Library, The Public Hotel.

So Monday morning there will be an announcement which many have guessed, or simply assumed, to judge by the congratulations I’ve been getting since before it was official. I am taking the post of Chicago editor (which is to say, writer and editor of myself) for Grub Street Chicago. Which, if you don’t know, is a site which aggregates and creates foodie world news in several major foodie cities.

In doing so I’m going straight against what one of the best-known people on the Chicago food scene has just done:

A couple of weeks ago I went to an announcement party at Union Sushi & Barbeque Bar for Steve Dolinsky’s new site, SteveDolinsky.com. Dolinsky, who is mainly known for his food segments for ABC 7 in Chicago, had (among his other gigs) been the food blogger at Vocalo, the bloggy offshoot of WBEZ which has now simply become WBEZ.org. He gave that up, and my friend Louisa Chu took it up:

One of the reasons Dolinsky told me he had left WBEZ and spiffed up his own site (for which he plans to create an impressive amount of weekly content) was that frankly, he felt he should be building his own brand on the web, not somebody else’s. I agreed completely at the time, and still do in general— and the value of my own efforts at personal brandbuilding were quickly affirmed by the owner of the restaurant introducing himself and turning out to be a Twitter follower of mine. (Okay, he follows 2000 people, but he’d responded to me on occasion, and I recognized his Twitter name.)

Afterwards, Louisa and I checked out the renovated Pump Room…

and the Library, which is a very nice, quiet bar, not at all overrun as I assumed this highly-hyped opening would be.

So why am I doing the opposite? Well, one, they’re paying me, and I really want to be able to afford to do things like go cool foreign places with my kids while they’re still young enough to tolerate me. (Happy 13th birthday, Myles.) As Mr. Mom/advertising freelancer/food writer person, I don’t exactly have the cares of someone depending wholly on their food freelance income, but I could certainly use an income. Two, although I have good access to the food scene and its notable figures, I’m sure just the needs of covering the scene will expose me to many more things much more rapidly. Three, I like the idea of being compelled to produce on a regular basis. To be forced to think up story ideas, day after day, to follow up leads right then. This is my training for the marathon, my fighting middle age contentment by taking on something new and demanding. Better to burn out than to fade away, and all that. So, I’ll be doing the grunt work of aggregating news from all over every day, but I’ll also be trying to produce original content just about every day, interviews and videos and slideshows and commentary. Bookmark it, if you haven’t already!

Marcus Jernmark and Chandra Ram at Plate Cooks.

Not that Dolinsky’s event is the only thing I’ve been to lately, but most of the others quickly got repurposed into material for Grub Street’s insatiable appetite. One was the industry how-to conference Plate Cooks, put on by Plate, a trade magazine based in Chicago whose editor Chandra Ram I’ve met on several occasions. Two different publicists invited me to events, one with Marcus Jernmark, of New York’s Aquavit, which used to be Marcus Samuelsson’s place. To be honest, I had never heard of him and barely of Aquavit, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with that here, but I had nothing else that morning and I figured, hey, I can attend a chef’s demo at Kendall, why not? Little did I know how grateful I’d be for this material the next week when I started filling in at Grub Street; you can see what I made of that here.

Another was a butchering demo with Rob Levitt and Michael Paley of Louisville’s Proof on Main; I’ve never made it to one of Rob’s butchering demos so it was a great chance to see one and share it, finishing the demo off with Paley’s coppa and fried pig tails:

After that one I stuck around for the next, a panel about sustainability, which included Randy Zweiban and Ari Weinzweig, the co-founder of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I had visited for the first time a few months back. I especially wanted to meet him… because I was already planning to have dinner with him that night. Anyway, Plate Cooks was a great industry event, strong on the technical side which I found fascinating, light on the showbizy-commercialized side even though it did have sponsored interludes (but even those, like Tony Priolo demoing risotto with potatoes in it, were perfectly respectable and worth attending). I’m definitely going to try to get invited again next year.

But wait, you were about to ask, how was I planning on having dinner with the co-founder of Zingerman’s again? Well, some months back the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, who invited Hammond and me on this, invited me to a bacon dinner at L’Etoile in Madison, part of the push around Weinzweig’s new book, Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon.

And I’m not just repaying their hospitality when I say this was a fantastic dinner, worth the 3 hours each way. I was a little apprehensive about having salt/baconfat overload, but I should have know that L’Etoile’s Troy Miller would have a delicate touch with bacon, bringing out the flavor of numerous different bacons in delicate, surprising ways:

But the other great part of it was that I had the chance to talk with Weinzweig about the prospect of doing a Sky Full of Bacon video at some future date. As I said to him, “Think of some part of your business that you’re fascinated by but no one else seems to be interested in. I’ll be interested in it.” And he was receptive. (In the meantime, this short clip ran on Grub Street.)

So wait, you say, does that mean Sky Full of Bacon is still going? Hell yeh, it’s still going and Key Ingredient comes back this week, too. SFOB is certainly going to be quieter, I’ve tried to do a post a week no matter what, and that won’t happen now. But I’m going to make the next two promised videos on schedule, and there will be something here from time to time.

In the meantime I had a couple of suggestions to check out in Madison before I headed home the next day. One was suggested by one of the Milk Board folks, a very tidy and friendly German sausage place, Bavaria Sausage, where I picked up a bunch of really well-made sausages that went happily into a choucroute garnie that very night when I got home. The other was an old-school Italian deli, Fraboni’s, suggested by Matthew, who comments here from time to time. It’s not as impressive as Tenuta’s in Kenosha or Glorioso’s in Milwaukee, but you certainly wouldn’t be sorry you had it nearby, either, and I grabbed a nice sub (could have had better bread, but what was inside was just fine) for the road home.

Check me out at my new home, Grub Street Chicago, from now on, and my personal home here, too, at least once in a while when I have something to say or show here.

So did we all just agree to pretend that we knew words like “izakaya” and “robata grill” a year ago? Restaurant owners are opening them like mad and food writers are using them like they’ve known them since grade school, but while I certainly knew that there was Japanese food grilled on sticks before last week, the word for it tended to be “yakitori”— as it still is at by far the best and seemingly most authentic of them I’ve been to, Yakitori Totto in New York. But I think in general “yakitori” came to be associated with chicken sticks in mall food courts, so new words were imported for trendier spots. Nonetheless, after eating at three different American versions of this general category of cuisine, I’m not sure I’m not more confused about what the real Japanese version of this is like than I was before. There’s often good food to be had, on sticks and off, but “izakaya” seems to be quickly becoming as non-specific as, say, bistro or trattoria.

