quickly ceased being when it turned out that demand was through the roof). The staff seems young and sometimes a little giddy, their enthusiasm about what Chef has done shading toward fannishness; and the room is deliberately neutral, meant to evoke a train station leading you away (but also reminding one of a simple storefront theater where Shakespeare and Mamet get the same minimalist setting).

A sauce for one dish.

I liked the conceptualness of Childhood as a show, but didn’t come away desiring any of the dishes again. Kyoto, hewing closer to a real-world model, is far more successful in food terms. I’ve had kaiseki and omakase meals before, and this wasn’t the most out-there by any means; this meal at Sankyu, for instance, was more of a mind-blower in terms of strange textures and new experiences. But the microfocused precision of Japanese food is as good a fit for Next as anything they’ve done, and the meal was, simply, beautiful, a series of exquisitely executed dishes which gained in dramatic effect from their placement within the Next storyline, which took us from fall to winter, and in and out of the farm and the sea. And in and out of Japan and the midwest; a number of dishes were altered to make use of American ingredients, introducing homey midwestern flavors like corn or maple into a Japanese-context dish and, somehow, producing the shock of the familiar as palates prepared for the exotic were suddenly taken back to, well… childhood.

Things I remember as particular delights— a smoky corn husk broth which set the autumnal tone, and was amazingly satisfying and comforting; duck prosciutto, pretty as ribbon candy, tucked among the leaves of a “forest floor” course; a maple-tinged chawanmushi; a hearty broth, similar to the ramen they’ve been serving at The Aviary, served with wagyu beef; a persimmon filled with persimmon gelee and accompanied by edible maple leaves (and lots of powdered sugar; they were a bit bitter). Some courses were overly salty, especially a course of fried items, and though the robata-style box with pieces of brook trout was a cool presentation, I suspect it was a more exciting dish on days when it came with eel, as it apparently does.

And for this meal, not wanting to lose the delicacy of the meal in alcohol, I chose the non-alcoholic pairings and had a fascinating, if not always easy, series of teas and concocted sodas— though there was one, using roasted barley, which immediately conjured up a very midwestern picture indeed. I even passed it around and the same thought occurred to others in our party— “Convenience store on the highway.” Somehow the roasted barley suggested, with remarkable precision, the smell of a 7/11-type mini-mart downstate, mixing coffee burning in industrial pots with donuts in the air, maybe a little pine-scented air freshener. The power of food to evoke specific places at Next is truly extraordinary, even when it may not be intentional.

Pickled complements to something or other. See more of my photos at Grub Street.

* * *

Before Next I stopped at La Sirena Clandestina, John Manion’s South American-inspired restaurant (see my interview with him here), to have the drink that would take the edge off and ease me into an evening of non-alcoholic pairings. (As it turned out, Next had the same idea; even the non-alcoholic meal started with sake.) I didn’t taste anything, but I could tell I’d be happy hanging out here and eating Manion’s Brazilian comfort food.

And so I did and I was. La Sirena Clandestina reminded me of its neighbor down the next block, Vera, which is never a bad comparison— the restaurant with the least touristy frillery evoking the place turns out to be the one most true to the spirit. (Well, never bad except to Michelin, who overlooked my favorite restaurant of the year entirely in favor of mediocre white tablecloth spots.) I’ve been kind of burned out on South American food in Chicago— too much of it seems muted, like canned food, a dim reflection of what must be brighter and livelier at home. Manion puts the life back into South American flavors in dishes that had the freshness of good ingredients, whether it was an empanada filled with sharp, funky lamb merguez, a tart shaved brussel sprout salad, or massive shrimp dripping with butter, char flavor and the sea. Best of all is moqueca, something like a South American risotto in that shrimp, mussels and some kind of white fish sit atop a heat-tinged soupy rice which is incredibly comforting (but has too much kick to be lulling). As at Vera, things tastes like themselves and are never dressed up to the point of losing themselves; only enough to be even more of themselves. There’s an essential honesty to the cooking that puts La Sirena instantly among my favorite openings of the year.

* * *

Strikingly similar to some of La Sirena’s stewy dishes is a dish like the African chicken at Fat Rice, a comforting dish full of good fresh finds (hunks of potato or whatever) hidden beneath its main protein. Otherwise Fat Rice, which is mostly Asian and specifically aimed at recreating Macanese food (the food of the Portuguese colony of Macau, and its European influences), is mostly about Asian flavors, but there are similar virtues in the way it highlights fresh ingredients. The dishes that have equivalents in local Asian restaurants bring brightness and clean flavors to sometimes muddled dishes like potstickers or the flat noodles in XO sauce.

Other dishes are, mostly, just simple and good— a crispy grilled sardine, or a clear pumpkin broth. I don’t think the food is as sharpened to a fine point of finesse as Manion’s food at La Sirena is; his is great out of the gate, Fat Rice (which just opened a week ago; we may in fact have been the first customers to actually eat on its opening night, though it had been doing soft opening dinners for several days) will be more of a journey of discovery. As comfortable as a dish like the African chicken is, you want to believe there’s a sharper, more refined dish to be found within it. Yet there’s so much to like here already in terms of good ingredients and honest approach that it, too, becomes an immediate favorite; I will be happy to see how it’s progressing every few months or so. And to congratulate when it wins a Bib Gourmand, Michelin’s pat on the head to restaurants they don’t quite get, but feel like they should be seen to like a little.

Disclosure: I was known to, and comped some items at, both La Sirena Clandestina and Fat Rice.

Tags: fat rice, la sirena clandestina, next kyoto

At some point at dinner at Elizabeth a thought crossed my mind: is this the end? This was not a comment on the imaginative and thoroughly interesting meal, but rather on myself, as I waited for the next entirely new and novel taste sensation to cross my palate. We had the deer menu, which is the foraging-based one, and while there were many things in it which were familiar— I believe I’ve had carrots before— there were also some that had come out of a forest one way or another, from autumn olives to matsutake mushrooms. And forest food has a distinct difference from plant or root food— it’s intense, woodsy (well duh), and… not exactly food, to our sensibilities. More like something between food and not-food. So when I ingested something like spruce soda, part of me was excited to be opening new territory on the border between food and the country next to it, but part of me was haunted by a thought… so have I exhausted the world of food? Are there no new flavors left in known cuisine, that I have to go hunting for novelty in a land beyond food?

Iliana Regan’s response to this would surely include the observation that many of the things I’m assuming to not be food have been food for other cultures and eras— spruce, to name one, was used like hops are today in beer around George Washington’s time. Or they’re simply other forms of food— those carrots are wonderful, but when their familiarity is joined with Queen Anne’s lace jam, all you’ve done is reunited today’s carrot with its grandmother’s flower. (At the bottom of that Queen Anne’s stalk is a little bulb that would eventually be bred into the modern foot-long supermarket carrot. I learned that in a Sky Full of Bacon video.)

The other thing is that if you want to talk not-quite-food, there’s plenty of modernist manipulation going on in this meal, in which twigs and sprigs rest atop emulsified stabilized this or that. So if you think Elizabeth’s little storefront is doing a sort of eccentric, primitive folk art food— a reasonable impression from media and Regan’s deceptively dreamy manner— there’s also plenty of cutting-edge technique under the Etsy-obsessive picnic in the woods image that she’s constructed.

But how was the food, you ask, suspecting I could go on for paragraphs in this vein. And you’re right. This is a meal that everyone who thinks about their food should have in order to think about it, and conversely, if you’re going to go there because it’s new and trendy but you’re going to be disappointed that it didn’t hit familiar notes, please, spare us all and go have a steak at Bavette’s Bar and Boeuf.

