Vegetarian for a Day

Green Zebra interior photo courtesy of Mariani's Virtual Gourmet.

F and I are not vegetarians. As is evident in this blog, we like our meat. Most of our dinners consist of 1/3 pork or chicken or fish, 1/3 vegetables, and 1/3 grain, and it’s all I can do to sneak those vegetables into the equation. If it were completely up to me, I would cook a few vegetarian dishes a week. But when I make a ragout or an eggplant lasagna, F eats in silence and when prodded admits, “It’s good. But it would be better with meat.”

As described in the previous post, my sister B is essentially a vegetarian. When ordering a “design your own” sandwich, she will circle the entire vegetable section without prejudice. So when B came to visit, I embraced the opportunity to finally try a restaurant where I knew F would never willingly eat: the vegetarian Green Zebra. We made our reservations and invited F to join us, if he was so inclined. “There’s no meat at all?” he asked. Assured that there would, in fact, be no meat on the menu, F stocked up on a pulled-pork sandwich a few hours before dinner and agreed to accompany us “if only for the dessert.”

We arrived at Green Zebra in the midst of a raging downpour, complete with sleet and howling winds. The hostess led us to a table near the window, with a lovely view of the gray sky and rain-streaked street. The room was painted in muted greens and browns and dotted with pots of towering bamboo. We were in a little rainforest all our own.

The waiter provided a quick lesson on the menu. The dishes were relatively small and meant to be shared; he recommended three to four plates per person. The menu started with light, leafy dishes and soups and worked its way down to heaver plates of mushrooms, lentils, and creams. There were four distinct sections, and we decided to order one dish from each, forgoing the suggested three to four plates per person. To start, we ordered Honey Crisp Apples, Fresh Horseradish, Tarragon, Hazelnuts and both soups because we couldn’t decide between them: Thai Spiced Carrot Soup, Crispy Rice Noodles and Sweet Onion and Garlic Soup, Truffle Cream.

The carrot soup was a vivid orange with electric green foam. At once spicy and tangy, this was B’s favorite dish of the evening, while I was reluctant to share the onion and garlic soup. Its presentation was imaginative—if a little pretentious. The truffle cream arrived first, at the bottom of a white dish. Then the waiter poured the soup into the bowl from a cast-iron tea kettle. The cream spread throughout the soup, while a daub rose to the top, so you could garnish a spoon of soup with a hint of truffle. It was just the soup I wanted on such a damp, cold evening.

And F loved the apple dish. The plate was painted with a light streak of green horseradish, topped with a crispy stack of julienned apples and hazelnuts that appeared to have been lightly fried.

For the next course, we chose Foraged Mushroom Dumplings, Tofu, Thai Basil, Baby Bok Choy, Star Anise Broth and Olive Oil Confit Fingerlings, Dijon Mustard, Parmesan, Truffle, and a side dish of Spiced Edamame.

The edamame was salty and zesty and went very quickly. I could have done without the fingerlings, which were good, but pretty much just fancy potato wedges. B and I both liked the mushroom dumplings, which arrived in a star anise broth with plenty of green vegetables. The dumpling dough was chewy and slightly peppery, and made the dish.

For dessert, we ordered Cream Cheese Beignets, Carrot Cake Ice Cream, Ginger Snaps, Sugared Mandarin Peels and Chocolate Cake, Creme Fraiche Ice Cream, Salted Caramels, as well as the Lemon Pound Cake, Vanilla Gelato, Mandarin Slices from the "sweet bites" section.

The lemon pound cake was very good, but again, it tasted like pound cake should, without being particularly interesting.

But the other two desserts! The chocolate cake was heavy and soft and warm and the ice cream was flaky and sweet. It was accompanied by wrapped caramels that melted as you opened the wrappers. And the beignets! I took one bite and nearly leapt from my seat with joy. The soft, delicate beignet disintegrated as soon as it touched the tongue, leaving sugar crystals in its wake. The subtle cream cheese filling added a hint of tang. The carrot cake ice cream was creamy and tasted of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice. It was a little heady for me, but B professed to love it.

