This will be a restaurant review in a moment, but first a couple of words about upcoming videos.  (Or skip to the second photo below.) It’s been nearly two months since the Hoosier Mama video, but your Sky Full of Bacon correspondent has been busy and two, count ’em two, pieces should be up shortly, both of which, oddly enough, involve subjects skirting the edge of modern American food safety bureucracy.

The first, which should be up later this week, will be kind of a cool collaboration with my buddy David Hammond, who does little audio documentaries about food for WBEZ. In this case, David was interested in non-aged raw milk cheeses, which are illegal in this country because of supposed health risks (which somehow manage not to kill millions of Frenchmen every year), and he connected with a woman named Coleen Graham who makes raw milk cheese at home. (I hasten to point out that Coleen does not sell cheese, raw milk or otherwise; she just makes them for consumption amongst friends, which is legal, assuming you buy the raw milk in a neighboring state where it’s legal.) So David invited me along to Coleen’s house in November to shoot the process of making cheese at home. That’s as far as my video goes, but a few weeks later we went to a wine bar in Itasca to taste the cheeses and see if we could tell the difference between raw milk and pasteurized camembert, and so you’ll be able to watch the video, and then get the rest of the story from David in a radio piece on WBEZ’s Worldview next Monday, February 15th. UPDATE: moved to February 22.

The second is, as promised at the end of the last video, a remembrance of Healthy Food, the last surviving Lithuanian restaurant in Bridgeport. Lithuanian Chicago is little remembered today, but at one time (c. 1920s) there were more Lithuanians in Chicago than in any city in Lithuania, and Healthy Food, which opened in 1938, was the oldest surviving Lithuanian restaurant in the world. Healthy Food was one of the places on my mental list of places I thought about doing a video about someday, so when I heard that there were closing within the week last December, I raced down there and basically camped out for a couple of days, interviewing the owner and staff and— this was the coup— filming the making of kugelis, the baked potato-bacon pudding that is Healthy Food’s signature dish.  Why was this a coup?  Well, let’s just say that there are certain old world cooking practices involved which the owner said she didn’t let previous camera-toting visitors like Steve Dolinsky film, for fear of attracting unwanted Health Dept. attention.  But since she was planning to close in a few days anyway, she said what the hell, and so I document the making of kugelis in all its pre-modern glory.  If the result frightens you… well, it’s closed anyway, so you not only don’t have to eat it, you can’t.

That piece will be up in a couple of weeks, which brings us to the restaurant review…

To finish it up I needed some shots of the now-defunct Lithuanian shopping strip in Marquette Park on 69th street, which is labeled “Lithuanian Plaza” although since the closing of Lithuanian Plaza Bakery & Deli a couple of years ago, it in fact has no functioning Lithuanian businesses left (at least that were apparent in daytime; hard to tell with some that might still be taverns).  In doing a little research ahead of time I discovered that there was still one remaining Lithuanian restaurant in the city, two blocks south on 71st street.  (There are more in the south suburbs, including a new branch of Lithuanian Plaza Bakery & Deli.)

Reading the one LTH post by Rene G, Seklycia sounded elderly bordering on sepulchral, its entrance disguised to the crime-ridden neighborhood around it (note his photo of the sign cryptically promising “Lithuanian Human Services”), a buzzer allowing admittance to the few who know.  I envisioned the last, preserved-in-amber holdout against the waves of change that had integrated Marquette Park in the 1960s.  Marquette Park’s place in the turmoil of the 60s is usually depicted one-dimensionally, Martin Luther King versus white racists, but I could certainly imagine sympathy for the ethnic immigrants who had created a little neighborhood of their own in pursuit of the American dream, only to see bigger historical forces blow it away.  (I mean, it’s not like Lithuania has any history of being wiped off the map or anything.)  It seemed as if I was coming to the most obscure restaurant in the most obscured ethnic enclave in Chicago, and I fully expected a cobwebbed, funny-smelling grandma’s house atmosphere to match, like Zakopane or the like.

In fact, Seklycia is nothing much like that at all.  The cryptic sign is down, replaced by the jaunty message above, and there’s no bell to ring to go in.  (The neighborhood doesn’t seem bad at all, frankly— mostly daycare centers.) The dining room could be any modest cafe in a small town, and a waitress several decades below 80 cheerfully took my order as modern American pop music played on a tinny radio.  Figuring this was likely to be my one shot here, I ordered the $7.99 Lithuanian combo.  It started with bread, continued with a huge bowl of beet soup (which tasted a bit French oniony, as in, there might be a package of onion soup mix in there) accompanied by a boiled potato, and then— I was nearly full by this point already— proceeded to a massive plate of kugelis (fluffier than Healthy Food’s, quite good), sausage (overcooked and not that interesting; definite win for Healthy Foods here), sweetish sauerkraut (just fine and improved the sausage immeasurably), and a terrifyingly large “zeppelin,” a big wad of ground pork meat inside a 3/4″ football-shaped shell of gooey potato dough, which I could barely face at all— it was like some form of mutant dim sum.  Lunch concluded with tapioca pudding, which I enjoyed shamelessly.  All in all, the meal was just fair, and not a replacement for Healthy Food, but clearly there are at least some good things on the menu.

