Marrakech Cuisine: a taste of Morocco

When it gets really cold and snowy and gray in Chicago, it's nice to let your mind wander to somewhere warm and exotic.  With a destination off the beaten path planned for later in the evening, we set about to find a new and different restaurant in a new and different (to us) part of town.  After some digging around on Google, a winner quickly presented itself.  What would take the chill off and warm your taste buds better than some Moroccan food?  The reviews online warned to not let the street view scare you off, so we set out in the freezing winter to check out Marrakech Cuisine.  When you walk up to the restaurant, the outside appearance lived up to the billing.  This is the kind of place you could walk (or likely drive) by a hundred times and not look at twice.  When we walked in, it appeared to be empty of people, but as you walked towards the back, you quickly realize that the real action is the back half of the room, where a small bar/service area is set with eight or so small tables around it.  We came in, got a table, and began our Moroccan adventure!

Week One: Jin Ju, a Korean Adventure

In our seven years in Chicago, we've walked by Jin Ju approximately one million times.  It's on Clark Street in Andersonville, the main drag that we frequent almost every week.  It's always looked interesting, but for no particular reason we never actually made it inside to eat, making this a perfect place to start!  From the outside, the restaurant looked mildly trendy, especially for this somewhat laid back and homey area of Chicago.  On top of that, I wasn't even sure what kind of food they actually served thanks to the minimalist presentation to the street.  We walked up on a Saturday night to check it out and looked at the menu, which immediately looked interesting with some names that were obviously Korean but descriptions that gave a pretty good idea of the food.  So now we begin our little culinary adventure...

Let's Take a Trip!

With 2012 upon us, Beth and I decided that we needed a new challenge, a new adventure as we moved into the new year. What could we do?  Learn a language?  Spend our time volunteering?  Go back to school?  That all sounded like a lot of work.  Instead, we decided, in the spirit of the modern economy, to have a year long restaurant stay-cation.  52 weeks.  52 different cuisines.  Chicago is a big city, but can we do it?  Come along with us all year as we explore the city and the great variety of food that is just a fork away from our lips.  Good, bad, or just weird, this should be fun!