Yuzu Sushi & Robata Grill doesn’t say izakaya but the promise of a robata grill— well, the first time I heard the term I feel I was promised a giant robot cooking my food, but it turns out to mean kind of a campfire cookout using a particular (and expensive) form of oak charcoal called binchotan. Only the high end places in town actually use that (Sushi Samba Rio and the new Roka Akor, apparently), and so far as I can tell, Yuzu is just using a standard restaurant grill. Yuzu’s up-to-the-minute trendiness cred is nonetheless furnished by sushi chefs in hipster hats, obscenity-filled rap blaring over the speakers, and, well, the trendy fruit in the name.

What this turns out to be in reality is a reasonably priced neighborhood sushi joint with some cooked items, and on those terms it wasn’t bad at all. The sushi wasn’t overly dressed up— yes, it had a sliver of lime on top, but at least they weren’t drowning good fish in unneeded flavors or pushing gooed-up maki rolls. A curry puff was like most Japanese curries, sweet and lacking complexity next to Indian curries, but enjoyably comfy.

The grilled items off the robata grill went two for four, I thought. The steak and scallop were simple and just what they should be. A rectangular hunk of pork was too thick and coated in too much sesame-paste sauce, and chicken was a little dry and underexciting. I wish there were more and more unusual offerings, a la Chizakaya, especially since I would have had bigger portions for less of them here. Yuzu isn’t a place to go out of your way to visit, but it’s a little more unusual and interesting than the generic neighborhood sushi place found all over town.

Yuzu Sushi & Robata Grill
1715 West Chicago Avenue
Chicago, IL 60622
(312) 666-4100

When you gaze across the dining room of Tokio Pub you can imagine yourself in any fashionably dark and sleek Asian-hipster locale in the city. Only once your gaze reaches the window and sees parking lot stretching like a Texas ranch beyond does it become obvious you’re in Streets of Woodfield, attached in fact to the branch of Shaw’s in the parking lot (better to be Shaw’s spinoff than Big Bowl’s).

I came here as a guest of the publicist, ostensibly because they were having Maki Month or something like that. For me, maki rolls are guilty until proven innocent, all cute names and sweet flavors obliterating any Asian fish flavor; and I wasn’t encouraged here by the fact that their menu features tacos (I still don’t get that). So I gravitated as much as I could to the grilled items off their, yes, robata grill, the menu says so.

Surprisingly, the maki were admirably restrained, not overdressed, simple and with clean fish flavors. Also surprisingly, a drink with the ghastly-girly name of Blushing Geisha (I asked the bartender to instead call it a Stammering Samurai) was a nicely tart, well-balanced gin cocktail (with prickly pear juice and lime sour). Like the decor, this part of the menu transcended the cartoonish concepting and seemed pretty genuinely cool and good. If you ever have a need for a hip place to get a drink and some snacks in Schaumburg, I can’t imagine there’s a better choice. Or many at all, but still.

Unfortunately, the robata grill items had been American-suburbanized-supersized-gloppified. All the cuts were too huge to grill well or eat off a stick comfortably; all except the spicy shrimp were coated in a thick honeyish glaze straight out of the orange chicken at Panda Express. There was good meat under there, but it didn’t need to be, the way it was mistreated. The virtues of small, freshly grilled slices of meat are so obvious, I can’t imagine how anyone saw that and thought, what this needs is to be dripping high fructose corn syrup by the quart. Bummer. The meal ended with dessert sushi, which I preferred to think of as a Moto-like joke course, looks like sushi, tastes like Fro-Yo! Anyway, the creme brulee was fine.

I never did find out what the tacos were about. Maybe by the rule of inverse expectations at play here, they’re pretty good.

Tokio Pub
1900 E Higgins Rd
Schaumburg, IL 60173
(847) 278-5181
tokiopub.com/

Izakaya Yume is in what at first glance seems a hardly more prepossessing location for authenticity— a strip mall at Golf and Milwaukee. But in fact this stretch of Niles is a little hidden-in-plain-sight ethnic food-shopping enclave— catecornered is Himalayan Restaurant, the Nepali place David Hammond, Jennifer Olvera and I visited in Hammond’s recent radio exploration of suburbia’s ethnic gems. Korean is dominant in this stretch, with Polish a close second, and Izakaya Yume appears to be a Japanese restaurant run by Koreans. It was less like other izakayas I’ve been to— no food on sticks, at least for grilling rather than making them pretty— and it’s basically all fish-oriented, no beef skewers or chicken fat, but however much it matches an authentic Japanese izakaya or not, it’s an authentic something, and making very simple Asian food very well for prices that are scandalously cheap.

A few free starters aside, we began with a sashimi platter, but urged the chef— formerly of Japonais— to pick us out interesting things and not assume that we wanted the safest choices. He decided to give us about half of his standard sashimi platter for two, and to round it out instead with a small mackerel cut into pieces, showing us a small tray of the gleaming black fish to close the deal.

If describing food is hard, describing slices of raw fish is harder yet, so there’s little to say except that it was all of excellent quality, pristine and impeccably fresh, sliced with skillful delicacy. At $21.99 for a good twenty pieces (plus a terrific little octopus salad), it was a steal.

A discordant note came when we saw him preparing oysters for a large party. My dining companion shriveled in horror as the chef washed the liquor out of the oysters in his sink, then replaced it with soy sauce. I could tell he thought this was sacrilege, losing the best part of the oyster down the drain. Ten of them went off to the large party… and then the chef plated two more for us, on the house. My friend tried to smile, kind of like the one Christina Ricci makes when she gets sent to happy-time camp in one of the Addams Family movies.

They were all right, but even I, oyster-clueless as I am, don’t get why you’d want to ditch the liquor. Anyway, next up we tried to order a couple of things off the grilled menu, which features about 7 or 8 fish (plus a few more as specials). The chef urged us to only order one. We looked at each other and felt pretty confident we could polish off two filets of fish between us, but for the moment, accepted his advice. I mean, the mackerel we ordered was only $12.99, how big could it be?

