Usually program notes for stage productions all sound alike; your actors have a nice list of serious credits for Remains or the Goodman along with some minor scattered TV roles on Chicago-shot shows like ER or Early Edition. Then there’s the notes for Cascabel, where the past roles are more likely to have been Vegas, Cirque de Soleil, or some strange fringe carnival troupe… not to mention the guy who’s apparently never appeared in anything, other than his own TV series about cooking in Mexico.

Mike G’s Rule holds that if there’s a reason to eat somewhere besides the food (ie, a view, waitresses in skimpy outfits), the food’s most likely not that good. Cascabel, co-conceived by and starring, sort of, Rick Bayless, seems to invent a theater corollary to that— if there’s a really good chef’s food in a play, the play itself is probably not much. Cascabel has a wisp of a plot about a mysterious cook and a boarding house whose female owner has a secret sorrow, cobbled out of Like Water For Chocolate’s cookbook for mixing food and erotica, with a hearty dose of broad Latin stereotypes— but like in a play about a famous bunch of musicians, you can’t judge it by too stringent terms, it’s there just to bridge the numbers. Of which Cascabel has two kinds: Bayless’s food, and the cast’s acrobatics.

The acrobatics are great, nervy fun, insofar as most of them are performed over the heads of at least a few audience members and could, conceivably, kill them if they went wrong, a fact that even the well-muscled performers of both sexes can’t shed enough clothing and grind lasciviously enough to entirely make you forget. One performer changes clothes standing on a clothesline tightrope, leaving you genuinely wondering how much of his shakiness and near-missing is actually acting; a couple doing an erotic dance wind up not only using bananas in the obvious sexualized way, but shooting chunks of banana from one mouth to the other, and catching nearly every time. At their best, which happens pretty frequently, the acrobatic numbers are graceful or thrilling or just plain funny enough that they blast past erotic-review cheesiness and achieve something of the “magical realism” the story aims for.

Then there’s the other kind of “number” this show has— the food of Rick Bayless, who is on stage for almost the entire play, cooking for the cast (and given that he is pretty much nose to the grindstone, no phony flourishes the whole time, you believe he really is cooking). After a couple of appetizers and a complimentary margarita, the meal has three courses, eaten at the same time as the cast eats it and is transported to new realms (several feet in the air) after a few bites. The first and best by far was a tuna ceviche with a passionfruit flan, all the gloriously tart citrus flavor of Mexican seafood (I even loved the pre-show popcorn snack that sat with it and soaked up a little of its limey flavor). The second is the inevitable hunk of red meat, a compromise nod to those audience members for whom every meal must have a big piece of protein even if Mexicans generally don’t eat like that: a ball of filet in a mole with a tamale and some braised kale. (Given that my favorite Bayless recipe to make is his swiss chard tacos, I’d have been happy with less red meat and more greens.) Finally, a bright pink cake of Oaxacan chocolate with a blood orange mousse on top, which is good but not so obviously Mexican. I’m sure it’s the best meal I’ve ever eaten at a play, if not the most interesting meal I’ve ever eaten from Rick Bayless.

All in all, it’s a good meal and a broadly enjoyable show, though the fact that the play has to stop cold for both kinds of “numbers” only emphasizes the thinness of the underlying dramatic material; there might be thirty minutes of dialogue in this 2-1/2 hour show, and by the time they’ve hit the wine pretty good, a lot of the audience is barely aware when there’s a show going on on the stage at all, only paying attention when it’s going on above it. I might have wished for a real playwright to flesh out these archetypes during the dead time when audience and cast are eating. I also might be the only one who was thinking about that as well as of the carnal pleasures on display, on stage and on plate.

At the end, happily, the cooks in back come out to join the cast for a bow, and are warmly appreciated by the audience. Will there be more Cascabels? I’m not sure how many chefs can really act even to the degree that Bayless does, though it does have me suddenly contemplating shows they could do (Paul Kahan and Donnie Madia as Nathan and Sky in Guys and Dolls?) I doubt we’ll see many more shows of this type— much easier for the chef with performing ambitions to just be on TV— but as at least one other restaurant is proving right now, there is an audience for a dinner that tells a story and puts on a show as much as it satisfies hunger, as surely as there was 60 or 70 years ago when the floor show of dancing, acrobatics and girls was as essential to dining out as the food.

I’ve sometimes made reference to “Finedininglandia” or some other term representing the fact that wherever you are in the world, there’s a kind of international “country” of fine dining that transcends place. This is only natural because it’s a jet-connected world where chefs pop into each others’ restaurants around the globe, read the same books or articles about the same techniques, etc. So what one chef does in Oslo, soon becomes what chefs from San Diego to Sao Paolo are playing with. That doesn’t mean there’s no difference— obviously there is if there’s any sort of localism to the food— but nonetheless, as Walt sagely put it, it’s a small world.

I hadn’t really thought about the temporal rather than the spatial version of that that much, although it’s obviously the case— if everyone in 2012 is doing a certain thing, that means all restaurants are different even from themselves in 2008, say, when they were all doing a certain other thing. The reason I didn’t think about that, I’m sure, is that you can’t pop in to, say, Blackbird five or ten years ago and see how it’s different from Blackbird now. What’s the point of thinking about it if you can’t eat it? But I just wrote a review about a place (Urban Union) that I thought was kind of 2008 all over again, and if that sounds like a slam, I enjoyed revisiting 2008 again, having it to contrast with 2012. Some of how food has changed since then is more refined, but some of it is less focused than the simplicity of big porky flavor pops, which seemed to be all the rage then. So going back to 2008 was both instructive— and simply pleasurable.

I mentioned Blackbird because I went to a dinner there a couple of weeks, sponsored by Tasting Table (whose guest I was), that aimed to recreate the original Blackbird c. 1998-9 when it opened. Now that’s really going back in time— there are many restaurants still serving largely what they served then, I’m sure but Blackbird is one that has done so much to change the world it works in that its menu of 12 years ago is truly an act of historical reconstruction. Local produce is so much more common and available now, the idea of eating funky cuts is so much more common now (thanks in no small part to Blackbird famously popularizing pork belly and the like). But Blackbird has also changed, become more refined under Paul Kahan’s successive chefs de cuisine— more a citizen of Finedininglandia. (Listening to Paul Kahan talk that night about getting Blackbird open back in the day, you realize that apart from chic decor and location, it was kind of more like a hippie cafe in spirit than the typical fine dining of the day, with its emphasis on fairly straightforward ingredients rather than all the chic frou-frou of the time.)

Anyway, we had a three course meal of dishes from the early menu, including a sturgeon dish with spaetzle, housemade pickles and a buttermilk sauce, and a knackwurst and sauerkraut dish. Kind of amazing to think that a chic white restaurant then was serving hearty German food in the latter case, and in the former case, outright Jewish food. I knew Paul Kahan’s dad had had a fish smoking company, and deep down his connection to simple meaty ingredients came out of his growing up around the meatpacking district (he talks about that in my latest video) but never before had I had something at Blackbird that came so directly out of a Jewish fish merchant-and-deli milieu. And you know what? I loved it and I instantly wished that there was more of that on the menus of his empire. Why shouldn’t there be smoked fish at Publican Quality Meats next to chorizo and blood sausage? Paul Kahan’s the last guy who needs me or anybody to tell him what he should be cooking, but I’d love to have a Jewish Blackbird pop up some more, somewhere on the menus of his various places. In this case, seeing a little of Blackbird in 1999 opened the door to a whole world of Chicago food culture history beyond it.

* * *

I had another flash from the past at another meal. Sixteen is the restaurant in the Trump International Hotel & Tower. As you might expect, this is nosebleed-pricing fine dining land in every way, a very expensive menu, a grand dining room with a two-story sweeping wall behind it, a chef (Thomas Lents; I interviewed him here) who got his start at Everest but has worked all over the world for people like Joel Robuchon, and a pretty-much-admitted mission to land three Michelin stars, cost be damned. (I was a media guest. Needless to say.)

What’s interesting is that although it’s plainly modern food, it’s not modernist food— there’s only the slightest dabbling in foams, and no powders or other strange transformations happening here. Which makes me wonder— is there room in Michelin’s universe, and in that of diners for whom fine dining has come to mean Alinea’s and Next’s bag of magic tricks, for straightforward food at the highest level? Because this was, unquestionably, at the highest level, refined to a delicacy so exquisite that the only other place I’ve experienced anything like it lately was, indeed, during my sampling of the Next El Bulli menu. The difference is, when Next gave me a carrot dish that downright sang with the intensity of the purest carrot flavor, it was a space-age El Bulli concoction, disembodied carrot foam in a glass bubble. Where at Sixteen, Lents simply made carrot soup, physically as anyone might make carrot soup for a piece of Dover sole to sit in. (The sole was, incidentally, the one off thing of the night— tougher than it surely ought to have been, especially resting amid carrot evanescence.)