Elizabeth has its moments of conventional comforts— a ragu on top of polenta is warm and comfy, and without being told you’d never know the odd thing about it, which is that that’s not beef, it’s raccoon. Right where you want a red meat course comes a course of venison, both loin and a sausage wrapped in cabbage (which led to the only real executional misstep of the night, in that my wife’s wasn’t warmed properly). Matsutake mushroom tea isn’t expected, exactly, but it’s certainly warm and nurturing. But most things are out to surprise you in some way. I loved a bite the menu simply calls “rice crispy,” which had puffed rice and other savory flavors topped with a single chip of air-dried… did she say bear? I think she did. The meal ends with a caramel whose comforts are instantly undercut by a livery tang. Even at the end, you’re not getting out of these woods easy.

All this happens in a small storefront where the kitchen is entirely open to the dining room; the obvious comparison that everyone makes is Phillip Foss’s EL Ideas, but I compared that experience to a backyard barbecue and it has a definite party-at-Phil’s-place vibe, a downshifted haute cuisine that says “I could make you the most precious thing you ever ate, but I’m just going to make something that sounds good to me.” Elizabeth by comparison looks as quietly, seriously efficient as surgery back there, and if the welcome is genuine in its desire to make us part of the family— at one point, we’re moved up one communal table, to the one the Owl menu diners have just left, to be closer to the kitchen and the other remaining diners— well, Regan seems relaxed and whimsical when she comes out to introduce a course, but everyone else works like they have a boss who wants things just so. (People have worried that her scant kitchen experience suggested that Regan was taking on way more than she could manage with the three menus running side by side. Talk to her for five minutes and you realize that, like Grant Achatz, she’s the type who knows exactly what she wants and doesn’t screw up anything, ever.)

As in the movies, where a “personal vision” these days is something a director brings to a corporate property like Batman, the restaurant scene has gotten so good at blending chef’s strengths with huge commercial projects that we take it for granted that any chef’s goal is to get to the 500-seat restaurant which updates the traditional genre with farm to table ingredients or a knack for charcuterie or whatever will keep the chef happy cranking it out night after night. Elizabeth is a restaurant not so much opposed to thinking about a restaurant that way as simply existing in another dimension where the question doesn’t make sense. As with a Terence Malick movie, either you’re in for trying to keep up with a completely personal journey, which will sometimes frustrate you but promises showing you something you’ve never seen before… or you shouldn’t even start. Part of the thing about going in the woods is that people do get lost there.

* * *

Of course, we haven’t really exhausted the world of food at all; even when we’ve tried something, who’s to say we’ve really had it? Surely part of the fascination with food comes from its evanescence— one person says X is the greatest barbecue place in the universe, but on the day you go it isn’t and some other place blows you away. In Spain I had delicious iberico ham at every opportunity, but transcendent iberico ham only once, at an upscale restaurant. What was the difference?

I went with two friends to Kai Zan, the new sushi restaurant of the moment, at least the moment between B.K. Park leaving Arami and the launch of his upcoming Juno. It’s a tiny place, where I was wedged into a table like I haven’t been wedged into anything since my late grandfather’s early 60s British sports car. We ordered the omakase, which starts at $50, telling the waiter that we’d pay a little more for something exceptional, we weren’t afraid of anything, and we didn’t want to just see tuna and salmon all night. He immediately called our bluffs by saying that they had live uni (sea urchin) tonight, would we be interested?

I’ve eaten uni. I think I even liked it once, at NoMI Kitchen where it came with iberico ham and avocado on toast. I’m not opposed to it, but let’s face it, it’s got all the squishiness and fishiness that says to a westerner, you’re eating something that you shouldn’t be and you will be paying for it later. (To be fair, I don’t think I’ve ever felt ill off it, only during it.) But I was in the kind of company where we all felt, if you’re promising us a better uni experience— it wasn’t actually live so much as “extremely recently dead”— then we should, in the name of our honor as gentlemen and officers of her majesty, eat uni.

As it turns out, we ate a lot of uni. Possibly 50% of all the uni I’ve ever eaten, in fact. One grade of it was in the cup above, alongside a scallop and a shiitake mushroom. More of it was in something else, and then finally came our live uni, half a dozen pieces draped on a plate. I would have happily not eaten any more by that point… but I also would have been sorry not to have had this uni. Squishy, yes, fishy, no, it was mild and tasted of the sea in a clean way. It was the best uni of my life, in the sense that it explained why I disliked previous uni but not, entirely, why anyone should really want uni— why it’s a food at all (except for desperation by seashore-living peasants millennia ago). But that is part of what I find fascinating about Japanese food— they seem to live much closer to the border between food and not-food than I do (though quite possibly they feel the same way about westerners).

Another thing I had I have no such ambivalence about. It was some kind of wild trout— I forget the exact descriptor, but this was plainly cold-water fish, muscular and yet ribboned with lush layers of fat. It was easily in the five best pieces of sashimi I’ve ever eaten, delicate yet firm, fatty yet meaty, containing contradictions and multitudes… and, significantly, prepared with a confidence that it needed nothing more than the sprig on top and the lemon below.

Sushi falls into two schools these days— there are a few minimalists remaining, like the great Katsu, but the trend these days is to gussy fish up with other flavors. The late Kaze restaurant (Kaze the chef is now at Macku) was a notorious practitioner of this with his banana toppings on tuna and the like, those rolls full of mayonnaise and sticky-sweet sauce are the ubiquitous offenders, and I wouldn’t say this kind of thing is strictly unknown at Kai Zan, but it’s kept from overwhelming the fish (or the fresh wasabi, which made many appearances, unmistakable both on looks and the lack of the instant horseradish burn). A couple of dishes got out of their control— a starter with a raw quail egg in it was like taking a swig straight from the soy sauce bottle— but most were simple and successful. On the whole, they’re buying beautiful fish, treating it with respect and enhancing it in only small ways. And the final tab for a meal which wedged us even further into our tiny table was all of $75 per person (it’s BYO), even with every special in the house thrown in. I tweeted this when someone broke the news of B.K. Park leaving Arami:

BREAKING: Katsu back to being only place to get sushi in Chicago

Which may not have been strictly true, but came closer to it than you’d wish. Kai Zan steps us that much further back from apocalypse.

Disclosure: my meal at Elizabeth was comped, as a media guest. Kai Zan was paid for.

* * *

Well, I’m a full month behind on tracking my favorite things I ate this year, so here’s the list for July through now:

PB&L, PQM.

• Cheese curds at The Old-Fashioned in Madison, The Brewery in Mineral Point
• Ribs, 17th Street BBQ, Murphysboro, Illinois
• Filipino soup at Max’s
• Grilled beef tongue at Vera
• Fries at Au Cheval
• Fries at MBurger
• Beet, chicken tacos, Bullhead Cantina
• Manti at Afghan Kabob
• Margherita, sausage at Armitage Pizzeria
• Nathan Myrhvold’s modernist pastrami, caprese salad shooter, Trotter’s beer-can squab with tripe ravioli, at Charlie Trotter’s 25th anniversary dinner
• Tea-smoked duck at Lao Yunan (former Spring World), different from other Tony Hu versions
• Bonsoiree a la Beverly Kim: Chawanmushi, smelt, makkoli cake
• BLT dog, Bill Kim’s Urban Belly Dog, Franks N Dawgs
• PB&L (pork belly & lamb) sausage at Publican Quality Meats
• Phil’s Last Stand’s imitation of an In’N’Out burger
• Burger with tomato jam at Burger Bar
• Fried Dill Pickle Salad, Stout Barrel House & Galley

Armitage Pizzeria.