We drove home in the rain, full and happy. I thoroughly enjoyed being vegetarian for a day—everything was so green and leafy. B seemed to love the entire Green Zebra experience and even F the meat-and-potatoes man liked this meal. I was nearly convinced that F and I could be vegetarians, if we could eat like this every day. I slept soundly, dreaming of truffles and bamboo—and woke up Sunday morning hankering for bacon.

Mad About Mado

I met my supper club for dinner last night in Bucktown/Wicker Park at Mado, home of the fabled Rolled Pig’s Head from my previous post.

Although the restaurant is relatively new, husband-and-wife chef-owners, Robert and Allison Levitt, are already known around town for their daily seasonal menu of farm-fresh meats and produce.

Mado is an unassuming, even ugly brick building on an otherwise dreary side street populated with shuttered buildings and empty lots. Until recently, it was a pizza joint with bright orange walls and plastic furniture. The windows are still tagged with spray paint, but inside, the orange walls have been stripped to reveal warm brick. The dining room is intimate and unadorned, and the food is outstanding.

We were tucked into the back corner at a long rustic table for eight. Our group arrived slowly, so we opened a bottle of wine and chatted until the last member of our party had arrived. By that time, we were all ravenous. S suggested ordering family style and the rest of us heartily agreed. We started with two plates of the meats, featuring Country Pate, Rolled Pig's Head and Tuscan Chicken Liver Pate accompanied by Freshly Baked Sourdough, Grain Mustard, and Pickled Vegetables. The assorted meats arrived on antique, pig-shaped cutting boards.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I was excited about the Rolled Pig’s Head, but was possibly even more excited to be dining with a group of people who were just as enthusiastic about trying something new. For four hours, we talked about food, and less important subjects, like men. It was refreshing to dine with a group of girls who are as passionate about food as I am—most of them more passionate and more educated about the subject I have only recently come to love. When I said that I’m looking for a pasta machine, they each had suggestions about the best one on the market. They agree that a culinary tour of Chinatown or the Korean neighborhood would be an ideal way to spend an afternoon. And without blinking an eye, they ordered Rolled Pig’s Head and critiqued its taste and the merits of its texture.

When the meats arrived, I am ashamed to say that we spent a good amount of time debating which meat was which. We finally puzzled out that the soft, pillowy mound on one end was the Country Pate, the grayish meat in the middle must be the Tuscan Chicken Liver Pate, and the strips that looked like Prosciutto must be the Rolled Pig’s Head. Of them all, the Country Pate was the unanimous favorite—smooth and delicate and addictive.

We followed the pig with a selection of appetizers: Roasted Baby Carrots with Gorgonzola; Grilled Calamari Panzanella with Red Onion, Vinegar Peppers, and Capers; Confit Pork Kidneys, Grilled Bread, Hard Cooked Egg and Mustard (first photo below); and Fried Farm Egg Bruscetta with Truffle Butter (second photo below).Absolutely everything was wonderful. We raved over the crispy bruscetta oiled with truffle butter topped with a runny, salty fried egg. The carrots with gorgonzola were a surprising delight—and an aesthetic extravagance, with orange, yellow, and red carrots. I didn’t know that carrots came in yellow and red!

Next, we ordered two bowls of the home-made Rigatoni with Grilled Radicchio, Walnuts and Gorgonzola: Followed by: Rainbow Trout Stuffed with Braised Swiss Chard and Confit Pork Belly (Pictured below with Rosemary-Roasted Potatoes), Hanger Steak with Gorgonzola Polenta , and Casuela of Farm Egg, Braised Pork and White Beans. With sides: Rosemary-Roasted Potatoes (pictured above) and Creamy Polenta. It would be a daunting task to describe each of these marvelous dishes, so I won’t try. I will say, however, that I have never tasted polenta quite like this. The polenta I make at home tends to solidify as soon as it hits the plate, while this was rich and creamy and tangy. I could eat Mado’s polenta with every meal for the rest of my life.

