Category: Restaurants & Stores

jackpot! Korean BBQ in Chicago appears to come standard with real charcoal braziers, which take an already fabulous eating experience and push it over the edge into a whole new realm of yum. From what I read, most of the Korean bbq places here use charcoal, and our dinner at Hae Won Dae certainly did.
We got kalbi & spicy pork bulgogi, both excellent, though the pork might have the slight edge for sheer deliciousness. The charcoal gave the meat a strong smoky flavor, mmmmmm. There were 9 dishes of pan chan, including really outstanding cabbage kimchi with a wonderful sour edge, raw marinated crab legs that were new to us and delicious though a bit hard to manage since they’re goopy with chili sauce outside and goopy with runny marinated crabflesh inside, spicy cucumber, spicy daikon, nice soft salty seaweed, flat thin slices of slightly-sweet daikon, omelet slices, potato salad, & yellow takuan pickles with extra chili & sesame dressing that were fantastic.
We also ordered some duk bok ki as a starter, which were nice & soft but not as spicy as we expected, given the warning we got from our server. Dinner came with rice & a mini-hotpot of soup that seemed to me to be chigae (tofu, miso, veggies, jalapenos). And we got a new flavor of soju that claimed to be flavored with green tea — you could have fooled us, not that we didn’t knock it back with some vigor nonetheless.
So yeah: soju, charcoal grilled meat, and spicy-ass pickles, in enough quantity to feed a party of four, just for the two of us for our first meal in chicago. It was a good night.

Also near my new house is Rudy’s Taste, a relatively new place with a tripartite specialty: Guatemalan, Cuban-Caribbean & Mexican. It’s on Ashland between Chicago & Division.
I have been hearing about jibaritos, a Puerto Rican sandwich which I didn’t know about before I came to Chicago, but ye cats, what is not to like about a meat and cheese sammich on a FRIED starch? Apparently Rudy’s Taste is known for them, which makes sense considering the reason I went in there in the first place was the neon sign reading JIBARITOS. I got the cubano this time, though, just because I was craving one. I was not disappointed — it wasn’t the best ever, but that’s no crime, because it was really good and full of the proper flavors: salty roasty meat, mayo, mustard, pickle, toasty bread, a bit of melty cheese, and a tangy salsa on the side. The cubano was just the ticket for breakfast after a beery evening on the roofdeck with the new upstairs neighbors.
Why the place was empty during prime brunch hour on a Saturday I have no idea. The coffee was pretty mediocre, but that’s easily fixed (or just get coffee elsewhere — there’s a foofoo coffeeshop pretty much on the same block — and have one of the awesome-looking juices instead). And I’m pretty sure it was Rudy himself who waited on me, and he seemed like a very sweet guy.
I will be going back for dinner and to try the Guatemalan specialties (apparently Rudy is Guatemalan, his dad is Mexican, and his wife is Cuban, thus the triple combo) and the jibarito. Stay tuned.

So the nearest market to my house is a mexican carniceria/grocery called Carniceria Laura, on Ashland just north of Chicago. It’s a cute little full-grocery market, with a mini-restaurant in the back and a monstrous meat counter. There’s all manner of beast products (tongues, large cuts of beef, etc.) and a smaller hotcase that has roasted pig and the biggest damn chicharrons I have ever seen. I am so going back to get some of those.
They have a whole wall of dried chile peppers and herbs and so forth, plus anything you could want in packaged Mexican goods, including horchata concentrate. Oh yeah.
I bought some necessaries, and a bottle of that great Tamazula smoky hot sauce, which made a really great guacamole, and a packet of locally made tortillas that were still warm in their paper package on a late weekend morning (er, early afternoon, whatever). The tortillas were awesome, full of soft corn flavor, and i put some of the leftover steak in there with the guacamole, to great effect. Yum!

As promised, the report on the posole at Perez. Yum yum. Six bucks gets you two meals’ worth of savory red-orange broth full of soft hominy and big melting chunks of pork. A shade bland, but squeeze in a few of the lime wedges and magically it’s perfect. With tortillas & hot sauce on the side, along with raw lettuce & onions to add in for crunch and body. Seriously between this and pho I am starting to think that all broth soups should have lime juice in them, I love them so much.

