Author: foodnerd

C and I went to Naha last week [really it was early december, i’m lame. -fn], since we couldn’t get a table at Topolobampo.




The space is beautifully serene, in a just-hip-enough sort of way, but it did make me think that it was carefully designed to be fashionable-but-bland in just the right way as to make your haute-couture outfit really stand out to best advantage. So, you know, not really my scene, but I can dig it, and the room dividers made of crazy branches stuck into planters were really great.
Our first courses were both terrific, my mixed-beet salad with blue cheese and C’s romaine with red pepper & serrano ham. Simple but interesting on the tongue, and very well executed. We’d both had separate evenings of wretched, wretched meat-laden excess a few days previously, so we craved salad, rather uncharacteristically. 🙂
The mains were less successful. The bay scallops were tasty enough, but a bit soggy of crust in their buttery sauce, and almost too rich, or too numerous. I like my scallops crusty and crunchy on their exterior, and nearly raw inside, and these little guys were perilously close to overcooked. Still, not a BAD dish, just not a raving success. C’s dish was night and day — a boring bland piece of monkfish sitting next to what may be the single most delicious bit of porkbelly I’ve ever tasted, and that includes the Tung Po pork i had in LA last year, which put me into paroxysms of joy. Weird, and we couldn’t quite figure out what the idea was in combining the two.
The desserts all sounded good, but what i really wanted was the goat-cheese cheesecake from one item and the lemon-verbena icecream from another item. Being greedy and unwilling to compromise, I asked the waiter if I could combine them (I recognize that sometimes the kitchen has very specific quantities on hand and mix-matching can screw up the logistics). He came back and told me that the chef said I could mix them, but that he strongly recommended against it. As if I’d let THAT stop me. Pshaw. The two together were SO GOOD, two sides of a dairy coin, both light but creamy, one with a floral tartness and the other with a savory undertone. I think these might be on the menu frequently, since H had the goat cheesecake also on her trip to Naha, and loved it just as much. If you find yourself there, on a business dinner or a fancy date or whatever, the best way to proceed is to get a salad and the goat cheesecake (or the lemon verbena ice cream, or both), and a nice bottle of wine, and either ignore or laugh at the expensively-dressed yuppies all around you.

Went out to La Bonita last night with H&J and H’s mom LL, and had some high-quality mexican eats. The strength of this place is its sauces: the mole on the enchiladas pollo was rich with anise, and the rough tomatoey sauce pooled around my lamb chops was much spicier than it looked. Really I think the lamb was the best, but that’s very much personal preference, and a testament not only to the sauce but also to the perfection of the cooking of those little chops — succulent and tender, with lots of crispy salty edge bits to gnaw off the bone. Oof – yummy.
Everything was delicious, from the creamy avocado sauce swaddling the seafood cocktail to the tangy tomatillo sauce on LL’s chile relleno to the desserts: fresh coconut-nut-caramel pie, coffee-tinged flan, chocolate pecan bars, pineapple upside down cake. (One weird thing was the large bits of cinnamon stick apparently stuck into the coconut pie as garnish — they blended in with the nuts & caramel and you ended up eating them by mistake, which wasn’t so pleasant.) Avoid the creamy fruit-tequila after-dinner drinks that taste like Nestle Quik, and stick with the excellent before-dinner margaritas & tequilas — we should have known better than to try something called “Tequila Rose.”
But don’t let my harshing on the silly drinks put you off — the cooking is excellent and worth a trip.

Not long before the roommate upped stakes to Florida, I went with him and some of his friends to Siam Rice & Noodle House for some Thai food reputed to be the genuine article. (The roommate and one of the friends are of Thai extraction, so their standards are high — I just look for the yum, they look for “like mom makes.”)
The big draw is the traditional sticky rice, which arrives in a little woven steamer with a lid. It is seriously sticky, and the way you eat it is to pick some up in your hand and roll it into a little ball, just like you did with Wonder Bread when you were a kid. This is, as you might imagine, intensely satisfying to do. It’s also very tasty rice, kind of nutty, and with a chewy elasticity to it that is fun to eat. You dip your little rice nugget into whatever else it is you’re eating — we had spicy beef salad, some chicken larb that didn’t pass muster with the Thais in the group (but i thought was not too bad), and some grilled chicken wings. The food is excellent, better than pretty much any Thai food I’ve had so far — less sweet, more savory, which is how I think it’s supposed to be, based on my experiences watching the roommate eat, and learning to cook pad thai from a Thai woman in Boston a few years ago, who said that no Thai food in the entire Boston area was worth eating.
A word of warning: do not be confused by the other place named Siam Cafe up the street. That place seemed pretty good too, since we stumbled in and read the menu before getting a cell phone call from our friends waiting for us in the correct restaurant, but the place we ate was called Siam Rice & Noodle House.
There’s also a banh mi place a few blocks north on Sheridan that I’ve heard is awesome, better than Ba Le, so I will have to head back up there sometime soon.