• Trenchermen: bacon cured sweetbreads, smoked sturgeon dish, heirloom tomato salad, coffee cake with smoked meringue
• Choucroute garni at Everest
• Sopa Azteca, Masa Azul
• Taleggio with green onions and grapes and speck pizza, rabbit sausage, Nellcôte
• Deep Purple Poutine, iNG
• Rice Krispy, carrots, raccoon ragu and polenta, Elizabeth
• Salmon from Ming Tsai’s new book at Takashi
• Lots of fresh uni, wild trout, Kai Zan
• Not-perfect-yet chestnut pasta with guinea hen sugo, Avec
• Duck and vinegary slaw ordered by pointing at what someone else was eating, Pho Xe Lua
• Ramen, Ginza
• Chicken soup with crispy rice, Lao Shanghai
• Enormous roasted chicken wings, Golden Palace
• Calamari dish, Bar Ombra
• Chicken boti, Ali’s BBQ
• Butternut squash velouté, fall chocolate dessert, Acadia
• Miche, La Fournette
• Hard kiwi-quince jam, from Orianna Kruszewski at the Green City Market
• Smoke cocktail, Allium
• Something from The Aviary… wish I could remember what…

Beets, Vera.

Tags: elizabeth, kai zan

As I was saying about food before I was interrupted…

I was trying to think of an analogy for The Trenchermen, the new restaurant from the Sheerin Brothers (which I went to for a PR dinner, so I don’t think I can fairly comment on whether service and kitchen execution is better for reviewers than normal folks, as has been alleged in at least one review). I settled on the Coen Brothers. Which is to say, possibly brilliant, in such a quirky, possibly three steps ahead of everybody way that I’m not sure yet what it was really about. (This is on my mind because someone recently asked me what No Country For Old Men was about beyond just really brutal violence, and my attempt to summarize some theme about individual will versus blind chance in an amoral universe promptly drove into weeds it could never get out of. But it’s sure about something!) Also, as with the Coen Bros., the joke may be in some way on us the audience. Certainly some of the combinations, even in this era of weird combinations, seemed like parodies of 2012 fine dining— like mortadella fried rice. Yes! At last, the Italian deli-chop suey fusion restaurant we’ve been waiting for! Yet however preposterous they sounded, they were mostly, if not always, pretty great.

But the way they were great was not like the way I’m presently used to things being great. I mean, they’re back there curing meats as you expect restaurants to do today, they’re buying good farmer’s market stuff as they always have wherever they worked… but the result isn’t Perennial Virant, a tribute to the fine intrinsic flavors of such things. (Mike’s charcuterie at Three Floyds was certainly like that.) Somehow what they’re doing with them is more complex and surprising than that, a four-dimensional game of chess in which frying and pickling and smokiness and acidity and fruitiness and who knows what all get put together in a new strange way that’s different with every plate. (Not every time, of course, and when things don’t add up in the Sheerin’s new math, they’re often wan— corn tortellini in a broth, for instance, at the height of corn season, somehow fizzled on the launchpad. But three out of four.)

Now, I’ve eaten at places that seemed like a different restaurant with every plate, and in most cases it’s simply a chef who knows how to do a lot of things but has no overarching personality of his own that comes out in every dish. I’m convinced that this is not the case here, that the Sheerin Bros. not only have personalities but in some sense one personality they form in the kitchen. But I would need to eat more analytically, and less socially than I did that night, to start to get what it’s really about. (Which will be costly— it’s pretty pricey, but at last as small plates go, they’re pretty big. Still, it’s an intellectual pursuit worth paying for, I think.)

For now, don’t miss the bacon cured (!) sweetbreads with XO sauce and black garlic, which give insanely likable southern fried crunchiness with a dark, haunting Asian depth of flavor, the heirloom tomato salad with, I think, balsamic vinegar ice cream, and order whatever fish is involved in the smoked fish dish (sturgeon when I went, looks like Kentucky paddlefish now). And though some reviewers have dinged dessert because the chefs do it themselves and don’t really have a pastry chef per se, I loved the non-traditional dark and savoriness of a couple of the desserts, notably the coffee cake with smoked meringue.

* * *

Stout Barrel House looks like any bar in Chicago, dark wood and TVs turned to sports. You would think the menu would be like any bar’s, “Angus” burgers and mozzarella sticks. But this is 2012 and the guys who previously had a nightclub of no culinary distinction here hired away the chef of Blue 13 (now gone), Chris Curren, to up their company’s food game, and so it has, for one thing, an inhouse charcuterie program. Five years ago this would have been a miracle— housemade cured meats in a bar in River North? Think how much credit Avec got for that. Now we’re so spoiled it seems normal. Housemade charcuterie? Call me when you make your own blood pudding.

I liked the spicy sopressata and the prosciutto, a little dry and chipped as a result, but they were pleasing. (The Sheerins are making prosciutto too.) Pates were fine but not that intriguing, the rest was a nice cheese selection (the Pastoral truck actually pulled up while I was sitting there.) What would have rocked the bar world a few years ago gets a B+ for effort now. The rest of the menu is artisanalish but leaning, not surprisingly, to the meaty and fried. Partly for the sheer perversity of its name I ordered the fried dill pickle salad:

It was great! Buttery bibb lettuce with an ultra-fresh buttermilk-dill dressing partied with the crispy fried crunch of pickles and cheese curds. It did a little dance of joy in my mouth. It was one of the funniest things, and one of the most fun, I’ve eaten in a long time. There’s so much talent in Chicago kitchens, more than we have enough fine restaurants for— which makes it possible to discover things like this in ordinary and clichéd places. There is no excuse for eating bad things!

* * *

Ten years ago a place called Grandma J’s Local Kitchen would have been done up in Kountry Kute. But now even grandma places have a certain thrift store-hipster vibe, and this one in Humboldt Park just south of North & Kedzie (looking right across the street into the doors of the armory) looks like it could be a calculated effort at Etsy-esque homespun chic, like the Wicker Park steak place Time Out called “if Pinterest designed a steakhouse.”

Then the friends and neighbors start wandering in and out, helping deliver supplies in the middle of breakfast service (they’re betting on a big crowd from something called RiotFest), and you know that ramshackle is not an act— this is the real deal, the kind of food business where people without a lot of experience decide to follow their heart into hospitality and the result can either be sweet or disastrous.

Happily, the results are mostly happy. Would a professional chef have invented a version of eggs benedict that has both ham and bacon on rye bread? No, a home chef winging it out of what ingredients she has on hand would, but the rye bread works surprisingly well, a little sharpness to cut into the egg and the sauce. And the actual cook that morning, a small Latino lady working on a portable grill, must have some experience because the poached eggs are perfect and the home fries are just fine, no underdone bits at this early point in the day. It’s a winning place with a sweetness hard-edged Humboldt Park could use, and I’ll be back.

* * *

So I spent months, intermittently, doing the hard research of eating tacos for the taco slideshow I did (as did all the Grub Street cities) a couple of months back. And looking for new places to add to the body of known good Mexican spots, I tried a lot of places that were all right… but not good enough or different to take a slot on a 25-slide slideshow. Not good enough to suggest somebody ought to drive very far to check them out. I affirmed the position of some places I’d heard about but not tried, or needed to try again, but I think I only made one real discovery that nobody’s talked about— Tacos y Salsa in Berwyn. (And even then, how far should you drive to go there? Depends on what you’d pass on the way, I guess.)

