Category: Restaurants & Stores

There is a Chipotle near one of my clients, and so I’ve eaten there now several times, and I am truly impressed by both the yummy factor and the consistency of the yummy. I think my favorite so far is the barbacoa burrito with hot red salsa — if i go for the green salsa I end up having to slather on lots of chipotle tabasco for spicy smoky goodness, which is certainly not BAD, but is more labor intensive. 🙂
And it strikes me that the metal-and-wood industrial aesthetic is not just pretty but probably has a lower build-out impact (in both dollar and environmental costs) than your average plastic-coated fast food site. And if they really do use organic and small-farm sourced foods the way they say they do, then I don’t care if McDonald’s owns them. A company that gives me fast, cheap, unreservedly tasty meals, while being easier on the environment and the farmer, is certainly welcome to stay in my world. Now all we need is a few more Pret A Mangers and we’re golden.

so i have this client out in Addison, IL, and sometimes I end up being out there right around lunchtime, like I did today. And today, happily, I had arrived early to my meeting and gone to the nearby mall to buy thread before heading over to the client, and while I was there I saw a little sign reading “Polish Deli.” Now of course you know that’s like a freaking homing beacon for me, so when the meeting ended at noon, I went straight to the deli, hoping for a decent sandwich at least. But they have also got a hot-food bar, and you can buy a “hot lunch” for $4.89. This consists of a meat, mashed potatoes (or you can swap in sauerkraut as I did), and a salad (this being one of those russian-style mayo salads in the cold case). You could choose pork in mushroom gravy, pork or chicken cutlets, ribs in gravy, galumpkes, and a few other things for your meat — i chose the pork in mushroom gravy, and the carrot-horseradish salad. I worried it might be pasty steam-table blandness, but this stuff turned out to be great! The meat is tender and flavorful and moist, the light creamy gravy is super tasty, the kraut is nice and the horseradish in the salad is strong and fresh. A hidden gem, although not so hidden to the Polish population — the place was jammed with people and the only person getting English from the staff was me. Let’s hope for more lunch-time trips to Addison, heh.
Barbara’s Polish Deli Store
10 W Lake St
Addison, IL 60101
630-628-8559

Tallasiandude is here for a visit, and I’m still on the quest to find an acceptable chinese restaurant, specifically a shanghainese restaurant. Ed’s Potsticker House was reputed on LTHForum to have great soup dumplings, and some of the other dishes got raves as well, so we headed down there for lunch today. We had the soup dumplings, the house cigar-shaped potstickers, some pork belly in garlic sauce, and sauteed rice cakes with bok choy & mushrooms & pork.
All of it was decent, some of it was good, but none of it lived up to the raves, and none of it was spectacular. I am beginning to despair of the potential of finding chinese here as good as the stuff in Boston, New York or California. It makes me a little distrustful of the LTH reviews, but i have to remember to account for the fact that people usually only really know the eats in their own town, and can only make comparisons with what they know. I had no idea how good Boston chinese could get until I met tallasiandude, and he took me so much further past what I knew as “good” in Chinatown.
The rice cakes were pretty good, nice flavor in the bok choy, and the soup dumplings were fine but not as good as Wing’s in Boston. The cigar potstickers had an odd sweet, almost cinnamony flavor in the meat, and the wrappers tasted like wonton wrappers — i thought they were ok, tallasiandude was not a fan. The pork belly was nice, meaty & fatty with a sort of black bean-garlic lightly spicy sauce; we quite enjoyed it, especially with a bit of white rice. So yeah, a decent feed but not what we’ve grown accustomed to, alas.

so we waded through the clots of hipsters outside The Bongo Room (at 10am on Saturday! don’t these people have hangovers to sleep off??) and got some brunch. Eggs benedict, to be specific, one with lobster and the other with canadian bacon. First of all, they actually poached my eggs hard, the way I asked them to — i was thrilled. NO ONE ever actually sends me hard-poached eggs in my benedicts, and so my hollandaise gets diluted by the runny yolks. Eeew. It was very nice, but the lobster version was lacking in salt, easily remedied with a quick go with the shaker. Their “hash browns” are really home fries, but they are exceptionally good, some of the best I’ve had, very flavorful and moist, yet with a crunchy exterior. They also have some cool-looking mimosas and bellinis, though we didn’t indulge. One thing I thought was weird, though, is that the decor was surprisingly boring except for the crazy spinning steel ceiling fans.
To kill time waiting for a table, we walked down to the Earwax Cafe and got a cappucino, which was very good, not at all bitter like most of the ones I’ve had of late. The people there were really mellow and cool, as well, which was a refreshing change — given the hipster ambiance of that stretch of Milwaukee, I expected faux-ragged hauteur. *grin*