Like the Hungryman’s Special at Red Lobster, that’s how big. It basically was two full filets a foot long from the meatiest part of a good-sized fish. Again, the preparation was simple and perfect, grilled to a crisp but just a nudge past flaky inside, the oil collecting at the bottom for when you wanted especially crispy-greasy bites.

The price in the end was $90, but considering that $40 of that was a bottle of sake, this was an utter bargain for the quality and quantity of the fish and the chefly attention paid to our meal. (It helped that it was a quiet Tuesday night; I have a feeling on a busy Friday night, the painstaking attention paid to each dish would really slow things down.) Roka Akor, in River North, may by all reports be the Japanese restaurant of the year, but for those of us not on an expense account capable of encompassing a $14 truffle shaving add-on to our $144 wagyu steak, it’s far more exciting to find a discovery like this making genuinely first-rate food at delivery pizza prices. The only thing some might find no bargain is the seating; for some reason, the bar seats are down at kindergarten classroom level, making it hard to see what’s going on far, far above you with the chef, and harder to get back up to a standing position once you’re full. I don’t know whether those chairs are authentic to the izakaya experience either, but they’re a price I’m willing to pay for whatever authentic experience this was.

Izakaya Yume
9626 N Milwaukee Ave
Niles, IL 60714
(224) 567-8365

Tags: izakaya, Izakaya Yume, japanese, robata grill, Tokio Pub, Yuzu Sushi

I haven’t been anywhere worthy of a post on its own, but I have little fragments of semi-interesting things piling up, so… EVERYTHING MUST GO! We’re clearing out the inventory!

* * *

Would you like a free box of our organic produce? emailed a company called Door To Door Organics. Sure, said I:

The stuff was very pretty, almost too perfect for farmer’s market stuff. Maybe they just prettied my box up because they hoped I’d take pictures. (UPDATE: they say no, they’re all this gorgeous!) Anyway, nice looking and tasting stuff, and I think the quantity I got was a “Bitty Local Farm Box” which goes for $26.99. That strikes me as on the high side given what was in it (seen below, plus there was some parsley and kale), but I may be deluding myself about what the same quantity would cost at Whole Foods— that’s surely a $4 box of tomatoes, $4 worth of peppers, etc. at yuppieville retail prices. (The two small ears of corn were kind of silly, given that that’s probably the cheapest thing in the box at the moment.) I feel like you could beat this price with an individual farmer’s CSA by a good ways, but I have a feeling they’re doing more active management of what you get, so you’d get more consistently useful boxes than some of the ones I got from Genesis last year when I did their CSA. So for the right person, this seems to be the right service.

I’ve done a few things with several of the things I got, like poking garlic all over the eggplant and tossing it on the grill to make baba ghanoush as an appetizer for my wife’s birthday dinner:

So anyway, seems like a good addition to the organic food delivery scene, and if you’re interested, I have two offers. “Bacon2011” is a promo code that will get you $10 off an order; and I have the awesome power to award a freebie box to the first person to comment that they want it in the comments on this post. UPDATE: THE BOX IS SPOKEN FOR Go for it!

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SKY FULL OF BACON EXCLUSIVE MUST CREDIT: I learned, this weekend, the followup to the infamous Paris Club stinky barn smell story. So far as I know this hasn’t been reported anywhere.

As you may recall, Paris Club, the hot new Sons of Melman place in the old Brasserie Jo space, was reported to smell like manure… sometimes; it was supposedly because the recycled wood in the place came from a barn. Mike Sula sensed a vast conspiracy on the part of people attending a VIP preview to cover up the stench, but others questioned whether it was there all the time, or only under certain circumstances (David Hammond and I walked through at 10pm and didn’t smell it), or existed at all.

Here’s what I was told. First off, the wood didn’t come from a barn at all, but from a factory, I was told. Nevertheless the recycled wood was a suspect at first and various things were tried, such as cranking the heat up as high as it would go to see if they could bake the smell out.

But then suspicion shifted to the venting from the toilets. (Which is no doubt why they didn’t send out a press release announcing the solution of the problem, even though I’m sure this kind of post-opening emergency fixer-upping is more common than we know.) They came to this conclusion for the very logical reason that the smell tended to appear only during a certain window of time— apparently after enough people were there to have used the toilets sufficiently, but not so many that the smell of people, perfume and dinner being served proved stronger. In the end, they expensively ripped open the walls and rebuilt some of the ventilation system, and the “barn” smell went away… leaving only the scent of Axe and desperation, I’m sure.

* * *

Why, when I’m making appetizers for two different parties, do I add to my workload by insisting on canning some beets along the way? Because I had the beets, dammit. And besides, just think of the time I’d save using the hot water from the canning afterwards to loose the skins on some tomatoes for bruschetta. Yeah, right.

Anyway, I was making something for the LTHForum picnic out of David Thompson’s new Thai food cookbook, Thai Street Food. It’s a big gorgeous book but I have to say, as a practical cookbook, I’m having some trouble. Things have always worked out in the end, based on some winging it and the fact that even bastardized, winged Thai food is better than most things. But the things that seem easy for him to find and do, are not easy for the casual reader.

One thing that I’ve learned has tripped up better cooks than me is a common ingredient in the recipes— coriander root. In theory, this should exist, since coriander is cilantro and plenty of cilantro is sold around here, so how far away can the roots be? Ah, but it’s one thing to buy cilantro from a farmer and another to convince him to rip his plant out for you. Only one chef has managed that for authentic Thai recipes, Grant Achatz…

…except he’s not the only one, as Jason Vincent of Nightwood explained bemusedly; he’s been buying it from the same place, City Farm, for a while and is bemusedly irritated to keep reading that only Achatz can manage the trick. Anyway, we talked about this a bit at the Key Ingredient shoot and he offered to give me some but I forgot about it by the time we left. (We = my kids, who were tagging along, and amusing themselves during the shoot by filling up my phone with photos of Jason Vincent’s baby.)

So I just used the lower stems of coriander. Anyway, looking through Thai Street Food for a cool thing to make for the LTHForum picnic (needless to say, a high stakes event where I have a reputation to protect), I found a recipe for cured, deep-fried pork, using the cartilaginous end pieces of the rib…

…or as we call them in Chicago, the rib tips. Which have been on my mind a fair amount lately.

