The 12 Most Memorable Things I Ate In 2016

(12) Buckwheat scone from Crumb at the Green City Market  - real, full-on buckwheat flavor without sacrificing texture.  Impressive.

(11) Eggplant parm sandwich at Lucia - bright flavored sauce, breading stayed crisp for a long time and didn't overwhelm flavor of the eggplant.

(10) Smoked paprika and cheddar croissant from Crumble & Flake in Seattle - I'm not usually a fan of attempts to mess with a croissant, but this was remarkable.   

(9) Corn sundae at Spoon and Stable in Mpls - Hard to believe that dessert at this place could top what was already a tremendous meal, but it did.

 (8) Creamed hard boiled eggs with truffled mornay and toasted brioche at Taus Authentic -  decadence at its very best.

 (7) Gnocchi short rib ragu trattoria Ultimo - pillowy texture, light as a cloud with an intensely meaty sauce.  A real surprise from such a humble byob storefront.

(6) Blood orange flan at Salero - soft and luscious with intense acidity and sweet bitterness from a saba caramel

(5) Isaan sausage at Mott Street.  Juicy, funky, spicy - hard to believe that a hip place like this is making better Isaan sausage than the great, authentic Thai restaurants in Chicago.  But it's true.

(4) Clams with Chinese sausage in some kind of amazing broth at Bad Saint in Washington DC.  All around, perhaps my favorite meal of the year.  The hype is completely justified.

(3) Chermoula marinated sturgeon at Honey's - served with a charred tomato vinaigrette - a dish that had both intensity and finesse.  The most memorable thing at what was my favorite new Chicago restaurant of the year.  The chestnut pasta with truffles was almost as good.

(2) Tomato salad at The Loyalist - height of season tomatoes with surprising bits of pear that worked wonderfully.  An amazing salad, though they kept it on the menu a week too long.  Not as good second time, early fall when local tomatoes were just OK.

(1) Fries at Roister - yes, fries are at the very top of my list.  These were fried so perfectly and had such great potato flavor that that might have made the list even without the visually mesmerizing and utterly delicious bonito flakes that took them over the top.

Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, you’ve got to live in the moment - one second to stop at a corner to contemplate which way to turn will get you trampled by a crowd or flattened by a bus.  Even my NYC roots could not prepare me for how fast everything moves in Hong Kong, and I find myself on edge almost constantly.  I’ve adapted by becoming very reactive, which includes the way I’ve described the food.  In one moment I’m in awe of how vibrant and fresh things are, and in the next I’m shocked by how tired, processed and bland much of it seems.

The street-style markets here are amazing.  Food that is literally alive is everywhere, frequently killed on the spot and cooked before your eyes.  I expect and have experienced that kind of freshness on the shores of Mexican beaches, but I was not prepared for it in such an intensely urban setting.  It’s really something to  watch skilled fishmongers pull twitching creatures from a  seawater tank, clean them precisely in seconds, then hand them to a partner who puts them on a  stick and fries or boils them before handing it over to you, all in a matter of about 4 minutes. 

This setting produces one of the best bites of food I’ve ever had.  It was a 4-inch piece of octopus that had been skewered and par-cooked.  When I ordered, it was dunked for about a minute into intensely spiced boiling liquid, redolent with Szechuan pepper and star anise which adhered to the sea creature the way the spices do to crawfish at the best Louisiana boils.  It was tender and tasted so fresh, with the sweet flavor of the octopus somehow able to stand up to all of that spice.  $1.50 bought me a food memory I’ll never forget. 

I’ve appreciated the food recommendations I’ve gotten from friends who have been to Hong Kong, and have followed some of them with good success.  But when I travel, I also like to follow my nose and the locals.  I look for crowds, see what they’re eating, and join them.  This is a dangerous method in Hong Kong.  There are a lot of people here who like terrible food.  Some of the most crowded spots are serving mushy spaghetti with ketchup sauce (that’s literally what it is) or limp elbow macaroni with cheap hot dogs in bland broth.  These people are not tourists.  Most of the above is served in places that have no English menu, and you won’t find a Caucasian face in sight.  It’s authentic Hong Kong cuisine, perhaps even the archetype.  I tried one of these places after waiting 20 minutes for a seat, and while I’m glad to have experienced this part of HK culture, suffice to say that the food tastes precisely as it sounds.

You can’t go to Hong Kong without having dim sum, and I did so at a super-crowded spot called The Dim Sum Corner, which I stumbled upon while walking around.  Despite the unusually English name, the place didn’t seem touristy at all – it was teeming with local businessperson-types who were waiting in line for a seat at prime lunch hour.  I had standards that I get regularly at dim sum places back home: egg custard buns, shumai, steamed rice rolls, and turnip cake.  I wanted to see if these standards were better at a mid-tier HK place than they are back home.  Better doesn’t begin to describe it.  This was whole different league.   The turnip cake was especially delicious, with a more varied, interesting texture on account of unprocessed turnip pieces, and more robust seafood flavor than I’m used to.  The egg custard bun was oozing in a way that I haven’t seen before, and the liquefied yolk was contained by dough that’s much thinner than what I’ve seen before.  A greater level of skill went into all the food here, and it showed.

I had a few higher end meals too, which ran the gamut from disappointing to revelatory, with one sort of in between.  A ha-ha-named place called Ho Lee Fook has been touted quite a bit by local bloggers, but its version of Modern Chinese food tasted just like regular Chinese food to me, at quintuple the price in a dungeon-like setting with horrible Springsteen music playing.  Ronin, a supposedly-izakaya style seafood place from a much celebrated chef who used to work at Masa had some really delicious bites (oysters with cucumber-pear juice and yuzu kosho), but also a few elements that seemed more style-over-substance (“mandarin salt” served on the side of some fish tempura).  Ronin staff were also annoying about upselling luxe ingredients and drinks (yes, I like uni, but I’m not ordering your tiny $30 uni supplement and stop asking already).  The revelatory meal was at a place called Serge et le Phoque, run by a 2-Michelen-starred French chef and his Parisian business partner who came to Hong Kong a couple of years ago.  The restaurant has an all-French wine list and French-accented staff, but the food transcends borders, with a focus on Japanese ingredients and styles perhaps more than anything else.  Every morsel of food I tasted at this place was spectacular, highlighted by things like dried fugu skin with teriyaki glaze, sea bass with a “risotto” made from land-based seaweed (samphire) cut into rice-sized bits, and an amazing lemon custard served with capsicum jelly and tarragon.