It was when I went to the bathroom that I discovered that in fact my original preconception of Seklycia wasn’t entirely wrong— the next room was the grandmotherly holdout against history that I had expected the whole restaurant to be, with old ladies playing cards or knitting at tables and, interestingly, a “Bibliothek” full of Lithuanian books.  I no longer saw it as sad and a bit gothic, though.  As the sign says, Seklycia is about 20 years old— which means it’s really not a remnant of the old Marquette Park community but a new business, relatively.  Someone saw the neighborhood as it was in the late 80s, long after all the turmoil and the “white flight” and the irreversible emigration of Lithuanian Chicago to the suburbs, and still had faith enough in it to open a restaurant and make it a kind of center for what community remained.  I find that kind of heroic, and if you ever find yourself in that area, or feel like making a trek to an obscure corner of the south side, you could do worse than to offer Seklycia a little support— and, as the sign says, enjoy Lithuanian gasp.

Seklycia
2711 W 71st St
Chicago
773-476-1680

I have seen the future, and it works from home.

Or at least from a cute little sandwich shop in Roscoe Village.

So I read there was this new Hawaiian cafe in my neighborhood, Roscoe Village. Hawaiian? I realize that the stereotype, that the main ethnic type in Roscoe Village is Strollermom-American, is well founded, but there’s a reason nearly all the Turkish restaurants in town are within walking distance of me, too, to name one other socio-ethnic group, and so I guess I thought it was possible that there were Hawaiians with a hitherto unsuspected desire for Spam musabi in the vicinity. So I walked up, and saw the day’s special:

Uh, yeah, Hawaiian. Turns out the name was just chosen for its new-agey visualize-your-inner-beach qualities, and otherwise, this is a sandwich shop targeting, yes, Stroller Mom America. It’s attractive, it’s low-key (so no death metal will come on the iPod and wake Baby), the stuff is tame and fairly fresh… and the meats are all, Proudly, from Boar’s Head. Which is when I realized another thing: someone had posted something on LTHForum about a place in my hood selling charcuterie, which had picked up a fryer on the cheap from the late Kaze down the street.  And this was it.  At that moment, my visions of a Salumi-level charcuterie mecca disappeared down a Boar’s Head’s gullet; it’s not that Boar’s Head is bad, exactly, it’s a supermarket brand and it’s one of the better ones, but all that means is, it’s processed to still resemble what it came from, it’s not totally fakey. But it’s not fresh-roasted turkey from Paulina, either, and there are places, like Wicker Park’s Birchwood Kitchen, that don’t just settle for the obvious marketing support you get if you commit to a full Boar’s Head program, but insist on real, fresh (or in the case of La Quercia, cured) food.  And I didn’t just get one of those two minutes from my house.

That said, nothing says you have to eat the things that use Boar’s Head meat-like meat™, and so looking around the menu of fairly light, very white food, I spotted a chicken salad sandwich.  It had asparagus spears in it, which was a nice touch.  It had a lot of lettuce and mayo mixed in, it was clean-tasting rather than especially interesting, if not for the asparagus and the rosemary bread it would have been bland, but (this is the dirty secret of my life as a food explorer) there are plenty of days when I just have to grab something on my street, none of which is going to lead to shouting great discoveries from the rooftops.  So I will be happy just to have this place making fresh, decent food within walking distance.

In any case, what interested me most about this place, as I sat there, wasn’t the food.  Like a lot of people, I think my reaction to Apple’s announcement of the iPad last week was somewhat contradictory: on the one hand, it seems a bit underwhelming, but on the other… I can’t help but feel, and hope, that this oversized iPod Touch is an important first step toward whatever the next thing computing will be is.  It’s a little glimpse of the future, even if it doesn’t quite do much that’s new yet.

Across from me there was a large table.  Two women sat there, with laptops, working.  Next to them was a kid’s table.  Sunlight streamed in the window.  Soft music played overhead.  They nibbled at their food.  We imagine that the future will be shiny, metallic, vaguely fascist in a nice way.  We imagine a future in which all of life is sort of like the Air Force Academy, basically, modernist and hyperorganized:

But in reality, this is the future for which Steve Jobs is creating the iPad, and it’s already here: Mom sitting at a table, doing her work while somebody else is making her lunch, just as when she was a kid herself, and drew at a table while her mom made her lunch.  Or maybe she wasn’t drawing; maybe she was using an Etch-a-Sketch.

Aloha, 21st century.

Nohea Cafe
2142 W. Roscoe
(773) 935-7448
noheacafe.com

A jibarita at La Bombonera.

I haven’t posted one of my 50 Places Not Talked About on LTHForum for a while, because most of my new places in the last few months were those 14 supermercado taquerias I posted about the other day. And while there were probably enough new places on that list to get me to 50, it would have been boring to finish off the list in one post.

But that doesn’t mean I had my eyes shut all that time.  In fact, I noted a number of places as I was scouting out the supermercados, including several new Cuban or South American places on the northwest side.  One of them, I found interesting enough that it turned into a blog post at the Reader, so go read it there.