And so the first Mexican restaurant I go to after taking a taco break afterwards, proves to be, if not city-crawling-worthy, certainly one of the best new finds in my approximate area (I guess it’s Humboldt Park, which I, if probably not many of my neighbors, consider fairly close, at least for lunch). It’s called Taqueria Perejil and it’s in a spot which I believe I checked out once under previous owners, but found either closed or utterly forgettable. They’ve spiffed it up for sure, but more than that they’re doing some nice things right, like handpatted gorditas and sopes with a nice salty-corny flavor, and taco or quesadilla choices like huitlacoche, cactus or flor de calabaza (squash blossome), which look like alien eyestalks and taste like canned asparagus. That’s a sentimental dish for me because it was one of the first exotic things I learned about in early Chowhound days–

BZZZZZZT! you’re not supposed to talk about food discussion sites!

— er, when I had first had friends who wanted to go eat Mex at the Maxwell Street Market. Whenever that was. I can’t remember for the life of me.

The floor is made of linoleumized guacamole.

Anyway, nice stuff, friendly people, check it out. We actually arrived at it after my sons, quickly learning the ropes, called an audible on my first choice because all it had was American beer signs in the window, and promptly said, c’mon dad, it can’t be an authentic Mexican place with Bud Light signs. Not sure that’s strictly true but the place certainly looked lamer than its Yelp reviews would have suggested, just proving that while Yelp is a good source for ideas, you can’t count on the Yelp community as a whole to–

BZZZZZZT!

Okay, okay. Anyway, as we drove past that place we spotted a nice looking little Churro and Mexican hot chocolate stand, Xocoatl, which turns out to have a few locations around the area. It’s a bit bare inside for what should be a friendly neighborhood spot, let us say it has more of the anti-atmosphere of the south side wings and fish stand than of the atmosphere of the Lakeview ice cream parlor, but you can watch the churros being made through a window, they come out hot and tasty, always fried to order… it was just fine.

Taqueria Perejil
3835 W. Fullerton
773-904-8150

Xocoatl
3755 W. Armitage
773-772-9525

* * *

Lest you think I’m a pushover who just likes whatever’s put in front of him, here’s one vaunted place that was quite a disappointment— in fact a real head-scratcher: Ada Street. Chicago magazine had it on their best new restaurants list, but it seemed like 10 left feet to me. It’s hidden away near the Hideout, but where the Hideout’s ramshackle bar seems a natural fit for this nowhere location near a City of Chicago refueling station, the sleek Ada St. just seems kind of forlorn. The entrance is genuinely bizarre; a dark non-descript place with rows of LPs for you to choose from (hmm, maybe everyone would enjoy Metal Machine Music), which aims to evoke the Velvet Hour’s entry, I think, but comes closer to the camouflaged entrance to the kitschy Spy Bar in Milwaukee. Then you walk down a long, disco-lit pathway which feels like a tracking shot in Enter the Void until you come to the main room, a dark box which during daylight hours, at least, looks onto a sunny patio paved with astroturf and with a ping pong table. The feel of the two spaces is so completely disparate the patio doesn’t seem quite real— the bar is dark like the hold of a space freighter, the patio is the holodeck recreating your sunlit childhood memories.

But hey, if the food is good… only it really wasn’t, and neither was the drink. I don’t remembered what drink I ordered, but I remember the first words that came to mind: “drinking cologne.” I ordered a couple of plates, too, and the only one I remember had octopus, beans and some kind of vaguely spicy sauce… but really it had no distinct flavor at all. Things weren’t bad, but they were unmemorable, as evidenced by the fact that I have unmemoried them. (Maybe they can bring them back on the holodeck.) I didn’t hate this place, but nothing about it at all worked for me, or made me ever want to spend any more time there figuring out why others think it’s one of this year’s stars.

Tags: ada street, grandma j's local kitchen, stout barrel house, tacos de perejil, trenchermen, xocoatl

I will drive an insane distance for something new and great to eat and the true is same, though less often put to the test, for a movie presentation. Years ago my wife and I drove to Dayton, Ohio for the only Cinerama theater left in the country. I made a somewhat smaller trek to Lincolnshire to see The Dark Knight Rises in 70MM (film that is four times the size of normal 35MM) at an IMAX theater (beware that there are IMAX theaters and there are IMAX theaters; go here for more explanation). Some of the movie was shot in 70MM, some in widescreen 35MM, which meant that the movie would expand to a full square image and then back to a rectangle, sometimes shot to shot. Unexpectedly, this is not distracting; I think most rarely notice it. One reason, however, that most didn’t notice it is because the Regal theater in Lincolnshire didn’t have the focus perfectly sharp, so the effect of 70MM— when the slight blur of 35MM suddenly gives way to the pinpoint sharpness of 70MM— was somewhat lost. Normally I’m the guy who goes and bitches about that… but it’s hard to do that in an IMAX theater when you’re wedged in the center of 25 people and the auditorium is raked at a 40-degree angle.

So I paid extra to have a less than perfect 70MM experience. Alas, the same was true of dinner, which proved to be Movie Dinner since we didn’t get there in time for one of the local specialties, like a hamburger at Red Robin. I kind of like, nostalgically, hot dogs and movie popcorn for dinner, even if I nearly have to pay the price of dinner at Next Childhood to relive this childhood experience too, but it’s not just that the Nathan’s dogs aren’t especially good, but they’d been sitting in the warmer long enough to petrify the bun– literally, I had to break pieces of it off like dried plaster to find edible bread. All in all, a rather sad attempt to recapture the lost excitement of the rapidly dying big movie theater experience. And if this theater isn’t up to par, I don’t know where I’m going to go when Lawrence of Arabia is reissued in October.

How was the movie? I admire that Nolan makes the apocalyptic disaster real for the people living through it, unlike all those movies in which giant robots smash cities without a thought for what that actually would be like. I admire a summer blockbuster that makes a French reign of terror allusion without spelling it out in dumbo letters for the clueless audience. I was absorbed, but it shows you how much a charismatic villain adds to these things, as Heath Ledger did to the last one; I find it hard to imagine caring enough to watch Bane make speeches and flex bulky shoulders for 2 hours and 40 minutes ever again. And if I do, it’ll be at home with Thai food.

* * *

Can I admit now that when everyone else was loving the first sandwiches at Publican Quality Meats, I wasn’t quite so ecstatic? Oh, I liked them, I had no doubts it was an estimable place, I admired the bread (which really is great) and the sausagemaking immensely, I knew early on that its place on my ten best list for the year was secured. But sandwiches are a less is more kind of thing, and the sandwiches I tried were always a little too much and yet less than the sum of their parts. I got to taste the cocido (a stew with their housemade sausages) once, and felt it blew any sandwich there away, having the depth and richness and soulfulness that the sandwiches didn’t achieve. For me, the best sandwich has the least stuff on it necessary; a ham sandwich with swiss cheese and mayo is almost invariably better than a ham sandwich with Havarti and pepper jack, pickled fennel gremolata, housecured turnips, red bean paste aioli and a latke on green apple foccacia. Publican Quality Meats’ sandwiches were good, I was always happy I ate there, but great? Not yet.

Then I had this:

The chicken parmesan sandwich with provolone (why it’s a chicken parm then I don’t know) and tomato sauce used to be a Chicago classic, though I’d guess, like the similar steak sandwich, they’ve gotten pretty rare except in redoubts of the south side. (I love the one at Johnny O’s, which tastes like Chicago in 1952 to me.) This is a less is more sandwich without question, no olive tapenade or grilled favas on it, and all they’ve done is exactly what you’d hope Paul Kahan & Co. would do, which is improve every one of its few elements— better chicken, better cheese (fresh mozzarella by the look of it), their great crusty bread, totally solid tomato sauce. I said to Kahan when I was shooting this that it was the best white trash sandwich in town, and I know he didn’t think that was exactly a compliment, but it was in every way: this has the irresistible deliciousness of low-class food made with the skills of high-class food, and it’s unimprovable.