I have a menu and could list specific dishes but you know, they’re all composed plates consisting of several different tastes; it wouldn’t tell you that much to rattle them off. What I can say is that, at least eight times out of ten, they tasted intensely, almost fluorescently of themselves, the most radishy or gingery or black coddy a thing ever tasted. (The plates were also often fluorescently colorful as well, like the aftermath of an Easter Egg accident.) What it suggested to me is what Charlie Trotter’s must have been like 25 years ago. Not, I think, that Lents’ food is much like Trotter’s (though it might well be more like it than it’s like Alinea’s) but people who ate at Trotter’s back then felt that they tasted things, truly tasted them for the first time back then when he made them— surely as pivotal a moment in the making of our modern food scene as their first taste of pork belly at Blackbird. Without being like Trotter’s actual food necessarily, Lents’ food at its best was like tasting these things for the first time (even the one I’d just tasted for the other first time at Next). Lents is not exactly a locavore, though he is definitely buying things at peak season somewhere on the globe; for instance one vegetable, I forget which, was coming from Florida, from a farm next to where his parents live.

So if this is the Trotter of 2012, will that draw the crowds in 2012 without Alinea/Next conceptual pyrotechnics? I guess the Donald can gamble on that; so far Lents hasn’t gotten a lot of attention for what he’s doing, but maybe they’re just playing the long game and don’t feel the need to battle Nellcote and Balena to be restaurant of the moment. If you have the money— a big if— and are okay with the atmosphere of the vast hotel dining room (great view, leaves you feeling a little like the small fish in the very big tank), Lents is making gorgeous, exquisitely well-crafted food that deserves to be tried, even if only to know what a major hotel company’s best guess at what Michelin and its international audience of well-heeled diners will love looks and tastes like.

Tags: blackbird, sixteen

WE PULL UP ON A SIDE STREET near the Merchandise Mart. There’s a small group of people already waiting, each with a smart phone in one hand, a paper or plastic bag in the other. In the bag might be tamales from the Tamalli Spaceship, mac and cheese from The Southern, or sausage from the Haute Sausage truck. Jared Forratt, a lanky twentysomething with a scraggly beard and tattooed “sleeves” running up both arms, pulls the emergency brake, makes his way to the back of the white truck and opens the window. The first person in the crowd walks up, clutching three ones. “Uni shooter,” he says.

Forratt goes to work, setting out a shot glass, then splashing the inside of the glass with aquavit. Deftly he cuts a sea urchin out of its spiny shell and plops it into the glass; then he grates fresh horseradish onto it and places a single slice of candied kumquat on top. He sets it on the ledge of the window and plucks the three dollars from the man’s hand. The customer takes the shot glass, knocks it back in a single motion, and sets the shot glass back down. “That was beautiful, man,” he says. Forratt just gives him the slightest nod, and then points to the next customer.

Forratt is the proprietor of Bouche-Bag, the world’s first amuse-bouche truck. From his earliest days cooking, he was intrigued— maybe obsessed— by that tiny first bite of the meal offered gratis as a welcoming gesture in fine dining restaurants. “Everyone deserves to have their meal start out with something great,” Forratt says. “An amuse-bouche is like a ticket to adventure.” He soon became famous in Chicago restaurant circles as the master of the form— sometimes beyond practicality. “I’ve got three guys waiting to get at the fryer, and Jared’s taken it over, battering and frying individual microgreens that he’s holding in the oil in his tweezers,” Rick Tramonto recalls of Forratt’s tenure at Tru. “He’s an artist, no question about it, but at 7:00 on Friday night I gotta use my kitchen to make things people actually pay for.”

After a tempestuous history with many of the city’s top restaurants— Trio, L2O, Graham Elliot, The Black Sheep— and repeated struggles with chefs who, he felt, compromised his vision for “an amuse-bouche that, as Aldous Huxley said, opened the doors of perception,” Forratt was talking with Phillip Foss, then operator of the Meatyballs Mobile. Foss, jokingly, pointed out that the city code which prevented food trucks from preparing food on board defined prepared food as multiple ingredients put together in a dish to be eaten in multiple bites. Therefore an amuse-bouche, which is designed to be eaten in a single bite, was technically not food for the purposes of the regulations. Excited by the prospect of doing amuse-bouches exactly as he wanted to, without the distraction of other chefs or a restaurant, Forratt quickly found a backer from among the fans who had followed his work over the years from one four-star place to the next, and at last he had his own rolling establishment where he could offer amuse-bouches that met his precise vision, directly to diners.

IT’S 12:34, AND WE’RE A FEW minutes late for a rendezvous at the Aon building. The line is about 15 deep, all clutching bags— Pret-a-Manger, Au Bon Pain, Taco Bell. I ask Forratt if it bothers him that his beautifully-crafted amuse-bouches are often followed by fast food. “No, man. An amuse-bouche is a promise; it’s not my problem if it’s a promise that the rest of your meal can’t keep.” Today on the menu he’s got three choices, each priced at $3: the uni shooter, a stamp-sized square of Arctic char on a cauliflower semifreddo with pickled Japanese turnip, candied blood-orange peel and radish sprouts, and a spelt cracker with ahi aioli, hazelnut dauphinoise soil and mung-lychee sorbetto.

The Arctic char amuse.

Forratt works amazingly fast, “plating” each onto a plastic spoon or other utensil with tweezers in less than a minute. Yet not a piece looks out of place, and the buyer receiving each handcrafted jewel holds it carefully, almost reverently, before downing it and then getting on with his chicken salad on Asiago roll or Doritos Locos taco. I ask one customer, graphic designer Wade Murdock, why he’s willing to pay $3 for a single bite of food. “I thought it was crazy, too, but as soon as I had one bite— which is all there was, one bite— of his pork belly niçoise with wasabi poutine gelee and banh mi smoke, I was hooked,” Murdock says. “It’s worth $3 for something that really sets up your slice of Sbarro’s so perfectly.”

Despite the high price, Forratt admits that he’s barely breaking even on the amuse-bouches; he’s thinking of adding a line of palate cleansers to his menu, so that customers might come back during the same lunch for a single spoonful of Thai lemongrass gelato, say. But at the same time, he curses himself out for even thinking of compromising his vision of the perfect amuse-bouche. “The most exquisite moment is the one right before you take that first bite, when all the possibilities and wonder of the meal are before you,” he says. “If I could, I’d sell you that moment, and then drive away as fast as I can before you ruin it by actually eating.”

Been to a ton of places lately, haven’t written about them, working backwards through my photos, here’s shortish reviews of a number of them.

Storefront Company— Chic, black and white place on a seemingly unlikely strip near the recent-college-grad drinking epicenter of North and Damen. My first thought was “Blackbird for stroller moms,” but actually given the neighborhood, by the end I was thinking more like Acadia— not that there’s any resemblance between Acadia’s post-industrial-wasteland gentrifying neighborhood and busy-trashy Wicker Park, but there’s a similar mission of, who says you have to go downtown for luxe fancy food and pay crazy prices for it?

Albacore with clam mousse.

Chef Bryan Moscatello, who was a Food & Wine Best New Chef in Denver and then spent a long time in D.C., makes lush food which looks to impress, but sometimes needed more of a flavor pop to compete with Chicago places, I think— it felt a bit like fancy food from somewhere else. An albacore tartare was gorgeous but the clam mousse on it didn’t have any real taste of the sea to it, damping it down; I did like the boldness of the garlic chips on it, though. A pork cheek hash with gooey six-hour sous-vide egg was the sort of thing where fancy touches don’t bring as much to it as just normal cooking— a diner cook frying the pork and the egg to a little browned crispness would have gotten more flavor out of both. And as far as I’m concerned, six-hour eggs are one of those things, like most malto-dextrin powders, that fall into the “just because you can doesn’t mean you should” camp. (Again, though, there was some daring in the crispy accompaniment on top, which were announced, simply, as what they were: fried chitlins.)

Pork cheek hash with six-hour egg.

But rabbit, treated sort of like a galantine and topped with several generous slices of black truffle, showed that they do know how to sharpen a dish to a flavor point, and though I had resisted the waiter’s fairly insistent pushing of the cheese program, when they sent me out an epoisses anyway (and a glass of white wine to go with it), it was a gorgeous, unabashedly smelly one that blended beautifully with the wine they chose. And the dessert was simply one of the best I’ve had in recent memory, a sweet-savory parsnip cake with cream cheese ice cream, a savory thyme-golden raising sauce, and little dabs of a tart “carrot caramel,” more harmoniously balanced between sweet and savory than you would ever think it could be.

This is an ambitious restaurant way above its neighborhood-place footprint and location— they have their own baking program making breads and mignardises and such, which is more like what a big hotel restaurant would do than a 60-seater in the middle of a block— and even if some of it seemed flash over substance (in a way that you can believe went over in D.C.), it’s at reasonable enough prices that you can afford to experiment to find some undeniable gems. (Disclosure: media dinner, fully comped.)

Parsnip cake.

Urban Union— Do you remember 2008? The heyday of the porky big flavors movement, places like Vie and Mado and Avec making their own salty porcine wonderfulness and putting it in everything, from main courses to vegetables? It’s not that that has exactly gone away, of course, but something about Urban Union, a new place on Taylor Street run by Michael Schrader (formerly of Epic, which I never went to), seemed to bring back those days in a way that wasn’t subtle— there was nothing subtle about the pool of balsamic that my brussels sprouts with pancetta left behind— but was easy to enjoy, and made Urban Union an instant feels-like-it’s-been-there-forever place. (The logo actually says “Est. 1997,” but that’s when Schrader and partner Jason Chan met.)