In the meantime, a quick followup to my Bolzano Meats post: take some thin slices of guanciale.  Heat in microwave for about a minute, to sweat some fat out.  Dice and place on pizza:

I don’t know if there was such a thing as guanciale pizza before, surely there was, but I was very happy with my possibly-not-original invention.  P.S. Just did a search, should have guessed.  Mozza, whose menu is visible in the entrance at La Quercia, has a LaQuercia guanciale pizza.

Back in the day, when the “auteur theory” stressing the director as the primary creator of a movie was a hot topic, film buffs squared off into two camps, the auteurists (or “Sarrisites,” named for Andrew Sarris of the Village Voice) and the anti-auteurists or Paulettes, named for Pauline Kael, who had made both herself and Sarris well known by attacking him in a lengthy essay. A story Kael told summed up the difference in their attitudes: an auteurist said to her “I can’t imagine Howard Hawks making a bad film!” to which Kael replied, “Go see Red Line 7000,” which was Hawks’ latest picture and playing at that moment in theaters. Kael was clearly sensitive to directors and the degree to which producer-directors like Hawks shaped their films; she certainly would have agreed with any discussion which focused on, say, the consistent role of strong women in Hawks’ films, from Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday to Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep to Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo, for instance, as evidence that there was such a thing as A Film By Howard Hawks.

But what she didn’t believe was that having a strong personality in filmmaking guaranteed that your next movie would be any good. Hawks made a number of movies which are clearly his but which simply don’t measure up, every artist does. Kael was a great resister of orthodoxy, of anyone telling her that she had to like something because she ought to like it, and for her, being told that you had to like a movie because it was a Douglas Sirk or an Otto Preminger was no better than being told you had to like it because it was about an important dogooder subject like race relations. Every movie was up for judgement on its own, to either please you or not by itself.

What prompted all this was a thread at LTHForum about Jimmy’s Red Hots, a kind of ratty, somewhat scary (the countermen are rumored to pack heat) hot dog stand on the west side that is undeniably full of character— they’re rabidly anti-ketchup (they don’t carry the stuff), food is served in whatever paper bags they got cheap (which may well mean Burger King bags, say), there are guys selling bootleg CDs and DVDs out front, and so on. Now, all this is charming as hell to us connoisseurs of urban decay, but I’m sure it won’t surprise anyone that a business that is ramshackle physically can also be inconsistent in the product it turns out.

Oh, but wait, it does surprise some, so much in fact that it’s unimaginable. Never mind the reports of overboiled, inferior skinless dogs at times, or flavorless fries at other times, not fried in the claimed beef tallow, all from respected posters (including myself). One could never imagine that a place using Chicken Delite bags that fell off a truck would ever use a lower grade of hot dog for a week or two because they got a deal! The Jimmy’s partisans, having declared what Jimmy’s should be, then insist that that is what it always is, who do you believe, me or your lying tastebuds, and go so far as to question the basic intelligence of the people who went to Jimmy’s as to whether they even went to the right place.

I suppose there’s something to savor in the fact that this degree of orthodoxy is being established not to protect a Trotter or a Bayless but on behalf of something as lowly as a ghetto hot dog stand. Still, orthodoxy is the enemy of open minds, now and always, and never so much as in discussions of something as mutable as restaurants. There should never be untouchable restaurants, restaurants that, because you liked them in 1998, must still be good today— especially if you, personally, are no longer out there tasting as widely and knowledgeably as you once were. Set up a shelf of your favorite places that are untouchable, and you make it impossible for others to see new things that might well be better. If George Stevens is unquestionably a great director and Shane established forever as the great western, you keep people from seeing Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher, who each made at least two or three greater westerns than Shane in the same decade.

And that’s antithetical in every way to the spirit of open inquiry. It’s like a reporter being on the take; he’s no longer capable of seeing and reporting things clearly. And The Untouchables knew what fate lay in store for reporters who don’t report on the level.

As for me, if I want a great hot dog and fries and real Chicago atmosphere, I go to 35th St. Red Hots. It’s always good, you can count on it. Trust me.

35th St. Red Hots
500 W 35th St
Chicago, IL
60616-3508
(773) 624-9866

So some years ago, a guy who had experience under one of the most respected chefs in town went out on his own and opened a comfort food restaurant, which I have expressed love for on many occasions.  It was in an unpretentious suburb (Burbank), had his name and a picture of a pig on its sign, and in general, it looked and felt like exactly the place in which you expect to get comfort food like chicken-fried chicken with mashed potatoes, sage gravy, and green beans with bacon bits for about $8.99.

Even if Chuck Pine occasionally shows his Bayless background by making artisanal-Mexican hybrid dishes like Mexican Pot Roast, he’s firmly within what we would call The Comfort Food Paradigm, which is to say, unpretentious, a little affectation of down hominess and honky tonk good times, easy to like flavors, modest prices— in short, nothing that Grandma wouldn’t recognize as food.

*  *  *

So two guys who had experience under some of the most respected chefs in the world, Thomas Keller and Grant Achatz to be specific, now turn up in a sleekly modern yet welcoming space in Lincoln Park, Kith & Kin.  And they start serving comfort food in something of a fine dining atmosphere, sometimes with French words or the names of pork breeds on the menu (though in general it’s very light on the ingredient-genealogy thing).  In some ways they’re fitting The Comfort Food Paradigm, in some ways they’re breaking it wide open.  A lot of people are loving it.