Suddenly I had an idea out of another cookbook entirely. Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Cookbook is full of jokey dishes that look like one thing and taste like another. Here was my chance to make something called “rib tips and sauce”— which wouldn’t be barbecued, and would taste more like Chiang Mai than Chattanooga. You start by mixing sticky rice, salt and garlic in a mortar and pestle:

Well, here was problem number one. The idea is that you pound the salty-garlicky rice into a paste, and cover the pork with it so perfectly that it is sealed up inside it, no air, and you can set it out in the hot sun for a few days (!) to get nice and funky but not spoil. Yeah, okay. But don’t pound the rice so much that you make it glutinously tough! And that was where I ran into trouble— I couldn’t get it to make a paste, but it already seemed like it was toughening up. So I abandoned plan A and went for plan B— coat the pork in the stuff and leave it in the fridge for most of the week. It might not get the full funk, but it would at least cure.

Then I had to make my own version of the dipping sauce common with things like Thai fried chicken. I roasted chilis, garlic and shallots (for which I’d fortunately paid Argyle street prices):

Another snag: my supposed seedless tamarind paste from Argyle street turned out to be, at best, “partly deseeded.” After spending entirely too much time pushing seeds out of it, I went to Patel Bros. on Devon and bought a jar of liquid tamarind goo. Which was probably much more concentrated, because the stuff was puckeringly sour when I first mixed it up. But I added a bunch of honey, and some more chilis and garlic, and in time, I had a pretty good imitation of Spoon’s version of the same sauce. I fried up the rib tips, and then it was time to assemble my dish with the thing that truly made it Chicago rib tips…

a little piece of white bread underneath the rib, soaking up the sauce.

* * *

Something I learned at the LTH picnic, may be a hitherto unknown factoid for all I know: the reason Mario’s on Taylor Street, the legendary Italian lemonade joint, closes a week or two after Labor Day isn’t just that the season is over then. But Mario, the dad who started it, apparently keeled over while making the lemonade one day, a September 16th as a matter of fact. And so his widow decided, from then on, to honor his memory by closing down after the weekend closest to that day.

Mario’s has peach– for a very few days before closing in memoriam Mario for this year. I’ve been skeptical about it in the past— they tend to make peach when peaches get cheap, regardless of whether they’re much good or not— but this year peaches have been great, so I have hope. Go get you some!

And if you haven’t seen:

Tags: CSA, David Thompson, Italian ice, lthforum, Mario's, Paris Club, thai

The last full Sky Full of Bacon video I made was about the annual Labor Day Weekend Taste of Melrose Park festival. Of course, since I finished it in late September, that didn’t do you a lot of good then. It does now, so watch the video, then hit the fest this weekend which is always fun, inexpensive, and full of good tasting stuff:

As my friend Michael Morowitz Tweeted at the time, “Your street festival is lame. Here’s one that isn’t.”

If the Miracle Berry didn’t exist, Homaro Cantu would have had to invent it.

Cantu has long been seeking something beyond mere food, a kind of altered-reality experience where he could be the Timothy Leary opening new doors of perception. The problem is that dinner is, in the end, dinner, not a higher consciousness, and his claims of changing the world with food wind up overselling, and thus diminishing, the experience of his often genuinely clever and witty food. Cantu is working in the genre of other food-magicians descended from El Bulli, perhaps closest to Heston Blumenthal who takes a particular magician’s delight in misdirection, making a dish that looks like one thing but turns out to be another. But Blumenthal is David Copperfield, staging elaborate tricks to make you laugh with delight, while Cantu seems to want to be Uri Geller, trying to make you believe it actually happened, right there on Mike Douglas.

Which is why the Miracle Berry is such a natural for him. For once, the trick genuinely doesn’t happen on the plate, but in your mind. Dropping a Miracle Berry tablet— the experience can’t avoid LSD connotations, and at iNG, shows no signs of wanting to— produces an effect by which sour things are perceived as sweet. It’s less pronounced than advertised, perhaps, but it’s there— you’re given slices of lemon and lime on which to test your tongue once you’ve dissolved the tablet, and lemon goes from lemon to tart lemonade, basically.

The problem is that having once taken the tablet, you’re stuck on the other side of the door— any dish or cocktail you’re given will taste like its Miracle Berry-ized self, without necessarily a frame of reference for the original dish. The Miracle Berry “Flavor-Tripping” menu at iNG confronts this problem with varying degrees of success.

I never ate at Otom, so I don’t know how much iNG resembles its predecessor in the space, though what its go-go boots-white and red interior did remind me of was Mod, the long-ago restaurant where The Violet Hour is now. The amuse which arrives inside your folded paper box of a menu seems to be there just to match the room, but what comes next is well designed to show the effect: a cocktail which tastes (somewhat) like a margarita before you suck the berry, and (somewhat) like a tequila sunrise after. It makes the point, though perhaps out of a desire to show up The Aviary a couple of doors down, it tries too hard. Some of The Aviary’s cocktails are meant to change flavor as they steep in their ingredients, like tea— a naturalistic, and probably pretty subtle, effect. iNG not only short-circuits the process with the Miracle Berry but with a small tube of cherry juice, which spills into the drink as you lift it to drink. By the last sips cherry flavor has sledgehammered the subtler Miracle Berry effect; less would have made more of the effect.

The first real food course, a sort of deconstructed Beausoleil oyster covered in uni and frozen-grated foie gras, doesn’t seem to draw on the Miracle Berry effect, but its drink pairing is quite wonderful: a taste of Dogfish India brown ale, in which the sweetness of a brown ale surges to the front under the berry’s effects. In this case the extra twist is well chosen: it’s served in a smoked glass, a neatly economical version of Blumenthalesque scent dishes involving things like smoking hay on your plate.

I got two of iNG’s baozi, meltingly tender pork buns, so I would have loved to have tried one before and one after the Miracle Berry. Not that it would likely have made much difference; these are so tasty that you almost want to tell Cantu to forget the fine dining stuff and just get a baozi truck out on the streets as fast as possible.

The next dish, a version of Nobu’s miso-black cod dish (I swear, Nobu by this point is the Colonel Sanders of black cod), seems a less wise choice for the Miracle Berry— already on the sweetish side, it becomes downright candy-coated under the Berry’s influence. (I’d rather have had a puttanesca sauce or something equally savory to serve as the Berry’s foil by this point.) While a duck dish with mint and white chocolate in its sauce (not so I could tell) was a very pretty plate, but what the Miracle Berry contributed to it (and by this point I’d been given a refresher Berry) wasn’t clear to me.

