We're Just Ordinary People: Part 1, Cellar Door (Evanston)

Once referred to as the Athens of Illinois for its high concentration of intellectuals, Evanston is now known better as the home to Kevin from the Home Alone movies and a small but respectable smattering of eateries (that and Northwestern, but who cares).

On a cold and dreary weeknight I rolled up to E-town to check out The Cellar, which is a plus-one to the full service (read, higher priced) The Stained Glass. The restaurant focuses on small plates, most of which hover around ten bucks. The Cellar also features a spunky little wine list and enough craft beer to keep a beer snob entertained for hours.

What I Got*:

the spooky scary pork belly

-Bacon Wrapped Dates- Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs clearly states that humans crave four things above all else: sweet things, salty things, a decent weeknight sitcom, and bacon. My friends, this dish meets THREE of those needs. As if dates and bacon weren't enough to satisfy your greedy taste buds those crazy fucks in the kitchen infused the interior of the date with chorizo and topped it with manchego cheese. This is edible crack (wait, is real crack edible?).
-Smoked Salmon Flatbread: This elliptical gem was served with a pesto base and topped with feta and arugula and fit in my mouth like Forrest Gump fit into the army. Flatbreads are everywhere these days but this was one of the best I've had. Why? you ask. Because it did two seemingly contradicting things at the same time: it was loaded with delicious ingredients (that brought the noise (and by noise I mean flavor)) yet said ingredients never compromised the integrity of the flatbread. Bravo.
-Braised Pork Belly with "Marrow" Potatoes- This dish gets the creativity Oscar. Observe: the root vegetables and potatoes formed a bone-and-marrow-look-a-like foundation upon which the pork belly rested (slightly overcooked, but still smoky and scrumptious) and maybe, just maybe, the red wine demi-glace was meant to look like blood? Not sure but it was good.
-House Fries with Truffle Mayo- I ordered these based on a friend's recommendation (it's actually off menu) and goes to show that truffle oil infused mayo (or aioli, or remoulade, or sweat) can save even the greasiest most flaccid of french fries. 


-Stone Levitation Ale (Bottle, California) and Great Lake Eliot Ness (Draft, Ohio): Not much of a reach here as I've liked both these beers for years (rhyme anyone?). Both are amber in color and relatively low in ABV, and both pair well with smoky, spicy and robustly seasoned foods (like pork belly, chorizo or smoked salmon).

Brass Tacks:
I really, really like this place and you will too as long as you like creative and good tasting food in a casual atmosphere and don't mind trekking up to the wild streets of "Heavenston" to get it. As an added incentive their sales tax is 1.25% lower than ours** so you can go BUCKWILD shopping at the Radioshack, Barnes and Noble or Urban Outfitters and laugh in the face of all your chump Chicago friends.


*note: They were 86'd the Ale Steamed Mussels (with ginger, grilled garlic toast and shiitake mushrooms) and I wanted them SO bad.
**For future reference don't trust me with stats like this as I often cite them based on fuzzy memories rather than actual data.

The Cellar

Oh You Fancy, Huh? Part 1, Sushisamba Lunch-o

A few words on Chicago's Restaurant Week (or RW as we call it in the biz). Every year, for one week, many of Chicago's finer culinary establishments offer a 3 course prix fixe menu for around thirty bucks. A good deal n'est-ce pas? Well, it depends. Some restaurants and chefs look at RW as an opportunity to generate new business by showcasing some of their most successful/impressive dishes for a reasonable price. Others look at it as a weeklong extension of Valentines Day (with its rushed service, impatient/ill mannered guests, and restrictive menu that allows for little to no creativity), meaning that they should get through it as quickly as humanly possible. The trick, then, is to hunt down the restaurants that actually want you there, want you to have a good time and want you to come back (and spend more money).


With that in mind, I recently ventured over to Sushisamba (Rio) to check out their RW lunch menu (a steal at 22 bucks). 