Me… some of it impressed me, some of it left me thinking, is that it?  Is comfort food enough when you’re performing on this stage, or should we expect more?  Does the mere fact of being in this fine dining atmosphere, in this neighborhood and with these resumes, oblige you to play at the more elaborate games of teasing and subverting expectations and expanding minds that seem to be de rigeur for fine dining these days?  Can you look like The Hot New Chicago Restaurant Paradigm and serve food like The Comfort Food Paradigm at the same time?

Or am I just asking questions that no else wants the answers to?

Before you answer that, let me walk through a couple of dishes.  One that’s received a lot of acclaim is the fried confit chicken thighs, and this is a good example of how a deceptively simple dish— fried chicken, dumplings, gravy— can have a lot of technique and work behind it which produce incrementally more wonderful results.  Doing chicken as confit produced dark meat that had reduced halfway to a jerky texture in some ways, yet still had the juiciness and crispiness of fried chicken, set off simultaneously by salty gravy and skin, the fluffy blandness of dumplings, and the bitterness of some brussels sprouts.  The technique and balance of this dish were impeccable, redefining the very idea of chicken and dumplings as a dish.

But if you’re redefining dishes, are you still in a comfort food zone?  At the very least, you’re pushing it to the edge of comfort, but with great success in this case.  At the same time, though, my wife had short ribs in a traditional veal stock-wine braise.  A classic dish, executed very well… and exactly as any nice French restaurant might make it, or would have made it in 1920, or indeed, as I’ve made it at home.  You got a problem with that?  Not exactly, but if I’m again expecting something as revelatory as the fried chicken thighs, I’m left waiting for the punchline.

Or is that just me?  Maybe.  But that’s how I felt about the meal— constantly wondering, should I just be happy to be comforted, or do I want my comfort nudged to the next level?  A salad was another good example— pecans and blue cheese and some poached pears could be in a salad anywhere, there’s one not entirely unlike it at California Pizza Kitchen, but not many places would use lightly grilled escarole, softening its texture and sharpening its taste; a wonderfully simple but refined touch.  But hardly safe or expected, if that’s supposed to go with the comfort territory.

On the other hand the pork “crock,” a spreadable pork pate, was pleasant enough (we ate it all) but it hardly seemed memorable as pate goes; here’s where Kith & Kin seemed timid next to the Mados and Bristols and Purple Pigs.  (The LTHer who damned it as being like Underwood deviled ham wasn’t being that cruel.)  Likewise, one dessert pulled off the highwire act with great success despite an executional error— an olive oil cake, served a little hard and cold, but beautifully balanced with a lush orange-vanilla ice cream; the other played it safe (fresh churros with a chocolate ganache to dip in) and was appropriately choco-decadent, but no more.  Again, the one that tickled the mind, too, made the one that merely pleased the belly look a little small.

It could be that Kith & Kin is exactly what it wants to be— sometimes ingeniously innovative, often simply a nicer version of Stanley’s Kitchen & Tap.  An audience for what it is has clearly found it, and so maybe everyone will just live happily ever after and not every meal has to be overthought like I’m doing right now.  But I liked the Kith & Kin that pushed my comfort zone so much more than the one that comforted me and no more, that I think it’s almost a shame if you have that ability and don’t use it to the fullest.  Enjoy your success, Kith & Kin— but don’t get comfortable.

Kith & Kin
1119 West Webster
Chicago, IL 60614
(773) 472-7070

I took down my sopressata today and tasted it again. A month ago when I tried it, it really didn’t seem like it was working at all. There was a kind of unpleasant tang and none of the pleasant funkiness that means a sausage has achieved the balance of flavors that curing is aiming for. Not spoiled, just unpleasurable.

Today, it’s certainly better. It tastes like sausage. The reactions I’ve been waiting for must have happened. That said, it’s far from a success. For one thing, I begin to wonder if we got the proportions of spices off. Because it’s very salty and very spicy and very clovey. I wonder if it didn’t get a double dose of everything.

The leg meat it comes from also doesn’t cut as neatly as the shoulder meat that went into the other. It doesn’t have the unified sausageyness that the saucisson sec has.

All that said, it’s undoubtedly better than it was. I just wouldn’t call it a success I’m in a hurry to apply the remaining several pounds of ground leg and fat to.

I also weighed the coppa again, it’s down to 620 grams, over a 40% loss. No funny things growing on it, smells great. I put it back up to hang while I try to find some form of consensus as to how long it should hang— two months so far, but I’m happy to keep it going for more if the flavors will continue to develop.

1. Apropos of Chaise Lounge reconcepting as The Southern, I was going to mention chef Cary Taylor’s new blog, but then there was this whole list of links to Chicago chefs who blog, from Ellen Malloy, so check ’em all out.
2. Jonathan Gold gives some smart tips on how to find good authentic ethnic food starting about 15 minutes into this Good Food episode:

There’s also an interesting bit on home charcuterie around 50 minutes in.
3. Department of Pushing the Envelope #1: Kennyz (headcheese taster in SFOB #4) contributes a quease-inducing post on frying up a big batch of bull testicles for dinner…
4. Department of Pushing the Envelope #2: Saucisson Mac tries to make andouillete, the French sausage made of intestines stuffed in intestine (I had it once in France; tasted fine till it cooled to the consistency of surgical tubing) and, well, he won’t be making that again.
5. You’ve probably run across this (parody) video on how to make a perfect cup of coffee, which has some laugh-out-loud moments, but just in case you haven’t…

How to Brew a Good Cup of Coffee from Ben Helfen on Vimeo.