Almost as good, though it’s starting to veer away from less is more territory, is a new pork belly sandwich:

Frankly, I’m a little thrown by the pork belly designation, there aren’t stripes of fat in the meat, looks more like a thick slice of shoulder, but it comes off like carnitas on a crusty roll with some fairly simple flavor accents (some green leaf, a green spread like gremolata, some little sticks that might be apple) which are fairly restrained as toppings at PQM go. In any case, if this is the second wave, the PQM guys have been going to sandwich school on the first wave, and you want to check their work now.

Publican Quality Meats
825 W. Fulton Market
312-445-8977

* * *

What will Red Door do in the winter? That was David Tamarkin’s question in Time Out, and he meant that the sometimes slack food would have trouble surviving without the help of the gorgeous patio it inherited from Duchamp in the same space. I disagree that the food is slack at all— okay, yes, the steak needed salt, and the burger isn’t a highlight (same is true at Longman and Eagle, say), but overall I love the simplicity of Troy Graves’ food, which dresses farmer’s market produce or seafood with just enough of something to make it pop. In two visits, I’ve really liked nearly everything, even the poutine Graves sent me after I said I wasn’t a fan of poutine. Did I like it? I ordered it the next time for my kids to try. I loved gnocchi with bitter greens, carrots tossed with chimmichurri, a perfectly cooked octopus salad, a beef tongue reuben, a Thai hemp cocktail.

But winter is a question not only because it will revert to being a fairly small, dark bar then, but because all those wonderful green flavors waiting for Graves to just twist them a notch to something great will be gone. We’ll have to see if it can weather the cold and make it to another summer, and what that will bring out in Graves’ cooking in the meantime. But for now the patio is gorgeous, one of the most tranquil outdoor spaces in town, and you should make an effort to go to Red Door early and often.

Red Door
2118 N. Damen
773-697-7221

* * *

Among other projects I’ve been up to lately is this taco slideshow at Grub Street; I was determined to present my definitive word on taco culture in Chicago, and I think I did; in any case, thousands and thousands have clicked their way through it, most to the end. In many ways it sums up the knowledge accumulated over the past decade at Chowhound and LTHForum, but I tried hard to knock familiar names off if I could find a better one, and most of the time I didn’t. One place I found and really liked that I want to call attention to, however, was a discovery made by searching Yelp for vegetarian-friendly taco joints. It’s a place named, even more generically than most, Tacos y Salsa in Berwyn, and besides a first rate cactus taco, they make one of the best fish tacos in town; it’s not breaded and deep fried, but pan fried I think, but what makes it stand out is that it’s marinated in lime and who knows what, so it really packs a citrusy kick. Plus, the service couldn’t be friendlier, and it was amusing that the TV was tuned to Toy Story 3, to my kids’ pleasure and the annoyance of the Mexican working stiffs who kept walking in.

Tacos y Salsa
6346 26th Street
Berwyn
708-749-3581

Tags: movies, Publican Quality Meats, Red Door, tacos, Tacos y Salsa

Here’s the first thing that happened at Au Cheval, the Randolph Street “diner,” that has never happened to me at any diner ever before. I sat at the bar, ordered a beer, and then asked for a menu. At which point I caused some consternation and hemming and hawing, which finally ended with the waitress saying “It’s late enough, I guess you can.” I’m not sure exactly what that meant, but surely part of what makes you a diner is that there’s a counter— not a bar, a counter— and no one has ever, ever, had to think about whether you could have food there or not. (I’m also pretty sure no counter has a thick brass pipe holding the beer taps set exactly at eye level, so that talking to your bartender is like talking to your lawyer in stir.)

When the concept of Au Cheval was announced I made some cracks on Twitter about what kind of a “diner” had a French name and foie gras in its matzoh balls and could be described, as Eater described it, as having

a vintage French bordello vibe with large hanging pendants over a zinc-topped bar, exposed whitewashed brick and black venting, an antique mirror hanging on the front wall, maple-stained driftwood tabletops alongside slightly distressed leather booths, basket weave marble tile and wallpaper with patterns resembling the ubiquitous fleur de lis at Sodikoff’s neighboring Maude’s Liquor Bar.

As I said at Grub Street, I’m pretty sure all that doesn’t come with a side of hash browns and a secondhand Sun-Times, like things do at a real diner. Eventually I went off on this enough that I got a tweet back from Brendan Sodikoff saying, basically, that diner-ness was a state of mind, an air of welcoming that they were aiming for. Okay, fair enough, I thought; maybe even as the design trappings and the menu suggest French decadence, there’s a core of Norman Rockwell small town cafe attitude underneath it all. I could buy that.

Unnh-unnnnh, I’m not buyin’ it any more. Not since I finally went there. As far as I’m concerned, Sodikoff is calling Au Cheval a diner because he doesn’t want to use the perfectly good American phrase that describes exactly what Au Cheval is: a singles bar. I haven’t been in such a blatant pickup scene since I watched the spry 70-year-olds hit on each other at Myron and Phil’s on a Friday night. (Yeah, I’m talking to you, guy getting all touchy with the waitress as he mentions his wife repeatedly to the guy he’s drinking with.) But it’s a singles bar with— not even just comfort food. Frankly, Au Cheval’s food is so big and heavy that it’s more like discomfort food; touchy married guy had a basket of Texas toast to go with the chicken liver, each slice of which was big enough to wreck your Atkins for a month. I’ve seen diners serve Adam and Eve on a raft, but never lifesize before. But what’s going on in America that people are coming together to mate with a fig leaf of deniability provided by overloaded fat guy food? Why do the skinny people need each other to think that they’re eating like LTHers before they’ll screw?

Everyone tells me that Sodikoff is a brilliant guy, so maybe he understands something about our weird psychology about food that I can’t see; the fact that he’s basically 4 for 4 so far in terms of opening places that get lines out the door would certainly suggest that possibility. But then there’s the food. Many of the same people told me that, as absurd as it often sounds, the food at Au Cheval was jaw-droppingly delicious. They weren’t always entirely complimentary about it— David Tamarkin succinctly said what I had sort of suspected, which was: “You can eat here, and you can eat well. You just can’t eat dinner,” that is, you can eat fatty rich things that will leave you sated and half insensate, but they don’t constitute a balanced, personally sustainable approach to dinner as the term is understood by adults. But others raved; Ellen Malloy (who has no professional relationship with Sodikoff) said she was blown away by her meal, and Michael Nagrant said, “if you like food, like really like food (and this is an important distinction), there are few better places in Chicago.”

Yeah, I’m not buyin’ that either. I figured for a base opinion, I might as well start with the hamburger, which Nagrant called “thin gridlded, juicy pre-World War II-era burgers (rivaled locally only by maybe Schoops in Hammond or Edzo’s in Evanston),” and which Mike Sula called “among the most unique and well played in recent memory.” I grant you that the burger manages to achieve a degree of the stewed-in-its-own-juices flavor that marks many great diner burgers, but which is nearly always lacking in bar burgers. Okay, so that means basically they do as good a burger as Top Notch Beefburger in Beverly, and I don’t even mind that theirs is three times as much— $9 is high but not crazy for a burger, $5 is higher but still not unprecedented for some excellent Belgian-style frites (served, of course, in a Belgian-style cone— like all diners do).