The downside to this cheerful unsubtlety is that there’s a bit of an unrefined, almost careless feel to some of the dishes— a mussels dish promised something new with Spanish chorizo and so on in it, when it was well-made but pretty standard, and the most interesting dish at first bite, a tagliatelle with pancetta (pancetta’s everywhere), sage and parmesan, was way too salty to eat much of; I suspect it was adjusted for salt before the salty parmesan was added as well. Apparently it takes more a little more effort than this to get effortlessness just right. (Disclosure: none.)

Yusho— I am, apparently, the only person on the entire Chicago food media scene who wasn’t instantly smitten by Yusho, Matthias Merges’ Japanese bar-izakaya-whatever. I went in (on Super Bowl Sunday) prepared to love it, prepared to at last find Chicago’s answer to Yakitori Totto, but it didn’t happen. Oh, there’s no doubt that things are well-made, as you’d expect from a Trotter vet; we sat at the omakase seats overlooking the cooks as three young women spent our entire meal smoothing out chicken skin onto plastic wrap, an unmistakable sign of care (and how boring line cook jobs could be). I don’t doubt the skill and devotion, but things just didn’t taste that great, it was the opposite of Yakitori Totto where the soap in the washroom would have made my ten best list. I don’t remember all that much now, but take the fried chicken, big chicken fingers (that’s whose skin we were watching being flattened) fried like fried chicken and then dashed with some green nori-type powder. Some people love it; to me it was like dipping my chicken fingers in the goldfish’s food.

Nothing was that great until we got to dessert— and suddenly the place blossomed for me. I loved a dessert built around a custard made from kalamansi, a tart Asian citrus; and a tongue-pricking Sichuan peppercorn frozen custard. With so much acclaim from every corner I’ll try Yusho again— but I’m willing to do that because I know if nothing else, there will be a reward at the end. (Disclosure: none.)

Mi quang noodles.

Nha Hang— Once in a while LTHForum takes time off from criticizing the reservation process at Next to work the way it was designed to work, and this one end-to-the-other exploration of Vietnamese food on Argyle street was one of the best examples in recent memory. The clear winner and new discovery to come of the effort was this family-run spot near the eastern end of the strip, and trying some of the LTH-scouted things, it’s quite good— I especially liked rare (it wasn’t, but never mind) beef salad, which had a Thai food-like limey-juiciness, woven rice wraps with terrific grilled beef and shrimp, and bun mam, a rich broth soup. (The one LTH recommendation I tried and was just okay on was the Mi quang noodles; curry-flavored noodles with lots of peanut, it just tasted like middling pad thai.)

The only caveat I’d add to the chorus of LTH praise is that while I liked the cleanness of the broths and flavors, which was almost Japanese in its purity, I also kind of like some funk in my Asian soup, or a lot of funk in it, and this isn’t the place for that so far as I could see. So it doesn’t replace, say, the bun bo hue at Cafe Hoang (thanks Dan Schleifer for the tip), which is almost satanically, Ike Turner-funky by comparison. LTH has a tendency to settle on one place as the place for a cuisine, to the detriment of seeking out others; Tank Noodle was it for Vietnamese for years, and I think the proper response to discovering Nha Hang is not to topple Tank and crown Nha Hang in its place, but to take the lesson, enjoy Nha Hang as presenting one side of the cuisine very well— and keep hunting.

Bun mam.

Jimmy’s Pizza Cafe & Beignets— Clean flavors were also the hallmark of another place nominated for an LTHForum Great Neighborhood Restaurants award this season, a New York-style pizza cafe on north Lincoln (which for some reason has New Orleans-style beignets, covered in literally a quarter inch shelf of powdered sugar). It’s a nice bready New York-style crust, but seemed a little bland to me while I was eating it. I have to say, though, it’s stuck with me since then; in a town of gutbomb pizzas that stomp a place into your stomach, this one steps as lightly as a ballerina, and that’s worth rewarding. We had both a freshly made pizza and a reheated slice of white (pesto and ricotta) pizza, and both were worthy.

La Lagartija— West or near south side taqueria-bar, you wouldn’t say upscale but a notch up from taqueria in ambience, owned by the Bombon Bakery couple. The question with any place selling $3 tacos is, are you getting a better taco in some way for that money over the found-everywhere $2 Chicago taco, or is more money actually buying you a less interesting, gringo-safe taco? La Lagartija just manages to come in on the better side, in part because it uses good toothy Chicago tortillas like a $2 taco would. Steak and pastor tacos were all right, you can get better for $2, but you will probably eat a lot of worse ones trying to find them. The best thing, as LTHers say and they are correct, is the shrimp taco, a bit too much goo on top for my taste, but good quality shrimp lifted this above the average.

La Chapparita #1— One of the things that was cool about LTHForum back in the day was how different people would discover similar things by different methods. I went looking for Supermercado Taquerias a couple of years ago by driving down major streets looking for awnings that suggested tacos might be made inside— but I never would have found this taqueria in a grocery/candy store, on thoroughly residential 25th street, that way; instead another old-timer found it by chatting up strangers and asking for their suggestion of their favorite taco spot. But however you found it, it’s a find— a vaguely spooky Day of the Dead themed taqueria turning out beautifully well-made tacos of all kinds. I stuck to things you don’t find elsewhere (longaniza, or sausage, lengua or tongue which is served as a whole slice, not chopped, and tripas, which is actually not tripe but chitlins— you want to order them crispy) and they were all exemplary, full of flavor and executed to a T. A place like this is why good $3 tacos are worth paying for, but the great $2 tacos are a gift from the angels to us mortals.

Urban India— Urban or Union is in half of new restaurant names these days, so it’s not that surprising that a new place on Devon with what looks like a little younger feel (like Uru-Swati, kind of coffeehouse-ish) would be called Urban India. The most promising thing to me was the fact that it smelled like woodsmoke— like there’s actual wood in their tandoor. There may be, but alas, it didn’t come through nearly as strongly as I would have liked on the tandoori chicken. That disappointment aside, I thought everything was pretty well made and of good quality… but it was also quite pricey for Devon ($12.95 for tandoori chicken is on the high side, but $11.95 for sag paneer, which is probably $5-8 elsewhere on the strip, is wacky; a little artfulness with the ginger hardly justifies the difference).

That’s-a-Burger— Burgers in the midwest are nearly always freshly-ground, and even an okay one in a place like Indiana or Oklahoma or Kansas is usually pretty damn good as a result. The exception to that was Chicago, where they used to nearly all be the frozen hockey-puck burger kind. The exception to that was always a small number of fresh patty places on the south east side of Chicago, both white (Top-Notch Beefburger) and black-run (That’s-a-Burger), which maybe because of proximity to Indiana, insist on fresh-ground meat against the tide of the hockey puck. With all our artisanal burger places (Edzo’s, Epic Burger, The Butcher & Burger, whatever) the need to go run and eat a burger on 71st street from a place where there’s no seating, you order through bulletproof glass, it takes an absurdly long time (about half an hour) to get your burger and the (black) owner plays rightwing talk radio really loud and will kick your ass if he catches you taking a photo, is maybe not that apparent. It’d be so much easier to just go eat a yuppie burger on Armitage, say. But trust me, you need to do this once, and then you need to go right back to your car and eat it immediately; it makes a big difference. What was I just saying about clean flavors versus Ike Turner funk? Yeah, here too. This is a burger that tastes like stockyards. Like a ten-hour shift. Like blood and onions in the air. Like Chicago, not some candy-ass yuppie burger. That’s-a-Burger, muthaf–….

Barbecued shoat.

Big Jones— This was a special dinner, not off the regular menu, but given its fair chance of making my ten-best this year, I should mention it now. The meal was the Kentucky tavern bourbon dinner, c. 1840s. I like Big Jones, I don’t necessarily think it’s great great, but it makes likable food that’s usually a pretty good example of Southern classics, and if you want fried chicken or shrimp and grits in a more upscale atmosphere than Feed or Wishbone and with a cocktail, it’s a happy, easygoing place to be. It’s also a place that seems to make things you expect to love but don’t, quite, more often than it should by now.

But chef Paul Fehribach has been digging diligently into old cookbooks for themed dinners, and the chance to make oddball, deeply uncommercial things like calves’ foot jelly seems to take Big Jones to a new level, where it doesn’t have to hit anyone’s preconceptions of “restaurant food” but can just be its own rustic, strange self. Some of these are incredibly simple (hominy, barbecued shoat or young pig), some of them reintroduce unfamiliar flavors (the surprisingly sweet calves’ foot jelly, pearl onion and mutton cream soup, a rosewater dessert). At this dinner, a few were flat-out great dishes (the mutton soup in particular) and all of it was a trip to an unfamiliar world. During the meal Fehribach was playing the Harry Smith Anthology of folk music, which collected the backwoods music of, in Smith’s words, “the old, weird America.” This was the food of the same place, and I can’t wait to go back. (Disclosure: none.)