6. Lots of macaron porn at the blog Paris Breakfasts, just keep scrolling till you see yet another geometric arrangement of brightly-colored cookies.  The post on the Paris flood of 1910 is pretty cool, too.
7. CHOW chows xiao long bao— without spilling. It’s amazing watching how fast this guy can seal them up by hand:

If you’re looking for something to do this Saturday night… it’s time for the annual Delafield, Wisconsin raccoon feed, chronicled in Sky Full of Bacon #9.  My friend Cathy Lambrecht, who has been the Coon Feed’s leading Chicago booster and publicist, has a piece about how it all started in the north shore editions of the Tribune today; you can read it here. And here’s the video, if you haven’t seen it:

Sky Full of Bacon 09: Raccoon Stories from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

HC Monterrey, Playa del Carmen, Mexico.

The tourist district of Playa del Carmen was just a few blocks behind me, but already I was in a different Mexico, dusty and built out of crumbling plaster. I couldn’t see it ahead, the place I’d heard about, but suddenly I could smell it, sizzling beef on the air. I walked into the butcher shop and there was a counter where they sold the goods— but mainly there was a grill, the size of a double bed, smoke rising from it as a couple of guys with tongs threw long, jagged pieces of meat onto the grill. The smell of arrachera, skirt steak, was manly and primal, and a few dollars’ worth of pesos bought me a hunk of still sizzling meat with the barest of accompaniments— a baked potato and some limes. It was maybe the greatest beef experience of my life.

*  *  *

Los Potrillos, Chicago.

Lots of grocery stores have a place to grab a bite in them, whether it’s slice pizza at Dominick’s or the full-fledged food court at the Kingsbury Whole Foods. But there’s a unique character to the taquerias inside Mexican markets— partly it’s that you can tell they want to show off the meat counter’s goods in the best light to encourage sales, like that butcher shop in Mexico did; partly it’s the social side, the fact that a market is something of a community gathering place, like a Mexican town square, especially on weekends when they expand their menus to include specials like birria and menudo.  Whatever the reason, they’re only about a million times livelier than their wan equivalents in American groceries, and they make for an immersive experience in Chicago’s Mexican culture.  In some ways they’re about the most authentic Mexican eating experiences in town, at least in the sense that they’re making the fewest concessions to the gringo trade in terms of menu items or English on the signage.

Taqueria Ricardo.

Which is not to say they’re all the same— in fact, they have many different characters and feels.  Some are big bustling cafeterias with lines of guisados (stews) or gorditas frying; others are like corner diners, a few stools lined up in front of a grillman as he works in a cloud of meat smoke.  Although tacos de carne asada, steak tacos, are the universally standard menu item and seem to account for half the business at any taqueria, beyond that there are plenty of regional variations which seem to suggest that Chicago’s Latino neighborhoods are in turn reflecting Mexican regional differences.  For instance, on the northwest side (which besides Mexicans includes many South Americans) rotisserie or grilled chicken is an important item, and a cafeteria line of guisados is often found.  While on the south side, handpatted tortillas (tortillas heche a mano) and skilled tortilla-makers visibly at work on the line are the center of attention.

Los Potrillos.

For the last few months, I’ve been scouting out and sampling supermercado taquerias around town whenever lunchtime presented me with the desire for Mexican food.  To be honest, I felt like I had fallen into a bit of a rut in my Mexican dining, eating at the same few places, a not uncommon ailment even among foodies, and this gave me an entire new subcategory, largely uncharted, to use to compel myself to try new places.  Only one Mexican supermercado taqueria is widely known in the Chicago foodosphere: Wicker Park’s Tierra Caliente, formerly Carniceria Leon, famous for some of the best tacos al pastor (the real kind, on the gyros-style cone) in town.  My initial thought was, here was an opportunity to find a place that might even surpass Tierra Caliente at the thing it’s famous for.  Ironically, that’s the one thing I didn’t really do; as it turns out, only one of the other supermercado taquerias I found actually serves pastor on a cone at all, and though it’s every bit as good as Tierra Caliente’s, I’m still happy to say that if you want pastor, Tierra Caliente is the logical place to try first.

Pastor spit at Taqueria Ricardo.

But I found so many other interesting things that it hardly mattered.  What follows below is my notes on more than a dozen supermercado taquerias all around town.  Typically, I tried carne asada tacos on the first visit, because that seemed an easy standard for comparison between places that cared enough to try harder and places that didn’t; but if there was any reason to think they emphasized something else, I tried that instead, and aimed in general to sample the various restaurants’ strengths.  (As has been noted on LTHForum, one of the challenges for these places is that since they’re cranking out food in quantity rather than to order, you have to time your visit well for the peak experience— for instance, steak tacos are best at lunch rush, when turnover is high and you have the best odds for getting steak fresh off the fire; but tacos al pastor are better a little off peak hour, when your meat has time to really crisp up in the gyros machine.  And of course, if there isn’t a gyros machine, take a pass on pastor— fried in a pan is common, but nowhere near as good.)