Top-Notch Beefburger.

Except it’s not as good as a Top-Notch Beefburger, at least not for very long. Maybe with simple ketchup and mustard and pickles and grilled onions it would be. But the burger comes with— God, I don’t even know what all that stuff was. There was a kind of white horseradish-tasting sauce that was something like bechamel, and there was lots of gooey cheddar leaking from the middle, and my fries came with a little cup of mayo; if I had ordered something else I felt like it would have been sure to come with a side of spackle or tub & tile caulk. After it was all delivered the waitress asked me if I wanted ketchup and mustard, and besides my doubts about this burger’s ability to hold any more fluids, it was asked in a way that was almost designed to make me feel ashamed for asking, as she might have asked touchy married guy if he’d be needing some condoms this evening. So I ate this burger of white gooey fluids as much as I could, but the moment came when all this whiteness solidified into Elmer’s Glue and I could not, under any circumstances, put another bite of that hamburger in my mouth. In fact, at the moment I have trouble imagining that I can eat Au Cheval’s food ever again, even setting aside the atmosphere (which, with its air of ruthlessly Darwinian sexual selection, was the very antithesis of small town diner-welcoming to me). I read those other reviews and I think I might like someday to try duck heart in gravy-smothered hash (“by far my favorite dish” —Nagrant)… and then I think of that burger setting like cement, and I’ll never be hungry again.

* * *

Although they’re barely two blocks apart, no one would normally think of Vera and Au Cheval together. Their vibe is as different as could be. But Vera does have a concept, too— it’s a Spanish restaurant, albeit the least deliberately evocative of tourist Spain imaginable; the room is just contemporary American restaurant, the soundtrack is whatever fairly modern thing is on chef Mark Mendez’s iPod, no flamenco music or bullfighting poster has ever stepped across its threshold. The Spanish-ness is all in the culinary approach, which is simple and direct. Which is why, at moments at Au Cheval, I found myself thinking about a meal a week earlier at Vera— it gave my fevered brain respite from the moment-by-moment calculation of what my experience was supposed to be at Au Cheval, who I was supposed to be eating that food while the ostentatiously displayed tape player slowly revolved and the scene played out.

Likewise, I never had to think about the food, about what it was seeking to be, what archetype it was trying to evoke and update in what way at Vera. There were fresh anchovies. They were dressed with olive oil and some citrus. They were maybe the best thing I’ve eaten all year (this was the second time I’ve had them). Not because they evoke some cultural archetype of a Jungian memory of a Catalan fish dock shack, but because they were fresh anchovies, dressed with olive oil and some citrus, which fill your mouth with a bright white citrusy light. Not since the crispy en choy at TAC Quick with all its fish sauciness have I felt like a single dish opened new horizons every time I ate it.

I’ve eaten, I think, four times at Vera by now. A few things have been unexciting— I’m not wild about the way he roasts root vegetables in winter; one meal was kind of half-wasted when I ordered what turned out to be two large almost identical plates of beans with pork in a tomatoey sauce, which is the sort of mistake a server should guard against on your behalf. (One of them was the tripe stew with fava beans, much loved by others, but the lesser of two to me.) But as with Mado, the prices are low enough most of the time that you can write such things off and wait for the moments when fresh things from the market are dressed or prepared so perfectly that it inspires you to eat vegetables all over again, makes meat seem a mean substitute. (This in a place where jamon iberico is a star attraction, no less.) Ezra Pound said something like, why do poets say things are like things, why don’t we just say they are? (Google fails me on the exact quote.) Dishes at Vera evoke nothing, they are the thing.

Tags: au cheval, brendan sodikoff, hamburgers, mark mendez, tapas, vera

The foodie scene and LTHForum have changed so much with the years, with media exposure and so on that there’s something nostalgic about someone doing what used to be the base act of chowhoundism— exploring the oddball parts of the city and reporting back on things no one has heard of before. Yet when Rob Gardner/Vital Information did it recently in reference to a strip mall in Harwood Heights on the northwest edge of Chicago, the reaction was less joy at new finds than mockery and sheer incomprehension— he was dismissed by a moderator for not supplying an address (he deliberately did not do so, as a comment on the pleasures of the hunt), a poster who has praised the most godawful things (Mr. Sub) made a joke about the highlight of the area being a Denny’s, and the best thing in it was a poster saying he’d been to one of the places and never written it up. I keep promising a certain other blogger and moderator to stop sniping at dumb things on LTH at Twitter— in the old days that’s what we had the moderator’s secret board for— but really, one could overlook the dumb stuff if anyone had responded to it in the old spirit of adventure. But now what gets you LTH love is not discovering the obscure restaurant but letting everyone know you went to the latest universally-publicized one.

So of course I couldn’t wait to meet Rob there and check it out. Adventure lives! On Twitter.

Some of what Rob wrote about this strip mall, located just west of Harlem on Lawrence, made reference to his long-ago post about the best Chow-block in town (which I mentioned here). So is this the best Chow-mall in town? To my surprise, you could make an awfully good case for it, as it manages to include within a dozen storefronts Serbian, Italian, Middle-Eastern, Filipino, Chinese, Thai… and Italian Beef.

Our first stop was in the Serbian place, Dani’s (hence the Denny’s “joke”), where Rob had already ordered a Serbian hamburger as an amuse-bouche; there was plenty of time, as it would take 20 minutes to cook in the back of this bakery and grocery. When it came, we divided it into quarters, each the size of a Big Mac:

A patty of beef and pork, topped with onions and sour cream on a fresh-baked bun— simple but delicious in its simplicity. There was relatively little other savory food on display, but an impressive bakery selection— I’m not sure if they make them in house or not:

Next we went to the Filipino spot, Max’s. Besides lots of packaged goods, it had a full buffet of Filipino foods; we put together a plate of things to try. Now, I would almost say that I’ve never found Filipino food I liked. As Rob pointed out, his wife has had home cooked Filipino food from coworkers and it always blew restaurant food away. But what we tried, honest to God, is the first Filipino food in ten years that made me want to go back and try more things, not just say, okay, another one checked off the list. We had a dish of vegetables, BBQ pork and shrimp paste which was good, and then a tripe soup that was absolutely terrific:

Really, this soup wins the Yah’s Cuisine award for Thing I Loved I Would Never Have Expected To Even Like. We tried some other things like skewers and egg rolls that were fine, but it’s worth noting that the best things by far were the least gringo-friendly-looking. The spirit of adventure, I tell ya. You gotta have it and keep it stoked.

I also eyed the desserts, including one in a quite startling royal blue:

Our last stop that day was the place that had brought Rob to this mall, Pita al-Sharq. It’s a perfectly good place with friendly people (who tolerated our inexplicable and confused way of ordering a fragment of a lunch to go, and then unwrapping it at table to photograph) though I don’t think it’s the best middle eastern restaurant on earth or anything. The shawerma sandwich seemed drowned in mustardy tahini sauce, but the fresh-fried falafel— something hard to get in other restaurants, where they insist on frying them up ahead of time— was first-rate.

Walking along, stuffed and borderline-ill in the hundred-degree heat, we nevertheless had to stick our noses in at least one more spot, so we opened the door to the Italian cafe. As it happened Italy was playing Germany at soccer at that moment, so it was like opening the door to another dimension— outside, the silence of a windswept parking lot, inside, a raucous packed house cheering on Italy. (Closed, silence. Open, Italy! Closed, silence…) The thin Italian pizza looked pretty good, and they have gelato— have to go there with the kids sometime.