Bourbon and calves’ jelly.

Keefer’s— I am not a steakhouse guy. I admit that freely. I do not find just a big hunk of meat accompanied by a couple of WASP vegetables (a baked potato or broccoli) to be interesting enough for a fancy meal. I went to one a while back courtesy of its PR people, and they kind of hinted at hoping I would post something, and I just thought… I have nothing to say beyond “very nice steak.” So it’s something that I actually had a couple of things at Keefer’s that motivate me to write. As my dining companion Kennyz noted, the Nantucket bay scallops were served in butter that was browned to the point of being mahagony— kudos to chef John Hogan, who many years ago had Savarin, for being willing to brown it that dark, but they were great. And we shared a veal chop, which I’ve thought of fondly many times since for the pure simple flavor of roasted meat and juicy saltiness. Other things reminded me why I’m just not into that food (the 1940s believed that a fillet of fish was improved by being stuffed with bread crumbs and crabmeat, I pretty much believe the exact opposite) but if someone were to ask me for a steakhouse recommendation, after expressing my doubts about the wisdom of asking me, I would steer them toward Hogan’s slightly more varied menu and mastery of classic American chophouse technique happily. (Disclosure: media dinner, fully comped.)

Tags: big jones, Jimmy's Pizza, Keefer's, La Chapparita #1, La Lagartija, Nha Hang, Storefront Company, That's-a-Burger, Urban India, Urban Union, Yusho

The first time I subbed for Nick Kindelsperger on Grub Street he was going through the things I needed to do the job without screwing it up, and one thing he said was “There are certain chefs who we pretty much cover anything they do.” The list was obvious enough, of chefs who were good at being endlessly interesting— Achatz, Bayless, Bowles, Izard, a couple others… and Phillip Foss.

My first thought was, one of these things is not like the others… everyone else had quite a track record by that point, but Foss was still relatively new on the scene (this was two years ago), and his food at Lockwood, though generally liked, had not catapulted him into the stratosphere of food gods per se. I had eaten at Lockwood (and then had a tangle with him online about a sloppy review written after a state of exhaustion/inebriation, quickly patched up), and it was a nice solid meal but still, you know, colored within hotel lines a bit. I wasn’t convinced he was a great chef (by any somewhat stringent definition of the term) but a good chef who was news because… he was good at making news. Asian carp. Fights with the Hilton over union slackers. Lascivious blog posts. I forget it all now, but he was brilliant at doing something fun— daring, a little naughty, delivered with a wink— that made him easy to like and fun to talk about, and made the whole scene a little more enjoyable.

So I did Grub Street for a week, wrote a small item one day about a guest stint he was doing on the Gaztro-Wagon, pre-wrote the last of my posts for Friday afternoon and scheduled them in the system, packed the car for this trip, and started driving to the east coast.

And right as we were getting on the highway, Phillip Foss was being fired by the Hilton for making a pot joke on Twitter. He had made the biggest news of my week at Grub Street, and I missed it.

If you’re reading this you surely know what has followed— first, veering downscale as the food truck pioneer of Meatyballs Mobile, then veering back very high end with EL Ideas, which was like a storefront theater version of Alinea, performed in the small sort of office space at the front of his Meatyballs prep kitchen down on an industrial nowhere stretch of the south side. I wished him well, I was as happy to feed him a little publicity as he was to get some by being the guinea pig for the test video for Key Ingredient (we shot his first, then worked it into the sequence when his friend John Des Rosiers said he’d have picked him anyway). But I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to spend my own big bucks, Blackbird or Schwa-level if not Alinea-level bucks, for Phillip Foss’s Hey Kids, Let’s Put On A Tasting Menu— versus other places I might spend it on. Talking with others, I gathered that this was not an uncommon opinion (and later, talking with him, 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). Anyway, he finally wanted to treat me (disclosure) when things got a little slower in February (and Andrew Brochu, who’d been cooking with him for some months, was leaving for Graham Elliot), so I went with a group of friends on a recent Friday night.

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.

And the food, if nothing jumps out for sheer exoticism and palate-jarring novelty, is smoothly excellent, always interesting, cultivated and maybe most of all, mature. The first course, above, is called shima ajii, consisting of tuna and grated smoked bonito over tapioca— a combination that sounds like it could be hideous, frankly, like smoked chubs in cottage cheese. But it’s not— it’s creamy and smokily subtle and complex. A deconstructed caesar— who hasn’t deconstructed a caesar by now? Yet instead of being a puzzle of disconnected blocks, it was more like caesar reconstruction, putting its flavors back together out of different textures, one or two at a time.

Not everything worked— buttery snails seemed beached on a dry plate of maltodextrin powder and raw cauliflower— but especially in the second half, things went from one to the next confidently and satisfyingly. Foie gras was sharpened to a point by a dash of mustard and citrusy marmalade, buddha’s hand. Fried sweetbreads and a spiral of apple added crunch and a little earthiness to lobster. Maybe the most interesting (and one that’s gotten him some attention) was called Anise Hyssop (shown above)— the one all-vegetable dish, with a root beer sauce on the plate (another thing far better than it sounds). With everything else dominated by the nature of its protein, this one was free to go somewhere unexpected, and I’d love to see him do more freeform vegetable dishes like it. Dinner came to a conclusion, finally, with a grownup take on a s’more, simple and surprisingly dignified.

The dishes flowed so harmoniously from one to the next that you might think that one mind was behind them all, but in fact each of the three chefs in the kitchen— Foss, Kevin McMullen (who also works on Crux dinners with Brandon Baltzley) and Michael DiStefano— came out and introduced the dishes they’d conceived, and between courses we occasionally wandered into the kitchen to take pictures or chat the chefs up. For all that they’re working with far fewer people than a 15-course meal normally takes, there was almost no stress in the kitchen, which was fairly remarkable, and no point where the schedule of dishes fell apart, either, which is more remarkable still.

I try a lot of upscale restaurants where I think “that was nice, done that now,” and a smaller number where I think “I want to get back and try more things” (Vera and Telegraph are the two I think of like that), but the rarest are the ones where I think I want to go back and take someone to a place, just to enjoy their enjoyment of it. There’s no place with the feel of EL Ideas, in which genially inventive food joins with a warmly welcoming and relaxed atmosphere carved out of what ought to be an impersonal, crammed-in space, and it’s a unique Chicago thing to which I would take any out of town visitor— or any critic afraid of such improvisatory dining and the perils of the near south side.

Next’s El Bulli menu is not Grant Achatz’s and Dave Beran’s take on the techniques pioneered by Ferran Adria’s restaurant, now passed into legend. There’s a restaurant that has offered that for years— called Alinea; it presented Achatz’s take on Adria, and Achatz’s take on Keller’s take on Adria, and in the process, it became simply Achatz’s, period. Next’s El Bulli menu is more like the test at the end of Michael Ruhlman’s The Soul of a Chef— we’ve seen how you cook your food, now show us how perfectly you can reproduce the original food it came from. Childhood’s food was the most like El Bulli’s food as food, but the El Bulli menu is most like the historical recreation of the Paris 1906 menu in spirit.

Or so it seems to me. Not that I had Paris 1906; not that I even had all of El Bulli. Roger Kamholz and I went to photograph opening night for Grub Street (he took the good pics, mine could only capture the blur of activity in this light… which is kind of cool in its own right, I think). And in the process, they wound up feeding us half the menu (nearly all the starters and all the desserts, not so much from the middle), while we stood— as out of the way as we could make ourselves, between the pastry station and the Mexican dishwashers— in the kitchen. Nothing, perhaps, speaks to how freely Grant Achatz deconstructs everything about dining as the fact that they deconstructed their own opening night for our benefit this way— an act of incredible generosity and graciousness given the insane demand for their product, with a surprise center of impishness, I think.

So this is a half review of Next El Bulli. But I had enough of it, at least, to overturn every expectation I walked in with. At an event a few weeks back, I was talking to Blackbird’s David Posey about the El Bulli documentary, which I saw on my flight back from Istanbul, and it turned out we had had the same reaction to the same scene— a moment late in the film where Adria and some of his chefs are talking to a fishmonger and buying some fish. And we both wanted to scream at the screen— “Just fry it! Don’t turn into a ball or a gel, it’s beautiful fish, just fry it!” Clearly I expected authentic El Bulli food to be the ultimate space food, the ultimate reduction of beautiful natural ingredients into the most extreme and unnatural globs and foams, with not even a hint left of the original physical integrity of the ingredient.

And at least one dish was like that to a T— the carrot foam (carrot air with coconut milk, El Bulli number 878 from 2003). Yet it wasn’t the desecration I feared, almost a consecration instead. It was carrot, freed of its physical form and made sheer carrot essence. The soul of a carrot, the spiritu sancto of a carrot, free at last to taste more like carrot than any carrot you’ve ever had.