I’ve eaten more noteworthy things that I’ll lump together here for the sake of expedience.  Pineapple buns (which don’t have any pineapple) are really wonderful, and are described well here: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1587246/secrets-behind-serving-hong-kongs-hot-cross-buns .  Portland Street in Kowloon is a mecca of diverse cheap eateries, and the one I settled into was a Yunannese places serving “mountain goat noodle soup,” a giant, $4 bowl of very gamey deliciousness.  Egg custard tarts are everywhere, and the ones I’ve tried at random bakeries have been OK, but surprisingly not as good as the ones at Cai back in Chicago.

Hong Kong is massive and dense, and it’s impossible to make much of a dent in the city’s food with just a few days.  I’m glad to have heeded bits of advice from people, but nothing beats the enjoyment of just wandering around and trying what looks good or interesting.  I even loved the experience of sharing a table (this is how it’s done in HK –people just sit wherever there’s a chair) with a cigarette-smoking cab driver while eating terrible macaroni soup.

Formento's

Our remarkably ill-conceived first dish at Formento’s was an unfortunately good predictor of what was to come.  Italian-American pizzerias and restaurants have been serving pretty much the same garlic bread for decades.  Slice open some bread, spread garlic butter on an exposed side, and toast it.  Simple enough, and undeniably tasty.  For $5, I knew Formento’s would do something to try to improve on this standard.  Use especially good, fresh, house-baked bread perhaps.  Maybe some kind of special organic garlic.  What I didn’t think is that they would utterly reinvent the dish in a way that made it impossible to eat.  Instead of cutting the loaf open and toasting it, they served a whole loaf, untoasted and scored so that the “slices” came just halfway down the loaf.  Then, inexplicably, a server lifted a carafe with some kind of thick, emulsified garlic sauce and started pouring it over the top and between the crevices.  I wanted to scream at him to stop, or grab the carafe from his hands.  But it was too late.  He had created a gooey, Cinnabon-style mess.  When a manager came by to ask about our meal, I asked her how we were supposed to have eaten the garlic bread.  Some people try a knife and fork, she said.  Others try with their hands but fail.  She didn’t really know either.

Formento’s tried to improve on eggplant parm too.  The downfall of many versions of this dish is that the fried eggplant quickly becomes soggy under layers of sauce and cheese.  Formento’s came up with a way to prevent that from happening: burn the hell out of the breading in the deep fryer.  It stayed crispy.  I’ll give them that.

Speaking of soggy, that’s the way to describe the Caesar salad at Formento’s  A Caesar salad is crisp.  It’s the defining principle.  Formento’s used too much of the leafy green part of romaine lettuce, and way overdressed it .  With plenty of whole anchovies on top, this dish was a fishy swamp.  Most bizarrely, instead of serving croutons on the salad, they served a block of some kind of gooey, bread-pudding-like thing which had been pan fried or something to give it a dark color on the outside.  Croutons rock on a Caesar salad, Formento’s.  If you want to upgrade a Caesar salad, just make the best damned croutons in the universe.  Not pudding.

The breading on the fried calamari was like beach sand.  So dry and chalky.  The good thing about that is that the texture made the breading easy enough to wipe away, revealing calamari that was tender and delicious.  They plated it with a sauce that tasted like ketchup.   Scrape off the breading, avoid the sauce, and squeeze some lemon over the top, and this was the one dish of the evening which could be rendered palatable.

The same cannot be said of the orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage, which I could not stomach after 2 bites.  The homemade pasta was very poorly executed.  It was gummy.  It was swimming in some kind of thickened, overly acidic wine sauce.  What surprised me most about it though was that the presentation revealed that the kitchen does not understand what this pasta shape is about.  The point of orecchiette is that the little cups are great at catching bits of stuff that form the dressing.  That’s why sausage works so well, as long as it’s crumbled.  Crumbled bits of sausage inside little orecchiette cups are one of life’s great joys.  Formento’s decided to “update” this dish by using 2-inch-long pieces of sausage instead of the crumbled kind.  With some of the other failures of the evening, I could perhaps chalk them up to growing pains of a new restaurant.  This one was more disturbing though, as it showed an utter lack of understanding of the fundamentals of Italian cooking. 

A day after dinner, I read this recap of a Formento’s preview dinner that my friend Mike Gebert attended.  Two of the dished I had are pictured there.  At the preview dinner, the garlic bread looked like normal garlic bread, and the Caesar Salad had actual croutons.  Why they changed these things, I have no idea.  But maybe there is some hope that they’ll go back to the old ways and get this place figured out. 

Formento’s

925 W. Randolph St, Chicago, IL

312-690-7295

Berrista

I was confused by conflicting media and patron reports about berrista, so I decided to try it for myself to set the record straight.  I suspect that many professional writers who have written about the place so far have not actually been there.  That's probably fine if you're just reporting objectively about a new opening, but I have a problem with it when you report subjective descriptions about a donut being "delicious" and another item being a "must-try dish".  Anyway, that's a subject for a later post.

Much of the berrista hoopla has been about its use of the miracle berry.  Some reports claim that the berry powder is cooked into the food.  Others say that you take the berry first, then eat the food.  The latter is correct.  According to the guy at the counter and a cook in the back, the berry is not cooked into anything on the menu. 

There are media reports that say the whole menu is designed to go with the berry.  According to the same 2 guys above, that's not really true.  For most of the stuff, they say the berry wouldn't have any effect.  The place also has a menu board with icons next to the items that are supposed to be good with the berry.  According to the description, these items are good with or without the berry, but the berry works with them.  Most of the menu items don't have an icon.  That said, I ate part of a "monte cristo panini," and while it didn't have an icon, I can't imagine that the lifeless, watery strawberry jam served wasn't made with the berry in mind.  So who knows? 

All of the pastries have the miracle berry icon next to them. I tried what was described as an orange-cream donut with chocolate frosting, and also a piece of raspberry coffee cake.  I ate part of each before the berry, then part of each after the berry, which is available for purchase for 50 cents.  Before the berry, the donut had absolutely no orange flavor, and left an intensely bitter, unsweetened-chocolate aftertaste.  It was weirdly spongy.  The coffee cake had the texture of playdough, and I wasn't sure I'd be able to swallow it.  There was also a heavily spiced cream cheese frosting that tasted like the Grinch got to the Christmas dessert.  Before the berry, these were probably the worst pastries I've ever tasted.

After the berry, the transformation was minimal.  The bitter donut aftertaste was lessened somewhat, but there was still no orange flavor.  The coffee cake was still highly unpleasant.  Concerned that I had eaten the berry the wrong way or had gotten a dud, I cut open a lemon and ate a slice.  Nope. Sure enough, the lemon tasted like sweet lemonade.  Delicious.  In fact, I ate the whole darn thing by itself in an effort to get the taste of those pastries out of my mouth.