I have been waiting for the cute new (bright green! fabulous asian-adorable graphics!) “spring roll bar” to open on Chicago Avenue at Ashland. For weeks I would walk by the “open soon” sign and anxiously peer inside. Finally, after my weeks away from Chicago, it’s finally open and I got to try it out.
I had a fragrant chicken deconstructed spring roll, which was pretty good, especially when you squirted on a combination of the sweet-sour sauce and the chili-lime sauce. Most anything is good with lime juice & fish sauce on it, of course, but this had some nice poached chicken and a pile of fresh lettuce, papaya, pea sprouts and other herbs & veggies. A little small, but that’s for the best, as it makes a very nice light meal. Especially when you add an order of french fried green beans. That’s right, battered and deep fried green beans. What could possibly be more tailor made for me, the child who at 4 requested string beans for dessert? These things are the freakin’ shizNIT, as the kids say these days — perfectly crunchy (all the way to the bottom of the cup — crunchy that lasts, yay!) and light, with lots of nice bean flavor to the vegetables, delightful on their own or dipped into whatever sauce you choose. A great way to satisfy your jones for fried snacky goodness without overdosing on starch.
I will post a photo of the great shop logo, but I am having technical difficulties at present. Tallasiandude got me a fabulous new digicam of my very own for my birthday, so foodnerd will no longer have to rely on the grainy phone-pictures, but I can’t get the downloading software to work, despite copious reading of the manual and swearing. Stay tuned.

While we wait for me to have enough time to post all my Euro-treats, let me tell you about my recent birthday dinner. Actually there were two. One was a trip to Blue Ginger in Wellesley, to check out the perennial hype about Ming Tsai’s fusion cuisine. This was very good, and I will post pictures of it shortly, but it was eclipsed by my dinner with tallasiandude at Tuscan Grill in Waltham. We ate at the bar as we always do, and we loved our meal and our evening, as we always do. It is so nice to have a place that just the two of us go that is always so comfortable and comforting but still chockablock with cooking skill. I never take pictures of my food there, I just groove.
We started with a spicy cold cucumber soup with dill & creme fraiche, which was spectacular and the best dish of the evening, and a crespelle (thick crepe) filled with ricotta & smoked trout, which was delicious but larger & heavier than i was expecting it to be. Then we split a half-order of cannelloni filled with chicken mousseline & swiss chard, and glazed with a marsala sauce. And finally we had a beautiful chunk of cod wrapped in pancetta and pan fried to crispy delectableness and served with sauteed spinach & pan fried basil gnocchi, and the grilled hanger steak with a panzanella salad. We skipped dessert in favor of heading home to have some vanilla ice cream topped with the rote grütze I brought home from Germany: a cooked mixture of sour cherries, red and black currants, strawberries, raspberries, rhubarb & blackberries. Holy moly, yum yum yum.

Sorry, just a little Bawstinonics slipped out. So the corner store near my house has a wide selection of Polish groceries (soup mixes, juices, cookies, etc.) along with locally made tortillas and Mexican staples. Psyche! I got some black currant nectar, and a carrot/apple/strawberry juice. They also have Vitner’s chips, in most but not all of the worthwhile flavors. Heh.

Twisted Spoke on Ogden: Our second latenight dining attempt was more successful than the first, due to use of internet and phone to make sure the sumbitch was open before attempting to breach the premises. Tallasiandude had a burger, which was excellent: nice soft juicy flavorful meat that didn’t overwhelm the toppings despite being large & thick. I had the sloppy joe, which was very well done but stylistically disappointing for me: it tasted like chili, while I feel that sloppy joes should be sweeter and more distinct in their flavor from chili. The fries that came with both were fantastic, dark golden brown and crunchy, with strong potato flavor. Props to the fry-man, ’cause I don’t usually like fries that thick but these were great! AND all the ingredients they use are organic, which is just a warm fuzzy all around.

I got a loaf of ciabatta at the Red Hen Bakery, and then neglected it for at least a week (i at least had the presence of mind to stick it into the fridge while I flew around the midwest to client meetings, then to Boston for a drive back out to Chicago with a carfull of my crap). This morning I dug it out for some breakfast and it was all stiffened up with a wet top where the salt topping was — sadness and despair! But pleasingly enough, it came out of the toaster all golden, light and crunchy. I guess you can’t keep a good loaf down. Or something. *giggle*

Last night tallasiandude & I took a trip to chinatown with H & J to check out Lao Sze Chuan. I think next time I will get the hotpot, since it is renowned for that, but this time we just ordered up a buncha stuff to see how it was. We didn’t order particularly wisely, since we got a few things called “house special” which turned out to get us a lot of similarly chili-rific sauces. But the salt & pepper spare ribs were dee-licious, and the dong po pork was very luscious and tasty (if in no way resembling the dish I know as dong po pork — this one had LOTS of chili pepper in a bright red sauce). And there was a dish of stirfried young soybeans with a salty-sour pickled vegetable, and the fish head soup had lots of lovely seafood, if not very much in the way of actual fish heads. Worth another exploratory mission.