I said to Beran (as he plied me with food) that I was surprised how Spanish the meal was. For all that Adria had created technological marvels which had gone straight to that stateless international realm of global fine dining, for all that it was an American reproduction with American ingredients of a Spanish original (Maytag blue instead of gorgonzola for the gorgonzola balloon produced by liquid nitrogen, no. 1570/2009), it also took me back to Spain as firmly as the most authentic dishes at, say, Vera or Mercat a la Planxa do. I was expecting everything to be transmuted beyond nationality, but in fact many of the tastes were quite simple and spoke plainly of their origin— the briny roe at the center of a deep-fried ball (hot/cold trout roe tempura, no. 644/2000), the mellow greenness of the spherical olives (no. 1095/2008), the iberico sandwich in which pungent jamon wrapped around puffed bread (no, 859/2003). They spoke of their place (Catalunya 2000) in a way that I didn’t expect.

But they were also, I think, Spanish in another way. I am no great expert on the culture of Spain, but I’ve seen enough Goya paintings and Buñuel films and Gaudi buildings and whatnot to have a certain sense of Spain as distinct from France or Italy, say. To see it as a place where the medieval outlook toward the physical world— morbid and overheated— lasted far longer than elsewhere in Europe, so that when modernist movements arrived, they took off from a unique place of fascination with the grotesque. The Dutch Mondrian, reacting to the industrial world, painted neat little subway maps; the Spaniard Dali painted watches that decomposed like a carcass in the desert.

Okay, I’ve lost you when it comes to how that translates to dinner, I know. This paragraph won’t be quoted in anybody’s ad (“‘Morbid and overheated’— Michael Gebert, Skyfullofbacon.com”). But I think there’s an analogous Spanish sensibility at work here in working so hard to manipulate physical form, sometimes to escape mortal reality and touch the divine (that evanescent, immaculately conceived carrot foam) and other times to revel in the brusque contrasts of earthy, briny flavors like the coca of avocado pear, anchovies and green onion (no. 105/1991), a trumpet blast of in-your-face peasant worldliness. Buñuel, who found no joke more potent than to interrupt the most civilized of dinner parties with the shocking intrusion of mortality, would have been right at home this night.

Which, of course, couldn’t be further from Next Childhood, with its narrow emotional range tied to the palates and understanding of children, especially children of an idealized Ward-and-June midwest. Ironically, that night I went to Vera afterwards for a glass of Spanish sherry, needing to balance it with a taste from the adult world. By comparison Next El Bulli works a full range of emotional and sensations from the sacred to the profane, but I think it was the simplest and most transcendent ones that really captivated me, made me feel I had been somewhere that, for all El Bulli is imitated around the world, I had never been before. Phil Vettel dismissed the opening dish, the nitro caipirinha (no. 967/2004), as merely a nod to Adria’s pioneering work with liquid nitrogen, but a look at the date reveals there must be more to the dish than that; by 2004 liquid nitrogen was all over the world, pioneering it was long past. And in fact this starter (or is it an aperitif in solid form?) fairly screams that it’s no mere flash-frozen dessert, when the caiprinha ice is stirred together with fresh tarragon, as if to critique the use of liquid nitrogen with a reminder that fresh flavors will always trump frozen textures.

And then there’s the thing that was perhaps my favorite taste of the whole night— so simple it hardly even seems a dish at all, which perhaps accounts for why I have yet to see a single mention of it elsewhere. Yet for me it combined many the virtues of the menu as I experienced it— simplicity, daring, wit. It’s called mint pond (no. 1647/2009) and it is literally nothing more than a thin crust of ice sprinkled with peppermint and some other spice flavor I have since forgotten. You crack the ice (this could as well have been a Childhood dish) and suck the chips. Ice and spice, hardly food, yet it was entrancing and laugh-out-loud funny— not least knowing what the meal cost. Someone must be mad that they paid 1/28th of $365 for ice, but I went home smiling about the beauty and impertinence of this dish as much as I went home smiling about the crazy circumstances under which I’d eaten it, standing up in the kitchen of the hottest ticket in town.

Here’s my list of ten best things I tasted this year, most of which you can still go out and have, though considerable airfare may be involved. As I did last year, I disqualified all the Key Ingredient dishes because they’re just one-offs made under unusual circumstances; I also decided not to count the one-night-only “Modern Midwestern Cuisine” dinner planned by Steve Plotnicki and Bruce Sherman at North Pond, although it was good enough to qualify and certainly has me interested in visiting North Pond again after some years since my last visit,not to mention some of the other restaurants involved such as Niche (St. Louis) and June (Peoria). (You can read more about it at Grub Street Chicago.) Michael Nagrant and I will delve into the year in far more exhaustive detail at some point this month, though we both took vacations at the end of the year rather than knock heads in time for Jan. 1.

10. My strawberry-mint-basil jam— For a party this year I made a Dale Degroff cocktail combining these flavors with gin. I liked the combination so much I made it into jam with good things I bought at the Green City Market, or even grew myself. It’s really good, you’re just going to have to trust me. Or make it your own self next year.

9. Corn cake and greens, Yah’s Cuisine— The least likely spot on this list goes to a south side vegan soul food restaurant visited after shooting an interview with Peter Engler for my barbecue video. Before the visit, I’d have said the soul in soul food inevitably came from pork; Yah’s deep, heartfelt food proves me wrong. (Or proved; there’s some reason to think that Yah’s is closed, though no one has confirmed that.)

8. Ham sandwich et al., Roscioli, Rome— We ate a fantastic meal one night at this artisanal deli/foodshop with a pop-up restaurant on its premises, full of great handcrafted Italian tastes, and had great takeaway pizza from its neighboring bakery a day or two later, but maybe the champ of all was the greatest ham sandwich of my life— as good a vehicle as any fancier dish for demonstrating how something can be even more than the sum of terrifically well-chosen parts.

7. Short ribs & spaetzle, etc., Perennial Virant— So, yeah, I said what the ad says I said, sort of, if you read this post it’s more or less there. But it’s not number one on my list, did I mean it? Well, yeah. I mean, there were other restaurants I loved on first visit (Vera and Telegraph and Bar Toma and who knows what), and they may well end up on a ten best list once I’ve been to them a few times, maybe even ranked higher. But Perennial Virant seemed like a culmination for Paul Virant as I’ve followed him over the past few years, his food a little more casual than in Western Springs, newly in a BoKa Group high-energy city setting, yet nonetheless fully realized out of the gate and perfectly attuned to my tastes. Even so, as successful as PV’s PV is, it seems half-overlooked already— there are so many openings, novelty smacks you in the face almost daily, and Virant has been such a familiar figure that you don’t think of him as having not been here all along and thus something new in town. So stop to smell the short ribs and spaetzle— Paul Virant, once out in the suburboonies, is now right down the street from you, buying from the market and cooking it that night to bring out all its smoky porky fresh farm flavor. Doesn’t that deserve as much cheering and insane hype as anything that happened this year?

6. Sehzade Erzurum Cag Kebabi, Istanbul— Winner of this year’s Screw the Fancy Stuff, Just Give Me Meat Over Open Fire Award goes not to the latest barbecue joint I’ve discovered, as it usually does, but to Istanbul’s possibly unique old school cag kebap spot, located near the Sirkeci station where the Orient Express ended. The preindustrial ancestor of the ubiquitous doner kebap, cag kebap is handcut lamb stacked onto a giant metal skewer and roasted sideways over fire, then hand sliced and threaded onto skewers. More to come on this in an upcoming Turkey post, but suffice it to say that the owner is brother to any great BBQ pit master— picking out just the right mix of crispy and fatty bits and occasionally rounding out a skewer with burnt ends from the tray below.

5. Tarte flambee, Paris-Brest, Balsan— Will Balsan under chef Danny Grant be around next year to make anybody’s list? With the sale of the Elysian it’s an open question, and pastry chef Stephanie Prida has already moved on to L2O. So this choice reflects the ephemerality of the magic that comes together in high end restaurants, but the two visits I’ve made this year to Balsan all confirmed that— especially for a hotel— this is a great big city restaurant with high capabilities and the kind of cosmopolitan atmosphere that makes you feel cool for living here.

4. Pleasant House Bakery. If the video above doesn’t explain why I keep going back for that mushroom and kale pie, go here.

3. Dry chili fish filet, Chairman Mao’s Favorite Pork Belly, and others, Lao Hunan— I said somewhere that this was the best Chinese meal I’d had in some years, then had to think what that previous milestone would be— which, in fact, was probably Lao Sze Chuan. In any case, an overfamiliar cuisine (Chinese, in all its gloppy Americanized familiarity) came to new life at Tony Hu’s newest and so far best attempt to showcase a particular regional Chinese cuisine— and teach us how much more there is to Chinese food that what we know and take for granted.

2. Lots of skewers, Yakitori Totto, New York— “If there was a place like this in Chicago I’d become an alcoholic just to hang out there every night. Or a yakuza.” Well, maybe there is one now, given all our Japanese bincho grill openings. I haven’t found its equal yet, but I’m willing to give them time. And my liver.

1. Everything, The Butcher & Larder— As I said in the Reader’s best-of issue: “When Rob and Allie Levitt walked away from Mado to open an artisanal butcher shop and have regular lives as a family, it was hard to see how cold raw meat in a case could compensate for the loss of all the beautiful things at Mado. Which just goes to show how little we understood Rob’s vision, and how quickly he’d turn his butcher shop into one of this city’s most essential spots for food appreciation, education, and evangelism.”