Berrista
4219 W Irving Park Rd
Chicago, IL 60641

Knife & Tine

When you hear that the chef is a Moto alumnus, you may think of food in test tubes or chemistry tricks that make sour things taste sweet.   That’s what I thought before I ate at Baume and Brix last year, but here’s what I know now: this particular Moto alumnus uses straightforward, varied cooking techniques to get the absolute best out of seasonal vegetables.  Sure, there are some creative liberties taken too, but at its core, Nate Parks’ food simply brings out the best in well-chosen ingredients.

“Charred sweet pepper bisque” tasted like just that.  Wonderfully sweet peppers with subtle smokiness, enlivened by some herb oil and thinly sliced leeks.  A somewhat thick, mouth-coating texture without tasting heavy.  Maybe there was some fancy Moto-esque thermomolecular reverse lipidation or something going on.  I don’t know.  What I do know is that this was a delicious, warming bowl of soup.

Cauliflower risotto showed further evidence that if there’s one “trick” Park has mastered, it is charring vegetables.  The charred purple florets that garnished this dish were sensational.  Even more impressive was the variety of ways in which cauliflower had been prepared, each bringing its own element to balance out the others.  There were tiny pickled white florets to provide tartness, dried cauliflower chips that tasted quite sweet, and the charred purple florets bringing more sweetness and a touch of bitter.  Plumped golden raisins and a scant scattering of walnut pieces complemented it all fantastically.  As good as this dish tasted, it was even more of a marvel to look at, with a color palate reminiscent of those remarkable photos floating around of Alain Passard’s food.

On the more “out there” side of the menu, Parks is serving something called “Pimento Burrata”.  Burrata is one of those fantastic, just-leave-it-alone products, such that this was a dish about which I had plenty of skepticism.  It appeared that the inside, creamy part of the burrata had been removed, blended with elements of pimento cheese, and then stuffed back into the burrata skin, along with a crispy, thin piece of dark rye inserted at the equator.  Mixed greens with pimento vinaigrette surrounded the alien-ish cheese ball.  Was it good?  Yeah, it was quite compelling, actually.  Better than a plain ball of burrata with, say, a tomato?  Probably not, but you can only that so many times in a summer.

The only dish that I wouldn’t order again unless it changes was the Sweet Corn Humitas.  The flavors here were wonderful, but texturally, it just didn’t work for me.  The humitas were formed into U10 scallop sized discs, then seared in a pan before serving.  They were dry and dense.  Again, excellent flavor, but I think this one could use some tinkering.

Save room for dessert.  It’s a limited menu of just a few pies, but if the dutch apple pie I tried is representative, you don’t want to miss it.  As good as any apple pie in town.  It’s big enough for 4 people to share, or for two to order and take home a piece for breakfast.

As with Baume and Brix, Knife & Tine has an interesting wine list with a focus on less common domestic places such as Michigan and New York State.  We had a remarkable $38 bottle of Finger Lakes chardonnay that paired very with the food.  It’s nice to see a place like this doing something a little different than the norm with the wine list.

The high ceilings and comfortable table spacing make this a very nice place to linger over a meal.  Service was attentive without being overbearing.  A couple of people who looked like owners or managers came by to check on us, and they seemed genuine about the desire for feedback, and their hope to become a neighborhood fixture.  I enjoyed Knife & Tine a lot, and will do my part to help them make sure that happens.
 

Knife & Tine

1417 W Fullerton Ave, Chicago, IL 60614
773) 697-8311

Ceres Table - Lakeview

We sent about half the dishes back, uneaten.  Grilled octopus had good flavors on the plate, but I chewed for a good 30 seconds before spitting it into my napkin and deciding that the flavors were not worth the choking hazard.  Two pasta dishes were the worst I can ever recalling receiving at a restaurant of this supposed caliber.  Spaghetti nero was overcooked to complete mush, and was swimming in a lagoon of mucilaginous mud.  The dish had the precise texture of something you’d pour from a can of Chef Boy R Dee.  Linguine alla chitarra had so many problems that I’m not sure where to begin.  First of all, it was not linguine.  It was angel hair pasta.  It too was woefully overcooked and served in a congealed state such that when I put my fork in to twirl out a few strands, the entire thing lifted off the bowl in one solid chunk.  I am not exaggerating.  It was truly horrible.
 
Our server at Ceres Table was a polished professional, with good knowledge about the menu and a clear passion for food.  I was embarrassed for her every time we brought an issue to her attention.  She’d clearly worked in successful restaurants and took pride in her job.  I wonder if she is trying to figure out how the heck to get out of this horror show before it puts a black mark on her career.

The manager she kept bringing over to our table seemed to be trying his best too, but he didn’t execute quite as well.  After a gap between our first course and second, he came over to explain that the crudo we ordered had been 86’d.  With his apologies, he said he was going to bring something over to us “on the house” to make up for it.  That never happened.  Between that incident and the multiple times he’d come to our table in response to us sending dishes back uneaten, we’d seen each other enough that by the end of the night, we all knew it was over.  He apologized again for all of the mishaps, and said he really wanted to bring us something – anything we wanted – to make up for it.  He practically pleaded with me to ask for something, but I think we both knew that it just needed to end.  The last thing I wanted at that point was to get another dish that I’d have to send back.

We didn’t starve at Ceres Table, as our meal started with a hefty portion of burrata, wax beans and bread, all of which was delicious and filling.  After that bright initial note, it was hard to believe the steep downturn the rest of the meal took.  I’m trying to think of a way to wrap this post up with something hopeful.  But no, the level of ineptitude I experienced last night offers not even a glimpse of hope about this place. 

Ceres Table

3124 N. Broadway, Chicago, IL 60657
773-922-4020

Yum Cha

From a quick scan of media reports, I gather that Yum Cha is a collaboration between a celebrity chef called The Food Buddha, a couple of suburban restaurateurs, and  Phoenix Restaurant, the much-loved traditional dimsum restaurant in Chinatown.  Certainly there were hallmarks of all three when I ate there.  The Buddha, I presume, is responsible for lily-gilding stunts such as topping classic Chinese egg tarts with foie gras.  The suburban restaurateurs are probably the ones that pushed for the shredded lettuce salad with every lunch entrée.  And Phoenix Restaurant, I guess, is the partner that teaches Yum Cha how to serve a fairly broad selection of traditional dimsum offerings.  If this type of please-everyone approach scares you, as it probably should, let me assure you that as long as you stay focused on what that third partner is bringing to Yum Cha’s table, you’ll be OK.  The traditional dimsum here is quite good. 

I tried a few different varieties of steamed dumplings, and all were excellent.  Har gow (shrimp dumplings) were perhaps not as translucent as the best versions, but the wrappers were still light, while managing to hold together without sticking to the paper in the steamer basket.  As with all of the steamed dumplings at Yum Cha, the filling was well-seasoned and not overcooked, as lesser versions can be.  Chive, scallop and leek dumplings were more translucent and delicate, and even more flavorful than the har gow.  Best of all was what the menu called “Giant seafood and pork dumpling in broth,” which had an extremely delicate wrapper enclosing firm, delicious filling, served in a piping hot little pot of excellent chicken stock with a film of chicken fat glistening at the top.

