Abby Mandel, who spearheaded the creation of Green City Market, and who had been generally known in the food community to be battling cancer for the past year, died this morning— fittingly, while the market was open and busy with growing things and customers.  Melissa Graham, of Purple Asparagus and the Market’s membership chair, has an especially nice remembrance here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My wife bought a box of these cards. Someone at Topps decided it would be smart business to make a complete set of cards under the name of the original baseball card company, celebrating… totally random stuff like the Battle of Thermopylae, James Fenimore Cooper, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Someone at Topps is on crack.

And I have trouble getting mildly clever ad headlines through a couple of layers of management.

I mentioned the TribStew giving P&P BBQ Soul Food some love after my Reader piece, now there’s a segment at Metromix (no direct link; go here, look for the video section), which I assume comes from TribCo’s CLTV, in which a guy with spiked up hair says Wow! about P&P before turning it over to a gal with cleavage to visit and say double yum!

This is why my video podcasts are not like that. But hey, it shows my kids and I are now not the only white people to have eaten there, and hopefully it’ll do them some good.

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

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

Fishing poles were also new to me:

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

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

Homemade noisemakers for every taste:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retroactively declared #3 in my 50 new restaurants challenge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pita Grill
6604 N. Sheridan
773-465-3466

Retroactively declared #2 in my 50 new restaurants challenge.

I am informed that the Maxwell Street tour this Sunday, which I cited as a rare example of a recent moderator-planned event on LTHForum, is in fact also part of the elaborate eGullet festivities for which LTHForum moderators are providing extensive planning and logistical support.

There are no LTHForum moderator-planned events for LTHForum users for the entire period from late June (when there was a dinner at Sun Wah) to early September (the LTHForum picnic).  Sky Full of Bacon regrets the error.