No place in town has given food more respect and meaning in the last year, no place, not even Next for all its fertile creativity, has thought more about food and done more to convey that thinking to its customers and get them thinking too. And if these all seem extravagant claims to make about a place selling raw meat for other people to cook along with a couple of prepared sandwiches each day, well, I’m at work on a video to validate that claim, so give me a little time to make that case in full. Working at the most elemental level of cookery, with the most direct contact with farmers and animals, The Butcher & Larder is the food revolution people like Michael Pollan write about at the level of rubber meeting the road. And that people have gone so wild for it is one of the most encouraging things to happen on our local food scene in years. None of which, however, should be taken to suggest that their placement at the top of my list is because of anything other than food— than the ground beef and sausages I’ve bought there for hamburgers or pizzas, the roast beef or porchetta sandwiches I’ve eaten there; the top spot is more than sufficiently justified by the amount of deliciousness they brought into my life last year.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I don’t usually do worst of the year, but the greatest disparity between hype/acclaim and actual execution had to be Shake Shack in New York, whose rare-well burger (one side was one, the other the other), frozen Ore-Ida fries and lukewarm shake would get Danny Meyer run out of Wichita on a forklift. But then, Wichita is a serious burger town, unlike New York City, which is a trendy burger town.

Here are other things I enjoyed in the last quarter, most of which you could go have now; you can see previous quarters by clicking on “Best Things I’ve Eaten Lately” under Categories at right.

• Red snapper, bluefin sashimi at Arami, though didn’t like the cooked stuff nearly as much
• Chestnut and buttermilk doughnuts, Doughnut Vault
• Fish course, cider doughnuts, Madeira-maraschino cocktail, Next Childhood menu
• Chocolate frosted cake doughnuts, Zettmeier’s in Tinley Park
• Speculoos shake, Edzo’s
• Rabbit bolognese, octopus, Telegraph
• Pork belly, octopus, Vera
• Lentil (maybe) soup, Barwaqo Kebab
• Bob Andy pie, made by me
• Duck sugo, fish & chips, Owen & Engine
• Low country oysters, Chicago Food Film Festival
• Sunchoke-hazelnut soup, Acadia (preview)
• Walleyed pike, Cafe des Architectes
• Olives, burrada, espresso at Bar Toma
• Shoyu ramen, Takashi
• Tequila manhattan at Trenchermen preview
• Potato pieroshki, Bai
• Honey Butter Fried Chicken at Dose Market
• Blueberry-bergamot preserves by Marianne Sundquist/Mess Hall & Co.
• Strawberry marshmallow, 240sweet
• North Shore Distillery Aquavit, at Ikea Julbord dinner
• Omelet full of lentils at Lula Cafe
• Side of blue cheese coleslaw, Knockbox
• Assorted dishes at Ciya Sofrasi, Istanbul, post to come
• Assorted pizzas at Pizzarium, Rome, post to come

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

The debut of a new blog a few months back devoted to what cabbies eat reminded me to pay more attention to this subgenre, which is truly the cutting edge of the immigrant experience in Chicago, places least devoted to serving any clientele other than the most recent immigrant from the third world, and thus offering, in a very gritty way, as direct a reflection of other cuisines at home as you are likely to find. This is not a new observation, of course; there were 24-hour Pakistani joints on the 24-Hour-A-Thon nearly a decade ago, which was one of the key bonding events of the earliest Chowhound posters becoming ultimately LTHForum. (I didn’t go on it, but I read Monica Eng’s account in the Tribune avidly.) Here are three I’ve been to recently, all worth a stop for at least something.

The sort of undefined slice of west Edgewater and Rogers Park between Clark and Ravenswood is a definite cabbie haunt and, not coincidentally, probably the city’s main concentration of African food. Barwaqo Kabob is an East African spot on an obscure stretch of Ridge, hidden back by Ravenswood cemetery, and it will serve to introduce several of the giveaway signs of a cabbie hangout, including 1) TV tuned to popular native channels (which means an Indian one for South Asians, and Al-Jazeera for the middle east and Africa), 2) communal seating (no one thinks anything of sitting right down in the bubble of personal space Westerners tend to expect exists around them), and 3) a menu whose existence is basically theoretical; what you get is basically whatever you see cooking behind the cash register. Which means, in fact, that there were no kabobs that day at Barwaqo Kabob. What I got instead was a plate of chicken and rice:

This was kind of bland in a mildly spiced, slightly tomatoey way, and, frankly, the vegetables and the chicken had a kind of industrial cast to them, as if they came from a large bag at Costco. What saved this was some sort of dark, bitter sauce served on the side, sour with tamarind. I don’t know that it was supposed to go with the chicken, but I used it that way, and it made it far more interesting. What really saved my trip to Barwaqo was the free soup that came with it:

I don’t know what it was exactly— mashed lentils would be my best bet, but I’m open to other suggestions— but it was powerfully garlicky, and full of deep stewed flavor. It was great; it’s worth ordering randomly among the entrees, just to get this soup. Barwaqo definitely deserves more exploration (and there has been some in this LTHForum thread).

Barwaqo Kabob
6130 N Ravenswood
Chicago, IL 60660

When Kennyz said there had been a 24-hour Kyrgyzstani place called Bai Cafe in a storefront in my neighborhood for the past nine months, on a stretch I frequently walk by (or at least I though I did), I found it hard to believe him— but I eventually found the city inspection records and he’s right. My only extenuating circumstance is that apparently it only put up a sign in the last month or so, and even now could easily be mistaken for a place that’s going to open soon, and hasn’t moved much of anything into the space yet.

But David Hammond and I popped in there late one night when most other options were unavailable and had a meal that was plain and perhaps best described with the word “sturdy,” yet had one stellar component— besides the warmth of the welcome. There were two employees at work at 10 pm— one a Chinese-looking man, the other a round little Eastern European-looking woman patting out balls of something. (To be honest, I’m not sure which of them was more likely to be Kyrgyzstani, if either.) After we looked, a bit hopelessly, at the menu written in impenetrable Kyrgyzanglish (stuffed into a plastic holder which, bizarrely, had some copies of papers from the City stuffed into it, the Asian-looking guy waved us into the kitchen and showed us what was on the stove— a soup, a stew of chicken wings and corkscrew pasta, some fried ovoid balls about which the little round woman beamed and said “pieroshki— you like?”

We said we liked all of it and the guy, rather than try to calculate an actual price, said “I give you some of everything and two pieroshki.” We said one pieroshki was probably fine, and sat down to wait.

The soup (below) wasn’t bad. A simple beef broth, with handcut noodles in it, it was easy enough to like if not something that will stay with me as the Barwaqo soup did. The chicken wing pasta— well, it was like something you might eat at home. Not my home, the home of someone who doesn’t cook as well as me, and doesn’t know how much to season stuff. Nothing offensive about it, but very plain, and the only thing to dress it up with at the table was sriracha, which seemed really incongruous with something kind of goulashy like that.

But the pieroshki— they were fantastic. I expected a dense ball, sort of like a samosa minus the seasoning, but in fact they were as light and fluffy as a beignet. We ate our one, then kind of looked at each other— and decided maybe we’d better have that second one after all. Which we did.

Bai Cafe
3406 N Ashland Ave,
Chicago, IL.
(773) 687-8091

Tabaq is a Pakistani (probably) place near the beginning of Clybourn, in the no-man’s-land before you start reaching things like the Apple Store, and nearly as white and tidy as that establishment. As I walked in I got a serious stinkeye from an imam-looking guy in a floor-length garment, to which I responded with a look of bluff German-American heartiness, but the actual proprietor couldn’t have been more welcoming and was happy to put together a plate out of the things lined up as a sort of buffet behind the counter. They had chicken tikka, fried tilapia and another kind of fish, nihari, and a couple of vegetables; I tried to suggest vegetables, but wound up with two meats and a plate of lentils over white (not basmati) rice, along with some salad/garnish type vegetables and a small bowl of very thin coriander sauce.

The tikka was very good; the lentils were good, though the bland rice sucked flavor from them and I tried to eat them off the top of it; the fish had a nice spice but muddy flavor (catfish maybe). Unlike my other two cabbie meals, this one was of a cuisine which I actually have experience with, so I can say that it wasn’t the best of its kind I’ve had, but it was pretty decent, and I’d go back to check out more things, and especially to push to try some of the vegetable dishes which included some things I hadn’t seen before.

Tabaq Restaurant
1245 North Clybourn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60610-6655
(312) 944-1245

Tags: african, barwaqo, cabbie joints, indian, indo-pak, kyrgyzstani, somali, tabaq

What do I do when I have a new gig at Grub Street and some advertising freelance work to get done? Why, I commit myself to make two movies for the Chicago Food Film Festival in three weeks, naturally. And wind up making three.* (You can see more pics of the fest here.) This is the story of my life in the last few weeks, which is why things I might have spread out over multiple posts are going to get lumped together in a comprehensive post here. Let’s go, we have too much time and very little to do!