Fried items were more of a mixed bag.  Fried sesame balls were outstanding, with a crisp, toasty exterior giving way to a glutinous layer and then some not-too-sweet, tasty bean paste.  Pan fried vegetable rolls, on the other hand, were greasy and bland.  There are two kinds of fried vegetable rolls at Yum Cha – the greasy, bland pan fried ones, and others that were called “crispy soy curd vegetable rolls,” which were texturally more pleasing, and had some good, earthy mushroom flavor.  Go for those.

I’ve seen pictures of the Food Buddha.  He has an infectious smile.  I’ve seen video interviews.  He’s engaging.  You want to like him.  You want to eat his food.  So, you might think, if he puts foie gras on a traditional egg custard tart and triples the price, it must be worth it, right?  Wrong.  The foie gras slivers were so tiny that I couldn’t even taste them.  The $11.95 foie gras egg tarts at Yum Cha taste exactly like the $3.95 egg tarts.  Don’t be convinced by the Buddah’s oxtail potstickers either.  The filling has the mushy texture of canned pet food, and the $11.95 price is nearly triple the price of the vastly superior traditional steamed dumplings, for the same serving size.

I joked on Twitter that heading east, you’d have to travel at least 150 miles to find a Chinese restaurant on par with Yum Cha (the restaurant overlooks lake Michigan).  The reality is that this is the best Chinese restaurant within a pretty big range north, south and west too.  It blows away Tony Hu’s first attempt to bring a bit of Chinatown to downtown Chicago, and it should be a most-welcomed restaurant for anyone who lives or works in the area.

Yum Cha

333 E Randolph St

Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 946-8885

Nico Osteria

Dinner at Nico probably costs about the same as dinner across the street at Gibson’s, which ought to make one feel quite foolish for eating at the latter.  There were some exquisite bites at dinner last night, but I still left feeling the way I always feel when I eat near Rush & Division.  Nico fits right into a neighborhood where the people and the restaurants are just not my speed.

We started with a striped jack crudo.  Four paper-thin, miniature slices of fish totaling maybe an ounce in weight were topped with radishes, chiles and lemon oil, all of which complemented the fatty, mackerel-like flesh quite well.  It was fantastic, but $20 for what amounted to an amuse-bouche-sized serving of raw fish was tough to swallow.

I had the same problem with the lobster spaghetti, though this time I started to feel as if I was being genuinely conned.  We were told about the $45 price in advance (it’s listed as MP on the menu), but the server described it as a 1-1.5 pound lobster cooked with classic stuff and removed from the shell before stuffed back in, its roe then tossed with the pasta along with other stuff from the cooking.  This was no 1-1.5 pound lobster.  It looked like one of those langoustines you get at Mexican restaurants.  Half a pound, three-quarters at most.  Maybe 4 or 5 forkfuls of meat.  I’ll take part of the blame for being enough of a rube to order something like this, but they didn’t have to take advantage so blatantly.

If dishonesty was the problem with the lobster, it was the opposite that really baffled me with the fritto misto, which last night included razor clams, oysters, and some kind of white fish.  When the dish arrived I popped a fried oyster in my mouth, and the server came over at that moment to ask how everything was.  As I nodded with approval, he gave what would turn out to be the first of two very strange explanations of this dish.  “Yeah,” he said, “We got some pre-shucked oysters in by mistake, and thought, what the heck are we going to do with these?”  He explained that they contemplated sending them back to the purveyor, but then the chef said “What the heck, let’s just throw them into the fritto misto.”  That’s the $25 fritto misto, in case you’re wondering.

It got worse.  We kept eating the fritto misto, which was all pretty good if a bit too greasy, and he came by again to inquire about how we liked it.  I think I said something like “It’s quite good,” to which he replied, “Yeah, we use the same fantastic fish we use for the crudos in the fritto misto.  When they’re not fresh enough to serve as crudos anymore, they become fritto misto.”  Did he really say that?  As I’m typing it now, I have the same incredulous look on my face as I had in the restaurant, with what now tasted like a perhaps-just-a-little-rancid piece of fish in my mouth.  But yes, I’m sure about it.  That’s what he said.  For better or worse, we’d lost our appetite for fried fish at that point, and the rest was taken away by the runner.

Too full for pastry (or perhaps too queasy), we opted for a couple of small scoops of ice cream and sorbet to end the meal.  Both were disasters.  Blood orange sorbet was loaded with ice shards and tasted like nothing more than sugar-water.  Pistachio gelato had decent texture but no pistachio flavor at all.  There’s quite a bit of dessert pedigree in this kitchen, but I can’t believe that anyone deserving accolades ever tasted these concoctions.

Given the choice between Nico and Hugo’s Frog Bar or Carmine’s or whatever other hell holes exist around there, I guess I’d go back to Nico.  But more than anything last night reinforced that, respected newcomers or not, this neighborhood is to be avoided.

Nico Osteria

1015 N Rush St, Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 994-7100

The Radler

There are a lot of reasons I love The Radler.

Near the top is its unique beer list, which sources a ton of German-style beers from local breweries, and some great ones from Germany as well. The list is focused and committed to the theme, with just a few outliers. There's nothing like this list in the city, and one could spend a most-enjoyable time doing nothing but sampling from it.

Service is fantastic at The Radler - friendly, very knowledgeable, willing to sample anything. So are the prices. I spent the same here as I did at Resi's Bierstube for a meal with similar amounts of food and drink. I even like the decor.

Where's the food on this list of reasons to love The Radler? I'll answer that with one dish description: Crispy bread dumplings with horseradish roasted mushrooms, spinach, pickled beef tongue, kohlrabi and currants. It's the best dish I've had in a 2014 that's seen quite a few good ones so far. It may be the best dish I've had in a much longer time than that. It's just perfect. Contrasting textures. Rich flavors balanced by tangy ones. A little earth. A little sweet. I need to stop writing about it. I want it again. Now. Badly.

Go to The Radler. Enjoy all the things there are to enjoy about it, but don't miss the crispy bread dumplings. The dark, warm and crisp bread dumplings. The tangy, tender pickled tongue. The earthy roasted mushrooms. The little strips of cool, crisp kohlrabi. The bursts of dill that seem to appear from nowhere to enliven your palate just when you think you can't eat anymore. What a dish. My goodness.

The Radler

2375 N Milwaukee Ave
(773) 276-0270
  

Next - Chicago Steakhouse Menu. Exclusive First Look!!!!

Next – Chicago Steak

 

Cocktail

2” by 2” cube of double-purified, blast-frozen Hydrogen Dioxide from Lake Michigan.  Topped with spirits.