Far more impressive was its effect on the drink pairings with these dishes— a slightly fruit-forward pinot noir was like sipping a fine balsamic vinegar, while a dry Riesling came off for all the world like an ice wine. Dessert followed— but as it’s a charming visual joke, I won’t spoil it.

So did I see an altered reality, or a possible future food? I doubt it, though the Miracle Berry’s use as a sugar substitute that works on the mind rather than the food is certainly intriguing, albeit more from a food-business standpoint than a culinary one. I look at the meal more prosaically: as a triumph of showmanship. The fact is this meal, minus the Miracle Berry, is nothing strikingly unusual— all very nicely done in an Asian-minimalist way, subtle and a little sedate for my tastes, one you can imagine having any number of places (especially the black cod). The Miracle Berry and the whole presentation around it turns a pleasant meal into a mindbender in which you think hard about every course, tasting and testing and waiting for transcendence. If it never arrives, you’ve still made more out of this meal than it would have on its own in a more conventional restaurant. As I said before, Cantu has found a magic trick that takes place not on the plate, but in your head.

Tags: Homaro Cantu, iNG, Miracle Berry

Paul Virant during the quickfire challenge between Chris Pandel and himself at Perennial Virant, July 25. I posted a slideshow and recap at Grub Street Chicago.

Next is fascinating, perfectionist, imaginative and eye-opening— and, ultimately, a kind of cul-de-sac; nobody really thinks that Parisian dining from 1906 will spread nationwide. It’s a fantasy dining experience with a necessarily short life. But because Next and Grant Achatz are daring and endlessly fascinating, the restaurants that represent where dining is really going right now are pushed out of the limelight, half overlooked even in the best of cases. Paul Virant opening a restaurant on the doorstep of the Green City Market, returning to the city to do battle with the best chefs in town after years singlehandedly putting some place called Western Springs on the map, could have been one of the great stories of the year. Instead it’s— oh what, Paul Virant’s cooking fresh vegetables and artisanal meats? That’s nice. Have to check that out some— HOLY CRAP NEXT JUST RELEASED TWELVE MORE TABLES ON FACEBOOK!

I feel almost alone in my belief that the most exciting news about a name chef opening a new place in 2011 has always been Perennial Virant. As much as that other food may dazzle in its ingenuity, represent the pinnacle of a kind of competitive perfectionism, the food that speaks to my soul is the food that makes comparatively simple use of the best ingredients. As I wrote reviewing Vie a couple of years ago, “in my experience there’s no Chicago restaurant at work right now better than the meal I had last Saturday night, for its dedication to getting the best, richest, most purely satisfying flavor out of the best ingredients. And if you can think of other things a restaurant should be doing first, well, we just have different priorities, I guess.” I often feel there’s a disparity in what I want from fine dining and low end food— fine dining is intellectual, sometimes to the point of seeming bloodless, low end food makes your soul sing. Vie does a better job than anywhere of bridging that gap— not just applying haute skills to homey dishes, but using homey products, all that stuff he pickles and preserves and cures, in a way that has the complexity and sophistication of haute cuisine. I love fine dining, and I love barbecue and diner food and stuff like that, but best of all… I love not having to choose between their respective pleasures in the same meal.

Yet the first reports I heard on Perennial Virant, from people I give all due respect to, were not all that good. So I didn’t rush to try it immediately, hoping that a little time would help it find its footing. I went earlier this week for a PR event, a cookoff between Virant and Chris Pandel of The Bristol (who is also, like Virant, being pulled into the orbit of the Boka Group). While there I ran into LTHer Crazy C and her husband, and wound up joining them for dinner. Charlotte (that’s what the C is for) was back for the third or fourth time since the restaurant opened, and she had no doubts about the caliber of what Virant is doing here— even as she was dismayed by that day’s news of the departure of Boka Group pastry chef Kady Yon for the Public Hotel, home to The Pump Room.

The menu, maddeningly, is divided into small, medium and large, though it was hard to see, either in price or the actual dishes, any particular difference between medium or large. We didn’t worry about it and instead focused on what we knew were Virant’s strengths. A silky pork pate had its fattiness precision-cut by the sweetness of Virant’s housemade strawberry jam. Something called Ted’s Cornmeal Cake— Ted’s Cornmeal is apparently sold by Three Sisters at the Green City Market— combined crumbly cornmeal and gooey burrata into a dish that seemed like decadence on a farm in Iowa. A robustly smokey lamb andouille sausage was combined with small shrimp and cabbage cooked in a complexly flavorful broth. Gnocchi were too soft, almost mashed-potatoey for me, but a dish of smoked short ribs with pickled onions and spaetzle was terrific, like if barbecue had a baby by a German soldier.

Before dinner I told Kevin Boehm that one of the things I liked about GT Fish & Oyster was that it was priced, and had an atmosphere, where everything didn’t have to be perfect to make you happy. I’m not sure any restaurateur ever quite hears something like that as a compliment, but when everyone’s raving about a restaurant where you have to slam the computer keys to get in at all, and price and expectations are high enough that anything below perfection will disappoint, something about the relaxation of fine dining has gone out the window. And what I liked about GT is also one of the things I liked about Perennial Virant— I felt I could come back here next week, have a bunch of new things, and be just as happy with what I had that night. There’s no pressure on me as a diner to love it or else; the love for great ingredients at Perennial Virant is generous, unconditional love.

Disclosure: I was a media guest at the Quickfire, and chatted with both Virant and Kevin Boehm at different points in the evening, but paid for my entire dinner.

So after spending much of the week debating the morality of the $6 tamale, I knew that I would have to go back to Green City Market and try the savory ones that everyone was raving about and at least some people considered worthy of the $6 price tag.

I approached the stand carefully, scanning it to see if a blurry photo of me with “DO NOT SERVE” was tacked up anywhere. Actually, they shouldn’t be too upset with me, considering the number of people I know who twitted something this morning about going to get “$6 tamales.” Blogging about overpricing— the new way to boost your business!