The Breakdown:
1st Course: Blue Crab Croquettes and Roasted Kabocha Soup
2nd Course: Laughing Bird Shrimp Ramen
3rd Course: Peruvian Hot Chocolate with Churros and Rosca with Chocolate Hazelnut Sauce
Beverage: Kirin Light, tears of our exasperated waitress,  more Kirin (to wash down the tears).

Hey ramen, you fancy, huh?

Portion sizes are always an issue with RW in that you usually get less than expected. Sushisamba brought its A-game with the bowl of ramen being downright big and the amount of shrimp (whether they were of the Laughing Bird variety or not) bordering on generous. 


The most interesting thing I ate during the meal was the kabocha soup. Having never eaten kabocha before I was expecting it to have a squashy flavor (but more asian), what I got was something more akin to sweet melon with the awesome added elements of bacon, pine nuts and a touch of spice. A close runner up in the interesting dish contest was, well, nothing. What followed were several tasty, but rather humdrum offerings.

this here soup was interesting and delish

The blue crab croquettes, otherwise known as crab cakes**, were good but I can get good crab cakes at plethora of restaurants around the city.


The ramen dish was noteworthy for the quality and quantity of its ingredients; the aforementioned shrimp, mushrooms, carrots, basil (tons of basil), and something called na yu choy (some kind of black asian cabbage is my best guess). Unfortunately the flavor profile was pretty one dimensional. With a lemongrass broth I expected the soup to taste more like lemongrass but what I got was, again, a lot of basil.




The desserts both involved chocolate, so I was feeling all sexy whilst I ate them. 


The churro and hot chocolate dish was straightforward and well executed, then again I've never met a churro I didn't want to shack up with and take home to meet my parents. The rosca was actually 3 doughnut holes accompanied by a sea salt sprinkled chocolate dipping sauce. Don't get me wrong, that's my jam and I was all over it like a NASA recruiter at a MIT graduation (I'm going to work on my analogies), but calling a doughnut hole a rosca is, to quote Kobe Bryant at his NBA All-Star game press conference, "a Bikram yoga stretch."


The food at Sushisamba was solid and the RW menu execution was commendable, but was I moved to tears by the flavor of the food? No. Was I blown away by the presentation? No. But, did I learn a little something about a young man from the Southwest trying to make his way in the helter-skelter world of big city dining?...No, not really, but I did leave full and that's something.


*Sushisamba is a concept that started in the Big Apple and like so many other NYC hits extended a branch of itself to our fair city (as well as Miami and Las Vegas). When it opened in New York in 1999 the food world was abuzz over its unique fusion of Japanese, Peruvian and Brazilian cuisine. The River North location was a hit when it opened but has struggled to stay hip in the ever crowded fusion scene since then.
**Take note my foodie friends, this sort of culinary wordplay is rampant in high end restaurants and its usually used to compensate for otherwise ordinary dishes.

SushisambaRio

Street (Food) Fight: Part 2, Taco Tango

Let's talk tacos. They're freaking delicious. They're the perfect storm of meat, tortilla, and condiment. Besides being bastardized by Taco Bell, tacos are pretty hard to fuck up. But they are also hard to perfect. In this way tacos are like so many other seemingly simple art forms (the blues, jump rope, bikinis, my hair); easy to understand but near impossible get just right.

Enter the Reigning King: Chipotle. That guilty pleasure so many of us indulge in, with their gigantic burritos, surprisingly strong margaritas, and the less gut-busting/colon-threatening offering of, you guessed it, tacos.

Enter the Scrappy Upstart: Flaco's Tacos. Flaco means skinny in Spanish, while I'm not sure how eating tacos is going to help anyone's waistline I do appreciate their rhyming skills. It's straightforward menu reads like a Mexican street food addict's dream; TACOS, TAMALES, TORTAS!

The Similarities: Both of these Mexican themed establishments offer a bevy of classic options (quesadillas, burritos, etc.) and both want you the think of them as "fresh" and "green." They're both fast and pretty cheap (much like my ex girlfriend).