 

Hors d'oeuvres

91 hand-carved semi-ovals of marble-sized transparent, odorless liquid that has been aged in our own temperature-controlled enclosure for at least 24 hours.  Served with carrot sticks.

 

Appetizer

Fluid matter that has been transformed through nucleation and crystal growth into a solid state, then pommeled with a blunt instrument to form irregularly-shaped shards that are then hand-placed into a 26 degree metal bowl.  Shrimp garnish.

 

Salad

Latent heat is released through an exothermic process from 5,000ml of a non-linear molecule in its liquid state, causing solidification which takes place in a proprietary capsule designed just for us by famous Japanese box-maker Yakimoto Toto.  Greens.

 

Entree

Warm meat to cleanse the palate for the final course

 

Dessert

“Sno Cone 86”  Each diner is provided with a vile filled with raspberry-flavored syrup, along with an eye dropper.  86 small mounds of shaved ice, each with a distinct water source and texture, are provided in an engraved cooler chest.  Diners are instructed to place a drop of syrup on each mound one-by-one, to experience the subtle profile each brings to the experience.

 

Executive Ice Chef – Hans Frigidein

 

Marching With The Sheep for Italian Food - Eataly & Cicchetti

I lied my way into an Eataly pre-opening party, then spent 5 consecutive days visiting during its initial week in Chicago.  Ready to move to the newest hotspot, I showed up at Cicchetti on the Sunday before it opened, having misunderstood internet postings about the place's grand opening.  Unable to talk my way into a mock service they were doing to train staff, I had to wait until they officially opened today for lunch.  Make fun of me if you want, but I am hungry for good Italian food in a city that sorely lacks it.  And my office is steps away from these places.  And I am a sheep.  I couldn't resist.

More has already been written in this town about Eataly than about The Bears, so I'll keep this brief and highlight a few specifics I haven't yet seen described elsewhere.  Eataly is very, very good.  There are interesting products that simply don't exist anywhere else in town, and there is a focus on handcrafted goods that's wonderful in some cases (the filled pastas and the mozzarella ), and admirable even where it works only modestly well (the bread and the pastries).  Among the many restaurants, I've already found some truly special dishes.  The pizza is now my favorite in town, with a crust full of character and flavor, quality toppings that are applied judiciously, and the wet center characteristic of many great Neapolitan pizzas - a characteristic that was sadly abandoned by other local pizzerias in deference to customer complaints.  At the restaurant focused on fried stuff, there's an ultra-simple radish dish that I can't stop thinking about.  No breading or coating - just the carefully-cleaned radishes with their greens still attached, deep fried in olive oil and drizzled with honey and salt when they come out.  I've never had anything like it, and I want it more and more.

At Cicchetti I ate a soup and a pasta.  The white bean soup was served with whole beans, pickled greens, toasted garlic and speck-infused whipped cream in the bowl, the server then pouring the piping-hot pureed bean soup over the top tableside.  The flavors worked well, with the each element powerful on its own in a way that balanced things out well in the end.  I had a small problem with the texture of the beans, some of which seemed rubbery and chalky, as if they'd been undercooked.  Still, it's a dish I'd happily eat again, which I can't say about the pasta.  The squid ink orecchiette were clearly handmade, because only about half of them were actually orecchiette.  The others failed to curve into the characteristic shape and texture, so were essentially just uniformly round coins.  The point of a shape like this is that it forms a little cup that captures and holds sauces, so this was a real failure in pasta-making execution.  The dish also had an American-style oversaucing problem, with way too much tangy tomato sauce for a restaurant with any real Italian ambition.

I'll be back to Eataly many, many times.  There's some terrific food to eat in, interesting handmade and imported products, and staples like bananas and milk and reasonable-enough prices that one could easily make Eataly a primary grocery shopping venue.  I'm sure I'll return to Cicchetti too.  The soup was good, and Mike Sheerin and Phil Rubino have each cooked food I loved at former venues.


Cicchetti
671 N St Clair St, Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 642-1800


Eataly
43 E Ohio St, Chicago, Illinois 60611

(312) 521-8700

 

Michoacanito

On the outside, Michoacanito looks like a hundred other humble Mexican restaurants - bright pictures of menu items, Mexican flag-themed signage, handmade signs touting tacos, tortas, etc.  But after a few observant seconds insite, I could tell this place was different.  The cooler was filled with fully-gelled stocks in see-through storage containers.  A woman in the kitchen was peeling and chopping papayas with the utmost precision and care, while a man pressed tortillas by hand.  The stove in the fully-open kitchen was filled with steaming pots emitting powerful aromas of meat and spice.

I ordered the consome de borrego (lamb soup) per my server's recommendation.  A hunk of lamb and bone sat starkly in the center of a bowl of not-quite-clear broth with bits of fat floating atop.  On first glance, it appeared that this soup would be just pure lamb without much other flavor.  The kind of thing that, though occasionally enjoyable, I expect more from a Central Asian place than from a Mexican restaurant.

As I started to dig in, the server brought a plate of accompaniments intended to Mexicanize the soup.  I added the onion, cilantro, lime, and a bit of dried chile.  Then when my spoon reached the bottom of the bowl, I realized that there were other goodies - lots of nicely cooked hominy, and a reconstituted chipotle pepper that had been part of the broth-cooking.  The fruitiness of the chipotle balanced the gaminess of the lamb broth beautifully.

Michoacanito makes tortillas by hand, and the homey,very thick, haphazardly-shaped rounds make that clear.  Be warned, these are probably triple the thickness of most tortillas, so they fill you up fast.  They were great for dipping in the soup.

There's a big menu here, filled mostly with stuff you can find all over town.  With a menu so large it's possible that not everything is a winner, but I feel very confident about the soups.  I also learned from someone at the next table that Micoacanito has something of a secret menu.  People in the know seek out the cook's gazpacho and special fruit cocktail recipes, none of which are on the regular menu.  Ask about fruit, I was told.


Michoacanito
4315 N. Kedzie
773-267-2820
byob

Mexique

I walked into Mexique with negative biases.   The attention given to the Michelin rating system is something of a joke to me, so I’m prone to discount anyplace with a star.  When restaurants take to Groupon, as Mexique did last year, I view it as a sign of decline.  Finally, the place is called Mexique.  Have you ever tried Mexican restaurants in France?  If so, you would know not to name your restaurant after that take on the cuisine.

With my first taste of the night, I was nearly converted.  A spoonful of the “spiced bouillabaisse broth” served in a bowl with something called a “Pescamal”, though more like a thick mole than a broth, was packed with intense roasted chile, complex spicing, and a shellfish undertone that made it unlike anything I’d ever tasted. 