The coast was clear and after a brief wait in line, I was the proud owner of $12 worth of tamales. I will note that a woman came up, said “They’re six dollars— for one?”, and left while I was standing there.

Though it’s possibly the least appetizing-looking thing I’ve eaten in some months, I liked the spicy (hardly) chorizo one quite a bit. The chorizo had good flavor, there were some bits of zucchini mixed in, and best of all the grease from the chorizo had soaked into the masa in an especially appealing way.

The brisket one had the rich flavor of pot roast and the toothsomeness of masa… but that was kind of all it had. I wanted another flavor note to sneak in there— like the spices that would have been added to a Mexican pork one at a $1.50 tamale place.

I liked these pretty well, but I still found them a little small and sparse (if there’s anything you can be generous with, it’s zucchini in July), and I can’t say I see spending $6 on them regularly. Maybe it’s just me and tamales, which I think are fine, but would not rank among my favorite things, partly because of the soft, no-teeth-needed texture, which doesn’t appeal to me all that much in general (when Kennyz was raving about how well the polenta was cooked at Davanti, I just sort of nodded, yeah, whatever, it’s polenta). I’ve certainly heard from enough tamale-lovin’ folks this week to believe that Las Manas is doing something right for somebody— I’m just not them.

Tags: green city market, Las Manas, tamales

Scott Harris is an American who built a fantasy Italy for Italian food. Giuseppe Tentori is an Italian who built a fantasy America for Japanese food.

This, at least, is my initial glib impression of two of the past year’s more celebrated new spots from known restaurateurs.

I think I’ve eaten at the Francesca chain once or twice, not in a long time, and not with enough excitement that I have hurried back. Scott Harris’ sudden intensive interest in Taylor Street— he opened Aldino’s, he closed Aldino’s, he opened Davanti Enoteca and Doughboys pizza joint, he reopened the old red sauce joint Gennaro’s and had to change its name to Salatino’s, and I don’t even remember what the story was on a Taylor Street Nella Pizzeria Napoletana— was more interesting if slightly unnerving in its drive to conquer. Except maybe for a couple of old places, Taylor Street is more a tourist strip than an authentic Italian neighborhood, so I wasn’t particularly worried that he’d lose the “character” of a street marked at one end by a giant mall-style Pompei. I liked that he was trying a lot of different things there to sort of give the plastic neighborhood a more varied character, and not just trying to launch new concepts.

Though you could be forgiven for looking at Davanti Enoteca and thinking it came out of a kit marked “Italian restaurant, model 1998.” The cutesy brick interior with pizza oven and Italian movie posters in the bathroom (I found the placement of Klaus Kinski disturbing) and so on really had the look of mall Italian. Nor was it all that impressive that before opening it, Harris and his partners and chef and taken a tour of major Italian food regions… in America. As some smartass wrote at Grub Street, “Hmm, what Italian-food-producing region of the globe is missing from that list?” Davanti Enoteca seemed like a place with its eyes lifted right to the middle.

But damn if it isn’t better than its Buca di Macaroni Garden looks. (Okay, that’s a low blow, it doesn’t look like Buca, there are no framed photos of Vic Tayback and Joey Travolta.) As my dining companion observed (you can read his whole take here), they seem to have put together kind of a menu of greatest hits from Mario Batali and other name chefs here, but the quality and modest pricing certainly don’t disgrace the inspiration, far from it. The best thing we had, a seafood pasta, cost about 2/3 what a seafood pasta I had at Lupa cost, and was probably about 2/3 as good which is very good indeed. It merely had crab in it, not something as novel as bottarga, but the pasta had the right texture and the saucing was not too heavy and it was pretty much everything you’d hope it would be at that price. Other things showed similar precision— meatballs bore the heck out of me, but the ones on our plank of polenta goo had real complexity, and a dessert with farro and cream was just sweet enough and no more.

Is there some sort of genius reverse psychology behind the lines Davanti draws every night, a Vizzini-the-Sicilian level insight that “People will only go to an Italian place if they are convinced it won’t be too exotic by seeing transparently faux decor— but because they’re Chicagoans, they know that only a place serving superior food could get away with suburban-level decor, and so the decor’s fakiness is proof that the food must be for real”? It’s as good a theory as any for how such admirable food wound up in this look.

* * *

The first time I ate at Boka, I wasn’t wowed by Giuseppe Tentori’s Asian-tinged food, delicate fishes topped with citrusy notes and whatnot. The second time I was; the one thing I remember of that meal was a bento box of different Asian seafood bites that was like a magical treasure chest with one surprise after another. (I also remember that there were 12 of us and only I was so transported by it. Philistines!) So when Tentori and Boka Group announced plans to open GT Fish & Oyster Bar, other people may have seen a rival to Shaw’s for business lunch for the big fishes, but I mainly saw a chance for that delicate, Japanese-influenced hand with seafood to shine. GT may put on the upscale Yankee crab shack look (it’s actually quite smart, a cross between Ye Olde Crabbe Shanty and Little Black Dress), but at its best it’s that light hand with the delicate flavors of seafood that makes it, for a Kansan still learning to appreciate seafood in all its variety, a place I want to return for continuing education, for glimpses of oceanic transcendence.

Only the chicest New England sailors use black rope.

The delicate hand was best seen in the first things we had. I keep trying oysters to see why people like oysters, and I keep getting closer to understanding; the simplicity and purity of these icy, evanescently briny invertebrates was bracing. (This is as good a place as any to disclose that one of our party knows Tentori well and we were sent a few extra things, including some of the oysters.)

While a clam chowder, not really what I planned on having in late June until peer pressure won me over, was a beautiful example of upscale-restaurant soup, a clean broth, al dente bits of potato added just before serving, lots of clam, housemade oyster crackers that seemed to have been handcarved in the back:

Main courses I felt were more hit or miss. Many combined seafood with pasta and the pastas were admirably delicate and feathery. But I had crab-stuffed agnolotti with caviar in a coconut broth, and to me the sweet, syrupy coconut broth dominated the dish cloyingly; I had to let as much of it as I could drip off to reach what seemed a proper balance of the coconut sweetness and the salt of the caviar. You couldn’t complain about the lobster in the lobster roll, it overflowed with big, tender hunks of lobster. But it didn’t quite come together as a sandwich for me, maybe it was a little too upscale in conception for what is, after all, Maine’s answer to a Wisconsin bratwurst. Shaw’s gets the cheap eats side of the lobster roll better with a buttery toasted bun.

