Author: foodnerd

I was oot and aboot yesterday in Humboldt Park, riding my bike, when I grew peckish. I came upon a likely-looking place that said Jibaritos and Lechon Asado in big letters in the window, and when I peeked in, the place was mobbed, which I took to be a good sign. There’s takeout in the front, so at first I thought I had to wait in line, but there are two dining rooms, one to the left and one to the back, and I got a table right away. It’s a little divey, but homey and full of families and young people and old people — lots of people, eating lots of food, speaking lots of languages (or at least spanish and english). This is Borinquen Restaurant.
There are some cool looking appetizers — i saw a skewer of meat and a big fried ball of something (plantain I’d guess) going to another table — and mixed plates, but I got the headline dish, the jibarito with lechon asado. I’d had a jibarito at Rudy’s Taste, which I found hard to eat and ultimately disappointing, so the fabulousness that arrived on the plate here was truly heartwarming.

Imagine some nice flavorful roast pork, in a sandwich with lettuce and tomato, glued together with a bit of cheese whiz and a generous dollop of mayo. Now imagine that instead of bread, there are two toothsome slabs of plantain, smashed flat and fried crisp in — wait for it, this where it gets really good — hot oil with so much garlic in it that globs of garlic stick to the outside of the sandwich. The garlicky goodness wafted up to me immediately, and I started thinking happy thoughts about the world and everyone in it (those of you who know me know how uncharacteristic that is). I am so grateful for all of the different kinds of people in the world, each of whom figures out these amazing and wonderful new things for me to eat. I mean, who thought this thing up? It’s brilliant.
It comes with a big pile of yellow rice, studded with beans and bits of ham and chorizo. Usually the rice in these situations is pretty dull stuff, just there to fill space, but this was really delicious. Happily, there’s a recipe for it on the website of the restaurant. 🙂 And they have Hawaiian Punch, for which I have a soft spot a mile wide, and I have to say, it goes really, really well with a savory treat like this jibarito.
It’s not on Metromix, which strikes me as bizarre, but that’s ok — we don’t want too many more people to find it, or we won’t be able to get a table.

There don’t seem to be too many food bloggers in Chicago, for whatever reason, but one whose blog I like a lot does live here, or at least occasionally she lives here, and last week I reached out of my usual reclusive misanthropic shell and met up with my first real live food blogger, Cindy from foodmigration. She’s awesome, and we made friends (yay!), and selflessly *ahem* explored the shanghainese offerings of Moon Palace, the only place I’ve been able to dig up that has anything on the menu remotely resembling what I’ve gotten used to at Wing’s in Boston.
We had xiao long bao, soup dumplings, which were delicious — they are bigger than usual, with a thicker wrapping, and with way more meat than soup, so they’re not in contention with top-notch soup dumplings, but they taste good and frankly a tasty nonstandard soup dumpling is better than no soup dumpling at all. Cindy’d never had any xiao long bao, and she loved these, so I can’t wait for her to get out to California and have soup dumplings at Din Tai Fung in Los Angeles. (WATCH OUT: The link plays music. Sigh.) She in for a TREAT. 🙂
The dumplings were the starter, along with some spare ribs steamed in spicy black bean sauce wrapped in a lotus leaf — good, but in no way spicy. We were distracted by trying to get to know each other and cross-examine the menu at the same time, but eventually we got ourselves sorted out enough to order more dishes.
We’d heard that Moon Palace had a braised pork shoulder, and from the photos on LTHforum it looked a lot like the dish at Wing’s that I call Pork As Big As Your Head. We ordered that, which Moon Palace calls braised pork thigh, along with rice cakes with pickled vegetable and bamboo shoots, and some clearly fried shrimp. The shrimp weren’t on the menu, and I had to try and explain what I wanted because I couldn’t remember the chinese words for it, but once we had established that the dish i was after was a) free of vegetables, b) not spicy, c) sauteed, and d) in a clear sauce, they knew what I wanted and told me i could have it. Yay! Cindy’d never had rice cakes, either, so I was thrilled to share my love for the chewy white pucks of joy, along with my recipe for cooking them with kimchi. Heh. The pucks here were delish, in a yummy dish of pickled salty veg, bamboo shoot slices, and pork, because no vegetarian dish is complete without pork, right? And the clearly fried shrimp were good too. The shrimps are regular shrimp, bigger than the special type of shrimp that you get on a good day at Wing’s and every day at Mandarin Chateau, and the sauce is somehow thicker and more visible, but I ain’t complaining — they were yummy. Tallasiandude says that I’ve been spoiled by starting out with the creme de la creme of the dish, and that most other versions of clearly fried shrimps come with that thicker sauce.
And the pork as big as your head? Perhaps not quite as big as my head, and it didn’t fall off the bone as soon as you glance at it sideways, but it was succulent and fatty and full of that lovely brown savory sauce, and we both liked it very much. Cindy had just made a big pot of veal stock and wasn’t up for more along the same lines, so I took the bone home and am going to make soup out of it, probably this weekend. (which i did – here’s a picture of it:)