And the desserts: Chocolate Cream Pie with Almond Cornmeal Crust, Caramel Biancomangiare with Crispy Chocolate and Coffee-Chili Syrup, and Migas Bark. The Migas Bark turned out to be chunky sheets of chocolate which, while certainly delicious, did not quite live up to the exotic promise of its name. The Chocolate Cream Pie was stunning, but the Caramel Biancomangiare was something special.

I will admit that I did not know what it was, so I did a little research and discovered that biancomangiare is a Sicilian-style almond custard with almond milk. It is believed that Sicily’s Arab conquerors and four centuries of Spanish domination inspired this distinctive dessert featured in the cookbooks of the Italian Renaissance and served in large troughs of snow at the banquets of the Medici court.

Shaped with a decorative mold, Mado’s biancomangiare was soft and light with a delicate caramel flavor. Tiny balls of chocolate graced the top and rolled down the sides, and the coffee-chili syrup pooled around the bottom. A single spoonful combining the soft biancomangiare with the crispy chocolate balls and the spicy syrup was startling and extraordinary.

Eight girls, 2 bottles of champagne, 7 bottles of wine (BYOB), 2 plates of assorted meats, 4 appetizers, 2 bowls of pasta, 3 entrees, 2 sides, 3 desserts, and 4 hours later, I headed home completely satisfied—and completely enamored with Mado.

(Mado photo courtesy of Menu Pages.)

Newlywed Fogies Out on the Town: Restaurant Week

It’s Restaurant Week in Chicago. One hundred and thirty restaurants have come up with a $22 lunch menu and a $32 dinner menu, throwing wide their doors to the impoverished masses.

This was an opportunity that F and I could not resist. So in our effort to get out more and to explore Chicago’s culinary scene, we chose Bistro 110 for our gastronomic adventure. This decision was not made lightly.

First, I read the reviews for each and every restaurant on Yelp.com and dismissed any restaurants that had received fewer than three-and-a-half out of five stars. Then, I divided the remaining restaurants by cuisine. Our options included French, Italian, American, Steak (evidently a subset of American), Japanese, Vietnamese, Continental, Fusion, Latin, Mediterranean, and one gastro tavern.

Then I visited the website for each restaurant within a given cuisine and reviewed their Restaurant Week menus side-by-side. I whittled down each cuisine category to two restaurants and did away with a few categories all together—like the gastro tavern, The Gage, whose menu featured various foams and a “reconstructed root beer float.”

I narrowed our options to the following four: Bistro 110 (French), Naha (American), David Burke's Primehouse (Steak), and Tizi Melloul (Mediterranean) and printed out the menus for F to review. It was really very close, but we went with Bistro 110, mostly because of the duck and the snails.

The Dinner Menu:

Appetizers
French Onion Soup
Endive and Goat Cheese Salad
Escargots en Croute
Pizza de la Maison

Entrées
Wood-Roasted Half Chicken
Grilled Steak Frites 110
Duck a l’Orange

Dessert
La Fameuse Crème Brûlée du Bistro 110
Gateau Breton

Bistro 110 turned out to be a spacious restaurant tucked onto Pearson Street, off of Michigan Avenue. It stands next to the Ghirardelli chocolate shop in the small square next to the Watertower that has always thrilled me with its fairy lights and horse-drawn carriages. We were seated at a table along the side of the large dining room and were immediately set upon by two waiters and a busboy. We were greeted, our waters were filled, extra place settings were whisked away, and menus appeared before us.

F looked up in near panic, “This is the regular menu!” he whispered. It was, indeed, a full list of $15 appetizers and $30 entrees. When I asked for the Restaurant Week menu, we were presented with a simple 5 x 7 card, and while our waitress remained friendly, the flutter around us ceased. It seemed we were still part of the impoverished masses despite our elegant setting, but we didn’t mind. F ordered the Escargots en Croute and Grilled Steak Frites 110, while I ordered the French Onion Soup and Duck a l’Orange. In the meantime, our waitress presented us with the bread basket and a huge, whole roasted head of garlic, from which we scooped generous lumps, hardly making a dent.

