Category: Restaurants & Stores

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.

Went to Wildfire a while ago with jB on the recommendation of friends. It’s supposed to be a 40s style supperclub, so of course I was hoping for actual dancing and waitstaff in faux-40s outfits, but I guess you can’t have everything. It’s got just a whiff of the chain that it is, but you can’t argue with gorgeous fat steaks and Basil Hayden bourbon and clams crusted with buttery horseradish crumbs and run under the fire. Good food, and just the ticket for certain sorts of occasions.

Went out with a friend on Saturday evening; we wanted to go to Blackbird, but couldn’t get a reservation, so we went to Avec and sat at the bar. The space really is cool, feels like a sauna with all that wood on the walls and ceiling, and it’s remarkably tiny for such a high-quality kitchen. However, the hipster see-and-be-seen quotient is enough to make you gag. Happily, we’d already had two dirty martinis apiece at Gene & Georgetti’s so we were tiddly enough to just ignore everyone. Except the guy to my left, who kept getting plates of things that smelled amazing, so I kept leaning over to bother him and find out what they were. Thanks to him, we ordered an extra unplanned dish that turned out to be one of my two favorites of the evening, a buckwheat pasta with red-wine braised rabbit. Simple, light but intensely savory, a wonderful combination of subtle flavors.
The other favorite was another simple thing, a shaved apple and celery salad, with slivers of manchego and a cider vinaigrette. I immediately ran out the next day to buy a bunch of celery to go with the apples in my fridge.
There was also some crispy-fried flanken short rib in harissa aioli, very nice, and chorizo stuffed dates with bacon and a piquillo pepper sauce (hubba hubba), and some lovely soft blood sausage with apples and watercress. Our other entree was the oven roasted pork shoulder, which was utterly monstrous. Huge. Bizarrely enormous for this kind of restaurant. And almost completely meat — there wasn’t nearly enough of the very tasty sauerkraut to properly accent each bite of meat, and the two of us together didn’t have a prayer of finishing off that pork. I took the remains home, and ate it for lunch today, and even that mere fraction was filling. Yummy though. 😉
We had some cheeses to finish, a garrotxa, a pave d’auge that was okay, and an epoisses that I enjoyed but my friend found too stinky. And then we lurched home to lie down and groan. Note to self: no meals too delicious to stop eating after knocking back two martinis and about 8 giant olives. Ooof.

I found a great friendly dive bar near my house called the Chipp Inn. Great juke full of old standards, R&B, disco, reggae and a few 80s pop hits, and a friendly bartender with a wide selection of cheap local lagers, mexican beer, and german brews. But the truly brilliant part is the fact that every hour or so a dude comes through selling homemade tamales out of an igloo cooler, $5 for a whole baggie full and some killer spicy green salsa. My kinda place. (i ate the tamales for breakfast today and forgot to take a photo of them first. oops.)

In between two unfortunately stressful meetings out in the western burbs, I got another fabulous $5 hot lunch at Barbara’s Polish Deli. This time it was a softball-sized chicken meatball (delicious, tender with flecks of herbs), with 2 sides: noodles with bacon & cabbage, and a tangy sauerkraut dish with bacon & kielbasa. It was the high point of my day.

So C emailed last night that he had bonded with his server at Spring last week, and her sweetie pie — a server at Green Zebra — was hooking him up with a reservation at Green Zebra tonight. And obviously I didn’t need to be asked twice.
I’d heard mixed reviews from several quarters, but I liked the concept of the restaurant and wanted to see for myself what was up with a not-quite-vegetarian restaurant that celebrated the vegetable. Unfortunately, I am an oaf and forgot my camera, which is a damn shame considering how pretty all the plates were; sadly, we’ll have to make do with camera photos.
The interior is all angles and hipness, but the palm fronds and faux-woven table surfaces are really cool, and the table arrangements afford more privacy than you’d expect from a restaurant so small. We ordered 3 dishes from each of the three stages of the tasting menu, and had just the right amount of food. The trout sounded good, but we were pulled by the wegemetarian dishes and stayed pure veg all the way.