Desserts were, well, Tentorian in their similar directness and lack of frouf, like this panacotta with graham cracker crumbs and a little fresh fruit:

Even if I felt the meal was mixed, I’m okay with that, because I’m happy (especially at highly reasonable lunch prices) to go for the ride with Tentori and wait for the dishes that achieve that perfect zen simplicity of taste and perfect presentation. I’m also impressed that Boka Group, which could have been expected to replicate the big bold flavors and slammin’ downtown feel of its runaway hit Girl and the Goat, is capable of following it by reversing gears and opening a spot driven by subtlety and a chef’s very different personality— or that they’d even want to, instead of chasing a smash hit into the ground. In some ways they are Lettuce 2011, they have a similar conceptual golden touch at the moment, yet their places feel like their chefs and don’t have that overarching Lettuceness that turns up everywhere from Foodlife to Shaw’s. Shaw’s, with its clubby, wood and black leather big business feel, is a seafood restaurant I’ve always respected but never loved; I wasn’t its target. GT Fish & Oyster, with its lighter, more intellectual touch in every department, could even make me love oysters. Someday.

Tentori explains where seafood comes from to David Hammond.

Tags: Boka Group, Davanti Enoteca, giuseppe tentori, GT Fish & Oyster, Italian food, Scott Harris, seafood, Taylor Street

No new Key Ingredient this week as it’s the Reader’s Best of Chicago issue, but I have a few items in the best of— read them here, here and here. And— I had no idea until I saw it— I was nominated (but didn’t win) here. Actually, if you look at it, I started fully half the nominees, and have done work for the winner— hey, Audarshia, if you’re taking a vacation any time, I got ya covered…

Food trucks may be all the rage, but I’d like to put in a word for someone putting down food roots: Art Jackson, his wife Chelsea, her brother Morgan Kalberloh, his brother (Michael, I think), and the various other folks involved in the operation whose front face is Pleasant House Bakery. (They’re the subject of one of the best-of items mentioned above.) There’s a lot more to their whole operation than this modest cafe, but it’s the entry point, and one of my favorite new places to eat lunch, though it took me till yesterday to actually get there with a camera that had a battery in it (oops).

I first heard of Art when he commented on my very first video (here). We emailed back and forth about a subject that I had in mind for a video, urban foraging, and he wound up appearing in my 7th video, Eat This City, opposite forager extraordinaire Nance Klehm:

It was obvious that foraging wasn’t a stunt for Art, a way of punking the city, as it can be, but reflected a deep-felt belief that he should be growing and eating the fruits of his own neighborhood, even if that neighborhood was a gritty urban one like Pilsen. Fast-forward a couple of years, and that’s exactly what Art is doing:

This is Pleasant House the cafe, at 934 W. 31st St. The menu at the moment is short. There are three or four pot pies like the one above, maybe one pasty, some sides like mashed potatoes or, at the moment, English peas with mint, and some housemade sodas (the ginger is pretty great). There are also some English style meat products for sale most days, like bangers or back bacon, made by Darren who writes one of my favorite charcuterie blogs, Low on the Hog. (Bizarrely, he’s been in one of my videos too, albeit briefly— he was working at Leopold when it opened.) Bangers aren’t my favorite as a style, but I really liked the back bacon, if you see that, grab it.

There’s more to Pleasant House than this cafe— indeed, Pleasant House seems to be less a storefront than a state of mind. The name comes from Art’s grandfather’s farm in Yorkshire, but besides serving as the name of Art and Chel’s blog, it’s also come to stand for his parents’ farm west of Chicago, and the rapidly growing networks of vegetable plots on which they grow some of the vegetables they use (which was two when I wrote the Reader piece, but was already up to four by the time I had lunch there yesterday). It’s also their homemade soaps and beauty products, and will grow to include desserts one of these days, and… who knows what’s all in Art’s head, but he clearly has a vision, which he’s pursuing full time, of a sustainable life in which you grow what you use and you use the heck out of what you grow and try to be as self-sustaining with good and beautiful things as possible.

But how’s the food you ask? I’ve tried three of the savory pies. A steak and ale one is fine, but it’s what you expect, nice braised beef and vegetables. I say zip past that conservative choice and try the “chicken balti,” so bright with curry (and the coriander chutney that comes on the side) that just breaking it open released wafts of enticing aroma. But my favorite, indeed probably my favorite vegetarian thing in the city at the moment, is the kale and mushroom, as robust and comfy as a meat pie, but with all the self-congratulatory virtues of leafy green vegetables. A dish like this, and the vision and support system behind it, is what lifts Pleasant House’s savory pies way above the trend du jour (meat loaf, cupcakes) and makes it one of the great things in the city that is changing the way we eat. Eat this city at Pleasant House.

Pleasant House Bakery
934 West 31st Street
(773) 523-7437
http://pleasanthousebakery.com/

Two return visits:

I liked some of the things I had at Chizakaya, but was pretty sure one dinner there would do me. For one thing, it was a “small plates” place where the plates were so small that I had to eat most of the menu to be full, so there were few surprises left for a return visit. For another, I basically came out of that meal feeling that it wasn’t a serious way to eat— that I had noshed all evening on silly stuff (the scraps of chicken skin for $3 silliest of all) and had never eaten what a grownup would recognize as food.

But Mike, you say, you ate things on sticks at that yakitori place in New York and you loved it. What’s the difference? Good question, and I’m not sure why I can rave about one and feel so dubious about the other. I guess part of it is context— Yakitori Totto feels like a real Japanese bar, and we ate things real Japanese barflies ate, while Chizakaya feels like another Lakeview concept, and at some point I just wanted them to quit goofing on Japanese junk food and make a real plate of something. One dish that really felt like Japan in a bowl would have done the trick, maybe, but instead it was just greasy stuff on sticks all night. Tasty, some of it, but I didn’t respect it, or me, in the morning.