My friend M came to visit last weekend, and on the way home from Midway we were reading the Reader trying to find a place to eat breakfast (brunch really, since it was after 11am by that time). I’d sort of set my heart on Pilsen, since the Ashland bus goes right through it and what a perfect excuse. Happily the Reader did part II of its regional-mexican feature that week, and we settled on Sabas Vega Carnitas, at Ashland & 18th.
Oh my heavens to betsy. Yum. Yum. Did I mention, yum? We were the only gringas in the place, but everyone there is friendly and there’s enough english spoken to get the job done. It’s mostly a takeout place, which means that you can walk in there and buy two pounds of top-notch carnitas or barbacoa for your next party, or tubs of birria and menudo, for which I will be returning sometime soon — readers of this blog know about my minor obsession with birria and posole — and on weekends they do table-service also. We had two tacos apiece, plus some pickled nopalitos and some velvety soft refritos. Every table gets some homemade tortilla chips & bowls of very good thin red and green salsas, plus some pickled carrots & jalapenos. I got coffee, the cinnamon-infused mexican kind I am growing very attached to, and our lovely waitress kept that mug full — for which I am endlessly grateful, since I stayed up the night before till 3am reading the new Neil Gaiman novel.
There’s pretty much two taco choices, carnitas & barbacoa, both fantastic. The barbacoa is redder and saucier than some that I have had, moist and delicious. The carnitas is savory & rich, toothsome pork cooked in its own fat but in no way greasy, and if you order it in a taco be prepared for its glorious immensity. That thing was the biggest taco I’ve ever seen, practically a small burrito.
THAT is my kinda fuckin’ breakfast. YUM.
Sabas Vega Carnitas & Restaurant
1808 S. Ashland Ave.
Chicago, IL 60608
312-666-5180
www.carnitasdonrafa.com

i got stuck standing out in the sleety rain for 30 minutes this morning, waiting for the bus, and I haven’t been truly warm since, so when a coworker decided to order delivery from Perez, I had to join her even though I’d brought some lunch. I had them bring me their “goat soup” special, which turns out (and I can’t believe it took me this long to figure it out) to be birria, my favoritest of soups. Well, one of them anyway. I am so happy now. I’ve eaten half the soft melting goat meat, and slurped up all the broth — i will be sad later, when i go to eat the rest of the meat and there’s no soup to go with, but I couldn’t help myself, it was so good and hot and spicy and tangy and rich with fat — and gobbled my way through 3 of the best tortillas in the universe. Make that 4 of the best tortillas in the universe. mmmmmmm…

I *heart* Frontera Grill, but the tortillas at Perez are better. Way better. 🙂

C is in town again this week, and last night we went to Frontera Grill. I was pretty excited to try it out at dinner time, and it didn’t disappoint. We had to wait for a table, of course, but a) C & I only just met and see each other like once a month, we had plenty to talk about, and b) Frontera has the best fucking cocktails in Chicago as far as I can tell, so this was not a problem. The mezcal margarita is pretty rockin’, and I got the barkeep to show C the little laminated mezcal-info thingy, and C had a pretty great super-tart no-frills margarita, so yum.
One of the things I enjoy about C is his habit of ordering two starter courses, followed by a course of mains, and we did this again last night. First in line, a trio of ceviches: one tomatoey and reminiscent of my favorite treat at Maxwell Street Market, one limey and light and full of squid and shrimp, and one, our favorite, also limey and tangy but more assertive, and full of halibut — ceviche fronterizo. We’ll totally get the single order of this one next time.
Then we had sopes de chilorio, crispy little masa cups with soft pork flavored with toasted orange peel and ancho, which i loved but C found a little too spicy and a little too reminiscent of his detested winter squash, at which point i had a minor giggle at his expense. 🙂 Also we got a huarache de barbacoa, which totally rocked the house: a perfect blend of corn base, smear of bean, and soft moist goat, topped with a little old cheese and a tangle of radish and pea shoots.
We’d ordered a Gigondes (woo, yay me, remembering the name of the wine without writing it down on an envelope even!), which went awesome with the barbacoa but fought with the spicy pork. C had a great conversation (several conversations, really) with the sommelier, who was really cool, helpful, friendly and knowledgeable. During the course of one of these conversations, I happened to mention that Rick Bayless is my hero and I think he is so excellently nerdy about his food — so she went in the back and sent him out. Yikes! So last night in the middle of my dinner, I shook Rick Bayless’s hand and told him some mangled foolishness about how great I think his stuff is. C pointed out later that what I should have said was that when he took on Bobby Flay in Iron Chef America, and lost to him by one point of plating, he was ROBBED — Bayless totally spanked Flay in that battle. Flay’s plating is so irritatingly late-80s NYC southwestern, and Bayless’s dishes in the battle were straight-up brilliant in concept, execution, and look, without any flouncy flourishy bullshit. But I am lame and failed to do so. 🙂
Anyway, after Senor Bayless was gracious enough to spend a couple of minutes with his adoring public, we moved on to mains. I had smoked duck breast in a delicata-squash/ancho sauce, with roasted green beans and more duck rolled in a soft masa polenta-ish stuff and sliced. This masa/duck thing, whatever its official name is, was totally the star of the show — YUM. C had a green pork posole, which was delicious but much much lighter than either of us were expecting. He felt he probably should have ordered a different wine, though the one we had worked well enough. C may have to henceforward be referred to as WineNerd in this blog. Hee hee hee!
We got the mezcal-spiked hot chocolate, which WineNerd enjoyed as much as I was hoping he would, even though it wasn’t as strong as the one I had last time. And we had blueberry-tequila and nectarine-brandy ice creams, with hot cajeta sauce (goat milk caramel, clearly homemade with cinnamon & vanilla in there dancing around with the goatiness). And as we were leaving, the sommelier came by with little food-wine-pairing pamphlets they’d made up to help people learn how to match wine with Mexican food, which was supercool.
The food is always foremost in my evaluation of a restaurant, and Frontera totally makes the grade. But it’s the geeky devotion of one man and his love of fresh food and Mexican cooking that shines brightest at this place — how many celebrity chefs do YOU know who are in their first restaurant’s kitchen most nights? — and makes me love it even more.