Had the kitchen served this compelling puree simply with fresh tortillas instead of the sad rectangular starch plopped in the bowl, it would have been great.  The Pescamal , described on the menu as a corn tamal, had the texture and taste of a bake-and-serve dinner roll, stuffed with rubbery bits of fish that were devoid of flavor. 

A trio of sopes furthered the possibility that the chef might be shopping in the Trader Joe’s frozen food section.  The masa pucks were equally sized and perfectly rounded as if by a machine, and they were dense, greasy and tasteless.  The toppings tasted far more pedestrian than their menu descriptions implied.  Bizarrely, two disparate-sounding sauces tasted identical – like balsamic vinegar reduction.  Maybe the kitchen made a mistake with the plating.

The best dish of the night was one featuring braised veal short ribs served with orange-scented mushrooms and peppercorn gastrique.  A well-executed dish even though every component pushed the sweet, fruity side a bit too far.  Had the advertised escabeche de fresas actually tasted pickled instead of just macerated in sugar, this might have been a nicely balanced dish.

Worst was a special of seared tuna loin with chile-infused polenta and “mole de la casa”.  The tuna was seared nicely, but the polenta was so full of lumps that I was shocked that a restaurant of this ambition would serve it.  The mole was way too sweet and overpowered by cinnamon.  Put a straw in it and call it an horchata, and I’d believe you.

The chef at Mexique is mixing a lot of different flavors and techniques, and I suspect there are cases where this produces more winners like the broth served with the Pescamal.  Unfortunately, everything skews very sweet and there is a lot of flawed cooking, including a special level of ineptitude with cornmeal based dishes.  For a place with any degree of Mexican makeup, that’s hard to forgive.

Mexique
1529 W Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60642
(312) 850-0288

 

Mott Street and the Lens of Asian Food Experience

“…flavors are as safe and unthreatening as a night on the couch with a bong.”  - Mike Sula, Chicago Reader in an article titled “Playing it Safe at Mott Street”

“…the cooking equivalent of driving 45 in a 55 mph speed zone.” – Kevin Pang, Chicago Tribune


Chicago and other major cities have dozens of humble, first-generation-run Asian restaurants which, even though we Americans are welcome, are cooking food targeted mainly at fellow recent immigrants.  Because of this, and because so much of this food is cheap, there isn’t a food writer or aficionado in Chicago that hasn’t tried pungently fermented kimchi, scorchingly hot curry, and salads flavored with fishy funk. 

I think it’s through the lens of that experience that we end up with what I believe are misguided sentiments expressed in quotes such as the ones above.  Mott Street is “safe,” perhaps, when compared to the translated Thai-language menu at Sticky Rice.  But why compare it that instead of to restaurants with similar ambition, chef pedigree and price.? Are the dishes at Mott Street “safer” than those at Avec, La Sirena Clandestina, Le Bouchon or Vera?  Pang did compare Mott Street’s crab fried rice with Balena’s uni pasta, but that is even more bizarre and useless than comparing it to something one might find at TAC Quick.  Past experiences are valuable, but Mott Street is its own place and it would serve writers well to remove their lenses and evaluate the place on its own terms.

Some of the dishes at Mott Street are far from “safe”.  Grilled mackerel with incredible, crispy skin and moist flesh is served with head, tail and spine all attached – a bold decision that most restaurants with similar ambitions and customer bases would not make.  Wok-fried Gai Lan uses greens so intensely bitter that I’m sure many people refuse a second bite, along with oyster sauce that’s fishier and funkier than any version I can remember having.  Kimchi udon challenges safety-seeking palates with tiny bursts of fish roe and a delicious set of complementary garnishes.   I found all three of these dishes highly compelling. 

The kitchen at Mott street shows creativity too, which produces a winner and a loser.  The “stuffed cabbage” bears no resemblance to its moniker, but it is a fantastic combination of contrasting textures and bold flavors.  “Everything wings,” on the other hand, have a mess of bland seeds and a too-mild effort at tzatziki dipping sauce that would have paired poorly even had it been bolder.

I found the service at Mott Street welcoming and knowledgeable.  We had a drink and a snack on the nice patio and were made to feel like part of the crew.  In the dining room for dinner, everyone served us efficiently and with a smile, including members of management who stopped by a couple of times to check on things and solicit feedback.

We all have our own lenses through which we evaluate new restaurants.  Through mine, Mott Street is a winner.


Mott Street
(773) 687-9977
1401 N. Ashland Ave.
Chicago IL 60622

 

DaVanti Enoteca

During a short stint in the kitchen of an Italian restaurant, I made a lot of gnudi and gnocchi.  I was obsessive about getting them just right, and so when I eat gnudi in a restaurant I’m usually critical.  In general, it’s just something I shouldn't order because I know in advance I’m going to dislike it.  Sometimes I’m a glutton for punishment though (or, some would say, I like writing blog posts about stuff I hate), so I recently ordered the gnudi at the new DaVanti Enoteca in River North.

DaVanti’s gnudi were wonderful.  So good that they could serve them with little more than melted butter or simple tomato sauce and I’d be thrilled.  That these gnudi come bathing in a rich, viscous and intensely delicious pork stock takes the dish over the top.  The dumplings have that ethereal outer skin which is characteristic of great gnudi, barely holding together a light interior of well-seasoned, quality ricotta.  The serving is relatively small, but the dish is so rich and intense that although I wanted more (even after sopping up every drop of pork stock with Davanti’s sub-mediocre bread), I was glad there wasn't any.

Impossible as it seemed for any dish to top DaVanti’s gnudi, the cauliflower steak from the antipasti menu did just that.  A flat, inch-and-a-half-thick slab of cauliflower was charred on the grill and barely cooked through to lend a meaty texture that was just-right for the massive steak knife served with it.  The grill lent a smoky, earthy flavor that was fantastic with the sharp lemon jam, the briny, tiny-minced olive tapenade, and the nutty, crunchy toasted ceci beans.  This is now on a short list of favorite dishes in town, and might be the best restaurant dish I’ve eaten all year.

That this post focuses on the food rather than the annoying enforcement of a “small plates” service philosophy at DaVanti really says something.  It is annoying.  This was my third experience at an outpost of what I think can at this point fairly be called the DaVanti chain.  I’ve enjoyed them all, and if this is what chain dining can become in 2013, please put one in every town small and large to which I’ll be traveling in the coming months and years. 

Davanti Enoteca (the outpost on which this post is based)

30 E Hubbard St

Chicago, Illinois
(312) 605-5900

My New York

No matter how long I spend there, there are 3 things I never fail to have on every trip to New York: bagels, pizza, and time at the bar at Gramercy Tavern. On a recent trip, I had those 3 and more, including pasta and tofu at wonderful Italian and Korean restaurants that remind me that cronuts and other nonsense obsessively covered by food media have not yet ripped the guts from what is still a great, diverse, sometimes humble food city with an unchangeable core.