I mentioned these marshmallows— made in Indiana, hence the Paw Paw flavor— in a Grub Street post, the maker (240sweet) thanked me, and one thing led to another, and… I wound up with a lovely box of three different marshmallow flavors. I could have questioned whether artisanal marshmallows were even possible, marshmallows are marshmallows, how many ways can you whip sugar and egg whites, but the paw paw flavor was pretty great, full of the banana-on-steroids natural flavor of paw paws, and they’re big enough (and marshmallows go a long way) that I’ve been quite the ambassador for marshmallows lately. (Indeed, I just got some strawberry ones from 240sweet at Dose Market, which may be the best ones yet.)

I was also gifted (as the kids say today) some black cardamom by Judy Shertzer of Terra Spice, after we did a Key Ingredient with it starring Top Chef’s Beverly Kim, and for Thanksgiving I used it in my pumpkin pies and in Beverly’s chai ice cream recipe, which was great (although the chai I found had more cinnamon than hers had, and that flavor dominated). It’s not the easiest ingredient— I had to crush the pods to get them to work in my grinder, then strain them to keep the woodier parts out— but it added a unique, kind of haunting smoky taste.

Bob Andy pie.

As long as we’re talking pie, remember the Bob Andy pie I mentioned a while back that I heard about, but didn’t try, in Indiana? So I made one, to take to a party on Halloween night. It’s super-simple, and kind of plain— just an egg custard with lots of cinnamon in it. But warm and with great cinnamon from Spice House, it was really good, and for all its simplicity, it comes with a built-in cool presentation trick— the cinnamon floats to the top, making a great two-tone look:

There’s been a lot of raving about a burger place on Armitage, the blank heart of yuppieville where I once lived and now never go, called Butcher and The Burger, owned by Allen Sternweiler who had Harvest on Huron where Graham Elliot is now. Serious Eats raved here (I actually ran into Zemans during one of his visits).

The first thing I noticed there was more evidence for my theory that the iPad is, secretly, a computer for women, non-techie women. The things were everywhere, in all their sleekly demure sexiness, an always-on aid to conversation for whatever it is that moms and ladies who lunch in Lincoln Park talk about. One of the iPads in the room was also the cash register-slash-ordertaking device. Unfortunately, I felt that the burger had many of the same attributes of the iPad— great design, lack of real power for the user to wrestle with and make his own.

The list of things you can put on your burger is impressive, except that, screw it, I don’t want any of that stuff; I want a burger, redolent of deep beefiness, onion, cheese, mustard, the basics, not some Sonoran Desert flavoring or Curry-Coconut game mix or any of that froufed-up foolishness. The beef is from Q7 Ranch, near Chicago, and I’ve bought it myself at the similarly named Butcher & Larder and made burgers that tasted of doubleplusgood meat, beefy beef beefitude. This meat just didn’t, weirdly, somehow. For a char-grilled burger, it tasted subduedly pan-fried; I wanted something on it to jump out at me and growl of carnivorous instincts, char or mustard or something, and it didn’t. It was as demure as a patty that thick can get. Surely I’ll give it another try at some point, out of suspicion I’m missing something, but I didn’t find this burger really worth the hassle of parking on Armitage, standing in the kind of inconvenient line that makes you move out of someone’s way 50 times before you finally get to order, and squeezing into a tiny table.

I’ve been to so many openings and events on the high end this past month or so, and as good as most of them were— ramen at Slurping Turtle and the mozzarella tastings at Bar Toma, to name two, I recommend happily— the new restaurant that I really want to explore and know more about is the cheapest one, but a great one, Tony Hu’s latest Chinese regional spot, Lao Hunan.

I went there with Dominic of Skillet Doux (aka Dmnkly of LTHForum) and his sister, and we followed (with one exception) this post by Peter Engler, which gives you a good sense of what some highlights are right now, though the reality is that the menu is growing rapidly. Two things set this Tony Hu place apart from Lao Sze Chuan, Lao Beijing and Lao Shanghai— one, this is an unusually fiery cuisine, even by the standards of Lao Sze Chuan, indeed one dish was nothing more than peppers:

The other is that it’s decorated in a style which can only be called Mao Kitsch, servers in mock Red Army uniforms, a big image of Mao on one wall, famous Hunan citizens on the other. (Of course, the only famous Hunan citizen to us is Mao.)

I don’t know what I think about glorifying a tyrant who caused a couple of the greatest famines in history in a restaurant; as I said to someone at another dinner, “It’s basically the Hitler restaurant,” but at the same time, maybe kitschifying Mao takes the sting out of him, does what Springtime for Hitler did. If we can mock the object of a personality cult, you have no power over us any more, I guess is the positive spin to put on it. Dom had more interesting comments on the Chinese predilection for famine-dictator kitsch in restaurant settings:

…the only knock on the place so far is that its Mao-inspired decor and uniform clad waitstaff are odd and/or offensive, depending on how comfortable you are with dictator chic. I have a hard time arguing with that conclusion, even if I’ve been desensitized by eating at more than a few similarly-themed establishments back in the mother country over the years. On an old blog, I once chronicled a visit to “First Work Team,” a theme restaurant intended to inspire nostalgia for the days when famine was killing off tens of millions of Chinese by serving unseasoned mashed tubers to diners sitting on bare concrete floors. No joke.

I suppose it’s sort of the Chinese equivalent of this Monty Python sketch— “You were lucky to have unseasoned tubers!”

I can’t say I have that clear a sense yet of what Hunanese food is from this one visit— in general approach it still seemed very much like other Tony Hu food, this fish dish like what you’d get if you added fish to Lao Sze Chuan’s dry chili chicken. The most unusual thing we ordered was the one completely untried dish, Home Fed Chicken Xiangxi Style. It’s a black chicken, beyond that I don’t know what made it “home fed,” or what that gave to its character, but it was a deeply funky dish, almost like stinky cheese, not a flavor that entirely reassures you about safety when consuming poultry. I’m sure it was fine, but I only ate a little of it, even as I sort of despised myself for wishing for startling new experiences, and then being repelled by them when they happen.

There’s probably a lot of that on the menu, or will be as it expands in the next few months (at the moment it’s still sort of transitioning from the restaurant that was in the space, and hundreds of new dishes are promised). It’s the first restaurant in a long time that really made me want to do research before I went back. Mike Sula called it one of his favorite openings of the year, and even as I’m now in the business of chronicling hot new places in yuppieville, of which there are an amazing number, I can’t see how this isn’t one of the most interesting, thoughtful and accomplished restaurants to appear on the scene in 2011, and by one of, I mean five, not fifty. In any case, there’s one title it already has, as far as I’m concerned: Calvin Trilin has written about his persistent fantasy that Mao would come to visit and Trillin would get to take him for Chinese food in New York, and blow his little dictatorial mind. Well, Calvin, I think we’ve finally got just the restaurant for your fantasy-dining Mao, here in Chicago.

* I made the Pleasant House film and the cutdown version of my old Mado/pig’s head video… but the second one only got made after I finished a cut of the Rob Levitt part of the upcoming butcher movie, but then the festival rejected it because it didn’t have appetite appeal… inasmuch as it consists mainly of Rob cutting bright red meat, including with a band saw. Oh well, you’ll see it in a month or so, and keep an eye out for other news about it as well.

The iconic dish of Next’s Childhood menu.

I had two feelings about Next’s Childhood menu itself before I went— on the one hand, I was excited by the prospect of a purely conceptual, even sort of dramatically shaped meal exploring the emotions and memories of childhood (specifically, as the red-LED typeface of the theme’s logo indicates, Grant Achatz’s 80s midwestern childhood, and that of Next chef Dave Beran). On the other hand, I have to admit that a dozen courses of PB&J and roasted marshmallows worried me a little— at some point an adult is going to want adult tastes, bolder flavors and contrasts than kids will tolerate. I was curious to see which side of that divide Childhood would fall upon.

What I wasn’t quite expecting was that it would fall firmly on both sides. Taken purely as a meal, Childhood is a little too narrow, a bit too sweet, caught up not only in the kid flavors but in something else I’m kind of past— the whole tiny dabs and maltodextrin powder approach of conceptual food. At Trio years ago, I was wowed by that as a display of virtuosity, but also by bold unafraid flavors (chocolate and green olive, oysters and lime), and by an exquisitely calibrated meal that served you a nice chunk of red meat just at the moment that single bites on spoons or pincers were growing a bit thin. I don’t think they’re unaware of this issue at all— the course called “Brussels Sprouts,” wittily built on the quintessential kids-won’t-eat-it-unless-ordered-to food, injects five more mature flavors (bearnaise, truffle, etc.) into the meal at one point for that very reason. But the concept is what the concept is; there’s a course called “hamburger,” and it’s a kid’s hamburger so it’s going to taste like a deconstructed Big Mac, ketchup and Thousand Island rather than spicy mustard and raw onion. You might like the latter more (I certainly do), but you didn’t when you were a kid, so this is what you get by the logic of the concept— and by the end of it, frankly, most of us were ready for something sharper tasting. (One of my dining companions and I walked over to Vera for a glass of very dry sherry, which hit the spot.)