The Escargots en Croute was OK. It was essentially a gigantic croissant, beneath which were hidden six slightly tough snails. The French Onion Soup was fantastic, but we had to break through a thick cheese seal to get to the soup. Both appetizers suffered from excess; too much pastry, too much butter, too much cheese. But F thoroughly enjoyed his steak and thin, crispy frites. My duck was tender and the sauce was tasty, but the sweet potatoes were the highlight of the dish—small, cubed, and lightly caramelized. Even F liked them, and he claims to hate sweet potatoes. So far, we rated our meal a 3 out of 5 stars. And then the dessert arrived.

F ordered the Gateau Breton and I ordered the La Fameuse Crème Brûlée du Bistro 110. The famous brûlée was a fine dessert, but the Gateau Breton! I have been dreaming of it ever since. It was a very simple, warm, crumbly shortbread cake dusted with sea salt and accompanied by an unnecessary but delicious scoop of vanilla bean ice-cream and a drizzle of caramel. This Gateau Breton was absolutely fantastic. F laughed as I returned again and again to his dessert, forsaking my poor crème brûlée. While as a whole the meal rates 3 out of 5 stars, this dessert was a 4.5 (I reserve the 5 for any dish that can rival a gorgeous dessert named “The Dieter’s Dilemma” at the now-extinct Brush Hill).

As we fought over the last crumb of the Gateau Breton, F and I pondered whether we had ever had a restaurant meal we would rate the nearly unattainable 5 out of 5 stars. Between us, F and I came up with only a very few. Here is my list:

Brush Hill

Once a year, my parents would take my sister and me to Brush Hill for a special dinner. Brush Hill was a restored 18th century post-and-beam barn at the top of a hill in Vermont. I remember the drive up the hill along a winding path through the woods. I remember the dining room with only three tables and a gently roaring fire in the 12-foot-long brick fireplace. I remember ordering perfect, tender, pink lamb chops with mint essence, garlic, and grilled leeks. I remember that the kitchen was directly through an oak door near the fireplace, and the chef would come out to talk with my parents. I remember walking up the creaking stairs to the restroom on the second floor, past two bedrooms furnished with antiques. I remember that at the time, my sister and I were in the habit of rating bathrooms from 1 to 5, and we gave Brush Hill the highest honor. And I remember the reason we came back again and again to this restaurant at the top of a hill deep the woods of Vermont: The Dieter’s Dilemma, a puff pastry shell filled with French vanilla ice cream, topped with chocolate-rum sauce. It was quite simply the best dessert I have ever had, and probably will ever have. Brush Hill is long closed, but the memory of that dessert remains forever imprinted on my taste buds, never to be outdone.

Dot’s

F and I were married at my parents’ house in Connecticut. For our honeymoon, we drove up the East Coast and spent a few days in Vermont, where we had the best breakfast of our lives at Dot’s in Wilmington. Dot’s is not much to look at from the outside—or the inside, for that matter. It’s a small building next to the river that runs through town. The back end of the restaurant hangs over the river. It’s dizzying but also exhilarating to think that were the restaurant to slip into the churning waters, Dot’s homemade bread would be the last thing you’d ever taste. And that would be just fine. My oatmeal and bananas were satisfying on the chilly October morning and F’s eggs and bacon were perfectly prepared. But Dot’s homemade wheat bread is the best bread I have ever tasted. I can’t do it justice with words, so I won’t try to describe it. You will just have to go to Dot’s for yourself.

Mercat a la Planxa

Our Chicago friends took us out for dinner at Mercat a la Planxa to celebrate our engagement. While the atmosphere is a little too trendy for me (Dot’s is really more my style), being with good friends on the eve of my wedding and tasting exotic and delicious dishes that arrived one after another in a dizzying array, made this dining experience one of the best of my life. Our friend E had eaten at Mercat many times with her colleagues and knew the waiter, who was exuberant and generous with suggestions, portion sizes, and little treats from the chef. It was a feast of Bacon-Wrapped Dates Stuffed with Almonds, Garlic Shrimp, Spicy Potatoes with Spicy Paprika Aioli, a selection of cheeses, and the truly wonderful and surprising Langotsa y Vainilla, or Butter Poached Lobster, Roasted Garlic Flan, Basil & Vanilla. And then our friends ordered F a glass of 25-year-old Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. It tasted like a barrel; like pitch and oak and knotted rope. It was unbelievably good, and everyone at our table held the glass to their noses, unwilling to pass it on. I wish I could have kept that glass.