Here's a post about the bagels and pizza part of my trip.  The other stuff will follow at a later date.
 
Bagels:
I'm not going to rehash all that's wrong with bagels outside of New York. In fact, it turns out that New York is no longer immune to bagel atrocities, as 4 out of 4 bagel shops on this trip were guilty of the cross-cutting I railed against in the linked post. I'll use this space instead to rank 4 rather popular places I tried, from worst to best.
 

4.   Worst was Pick-A-Bagel (3rd Ave and 23rd St), with monstrous bagels with no flavor and a soft, crustless texture throughout.

3.   In 3rd place came the famous Murray's Bagels on 8th Avenue in Chelsea, with bagels more reasonably sized and better flavored, but still missing the textural contrast I want between a crisper exterior crust and a chewy interior.

2.   Next came an outlet of a place called Brooklyn Bagels, this one also on 8th Avenue, just a block from Murray's. Bagels here were as huge as Pick-A and lacked textural contrast, but the unique malty, sweet flavor won me over. My love for these bagels might stem from nostalgia, as these are very similar in style to the now defunct H&H bagels I enjoyed many times after late night bar hopping on the Upper West Side in my early 20's. The bagels are probably too sweet, but the everything-bagel variety has enough big salt crystals to balance that out beautifully. I don't think I'd want to eat a plain bagel or any non-salt-topped variety from Brooklyn Bagels.

1.   In first place came Ess-a-Bagel on 1st Avenue at 21^st Street.  This had everything I want: a reasonably small size, great contrast between the crust and the interior, and excellent yeasty flavor accented by just a touch of malt and a little sweetness.  And don’t try to order a toasted bagel here.  They know better than you.

 

I should note that besides Pick-A, all of the bagel shops above are better than bagel shops anywhere outside of NY. 

 

Pizza:

Almost every article about “NY Pizza” gets it wrong.  Lists of “The Best NY Pizza” are comical in their misunderstanding of the genre.  Di Fara, Lombardi’s, Patsy’s – these are all fine pizzas similar to the best pizzas you can find in places like Arizona and Kansas.  They’re distinctly New York places, but they’re not making distinctly New York pizza.  New York pizza is not made by artisans.  It has no resemblance to the Old Country, and although it is undeniably great, it isn’t necessarily good.  What makes something “New York Pizza” is the fact that’s it’s cheap, fast, foldable for consumption on the run, reheated in a scorching oven, and ubiquitous.  That’s all great stuff that exists almost nowhere else.  Where is the best New York pizza?  Wherever you happen to be standing when you’re hungry and have just some loose change left in your pocket.

 

Doubt Conquered, Hope Shattered (Baume & Brix, Cantina Pasadita)

When Moto was in its hot early days and clients insisted that I take them there, my heart would sink. Test tube salads, ice cream that tasted like fried chicken - everything at Moto seemed like an experiment designed to produce something uniquely undelicious. Though I haven't been back to Moto in years, from what I hear it has evolved into something even more bizarre and less delicious. So, when I see "former Moto chef" on resumes, it doesn't exactly lead me to rush right over. It's pretty close to where I work and I have tried one dismal place after the next in the area, but Baume and Brix had barely made it to my radar screen before I finally tried it this week.

I cast doubt aside after eating the remarkably straightforward and delicious asparagus salad. Thin spears had been charred beautifully and served atop an intense asparagus puree. Asparagus is a strong and distinct vegetable, and I think it marries better with strong and distinct ingredients from other food groups than it does with other vegetables, which tend to get lost amidst the poweful greenness of the asparagus. The gamey chicken liver pate on the plate with it at Baume and Brix worked perfectly. Again, just a straightforward, gimmick-free pate topping some well-toasted bread. Sure there was a poached egg on the plate too, which they insisted on telling me was prepared at a precise 63 degrees in a circulator, but I can shrug that off and just acknowledge that this was one heck of a tasty plate of food with well-selected, carefully-prepared, seasonal ingredients.

The potato chip gnocchi was a bit more gimmicky, but no less delicious. The gnocchi were crisp and feathery, plated with a grown-up take on sour cream and onion potato chip flavors. There were sweet caramelized onions melted into a silky butter puree, thin chives, creme fraiche, and lightly pickled mushrooms that added sourness and a squeaky texture that served as a great contrast to the gnocchi. Good ingredients, thoughtfully combined and very well prepared.

Service was attentive and informed, though I should note that mine was one of just two occupuied tables during my lunchtime visit. I also found the wine list was well curated, with an especially wonderful and somewhat novel domestically-produced Gruner Veltiner which I enjoyed a lot. Baume and Brix surprised and delighted me, and I consider it among the very best of last year's restaurant openings.

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When I moved 6 years ago to my current home, there wasn't a single bar or restaurant that could just as easily call Lakeview or Wicker Park its home. Fast forward to now, with Leader Bar right on my corner and Pithfork a block away, this stretch of Irving Park could almost be Wrigleyville. Though I was happy when a Pasadita taco stand moved in a couple of years ago and have enjoyed it many times for a quick, just-fine snack, the largely-Gringo clientele add to a feeling that the neighborhood was trying to turn into Division Street between Ashland and Damen.

None of this bothers me at all, by the way. I like what it might do for my property value and I also like having a place on my corner to escape occasionally from a house of screaming kids to watch a game on some high definition TV's while drinking a pretty good beer. I also like margaritas. A lot. And I like drinking them outside in the sun. So when signs came up showing that Cantina Pasadita, a full-bar, table-service branch of the taco chain was taking over the space across from Leader Bar, with its nice sidewalk seating area, I was hopeful. I met the GM a few weeks before it opened, and he described the coming place as "high-end," with things like "tableside guacamole and a mixology program". He also said that they'd hired a chef with years of experience at well-known local restaurants. "It's going to be nothing like the taco stands," he said. I was skeptical, but really if all the place had were fresh chips and decent margaritas made with real lime, I'd be a regular.

The margaritas are fake and they suck. The chips are stale. There is crazy-expensive guacamole that's completely bland, and the table salsa tastes like ketchup. there's also something called "Cachos," described by my server as "authentic Mexican nachos". Whatever. More stale chips with some cheese, topped with cubes of watery chicken breast.

I hope potential buyers for my condo don't read this blog. Cantina Pasadita is horrible.