But the key phrase above is “taken purely as a meal.” Because if you take this meal purely as a meal, if you’re unwilling to play, to let your inner child sit at this well-heeled-grownup’s table, you’ve completely missed the point and really need to be eating somewhere else for the next three months. This is a show, and as a show, it’s a delight. To steal from myself on Grub Street, “it’s a culinary Christmas morning with one present after another to open.”

Which is why, as at Grub Street, I’m reluctant to spoil the surprises of so many of these dishes. Seeing a plate of pork at Perennial Virant doesn’t spoil anything, it heightens interest, but seeing what’s inside the much-reported lunchboxes does, and in return for what? There’s a cookie in the lunchbox that looks like something you ate as a kid, but doesn’t taste like it. Why spoil that moment of engaging cognitive dissonance for you? Maybe that means Next Childhood gets a pass from detailed criticism for the sake of protecting its surprises, but only in the same way any other magic show does. (If you do want gorgeous plate by plate photos, or are quite sure you’ll never go, my friend’s Charlotte’s pictures of our meal are in this LTH thread, no doubt soon to be joined by many others.)

Other chefs like Heston Blumenthal have created dishes designed to evoke nostalgia, and there’s a place (Kitsch’n on Roscoe) that serves lunch in lunchboxes right by my house, so the idea of achieving some kind of Proustian memory effect of childhood with food is not new. (When it comes down to it, we all do it at Thanksgiving or Christmas.) And I still have doubts about whether food can genuinely achieve dramatic effects— it’s kind of like music, music can tell a story… as long as you first tell everyone what the story is. But damn if by the end, dishes that sound like the generic cliches of kid-dom (PB&J, Campfire, etc.) hadn’t seemed to acquire, even if only by projection, a kind of dramatic weight and emotional freight that conjured up a specific childhood for a chef from Michigan (or two)— outdoorsy (two evoke campfires, one fishing), typically commercialized foodwise (not only does the hamburger specifically recall a Big Mac, we even got a Ronald McDonald Thermos at our table), moments of maternal indulgence (a certain dessert). You really do seem to have exchanged the secret passwords of childhood with the chefs here and understood who they grew from, in a way that I’m pretty sure doesn’t happen at Kitsch’n or American Girl Place. Of course, I also haven’t actually read the autobiography of the chef of American Girl Place.

Most interestingly, this seemed to hold true even for the two of our party who hadn’t grown up in the U.S. Maybe it’s just that American childhood has been portrayed so much in pop culture that it belongs to the world now, and feels like the childhood you should have had, even if you didn’t. (I’m surely not the only American who sometimes feels as if everyone else had it but me.)

So go if you can, not because it’s a better meal than you might have at Perennial Virant or Telegraph or Vera or other places that opened in the Year of Next, but because it’s an experience no one else is doing anything like, anywhere on the planet.

* * *

Now, having said not to be reductive and look at it merely as food, let me be reductive and go through the courses; again, you are advised not to read this if you expect to go, but I want to keep my notes on the meal and be able to compare them with others’. The first decision we were confronted with was whether to order the alcoholic or non-alcoholic pairing. I might find it a little tough to go through a meal like this without at least a little wine to cleanse the palate here and there, but in retrospect, I wish I had gone for the non-alcoholic one, which seemed to have some clever things in it (even if, as Kennyz said, it kind of came down to eight kinds of tea). I had one taste of a fennel root beer served with one of the courses and it was one of the best things I tasted all night. (I asked our server for more information about the two choices, but again because they wanted to preserve the surprises, got back a stream of generalities which didn’t really tell me anything.) That said, a Madeira/Luxardo Maraschino cocktail that started off the evening was also one of the best things I drank that night (or this year). If I could have that followed by the non-alcoholic pairings…

The first course, PB&J, is a present in a box which you are urged to eat in one bite. The part you can eat in one bite is a ball, maybe a rice shell, containing a liquid peanut butter and jelly flavor; only when I got the menu at the end did I learn that the fruit was pomegranate, which gave you the sense of PB&J but with a tarter taste than the sugary simplemindedness of concord grape. The next is Chicken ‘Noodle’ Soup, whose joke is that the chicken is the noodle; but with no particular chicken flavor, it was just an exercise in meat glue and the interest of this soup was in a very fine and complex, mushroomy broth. Fish-n-Chips, the kid’s picture course, followed, and was perhaps the most successful course of the night, both imaginatively and in terms of flavor— a beautifully sous-vided (I think; you could see the shape of the plastic pouch) piece of walleye with oniony chips-dirt, pickled waves, and crispy potato… something, I’m not sure what they represent in the picture except, maybe, how a kid with crayon draws.

Mac & Cheese was next, a nicely creamy mac and cheese made with a tarter grownup cheddar into which you were supposed to mix half a dozen bits of tiny flavors. Some, frankly, seemed too small to taste— a tomato gelee, a microscopic pinwheel of jamon serrano (I think) and arugula. A few— a cheddar crisp, a little mound of parmesan— were very good; one, a powdered hot dog, was outright gross, a nasty swig of salty artificial meat flavoring. I guess if you’re doing a kid food that everybody’s already doing, this is how you take it to the next level, but this was the first point where I felt the effort that went into a dish hardly repaid in results.

Next is Autumn, stuff smoldering over a dish on top that looks like the accumulated stuff of a forest floor. I joked that this one really did remind me of my childhood, since the adults were always smoking at the dinner table. Many parts of this were tasty— crispy fried kale and tiny broccoli bits, the nugget of polenta deep inside (don’t think too hard about what that is supposed to represent)— but I didn’t feel like I quite got it as a full dish. Maybe it isn’t one and the randomness of every bite being different is the point. School Lunch isn’t really food, except for a rice pudding/panna cotta called, surprisingly, “Prune” on the menu, but its various quirky manufactured foodstuffs were all fun to play with (though I couldn’t finish the onion chip, far too salty). Hamburger, with its piece of short rib (along with the walleye, the most real piece of meat all night) and its bun liquified and spread all over the plate, was fun in its deconstructive absurdity, though you’ll never want to eat a hamburger that way again. Still, as a culinary Rorschach test, it was one of the most playful and entertaining dishes of the evening. (Speaking of having all this again, a couple of people on LTHForum are talking about whether they want to book two or three times for this one, or just once. Even if I could imagine having this again five years from now, I would never have it again within a few months, any more than I’d see most movies twice in three months; you’d still remember it beat by beat, which would utterly kill the fun of it all. I also think I’m just too much of a guilty liberal to feel entirely right about grabbing multiple tickets for something where so many people are desperately trying to get in once. Think of all the poor Occupiers who will never get to eat a capitalist meal like this…)

The first dessert course, ‘Foie’sting, had terrific apple cider donuts but the foie frosting was, surprisingly, chocolate with barely a foie taste discernable. We all kind of wished that was dialed up, as chocolate (almost) alone seemed too… normal. The best part of the next dessert, Campfire, will be largely overlooked by people— the show part involves a campfire set alight at the table, made of sweet potato logs dyed blue with blue corn dye. You’re encouraged to eat them, but frankly, a single bite will discourage you from eating any more; I can think of a dozen better ways to make a sweet potato look like a log and actually taste like something. Meanwhile, hardly noticed, is the marshmallow part of the course, vanilla marshmallows with bourbon ice cream and, some kind of fruit (mango?) sauce, which frankly minus the show could be a dessert anywhere— and it would be a credit to any place that served it, a simple but superbly balanced dessert of sweet, tart and creamily boozy all at once. The meal ended with Hot Chocolate accompanied, for the drinkers, with a shot of Cognac.

So foodwise, I’d count the soup, the fish and chips, and that dessert as first-rate dishes, most of the rest as first-rate entertainment, which some might not find quite high enough a batting average; but I’m sure I’ll be thinking about this one when better dishes elsewhere have faded. Service at Next seems to be determined to be delighted, which occasionally was a little much, and at this very early stage (we went on the third night of actual service) we did have one half-long delay between courses. On the other hand, there was a point where I had left one Brussels sprout on that plate, and I became aware (because of the mirror behind the seats) that they were waiting, very unobtrusively off-stage, to deliver the next course; the instant I popped it in my mouth they swooped in, removed all the plates, and set down the next dish without ever doing anything that called attention to the fact that they were waiting on us.

And really, the best recommendation for the service is this: at one point, after I had tried snapping a few (blurry but kind of cool) shots of Achatz at work from my seat, a server came by and said: “Sir, I noticed you were taking pictures of the kitchen from your seat.” (At first I thought I was going to be chastised.) “After dinner, would you like a tour of the kitchen?”* Well, after such a good show, who wouldn’t like to go backstage and meet the performers?

* This was, incidentally, not because anyone recognized me as anybody. I’ve met Achatz enough times by now that I believe he would know who I am, vaguely, and I also think I’m pretty accurately pegged far down the list of media people he needs to think about. In any case, he was gone by the time we visited the kitchen, but Dave Beran remembered me from this shoot and we spoke pleasantly for a moment about the dinner.