The Differences: Chipotle is a huge corporate gorilla; there are over 40 locations in the Chicago area alone. Flaco's is a small Chicago based private business, with only two locations. Chipotle gives you dozens of options to spice up or down your burrito/taco/quesadilla with salsas, lettuce, beans and cheese. Flaco tells you how it is (tacos come with cilantro, cheese and onion) leaving you only the option of removing ingredients (blasphemy).

In the spirit of fairness I got two tacos from each place (one chicken, one steak). Then I ate them.

The Results: The Flaco tortillas were greasy and delicious, but lacked the tenderness and pliability of their rival (also like my ex girlfriend). Flaco's steak was succulent, and had a very steaky flavor to it (which is what you want when you order steak). By comparison Chipotle's steak and tortilla combo was lacking in juiciness, grease, and steaky aroma/flavor. The chicken tacos showed reverse results with Chipotle's chicken being moist and seasoned perfectly while Flaco's bird was dry and almost flavorless (and no amount of tortilla magic can save flavorless dry chicken).

Bottom Line: Chipotle is doing good things with their fowl taco (no beans, pico de gallo, lettuce, and cheese), and when you go to Flaco's you will not rue the day you ordered one or seven steak tacos with the works. As Guadalupe Hidalgo once said "¡Viva los tacos!"

Flaco's Tacos

Street (Food) Fight: Part 1, Beef Injection!

First things first, street food is usually served in shitholes (in fact, if you ever find yourself in a place that's not a shithole and claims to serve "authentic street food" count to 3 and hightail it out of there). This term can be misconstrued as negative when taken out of context. For the record, I love shitholes, especially when it's late and especially when I'm slightly under the influence, because they serve greasy hot food for cheap and they do it quickly. Shithole, in my personal dictionary, is a place that 1) specializes in one type of food, 2) is not considered "fine dining" by anyone, including the proprieters, and 3) is relatively small in size.

Al's Beef Regular with giardiniera

Now then, when it comes to italian beef people think first of Al's*, then they think of Portillo's* (and then they think of Mr. Beef, but I can't compare three places, it's too much). Both these places have drastically expanded their menus over the years to include hot dogs, tamales, chicken and for some godforsaken reason, salads (it's really getting out of control), but what they do best is beef.

Both restaurants bombastically claim to have the #1 beef sandwich (Al's even goes as far to put it on their sign). Well, as Silvester Stallone once said in his sci-fi action epic Judge Dredd, "I'll be the judge of that." And here's the decision: Al's is better.

The difference comes down to baptism. Al's submerges the ENTIRE sandwich in the jus, a technique they call "baptizing" (thanks to my roommate Michael for that fun fact), and it makes not only the beef but the bread a vehicle of flavor. When you bite into an Al's beef your mouth is overrun with hot juice (laugh now, now stop), spice and the thought that you're doing something wrong. As a bonus if you keep the wrapping on the sandwich while you eat a pool of jus will accumulate at the bottom making for either a digestivo of beefy liquid that nicely caps your meal or an outfit staining broth bomb that disgraces you in the eyes of your peers for the rest of the afternoon. The choice is yours.

Portillo's is good, don't get it twisted. But the bread is dry in comparison to Al's, and the beef was a bit stringy. 

As a consolation prize, Portillo's giardiniera is spicier and has a better, crispier texture to it than Al's, but it's the beef and the jus that make a sandwich great NOT it's toppings.

So, go to Al's, order the Regular Al, get the giardiniera, get a root beer and get out before the cops come.

*Just so we're clear, both Al's Beef and Portillo's are shitholes. Al's unabashedly embraces this image. Portillo's does not. It's River North location is a monstrous, Disneylandesque tribute to themed restaurants of old (equipped with memorabilia, animatronic figures, and inexplicable dixieland front porches in the restaurant!). Don't let this distract from the fact that they still serve, and are good at making, shithole food. 

Al's

Portillo's