There was an avocado panna cotta, savory this time, with creme fraiche and pickled sweet peppers and celery leaves. This dish was plain weird, but in a really good way. It was cool and soft and unctuous and rich, best when punctuated by the sweetness of the cream and the sharp brightness of the pickles and celery. It would be awesome as a summertime dish.
A trio of beets came with a deep garnet beet with gorgonzola-horseradish sauce, a fine dice of pink beets (my fave) with dill and white balsamic, and a near-puree of golden beets with orange walnut dressing. The subtle distinctions between the three types of beet was interesting, and was thrown into relief by having all three on the same plate. I *heart* beets with dill.
The marinated mozzarella was a spectacular specimen of imported italian cheese which would have been gorgeous just on its own, but it came with a garnish of olive-bean-spice puree, and a pool of pureed arugula, and a moroccan-spiced parmesan cracker. Yummy.

The middle courses were a roasted shiitake roll wrapped in a wonton wrapper and fried, served over sauteed savoy cabbage (the one discordant note in the meal — i thought the frying was a bit off, though the shrooms and cabbage were very tasty); a quartet of agnolotti filled with puree of cauliflower & mascarpone, and topped with roasted cauliflower and black truffle (whooo-ee, yum!); and a light, lemony “cassoulet” of artichoke, tomato and lemon-balm hollandaise (my fave of the three, closely followed by the agnolotti).
The bread and butter are fabulous at Green Zebra, by the way, especially the multi-grain bread, which has a nutty sweetness that’s just right. Normally i prefer salted butter, but whatever this sweet-cream stuff was could turn my head for sure, and they serve it nice and soft, the benchmark of a restaurant that’s serious about their eating.
We’d been drinking a sancerre recommended by Jeremy, our fabulous waiter, which turned out to be a real treat, minerally yet with a little bit of fruit in it. I will keep my eyes peeled for sancerre henceforward. As we segued into the third round of dishes, we moved on to a Domaine du Grapillon d’Or 2001 Gigondes (that envelope is sure coming in handy). Very nice indeed.

The last series was an eggplant tart with a smoked tomato sauce and a zucchini-cheese pate (good); a spicy-hot lentil cake with a sticky red-pepper jam and a meyer-lemon relish (awesome, both the cake and the condiments); and the best dish of the evening, a duck egg served over applewood-smoked potato puree with brioche points. Holy crap, this dish is good — somehow they got those potatoes to taste like bacon, and they melded beautifully with the thick gooeyness of the duck egg’s yolk, and all of it was perfect with brioche toast. I wish they were open for brunch so I could stumble over there and have duck egg and smoked potato for breakfast on the weekend.
We had room for a cheese course, since the all-veg menu was quite light, and we had a nice silky brie-style cheese, a funky hard sheep cheese, and an amazing find: Friesago from Shepherds Way. Nutty, milky, sheepy, perfectly balanced. Walnut toasts and date paste and fresh figs and micro-sliced apple went nicely with all the cheeses, and paved the way for dessert.

A fresh-fig galette with ginger ice cream and black pepper ice cream was very good, but it was the pumpkin beignets with warm cranberry compote & pecan ice cream that stole the show. Yum. We were unable to resist the idea of chocolate curry ice cream, though C was skeptical — it turned out to be fantastic, tingly and spicy notes playing around with the rich chocolate. (On a related note, C was telling me about his dinner at Tru last night, which involved — wait for it — foie gras in chocolate sauce with a glass of big rich madeira. *mwrowr*) And there was a lovely dessert wine, a spicy Monbazillac, similar to Sauternes but with a more complex kick of spice at the end.
This dinner was not as mindbending as the one at Blackbird, but I wasn’t expecting it to be; dinners like that don’t come along every day. But this dinner WAS interesting, well-executed and delicious, and was enjoyed with what has turned out to be a wonderful new friend. Yay!