Carne asada tacos, Los Potrillos.

*  *  *

After I had compiled a list of about a dozen places or so, I arranged an LTHForum event at three of the best, which took place this past Saturday.  Besides wanting to introduce my finds to more people, I was eager to visit some of them in a larger party that would allow me to explore their menus in greater detail.  So if you’re interested in checking some of these taquerias out, I’d recommend these three first as not only three of the best but offering a good cross-section of the scene and what’s to be had at different places.  Our first stop was Los Potrillos:

This is a small taco grill that really does first-rate steak tacos, cecina tacos, etc., thanks to an excellent grillman who serves good quality meat hot and juicy off the grill in big, tender chunks.  We also ordered the consomme de chivo which had impressed me on an earlier visit, though it was kind of watery and not as exciting this time— maybe it would have been better after cooking down for another hour or two.  (The pot on which Consomme de Chivo is painted in big letters was curiously missing as well.)

Next was Taqueria Ricardo. Besides the best atmosphere (you wouldn’t necessarily know you were in a supermercado at all, as it’s pretty separate), a ramshackle riot of tile that suggests the over-the-top exuberance of Mexico, this has such an extensive menu that we wound up really having a full (very full) lunch here.  Chicken grilled over live fire was a star here, but so were pastor tacos served at the peak of grilled crispiness, an excellent green salsa-poblano tamale, a lively caldo de siete mares (soup of the seven seas) with a big langoustine plopped right in it, a weekend special of barbacoa de res, and more.  (Though one I wouldn’t recommend was David Hammond’s choice of pickled pig’s feet, which proved that there is a lot of fat and not much meat on a pig’s foot.)  This is really a great Mexican restaurant in both food and atmosphere, which deserves wider attention and discovery.

Taqueria Ricardo; above: chicken over heater, below: caldo de siete mares, pickled pigs’ feet.

Finally we headed down to La Villita to Carniceria Aguascalientes, which has a large cafeteria-style area built on the handmade gorditas that are its star attraction.  Pork in red and green salsas and a poblano-cheese filling all proved to be worthy fillings for the wonderfully warm and nurturing freshly-fried gorditas.

Thanks to all who came along with me on Saturday and I hope many more will follow in our footsteps, discovering one of the last frontiers of ethnic food experience in Chicago.  Now here’s my list:

FAR NORTH

Chapala Taqueria
7117 N. Clark
An attractive modern grocery whose taqueria stresses pollo asado al carbon, char-grilled chicken. It was indeed first-rate, with a subtly seasoned outside (not just Goya Sazon) and cooked well; carne asada was fine if not first-tier. Weekend specials, including carnitas and menudo, would be worth checking out.

Chapala Taqueria.

Supermercado Carreta
6906 N. Clark
If you have an elderly aunt who wants to try a supermercado taqueria, this one is easily the spiffiest and most friendly to the hygiene-obsessed in its area, and the menu pictures on the wall looked promising. But a gordita with carne asada was fatally bland, flavorless masa and the meat smothered in lettuce, chese and crema. Deserves another try from another part of the menu, but disappointing.

Supermercado Almita
5957 N. Clark
This little grocery with a tin ceiling and wooden shelves has a 1927-in-amber decrepitude that will either charm you or creep you out; I was charmed by the two ladies running it, watching Mexican soaps as one of them made me a homey, but perfectly decent, steak taco.

NORTHWEST

Taqueria Ricardo
4429 W. Diversey
Easily my favorite find to date; I can’t think of another Mexican restaurant in Chicago that so captures the ramshackle charm of Mexico itself, from the over the top tilework to the grill haphazardly stacked on top of its burning wood. The menu is wildly diverse, ranging from seafood to grilled chicken adobo and rabbit. Carne asada is good and the pastor is flavorful with lots of pineapple dripping down. Wood smoke means the chicken is outstandingly flavorful, and the presentation of a whole chicken on a metal stand is impressive. A milanesa torta was freshly fried and the bread was toasted, both good signs. Though the guisados were hit (chicken in green salsa) and miss (chicharron), a weekend special of barbacoa de res was excellent, and so was a tamale of poblano and cheese. Among the seafood items, the caldo de siete mares was very nice, impressively decked with a whole langoustine, but a shrimp cocktail, though the shrimp were of nice quality, was way too sweet. In summer I’ve also seen them grilling in the parking lot.

Los Potrillos
3624 W. Belmont
With religious iconography on the walls, this tiny taqueria has a real step-out-of-Chicago feel.  Good quality beef, cooked to be tender and juicy by an expert grillman, makes the carne asada tacos and cecina tacos some of the best in the city.  But my favorite find on my first visit was the weekend special of consomme de chivo, goat soup, which had big chunks of goat in a great ancho broth.

Carniceria Jimenez
3840 W. Fullerton/others
I can’t speak to other outposts of this grocery chain, but with its decor of old radios and vintage Mexican movie stars like Pedro Infante, this taqueria bizarrely comes off like the Burt’s Pizza of supermercado taquerias. For some odd reason I ordered a torta milanesa, which looked textbook-correct but was kind of less than the sum of its parts; the better looking things are the guisados.

