My friend Bar comes to Chicago for business, and for once I was actually in town when she was here. I’d been hankering to try out one of the beer gardens we have here, so we trundled over to Resi’s Bierstube on Irving Park, wandered through the deserted bar and found a seat in the back yard under a tree.
If only all bars could be like this.
A wide and excellent selection of German beers on draft, including dark wheat beers, which I’ve never even seen before and enjoy very much. Affable indy-rock waitresses. And enormous portions of pork — we had a smoked chop and a weiner schnitzel — that come with sides of bland sauerkraut, gorgeously vinegary german potato salad studded with bacon, and rye bread with butter. We could have stayed there all night, and more or less, we did — when they closed the beer garden, we stayed another hour at the bar until the rest of the patrons left, and when the staff let us know they wanted to close up early and head home, we wandered out into the warm evening, happily full of pork and beer and good will.
And had a bit of schnitzel and potato salad left over to medicate the hangover next morning.