Then Michael Nagrant invited me to go try lunch there, lunch being focused on ramen and other soups or so the email from Tasting Table suggested (actually, it appears that they’ll pretty much make you anything on their menu at lunch, and the soups are just as available at dinner). We ordered two. One is based on oden, which is a broth with lots of things like fish balls to pick up and eat; this was sort of oden turned into a soba noodle soup, more noodles and broth, fewer things to pick up:

Mostly, this tasted like your typical udon soup, but there was a woodsy-buckwheaty note to it that was a little deeper and more evocative than the sweet, soy-broth flavor you usually get. For a few bucks more than, say, the udon at Mio Bento, it’s an upgrade, if not a radically better one.

The ramen was another story. Unlike some of my friends, I haven’t been to any of the hyperauthentic ramen places in L.A. or anywhere that have been scouted out by ramen bloggers, so if I say that this is the best ramen I’ve ever had, that’s not an opinion with a depth of experience behind it. But it was the best ramen I’ve ever had, the first ramen with the porky funk and the largeness of soul to make me understand why people wax so poetic about a noodle soup— why this is a dish capable of profundity. The organ-meaty funkiness of the broth and the velvety smoothness of the noodles, not to mention the sweet-salty porkiness of the slab of pork belly or two hidden in it, all made this a richer experience than I’d ever expected ramen to be. So Chizakaya, written off as lightly likable some months back, turns out to have more to it after all.

* * *

Nagrant had just been to the recently refurbished NoMi in the Park Hyatt, now under Chef Ryan LaRoche (who had been in the kitchen for a couple of years under longtime chef Christophe David), and I was going that night (with my wife, as guests of the restaurant <–disclosure), so I was eager to hear about his experience. He was impressed with LaRoche’s menu, which within the constraints of hotel dining (after the fancy exotic stuff, there’s a page devoted to plain cooking, for those who just want a steak or lobster) he felt was daring and inventive. He was less impressed with a service experience that left him worried that a top-drawer restaurant had gone too casual for its place in the world. (See the next issue of Chicago Social for more details, I guess.)

My only experience with NoMi was this special dinner, which gave a nice picture of the expertise in the kitchen but clearly not of everyday dining there. But at least it meant I had context for how the renovation, if not radically changing the space, had taken it from a borderline-sepulchral high end art museum feel to a jazzier 60s fantasy-airport lounge look. The kitchen was now open to the room, with a busy raw bar at one end and the de rigueur hood ornament of the modern kitchen, the red Berkel slicer, right out in the room:

LaRoche’s past experience includes Tru and L’Atelier Robuchon, but from his menu, he seems pretty eclectically devoted to most of the major virtues you want to see on a menu right now. There was housemade prosciutto as well as an unabashed shoutout to Benton’s Country Ham on the menu, while asparagus, rhubarb and especially peas all played prominent roles on the menu at this moment. The first thing we had, the unassumingly named “avocado toast,” was the kind of combination that could provoke a loud WTF?, prosciutto and creamy uni, sea urchin:

The first bite I had, unfortunately, tasted only of the spicy mustard on the toast, but the next bite delivered all the promise of the dish— saltiness coming not from the sea creature but from the ham, a lushly gooey mouthfeel with just the cleanest hint of the sea coming from the uni… score one for the bizarre-sounding combination, with bonus points for the fact that my wife, who I’m sure has never gulped down a slimy-looking uni shooter like I have, ate one of sushi’s best-known dare foods without even knowing it was anything to be grossed out by.

A salad with more of the prosciutto and chili-tinged shrimp seemed less inspired, but some pea ravioli with feta and little bits of pickled rhubarb was exactly the ultra-light spring dish you should have at this moment. Then there was our entree— the $75 chicken, which has drawn comment from several who have looked at the new menu. We ran into sommelier Aaron Sherman (whom I first met some years ago at Avenues) on the way out, and he said one of the things they had done with the wine list was thin out the most extravagant and absurdly expensive things on it— but still, if you have a need to drop $2200 on a bottle of Romanee-Conti, a reason why your business would be best served by spending that money, it’s on there.

Likewise, the menu has three increasingly extravagant shared dishes— a whole chicken, a whole lobe of foie gras, and a whole steer— no, not quite, but some crazily huge hunk of beef, on an ascending scale from $75 to, I think, $190.  Nagrant had goaded me to at least find out what could make the chicken worth $75— especially since it comes from T.J.’s at the Green City Market, from whom I’ve bought many things including a few Thanksgiving turkeys. I’m sure their chicken is as good a candidate as any to be glorified into a $75 chicken, but what happens between the market and my plate that makes it into such a remarkable beast?

Yet $75 for two was really not more than any other pair of entrees, so we didn’t feel that we were sticking the hotel too rapaciously by ordering it and finding the answer to the mystery of this chicken. Well, in short, if they have trouble getting people to pay that for it, maybe they can have it underwritten by the American Sous-Vide Equipment Manufacturer’s Association, because it was a marvelous advertisement for the ability of sous vide cooking to turn out meat that is uniquely velvety, sensuously soft and delicate. There was a truffle sauce poured over the top, surely helping sell the price, and it sat on a vegetable “marmalade” (which I take to mean, cooked long enough to develop their sweetness; it certainly wasn’t jam-like), but really, all that chicken needed was its own meltingly soft and silky self to wow you and leave you making little gurgle noises of enchantment. It was certainly the best fine-dining chicken I can recall having… since the last time I dropped a wad to get a chicken just to see what made that chicken worth so much more than other chickens, a poulet Bresse at Alain Ducasse in Paris.

The new pastry chef is Meg Galus, who came over from Cafe des Architectes.  I have to say I respected the desserts more than I loved them.  Actually,  I liked mine, a rhubarb soup with ginger marshmallows and lemon gel in it, a lot; light, imaginative… it’s just it’s the sort of thing that should be a small shooter on a tasting menu.  Working my way through an entire bowl of red punch and marshmallows, the novelty ran out before it was done.  While the chocolate mousse was well executed, but I was waiting for some spin on it and the bland ice cream (vanilla? not sure) wasn’t it.

And as for the service?  For us, it hit just the right note, friendly and easygoing but conscientious throughout (I felt like I had hurt the bread guy’s feelings when I turned down his offer at one point, as he appeared the instant I stopped chewing the previous roll).  NoMi, perhaps a bit intimidating in the past, is aiming to be more accessible, and at least for us on our night, it hit the balance pretty well.

Tags: aaron sherman, chizakaya, hyatt, izakaya, meg galus, nomi, noodles, oden, prosciutto, ramen, ryan laroche, soba, sous vide, uni