Is it the greatest strip mall in Chicago? Maybe, but really, who cares, it’s a great example of Chicago diversity packed into a tiny commercial space, thrilling to find so much in one tiny place, an accidental Epcot taking you around the world at lunch. Cheers, and if the spirit of adventure lives in you, go check it out and let us know how the pizza and the Thai and the bureks are.

* * *

It’s time for another quarterly roundup of the best things I’ve eaten lately:

• Pressed melon and buttermilk sauce, Premise
• Sunchoke soup, duck breast with lentils and ginger, goats milk cheese in filo pastry with red pepper/balsamic sauce, Goosefoot
• Cock-a-leekie pie from Pleasant House Bakery
• Chicken parmigiana sandwich at Publican Quality Meats
• Hot dog at Allium, roast pork leg with cheesy grits, veg-filled pork brat, Allium
• Porchetta sandwich from Becker Lane, Green City Market
• Q7 beef carpaccio with favas, wild boar pappardelle, sturgeon in red sauce, Moderno
• Phil’s Last Stand’s note-perfect imitation of an In-N-Out burger
• Poutine with English peas, grilled baby octopus, escarole and white beans, Red Door

• My own English pea/mint soup
• Bison tartare, fried pickles, The Gage
• Smoked sturgeon “caviar,” chilled English pea soup, pea tendrils, black forest ham, consomme, Tru
• Ramen, Yusho
• Shrimp taco, Del Seoul
• Fried chicken, Pecking Order
• Teriyaki omelet at Evanston Grill
• Queso fundido with Otter Creek cheddar, Frontera Grill
• Pork and steak tacos, Antique Taco
• “Classic” banh mi, Banh Mi & Co.
• Pastor taco, Zacataco’s (59th)
• Pastor taco, cabeza taco, Taqueria Mi Guadalupe
• English pea-mint bread, shortribs, semifreddo with spring fruit, Balena
• Barbecued mutton, Big Jones
• Square pizza, DiFara’s, Brooklyn
• Turnip dim sum, Joe’s Shanghai (NYC)
• Sturgeon, Barney Greengrass
• Romano beans in red sauce, braised escarole, Eataly
• Ramen, Totto Ramen

• Tripe soup, Max Seafood Grill (Harwood Heights)
• Oxtail stew at place in Rain Forest in St. Croix, and probably other things, but I have to look at the video to remember what all…

Lately I go to a lot of restaurants with professional representation— I don’t mean lawyers, I mean a PR firm. I don’t have a problem with that, he said as he nibbled on leftover mignardises from Tru last night, but I do like to get back in touch with the people on occasion. Here are two restaurants which are far from having much in the way of marketing support (though one has, at least, some professional logo design, and the other has a very nice painter). They are trying to get by on merely doing things well and hoping to attract foot traffic. Unfortunately, what they also have in common is a near total lack of media attention of any form (including LTHForum). So please notice them and give them a try.

Banh Mi & Co. suffers the problem a number of restaurants have— how do you make it if you’re doing the same thing as a really well-liked place very close by? Located at 3141 N. Broadway, it’s the other banh mi, or Vietnamese sandwich, spot in that area since Nhu Lan Saigon Subs, a branch of the widely-liked Lincoln Square spot opened on Belmont. Banh Mi & Co. doesn’t have all of the authentic funk of Nhu Lan, with a thinner menu of less exotic things, and maybe purists would quibble at the bread or something as not being quite the perfect banh mi bread, but what they do they do well and by hand, and they deserve a look.

It’s run by a couple— it looks like he’s Vietnamese and she’s maybe half, or she could be Mexican for all I know— who apparently (assuming they’re the owners) have other shops, although every time I’ve been in there they’ve been there, so I guess this is their flagship; they don’t act like people who have anywhere else to be. If you talk to her she’s quick to tell you how they make things themselves. I really liked the classic banh mi with the pork pate they make— not as funky as Nhu Lan’s, but this is a great lightish sandwich, satisfyingly meaty yet with the crunch of vegetables. I was a little less personally enamored of the “meatball” sub, which turns out to have something like a pork ragu in it, but if that sounds good to you, eating basically a bolognese sauce sandwich, go for it— it actually compared well to a wild boar sloppy joe that Longman & Eagle used to serve.

There are some other things around the edges of this bright, clean little shop to nosh on, including the occasional sweet fried ball of something or other, and you can get a special that comes with a bowl of very creditable wonton soup (at top). Something else that just might happen: the guy from across the street might spot you taking pictures in the window…

and take your picture doing it.

Banh Mi & Co.
3141 N. Broadway
773-754-5545

One of the parlor games that used to come up at LTHForum was, what’s the best food block in Chicago? Rob Gardner had some Polish block on Central he loved (and no one else did, mainly because everyone else was afraid of a Polish buffet he liked called Grota). Well, I’d give serious consideration to the 7000 block of north Clark in Rogers Park, which has Tamales lo Mejor de Guerrero, one of the city’s best tamale shops; A&T Grill, an old coffeeshop place with kind of elderly atmosphere but good ham on the bone; an entirely pretty good Mexican tacos and cheap steak place called La Choza… and this:

Like Birrieria Zaragoza on the south side, Taqueria Mi Guadalupe took over an old diner counter spot but mainly serves Mexican food, comida-style (so you get a bowl of very pleasant vegetable noodle soup at the start).

I got four tacos and have four recommendations. One, alas, is negative— the fish taco was an uninteresting slice of slippery white fish that didn’t taste like anything I wanted very many bites of. The other three are positive though— solid steak, which tasted like a little bit of marinade and was served in good-sized, juicy chunks, good cabeza (steamed head), and excellent crispy pastor. The kitchen is basically invisible from the room, so after I had taken the food photos I asked the couple running it if I could take their picture and chatted with them a little bit:

When I asked if they had a pastor cone, Armando shook his head sadly— the health inspectors wouldn’t let him have one. So he does what a million places do— fries pastor in a pan instead of cooking it on the cone, gyros-style— but unlike all the others, he carefully browns it to get as close as he can to the crispiness of real pastor. I think that’s pretty cool.

Of course, once I had taken so many pictures they wanted to know where they could see them. Facebook? Well, yes, I guess so. So not only did I enjoy their food and write about it… I’m now friends with them on Facebook. So they can come to this piece… and meet the couple who run Banh Mi & Co. … and the guy who tweeted and blogged the picture of me taking pictures of the Banh Mi. I think that’s pretty cool, too.

Taqueria Mi Guadalupe
7021 N. Clark
773-338-8644

Tags: banh mi & co., rogers park, taqueria mi guadalupe

Steak at Goosefoot, which is not X.

Three things I’ve written about recently at Grub Street, all having to do with a particular restaurant which I’ll just call X (it doesn’t matter which restaurant it actually is):

1) X’s new chef threw together his first menu in a hurry, but he’s really getting ready to stretch his wings in the next couple of weeks with his new menu.

2) X has hired a new pastry chef.

3) A review of X just came out, which wasn’t that wild about new chef’s food or desserts.

Well, good thing that’s exactly what they’re fixing, isn’t it? The problem is that, of course, this is the only review new chef will get from that publication for some years. It’s no one’s fault, but it’s a fact that long after things have changed considerably at X, you’ll still be reading about the problems of early 2012.

On the other side of things, on Thursday I published the story that erwin, an influential restaurant of the 90s, was closing. A few hours later, everybody had rushed out stories about grand, beloved old erwin. Lots of ink for an old favorite, we sure will miss ya, pal. But when was the last time any of them had written about erwin? Phil Vettel reviewed it twice— the year it opened (1994) and the next year, to give it an upgrade from two to three stars. Then… 17 more years without a word. Chicago magazine’s two-line blurb says it’s an update, but to judge by what it says, it could be from any one of those 18 years. I admit, I know exactly when I last went there— 1998, it was our last meal out before our first child was born. They could have been roasting whole humpback whales or spontaneously generating food out of dark matter in that Halsted storefront, for all anyone in the food media world apparently knew what was going on in there.