Holy cow. I often enjoy expensive fancy-pants meals when I have them, but I am rarely impressed as deeply as I was by my dinner at Blackbird last week. (I would have run home immediately to blog about it, but work and travel intervened.) My friend R has a brother-in-law whose job takes him to Chicago, far from friends and family — and that brother-in-law is not just a nice fella, but he is a Food Whore. Can I get hallelujah? Because I get to be his stand-in dining companion. Yay!
He couldn’t decide between the unknown-but-recommended (Spring) and the known-and-loved (Blackbird). I scoped the menus online — why doesn’t Spring put their whole menu up, dammit? — and was equally torn, until I had a look at the desserts: Blackbird was offering avocado panna cotta and chocolate semifreddo with bacon. Chocolate + bacon = I MUST GO THERE.
So we went. And the room is as sleekly fashionable as it had seemed from the outside, but oddly cozy, perhaps because you’re close enough to the neighboring tables to smell their dinners, and get pulled in to neighborly conversation about what you and they’ve been eating. Which is sort of nice, taking the edge of seriousness off such a highfalutin’ restaurant. The service is friendly but not overly so, knowledgeable but not snotty; I was pleased.
C & I got to chatting, since we’d never met, and happily had lots in common, so we hadn’t even gotten a look at the menu by the time the people next to us got their amuse-bouche — which smelled so goddamn good it was distracting: we both stopped talking and started staring. It was some sort of soup, strongly scented with black truffle. Normally i find truffle mildly annoying: it’s usually just a token extravagance that doesn’t add much to the actual enjoyment of the dish, it smells better than it tastes, and most of the time there’s not even enough of it there to really detect it at all. But this — it smelled SO good. When ours arrived, we immediately stuck our noses into the cups and sniffed. And sniffed and sniffed. The cups held a few spoonfuls of sunchoke bisque, supercreamy and light and savory, with big slivers of truffle floating in it along with tiny bits of apple and possibly sweet onion to add crunch & brightness. I scraped every single bit of soup out with my spoon, and only the fact that I was dining with someone I’d just met kept me from attempting to lick the cup.
I knew I was going to get along just fine with C when we couldn’t decide on appetizers, so he proposed to whitewash our gluttony, I mean structure our meal, as three courses: 2 appetizers to start, 2 more to follow, and 2 mains to end. Dude, sign me up. (And of course we shared it all. Duh.)

Course 1: We had a charcuterie plate of meaty country pate and boudin blanc (which I’d never had), with grainy mustard and pickled cabbage & summer beans & beet. The pickles were very sharp and well-spiced, as good as any I’ve made, and I make awesome pickles. The boudin was surprisingly meaty in flavor, considering it’s so pale in color, and dense and a bit sweet from the rice; I am going to have to do some boudin investigations in Louisiana sometime soon. And we had a plate of venison pastrami, dark, dense, salty little slabs dotted with dates, fried capers, pickled shallots, pumpernickel toast cubes and sunchoke cubes. (Tiny cubes are a theme at Blackbird; normally I would find that a bit affected and annoying, but everything we ate was so spectacular that I am willing to completely forgive and even embrace such things.) The intensity of the meat was made even more delightful by the soft rich sweetness of the dates, and I would just like to say that whoever thought of frying capers deserves a cash prize.
C is a wine guy, so we had champagne with the starters; I had a brut rose that was very nice, but of course because I am a wine retard I can’t remember what it was, or what C had. 🙂