Guisados at Carniceria Jimenez.

El Gigante
2500 N. Laramie
Not gigante at all, but this small market with a new taqueria has neon in the window to announce Barbacoa and Carnitas on weekends, which is promising. A weekday steak taco had good, tender beef, but was undercut by rubbery tortillas…

Carniceria y Taqueria La Loma
2535 N. Laramie
…while infinitely better tortillas were a strong point across the street; the steak seemed slightly cheaper (and cut to tiny bits) but it was greasy and salty in all the right ways. Pastor was given pride of place on the menu, so even though no cone was visible, I fell for it, and was reminded once again: If you don’t see a cone, leave the pastor alone!

El Gigante.

NEAR NORTH

Carniceria Guanajuato
Multiple locations
This grocery chain is one of the easiest supermercado taquerias to find, but I’ve never had anything at the taqueria I thought was better than okay, though I’m sure quality varies by location. Still, in the case of the 1436 N. Ashland location, it would be a shame to come here over Tierra Caliente.

Tierra Caliente
1402 N. Ashland
The former Carniceria Leon is the one supermercado taqueria widely known to gringo foodies, complete with Dolinsky icon.  It also has the highest ratio of taqueria to grocery, suggesting where their attention really lies.  The star attraction is unquestionably the pastor, which if you get it at the right moment (a little after lunch rush) is a perfect blend of crispiness and juiciness, and a contender for best in the city.  But LTHers have identified other notable items such as the gordita de chivo and weekend carnitas.

Danny’s Fresh Market
2140 N. Western
You’d think proximity to possibly the best steak tacos in the city, Las Asadas, would step up your game, but everything about Danny’s was dingy and tired; a pork guisado had the taste of seasonings that expired in 2005, and a steak taco came with purple (!) onion, lettuce tomato and mayo, giving it an unmistakable eau de Whopper.

Huarache at Laura.

Carniceria y Taqueria Laura
1051 N. Ashland
The enormous huarache I got, piled high with lettuce, starchy winter tomato, avocado and crema, looked like a monstrosity, and the fact that both meat and huarache were reheated seemed a second strike. Then I bit into it— and was surprised how good it was.  The steak was full of flavor and the huarache toothsome and comforting.  This place is surely overlooked due to the three La Pasaditas being just up the street (though Vital Info praised it in a long-ago Pasaditathon on Chowhound), but it deserves more attention and a return from me.

SOUTH SIDE

Carniceria Aguascalientes
3132 W. 26th St.
This meat market located near the La Villita gate has a large open dining and cooking area in 50s diner white tile, which serves to point attention to the main attraction: a woman hand-patting gordita shells and laying them out in neat rows.  Everything benefits from the toothsome, comfort-foody appeal of the piping hot masa shell, but that’s not to slight well-grilled steak or the complex spiciness of a pork guisado, only two of many choices.

La Chiquita
3555 W. 26th St./2637 S. Pulaski/others
Big, bustling supermarkets on the south side and in suburbs like Cicero and Aurora, these have functional-looking taquerias inside whose main attraction is handmade gorditas, sopas, etc. (Pulaski’s is much nicer, but seemed deader, than 26th St.’s 70s throwback.) Fresh masa made for a very good gordita with pork in red sauce at the 26th street location, though I’d still choose Carniceria Aguascalientes for that first.

Jerry’s Certified
4524 S. Ashland
I came here at off-peak hours, so it was kind of dead like a coffeeshop at three in the afternoon, but I have a feeling that at prime time on weekends, this is an exciting place. There are lots of good signs (literally), with weekend specials like chile rellenos and caldo de siete mares (seafood soup). The emphasis of the everyday menu seems to be on the tortas, and the torta milanesa I had was exemplary; on the other hand, it was one of the only places where I got gringo’d on a steak taco and it arrived with lettuce, tomato and cheese.

Carniceria y Taqueria La Loma.

The spat between Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan and the Empress of Organic Food, legendary chef Alice Waters, came to an end pretty quickly with all sorts of people running to the defense of Waters and declaring Flanagan anathema.  Not since Christopher Hitchens attacked Mother Teresa has the civilized literary world reacted with such a unanimous cry of “Oooh, who farted?”

I think Flanagan raises, snarkily (it’s undoubtedly a fun read), some issues worth thinking about apart from the near-universal adulation that Waters enjoys, and I think Corby Kummer and others refute them to a considerable extent.  But I think there’s an issue beyond that that no one has quite touched on— which, in the end, puts Waters in some very surprising company for an old Berkeley lefty.

Flanagan’s argument basically comes down to a single incredulous observation: So a rich white lady is telling Mexican kids they need to spend less time in the classroom and more time harvesting crops?  And people think this is progress for them? She portrays Waters’ Edible Schoolyards project as a crackpot idea out of Rousseau, an anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution which is cutting into the class time they really need and wasting it on hippie notions of getting back to nature:

What evidence do we have that participation in one of these programs—so enthusiastically supported, so uncritically championed—improves a child’s chances of doing well on the state tests that will determine his or her future (especially the all-important high-school exit exam) and passing Algebra I, which is becoming the make-or-break class for California high-school students?