I don’t have an answer for this problem— there simply isn’t the revenue to afford all the reviewers a chance to eat all the meals to cover the scene in truly conclusive depth, even if that were humanly possible. Citizen media like Yelp or LTHForum are, obviously, one answer that offers datapoints on an ongoing basis, but with their own problems of quality and credibility. I just bring the issue up to say it’s been on my mind… and so when I talk about some things that went badly wrong at what I nevertheless think is one of the best restaurants of the year, recognize that I’m writing in the context of a single visit on a particular night and six months or a year from now, much of this will not be true. At least, I hope not by then.

* * *

Sundae no. 2.

Balena and Nellcôte seem like twins to many reviewers— big, chic Italian spots which opened within days of each other, represent the second projects of well-liked chefs (Chris Pandel and Jared Van Camp, respectively)… and were reviewed as having service and consistency issues early on (see here and here, for example). The result is, for all that I’ve covered them, I haven’t had a professional reason I had to eat at either one and as others have raced to them, I’ve been happy to give both of them some time and work out the issues.

But I did get toone of them, Balena, a couple of weeks ago with my family. (Some of the photos, incidentally, are by my younger son, who’s now started photographing food when we go out— where’d he get that?) And at its best Balena is fantastic. A rhubarb white pizza with pancetta my older son ordered had all the virtues of housecured meat and all the virtues of hyperseasonal farmers market produce. The bread service— one of those ones everyone grumbles about because it’s charged for, not free— was utterly worth it, beautifully-textured breads with interesting flavors like mint-pea, and an interesting variety of things to eat on them. The pastas had an admirably toothy texture. The spicy burnt-orange-flavored shortribs seem to have wandered in from a Chinese restaurant, not an Italian one, but were so good you didn’t quibble.

Unfortunately, one of our choices— an acclaimed dish with squid ink pasta— turned out to be botched in the kitchen, at least, I can’t believe it was meant to be so puckeringly lemony. After a few bites, I gave up on it. And there was worse to come when dessert came: sundaes are the main focus of the dessert menu, sundaes in tall, somewhat precariously balanced dishes. Mine seemed to be set down at an alarming angle for the height of the glassware perched on that plate, my son’s came in even for a landing even more acutely… and toppled over straight into his lap.

So yeah, I’d say there are some issues to be worked out. In telling this story, though, the real point is that while they bungled some things, they also did exactly what you should do about it. First off, points to the waiter for noticing that I just wasn’t eating my pasta dish and, upon learning the reason, offering instantly to remake it or take it off the bill. (Since I was eating my son’s pasta for him, I did the latter.) You can say any waiter should notice if you’re not eating your dish, but… well, you can say they should. As for the lap sundae… they hurried out with not just a replacement but even more sundaes and one of the few non-sundae desserts, a semifreddo with fresh spring fruit (very similar to the Key Ingredient dish Amanda Rockman made, in fact). Unfortunately, that presented its own issue in that, next to the sundaes, the semifreddo, delicate and tart, was like a ballerina dancing around hippos. I kind of think the whole sundae-focus thing was an idea that came up in some meeting and maybe should have been left there; Rockman is a ballerina among pastry chefs, and just doing ice cream has her with one leg tied down.

Despair.

Should you wait for Balena to get its act totally together? No; Balena is a terrific restaurant at its intersection of Italian flavors and farm-freshness, and you should eat at it now, it’d be a shame not to. But recognize that if they’re aiming for a level of superior service, then you’re helping them get their act together by alerting them to problems and giving them the chance to do something about them immediately, as they did for us. (Disclosure note: in case there was any doubt, we paid for this meal, and although I’ve met quite a number of the management and staff over the years, I don’t believe I was recognized as “anybody,” I don’t think anyone I know was involved that evening in our service, and I believe you would receive the same level of service under the same circumstances.)

* * *

Speaking of old and new menus, before going to Goosefoot I happened to read an LTH post that said the menu there hadn’t changed with the seasons since it opened. This instantly bummed me out a little, which is absurd, because it’s not like I had been there before— it was all going to be new to me. But I didn’t like hearing that it was static; we expect every restaurant to follow the farmers’ markets now, week by week. I wanted it to fit my expectations of what they should be like.

Spirits were buoyed somewhat by learning that we’d get to try a couple of extra courses from the new menu, set to launch shortly. And it is worth noting at the end that our entire party pretty much agreed that both of the new dishes we tried were in the top 3 or so of the night, even as possibly-not-finalized dishes, and Goosefoot may be an even better restaurant in a month. So again, we’re in a situation where the reviews that have come out may or may not represent what this restaurant really is even a short time from now.

Goosefoot’s story is the foodie fairy tale of the moment; chef Chris Nugent and his wife Nina opened this neighborhood fine dining spot amid a fair amount of skepticism about whether they could command a fairly high price point (a $90 tasting menu, though it’s BYO which makes it more manageable) in this location amid Greek coffeehouses and Bosnian soccer bars. In fact, they were pretty fully booked from the start, but what really packed the place was Chicago magazine calling them the best new restaurant of the year. And it’s easy to see why they picked it; in a year of mega-openings (like Balena), this cozy little labor of love, from two just plain nice people, is immediately endearing, fine dining’s answer to the similarly lovable Pleasant House.

One notion that came from a couple of the reviews— both Michael Nagrant and Mike Sula said some variation on this— was that Nugent’s precise and unabashedly fine-diningy food needed to loosen up, rock out a little. In this case I reacted against this expectation when I read it— why should we want a guy pursuing his life’s dream to be anything else other than who he is?— but I understood it a little more a few courses in.

I ate at Sprout recently under its new chef, and the food there was flamboyant, the usual sauce-schmear on the plate being made out of black squid ink, the better to show off the colors on the plate, like a blacklight poster. Goosefoot’s is pretty much dead opposite of that— at first glance all the dishes are arranged in very much the same way, a stripe of tiny, neatly arranged food bits. You could wish for a dish that smashes the visual paradigm and gets funky on the plate.

But you’d still be wishing for the wrong thing in the wrong place, I think. It takes a couple of courses to adjust to Nugent’s scale and precision, to shrink your own preconceptions like the ship in Fantastic Voyage until the tiny squares on his plates are the size of boulders in a lake of sauce, and the variations on his theme from dish to dish ring out as big as cathedral bells. The duck— one of the new dishes— may look like duck breast in the usual brown veal stock demiglace, but the beluga lentils it sits on electrify your mouth with bright pickled ginger flavor, and the nondescript off-white ball on the plate turns out to be an equally mouth-jumpstarting compressed apple. The square of goat cheese in phyllo dough (another new course) reads like an appetizer, not a fine dining course, but then you pick up a tiny bit of fresh basil as you sweep the red pepper sauce— and the tiniest thing on the plate makes the biggest expression of pure green spring of the night.

Each dish becomes a similarly-wrapped package, where the game is to discover what the present really is. Sometimes an artist needs to work within a set of boundaries he understands exactly. Hitchcock wouldn’t have been better if he’d dabbled in westerns and musicals, he would have squandered the intense focus that makes each of his thrillers so distinctive and precise. The same is true of wishing Nugent would break his concentration on his style of plate; your reward comes to the degree that you’re willing to focus like he does.