Course 2: My scallop dish was one of the best things I have ever eaten, period. It was completely and utterly perfect. Maine diver scallops, seared to a thick crunchy golden crust, intensely scented with black truffles — two flavors that could not be more wonderful together, commingling and complementing each other — and celeriac cubes, a few leaves of celery for a lighter, brighter note in the same key, and a bit of butter and salt. OH. MY. GOD. I have had a lot of fantastic scallop dishes over the years, but this one takes the prize, for the combination of flavors alone, in perfect harmony. Decorum got chucked and I scooped up every last bit of buttery sauce with my finger, licking as I went.
C had a confit of suckling pig, gorgeous in its own right, but perhaps not as mindbendingly sublime, at least for me. But that’s no flaw — and there certainly is no flaw in a pile of meat so moist, flavorsome and velvety, pan fried to a crisp crust, and served over sweet and sour cabbage, a cider gastrique (mmmmmmmm) and a wee pile of winter squash cubes. This dish was all about the softness of the pork in the mouth. Lovely.
By this time we’d gotten a burgundy. It smelled of forest floor, which I think is a lovely thing to smell like, and it turned out to fill the mouth nicely, round, with no hard edges. It got more floral and complex over the course of the meal, and was quite pleasant to drink on its own after we’d finished the food and were waiting on dessert. It was a Fixin 2001 Hervelets Premier Cru; I wrote it down on an envelope because I knew I’d forget what it was.
Course 3: I was having too much fun by this point and forgot to photograph the mains. I had a confit of veal tenderloin. The server asked me how I wanted it cooked, which confounded me — veal usually comes one way, unlike beef. But this was grass fed, and was nearly as red as beef, and since I’d ordered medium rare, it arrived darkly pink and very tender, meatier than veal usually is — sort of like the tenderest filet mignon ever. It came with some fried cavolo nero (a bit chewy, which was rather pleasant), some starchy red lima beans (also nice), a wine reduction, and baby artichokes and white turnips nestled into a creamy white-turnip puree. Yummy. C had a guinea hen glazed in yuzu. I had a few bites, and they hit with a powerful citrus flavor, an unexpectedly intense surprise, but not overpowering to the bird. I would have happily eaten a plateful.

C got the english muffin pain perdu with fruity accompaniments, and you KNOW i got the chocolate-bacon extravaganza. It was two square mini-waffles, with milk chocolate semifreddo studded with hazelnuts in between, a dollop of sweet butter on top, and two tiny sticks of salty, fatty, strong, crunchy bacon propped up against a pillow of homemade marshmallow fluff. The fluff wasn’t needed, but it was good anyway, heh. The bacon was not the usual american bacon; it might have been pancetta, or guanciale? Anyway, it was fantastic with the chocolate and the waffles, all that I’d hoped it would be.
After all this, we were perfectly filled, not a bit overstuffed. We were delighted, entertained, educated, contented; it was sort of like an evening of art appreciation, in which none of the pictures were boring or stupid. We would talk about other things, but constantly drop out of conversations to focus on the art happening in our mouths. We were there for nearly 4 hours. A restaurant that can make an evening like that possible deserves lots of repeat business. Next time tallasiandude comes to town…

After the architecture river tour, which was awesome but did involve being outdoors and seated for 90 minutes in 50 degree drizzly weather, we went to Frontera Grill for brunch. (So that in theory we could go to Resi’s Bierstube for dinner, b/c it doesn’t open until like 3pm. We didn’t go, but that’s neither here nor there.)
They told us there’d be an hour’s wait, but we couldn’t have been there more than 20 minutes — we checked out the cookbooks and the amusingly-attired fellow patrons and weren’t even close to bored yet — when we were ushered to a corner banquette, perfect for sharing an excessive amount of food. The cocktails all sounded so appealing that we threw our better judgement to the winds and ordered a pair of the bloody marias and a limontini. Both of these were some of the best cocktails we’ve ever had — the bloodies were spicy and complex and had a knockout dose of lime juice, and the ‘tini was made of homemade lime-infused tequila, orange juice, mint, and a splash of damiana, which gave it a floral/bitter note that was perfect against the sweetness of the orange and mint.


We started with a halibut ceviche tostadita, a jicama/citrus salad, and sopes rancheros, tiny little masa cups filled with the most delectable braised beef in chile sauce and a sprinkle of dry white cheese. These little morsels were the best thing we had on a tableful of delicious dishes — get them if they are available when you go.
Then we had posole, a richer, more refined version of the stuff I love so much from Perez, with limes, shredded curly cabbage and tostadas on the side. We had Tamales de Frijol con Queso de Cabra: black bean tamales filled with homemade goat cheese in