Now, as it happens my kids go to a so-called “hippie school” (Chicago Waldorf School), which indeed has a garden.  And where they also learn things like knitting, painting, music, all that non-book stuff that there’s no room for in modern public schools.  Do I send my kids there because I want them to be macrame-making airheads who don’t know which century the Civil War took place in?  No, I send them there because despite spending a good portion of the day on non-academic subjects, I see that these kids, my own and their classmates, are far more engaged with the world, interested in history and politics, passionate about reading, curious about science and math, than the typical Chicago public school student.  In a very real sense, they get more out of four hours of that a day than most kids get out of seven in a public school.  (Kummer points out how the whole program comes out of Waters’ long-ago experience as a Montessori teacher; Montessori and Waldorf are, if not twins, certainly cousins.)

Knitting, what the school calls handwork, is the one that’s inevitably the hardest sell for parents considering Waldorf.  It seems like the school day is being wasted on occupational therapy.  But as the teachers patiently explain, it has all kinds of value for the rest of the curriculum, developing hand-eye coordination, inculcating self-discipline, nurturing a sense of accomplishment (people are blown away when they tell a second-grader “Nice hat” and the kid nonchalantly replies “Yeah, I made it”), even teaching math (you have to count rows and so on).

Likewise, gardening isn’t taking time from science class, it is biology.  And so on.  The focus and ability to concentrate and think things through and follow through till they’re done— all these things are crucial to academic subjects, and they’re developed in these non-academic pursuits.  The unchallenged assumptions in Flanagan’s piece are that more and more class time in algebra would get everybody through the tests on algebra— and that the tests on algebra have real meaning in terms of future achievement, indeed, they’re the only way you’ll get there.  Only if you think that the only place learning happens is a lecture hall, can you believe that it’s that simple.

Flanagan’s argument comes down attempting to paint Waters’ solution as run-amok 60s big government liberalism, what you might expect from a Berkeley free-speech lefty type:

Waters calls for a new federal program based on an old one [the Presidents’ Council on Physical Fitness], but the new one is necessary only because the old one has obviously failed: American kids are fatter and sicker than ever…

The suicidal dietary choices of so many poor people are the result of a problem, not the problem itself. The solution lies in an education that will propel students into a higher economic class, where they will live better and therefore eat better.

But if Waters is applying the Wahington-money-fits-all-problems approach, Flanagan is hardly a Hayekian herself; she simply wants a different federal program with different classroom priorities to make good middle class taxpayers out of all those kids.  And is there any evidence her kinds of government programs are working in inner city schools at a notably higher rate of success than gardening is?

At the same time I was reading this, I read a piece on minority Chicago schools by Heather MacDonald in City Journal, which is published by a conservative think tank; okay, I know many people checked out right there, but there’s some solid, if grim, reporting in the piece that will leave you better informed about how something like the Derrion Albert beating death happened.  (There’s also, admittedly, quite a lot of use of it to bludgeon the record of the area’s most famous ex-community organizer.)  The argument here is that Chicago social programs are very much focused on defeating social pathologies by raising the kids economically to the middle class with government spending.  Their (decidedly conservative) argument is that this has it backwards— middle-class responsibility will be achieved not when it’s handed to those unprepared for it, but when they have it inside themselves and raise themselves to the middle class:

Now, perhaps if [school superintendant Ron] Huberman’s proposed youth “advocates” provided their charges with opportunities to learn self-discipline and perseverance, fired their imaginations with manly virtues, and spoke to them about honesty, courtesy, and right and wrong—if they functioned, in other words, like Scoutmasters—they might make some progress in reversing the South Side’s social breakdown. But the outfit that Huberman has picked to provide “advocacy” to the teens, at a reported cost of $5 million a year, couldn’t be more mired in the assiduously nonjudgmental ethic of contemporary social work.

Talking about Boy Scouts in the context of schools run by gangs may seem like a joke— but it’s no moreso than talking about gardening, surely.  Gad!  Does this mean Alice Waters is a closet conservative, using gardening to infiltrate her sneaky rightwing ideas (like honesty and perseverance) into the school system?

Well, no, not exactly.  But it might mean that Waters’ idea of liberalism is a broader and more thoughtful thing than Flanagan’s big-government-by-experts version.  The hippie left of the 60s is usually portrayed as impractical and druggy, but it also had powerful strains of libertarian self-reliance within it— certainly within Waters’ world, it meant back-to-the-land types who ate or starved based on their own willingness to work, and who became her suppliers by assiduously seeking to produce the best possible produce for her restaurant.

And that’s what Flanagan just doesn’t get— gardening isn’t menial labor to Waters, it’s the pursuit of excellence.  Waters wants kids to learn the self-reliance and discipline that farming teaches— and if that’s conservative, well then so is my kids’ hippie school and so are Thoreau and Jefferson, and liberalism has just given up some very important home ground for bad reasons, it seems to me.  Flanagan is ultimately on the side of tests and credentialism and knowledge being dispensed from on high; Waters is ultimately on the side of developing the individual so they can achieve, and will want to.  And that’s why Waters is more right than Flanagan about the value of getting the kids out of the classroom for an hour a day and cultivating their own gardens.