Those are my top three restaurant experiences to date. What are your 5-star restaurant moments?

Newlywed Fogies Out on the Town

F and I have old-people tendencies. Our idea of an ideal evening is eating a home-cooked dinner on the couch and watching Lost. We sit side-by-side under a comforter. Our roly-poly black cat, Barry, sits on F’s lap, and our six-pound gray cat, Pickle, curls up tightly on the back of the couch above my left shoulder. It’s very domestic.

“Honey, I hate to say this, but you’re starting to sound like an old woman,” my mother said last week, when I informed her that F and I had been invited to see a play on Friday night, but that I would really rather go home, have dinner, and get to bed early. She was right. It’s not normal for twenty-something newlyweds in America’s second greatest city to want to stay home on a Friday night. It is time for us to get out and enjoy ourselves—even if we have to force ourselves to go to restaurants and movie theaters and see other people.

In the spirit of change, F met me on the corner as I got off the train last night after work. We had decided to start small and go out for dinner and a movie in our neighborhood, Old Town, and I came up with a short list of the best low- to mid-priced restaurants within ten minutes of our house. Luckily, we live in a popular neighborhood with thriving nightlife and a plethora of boutiques and restaurants. Just within that ten-minute radius, we had our choice of Italian, French, American, New-American, Japanese, Japanese Fusion, Bar/Pub, Diner, Fast-Food, Chinese, Lebanese, and Greek.

We settled on sushi. Last night, we went to Kamehachi, which the Yelp reviewers gave four of out five stars—and for good reason. Kamehachi, which means “eight turtles” in Japanese, has five locations in Chicago and was founded in Old Town in 1967 (although the original building was located down the street). Little did we know that we were eating in Chicago’s first sushi bar.

F is relatively new to sushi, but he’s enthusiastic. I have loved Japanese food ever since I spent a month in Japan when I was seventeen, but I do not pretend to know anything more than the basics of Japanese food. With our rudimentary knowledge of Japanese cuisine and our eagerness to try the exotic and extraordinary, we ordered:

edamame
Boiled soybeans in the pod

F especially loves edamame, which he calls “Japanese French fries.” They are actually a lot like healthy French fries; in Japan, edamame is a popular, salty snack eaten with beer.

hiyashi wakame
Assorted seaweed marinated in a red pepper and sesame dressing

This was beautiful. Centered on a white plate was a delicate bundle of four or five types of seaweed, each with its own distinct texture and shade of green. There were diaphanous, emerald ribbons that crunched. There were deep green seaweed noodles that slid through the chopsticks. There were vibrant, crimped strands that coiled out of the artfully arranged pile. The sesame oil dressing added a nutty flavor to the salty ocean taste of the seaweed. I have never tasted anything like it.

sashimi moriawase
Chef's artistic presentation of today's freshest sashimi assortment (filets of seafood), served with miso soup and rice

We figured that we would trust the chef to choose the most delectable fish of the day, and we were glad we did. Our pristine white plate held two small samples of seven different fish: octopus, shrimp, tuna, salmon, eel, and two white-gray filets that we couldn’t name. My favorite was the briny, chewy octopus, while F declared the tuna his favorite. We agreed that the two unidentifiable white-gray filets were extraordinarily fishy, which is not a bad thing in itself, but was just a little too strong for us.

Full, satisfied, and feeling very young and carefree indeed, F and I decided we had enjoyed our city enough for one night, and postponed the movie for another evening. We stopped at Treasure Island on the way home for Cheez-Its and ice cream, and retired to our couch to have dessert under a blanket with our kitties. It was a perfect evening.