So it still remains to be seen if Moon Palace passes the tallasiandude test, but so far it’s the best there is in these parts, and I will definitely go back — sometimes a girl just has to have soup dumplings and rice pucks and a big braised brown pork shoulder. And it’s nice to have a new friend in Chicago. 🙂
[photos are coming — camera pictures are hard b/c sometimes my download tool doesn’t work, and i am too cheap to pay 25 cents or whatever per picture.]

My favorite place to eat Korean in Boston is Wu Chon House in Somerville. That is where i first encountered my favorite food, their version of tofu kimchi bokum. So you can imagine the shrieking and jumping up and down that occurred when I drove past a place called Woo Chon Restaurant here in Chicago.
I had to try it, just for the amusement value alone. I’d been twice to Hai Woon Dae, just because that was the only one I could remember both times I was called on to get a group of people to a Korean BBQ. So when tallasiandude was in town recently and had a yen for kalbi & soju, we decided to try Woo Chon. (particularly appropriate since he knows and loves the Somerville Wu Chon also) All we needed was adequate eats and we would have been happy, but Woo Chon smacked it out of the park — it was WAY better than the already-good Hai Woon Dae. There must be a law in the universe that all restaurants called Woo Chon totally rule.

We tried to order kalbi and some crazy black-pepper dish I forget exactly, but we couldn’t have that because it wasn’t cooked on the coals like the kalbi, so we ended up with kalbi and giant prawns for the grill, and a dish of kimchi bokum to start. We had barely ordered and gotten some very nice barley tea before the best scallion pancake I’ve ever had arrived at the table for no charge. (free! crunchy! eggy! oh yeah!)

The kimchi bokum is my second favorite version — my heart still belongs to Wu Chon’s back home, but this version is very fresh and light in flavor, tangy and bright and full of lovely fatty pork and spicy vegetables. Quite different in style from my beloved, but very definitely yummy. Very happy to have found a worthy version of this here in Chicago.
And then the main course arrived. I don’t usually post really big photos here, but behold the glory of a Woo Chon bbq spread:

Head-on prawns. Glorious kalbi. More fucking pan chan than I have ever seen in one place, and ALL OF THEM freaking amazing. Holy crap. YUM. They use the inside leaves of the lettuce that can’t be used as bbq wraps in a salad topped with fabulous dressing. They make a couple awesome kimchi styles. Two kinds of sweet daikon pickle (be still my heart). An insanely good pickled oyster mushroom, of which they kindly brought us a refill dish when we’d demolished the first one. Spectacular cucumber pickle slices. Bean sprouts, garlic, fish cake, dried silver fishies, the ubiquitous potato salad. Crazy good sweet red dried squid. A sesame oil + black pepper dipping sauce for the prawns, and a spicy bean paste for the kalbi. Dear god, we ate until we couldn’t eat no more, and then we ate more. And knocked back a bottle of soju, ’cause that always seems like the right thing to do.

Very late in the meal, tallasiandude (a self-proclaimed “damn rice eater”) recovered enough from the kalbi euphoria to crave some rice, and asked the waitress for a bowl. She looked mildly confused and told us it was already coming, and moments later a bowl of pretty purple rice arrived along with another bowl of spicy miso stew. We had no idea it was coming (free, again) or we might have considered a) not letting our gluttony run completely amok, or b) not ordering that kimchi bokum. We tried valiantly to eat it all, it was so good, but we just couldn’t. But since we are totally going back there, we can do it right next time.
To top off an already perfect meal, they brought us the little tiny bottles of fruity yogurt drink that we love so much, that seem only to appear in Korean restaurants, and that are the most perfect thing after a big spicy meal.
Random afternote: LTHForum has a recent thread about korean bbq, and says there’s a kalbi special at Kang Nam through end of February – I guess i will have to try it, but after that I am going straight back to Woo Chon.