So on Sunday to while away my day I took a walk down Devon. All of Devon, from Sheridan to Kedzie, which looks on the map to be about 3 miles. The first part is boring, but once you cross Damen it starts to get interesting until it crescendoes in a mile-long stretch of Indo-Pak chaos: restaurants, bakeries, sari shops, jewelers, electronics hawkers, the works. I walked by one storefront marked “sweets and snacks” and got about another block down the street before I realized that it had been jammed to the rafters with people, so I went back and went in. It’s called Tahoora Sweets & Bakery, and I got a boxful of sticky Indian desserts, including some egg-shaped things stuffed with cream and rolled in coconut, a shredded-carrot cake, a giant pistachio-topped fried ball, and one of those greasy-sticky mini-funnel-cake things I don’t know the name of. I also got something called halwa puri, which I saw on pretty much every table in the place. It was a sectioned tray of spiced potato, spiced chickpeas, pickle, raita, some safety-orange stuff that seems to be the halwa (sort of a lightly-sweet relative of cream of wheat, with raisins and almonds, served warm), and 3 big puffy greasy puris. I got mine to go in plastic tubs, because there wasn’t a free table in the place, and I was the only gringo, and it didn’t seem fair for me to take up a whole booth for myself, and besides I was hungry and didn’t want to wait. So I ate on a bench at a bus stop, scooping up potato & pickle in greasy bits of puri and generally snarfing away. I got about halfway through and was full — not bad for $3.50. I forgot to get a napkin so I just rubbed all that grease into my cuticles (which were intensely grateful and looked better that day than they have in months) and went merrily along. It was all so good, and it held me through the whole long-ass walk, and the latter half made an entirely satisfying lunch, as you can see in the picture.
I also stopped at a place called Ambala that sells canisters of salty snack mixes; I had one at H’s that was great, and I tried to get one for myself, but I think I got one slightly different, so that will be fun too. It has shards of potato chips, nuts, dried fruit, spices, yum yum. This place is much more elegant and high-end inside, and has a whole range of sweets. I didn’t buy any because I’d already gotten a boxful elsewhere, but the shopgirl offered me a taste of their mini-funnel-cake treat, which was not glowing-orange and was the only one of these I’ve ever had that didn’t taste like the frying oil was stale. It was fantastic, crispy and sweet and syrupy without being cloying, so i will be going back there for my next batch of sweets.
Then the street morphs into a Muslim section, and then stops briefly in Central Asia (one Turkish shop and Argo Georgian bakery). I got some Turkish sheep’s milk feta and oil-cured olives, and a big yeasty round loaf at the bakery, and cilantro and dill at the produce market next door, so I can have a Baku-style breakfast tomorrow, yum. I stopped at a dollar store and bought the most hilarious shower curtain ever (i’m staying in a totally empty apartment, you will recall). This thing is like tissue paper, and the printing doesn’t line up properly — whaddaya want for $1.19? And then I trucked on through the Hasidic neighborhood, spying Hashalom, reputedly the only Israeli felafel in the city, but I was still full so I’ll have to try it later. And then at Kedzie I went over the river, but saw only Home Depot and strip-mall hell, so I turned around and caught the bus back east. There’s a bunch of stuff that needs more time, not least of these being an African restaurant called Toham (at Newgard & Devon) that claims to have smoked goat, so I will be heading back sometime soon.

Tonight we went to Moody’s Pub, where there seems to be only one really good way to order: Berghoff beer and cheeseburgers. I asked for my burger well done (I like my steaks rare, and I love steak tartare, but commercial ground beef is just kind of icky when it’s soft and pink), and damned if it didn’t come out fantastically crunchy on the outside and still tender inside, with a nice toasty taste, not at all burnt. The fries were magically crunchilicious too, even when they got cold, which they did rather quickly because we were sitting outside on the patio in our coats, just because we could. I think in terms of taste and overall joy-factor, my heart still belongs to Charlie’s Kitchen in Cambridge, but these Moodyburgers will hold me quite nicely, especially considering that they can be consumed either in a fabulous tree-shaded patio or in a dark divey snug of a bar.

My friend H is recovering from her months of job-seeking and wasn’t up for leaving the couch, let alone leaving the house, so I went for dinner on my own. She did, however, pass along the nugget of information that I could walk from her place to Argyle Street’s asia-fest. I figured it was 3 el stops, it had to be too far to walk, but turns out I was wrong. I went with H’s recommendation to seek out the Vietnamese Food Court, and was well pleased. I knew I wanted pho, because it was cold and I was feeling tired and rundown myself, but I wanted also to try one of the many things on the menu that were new to me. So I went with an appetizer that turned out to be 8 little soy sauce dishes, each filled with rice flour and steamed, then topped with dried shrimp fuzz (what pork sung would be if it was made out of shrimp) and shrimp cake, shallots and scallions, and served with the usual viet-sauce of lime, sugar, fish sauce, & chillies to be spooned into each wee dish. You had to sort of scrape the little rice cake free of the dish, then shovel it right into the mouth. They were delicious, each one a mouthful of sweet, salty, savory, spicy. The pho was very nice, nothing mindblowing, but very satisfying and beefy in the broth, and the meatballs seemed homemade and the rare beef was tender. And the whole thing came in a marvelously bizarre setting: the room is a mishmash of elegant bamboo and gold calligraphy and tube lights and cheesy paper decorations, and at the front is a stage, which that Saturday night was featuring a homegrown band doing reasonably convincing covers of the Cranberries and Bryan Adams and Guns N Roses. Hee.