----------------------

Baume & Brix

351 W Hubbard St
Chicago, IL 60654
Neighborhoods: Near North Side, River North

Cantina Pasadita
2958 W. Irving Park Road

Foods I Like (Yes, you read that right)

People tell me that I have a reputation for hating everything.  Though the pages of this blog already show that such criticism is unfounded, I’m devoting this whole post to a bunch of stuff I’ve had and liked recently.  It’s the first beautiful Spring Friday of 2013.  Here’s a little extra sunshine:

Jerk wings and festival from Jerk – Modern Jamaican Grill Food Truck.  This truck is one of the first in Chicago to cook onboard, and they’re doing a fantastic job with a simple menu that uses just a grill and a deep fryer.  Wings are juicy and fresh, and have hot, no-holds-barred jerk seasoning with an especially  potent garlic component.  Hand-cut fries are well-seasoned but a little limp and greasy.  Skip those and opt instead for a side of festival  - crisp, slightly sweet corn fritters that do a great job cooling down all that spice.

Smoked whitefish Caesar salad from Bavettes.  Most of the time when people mess around with toppings on a Caesar salad, they ruin a good thing.  The salty, slightly-smoky fish here was an exception.  It tasted great and had a firm enough texture to hand up to the crisp greens.  This was a well-executed salad with a little something to take it up several notches.  This dish stood out even at a meal where I liked just about everything that was served (except the” creamed spinach”, which had cream and spinach, but was not creamed spinach).   

Lentil soup at Salam.  The food at Salam is generally much better than at any other local place serving similar food, and this soup is a real highlight.  It has a refined, creamy, extra-strained texture you’d expect at a French restaurant, with lightness and balance unmatched by other lentil soups.  I love it, and it’s my 3 year old’s favorite delivery food (mango lassi is a beverage, not a food).

Smoked salmon at Jam.  I will never understand why Jam serves a piece of frosted chocolate cake as an amuse bouche for dishes like this, but recently I’ve been able to put that incongruity aside and simply enjoy the good things about the place.  The smoked salmon dish is a real standout.  House-smoked fish with great flavor and texture, a brilliant béarnaise sauce, crisp potato pancakes, gorgeous, gooey poached eggs, and some nice crunch from salsify slaw.  A dish of beautifully contrasting colors and complementary flavors.

Granduca cheese from JP Graziano.  This Sardinian pecorino is incredible.  It’s hard and I suspect intended mainly for grating, but I’ve just been eating it straight with young, cheap Southern Italian wines.  It’s very nutty and only mildly salty as compared with other pecorino cheeses, but what makes it so special is the underlying flavor of high-quality goat milk with complex, but not overpowering funk.

Jekyll & Hyde at Howells & Hood

If you order the seafood salad at a massive, corporate-looking sports bar at the bottom of a downtown Chicago office building, you deserve the mushy, tasteless fish with gloppy dressing you’re likely to get.  It is a marvel that at Howells & Hood, the dish rivals the best versions at seafood-focused restaurants in places like Boston and San Francisco.  Tender, well-charred octopus mixes with a variety of delicately poached shellfish, all adorned simply but robustly with lemon and oregano.  Eat this and you can reasonably imagine being at seaside restaurant in Sicily.  You’ll have to tune out the very-American couple next to you as they order their burgers to be made without salt, and the very American sorority girl a few feet away as she requests a round of Sex on the Beach for her table.

The good vs. evil theme suggested by my post title is inaccurate.  Howells & Hood is not 2 things.  It’s not 3 things, 4 things or 5 things.  Howells & Hood is everything.  It’s a restaurant for locavores, run by a chef who passionately espouses things like rooftop gardening and hyper-local cuisine.  It’s a sports bar for the heavy-drinking frat crowd, such as the ones who, during one of my visits, did shots of Jack and high fives every time their school’s basketball team hit a 3-pointer.  It’s the place where 14 office workers grab lunch together and ignore the gigantic beer list while they drink diet cokes and make fun of the boss.  It’s where tourists go to lay out their guidebooks before planning their Mag Mile shopping adventures.  It’s the spot for beer geeks who want to explore what must be the city’s largest tap beer list. Howells and Hood has high tops and low tops and medium-sized tops.  Indoor bars and outdoor bars.  Booths, tables, and semi-booth-tables.  It has everything.

Not surprisingly, Howells & Hood even has a burger.  A very, very bad burger.  At about 6 inches tall, this burger is inedible as a sandwich unless you pull some of the parts out first.  I started with the inch-thick onion rings, breaded so thickly that the batter inside was still gooey and raw.  I took out the tasteless tomato next, and then brushed off some of the slaw-like shredded lettuce.  I was barely able to get my mouth around the thing now.  Then I sneezed.  The pepper in this monstrosity was ground very coarsely, and there was so much of it that my nostrils were not able to cope.  The next flavor to hit me was carbon.  The exterior was blackened with a burnt crust that obliterated all other flavor.  I had ordered the burger medium rare and there was indeed a corner of the thing that was cooked that way.  The rest of the burger ranged wildly – parts of it were reddish pink and juicy, but more parts were totally grey and dry and there were some parts in between – signs of a cook that doesn’t understand how to manage a fire.

I’ve been to Howells & Hood several times, and for the most part I’ve liked the food.  The seafood salad is special, and I expect to find other gems as I continue exploring the menu.  Howells & Hood is everything, so it takes a bit of time to sort through it all to find the somethings you like.  I work steps away, and with the limited options for good food around, I will be happy to keep exploring.  One can eat at The Purple Pig only so many days in a row.

 

Howells & Hood

435 N Michigan Ave.  312-262-5310

Flour and Stone

"We're running a lunch special.  A pizza for one and a salad for $19".  This was the start of my dialogue with the Flour and Stone staff, and at prime lunch hour I witnessed several other conversations that started the same way.  I stayed for lunch, but more than half of the others left with various levels of huff and head-shaking.

I'm not sure what Flour and Stone is trying to be, but whatever it is, I don't think it's going to work.  There is a huge and captive business/ tourist lunch crowd in this area, with a whole lot of crappy choices for them.  It's hard for me to imagine shunning this crowd the way Four and Stone does.  When the place first opened, it was dinner-only.  That really baffled me.  Now they're open for lunch, but a solo luncher would be hard-pressed to get change back from a 20.  If they're shooting for some sort of upscale restaurant vibe, neither the counter-service setting nor the sparse decor are going to make that work.

But readers don't want paragraph after paragraph analyzing decorations and business models and what might or might not be going on in the mind of a restaurant's owner. The Sun Times would still have a food section if you did.  You want to know how the pizza is, and I'm going to tell you - not that good.  The crust is thick and overly bready.  It's got more char than Pizza Hut, but it's in the same ballpark.  The sauce is tart and watery, and could use salt.  Toppings include onion and garlic that are still raw after coming out of the oven, and mushrooms that are bland and need more cooking time too.

I saw an interview somewhere, where a Flour and Stone Owner said, bizarrely, that what he is describing as Brooklyn-style pizza is based on the style of pizza he ate growing up in Rochester, NY.  I believe him.

Flour and Stone
355 E Ohio St  Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 822-8998