On the walk along Howard Street from my temporary dwelling to the el stop is a tempting bakery that has a huge selection of Jamaican treats. I got a pile of sweets to share with the office — banana cake (tastes just like banana bread), sweet coconut bread (more truly a bread, with raisins in) — and some other stuff for myself. Jackass corn had to be bought for the name alone, and turned out to be the lovechild of gingersnaps and graham crackers. They’re really hard and crunchy, and I think they would be lovely with a cup of tea. Grata cake is a big brownie-size bar of the filling of a Mounds bar: grated coconut and sugar, with the top dyed hot pink. I *heart* grata cake.
It so happens that this bakery is apparently the only purveyor of jamaican patties in the city, and sells them to caribbean restaurants all over town. I got a bunch to share with H + J, and they were fabulous. The pastry is nice and flaky, not too greasy, and the beef filling is good and spicy, and the jerk chicken filling is just to die for yummy.

So while wandering the streets yesterday exploring neighborhoods and searching for apartments, I ran across a Mexican (?) bakery that looked interesting. Big clean empty room, ringed by glass-fronted cases containing trays of rolls and cakes and cookies, all apparently marked 35 cents each. It was around lunchtime, how could I resist? La Fama Bakery, 1751 W Chicago Avenue, turns out a fine selection of rolls and sweet pastries, much more consistent and delicious than some Italian and Latino bakeries I’ve tried. The review linked says things are heavy on the sugar; I disagree. Sweet, yes, but certainly not overly so, and I found on the whole these treats were less gooey-sweet than most American desserts.
I had a big bag of stuff, which I photographed with my new camera-phone (yay! foodnerd continues to be illustrated, even though tallasiandude kept the camera in Boston!), but sadly I didn’t stop to read the manual first, so I lost the image because I forgot to save it, in all of my pastry-anticipatory excitement. The image above is of three delightful items that were not completely consumed by my afternoon’s worth of dipping into the bag every so often, in lieu of stopping for lunch.
The best of all of them was a round, flat, thin crispy disk covered in cinnamon sugar. This is awesome. Sweet, spicy, crispity-crunchity, a little bit flaky-tender. Like the best pie-crust cinnamon roll EVER. You can see the last couple of shards of this at left in the photo above. If anyone knows what these are called, let me know. These alone are worth a trip.
There were a couple of bread rolls swirled into pretty shapes, both with different flavors — one more bland & airy, the other a little richer but still light. There was a tiny raised donut, a mini-loaf of yellow cake topped with pecans, a round soft cookie-cake studded with raisins (very nice), another round soft cookie-cake that had a topping of what appeared to be icing and coconut that had been baked so it separated into a pretty mottled pattern on the surface, and the gooey coconut ball you see in the picture above. It’s two half-spheres of bright yellow cake, glued together with berry jam, coated with more jam, and rolled in coconut. This would seem like it might be super-sweet & too goopy, but really it is quite light and tasty. I am eating it for breakfast this morning. Again, if anyone has names I can assign to these things, let me know — the girl at the counter was nice enough, but not exactly chatty, and there were no signs anywhere.
The business card I picked up says: La Fama Bakery — We are not the biggest, just the best. I have to say, I think I agree. Yum!

Around the corner from my new office is a Mexican restaurant called Perez, where for $6 I had a plate of 4 big meatballs in a mild savory orange sauce, with creamy refried beans and rice, along with a basket of nice crunchy not-at-all-greasy tortilla chips, a bowl of pico de gallo, another bowl of fairly mild smoky thin salsa, and a half-dozen fresh hot soft corn tortillas. And the standard-issue table hot sauce is really good, spicy tangy and smoky, and new to me: Tamazula. Holy crap, it was good.
These albondigas were the Thursday special, along with posole, so stay tuned next Thursday for a report on the soup. Or possibly sooner, for some other day’s special. *grin*