Ginza Japanese Restaurant: Neil Continues to Turn Japanese

Those of you who know Neil know that he has some unique interests and hobbies.  Of course he loves puttering around in his aquariums and jogging, and a podcast and food blog aren't uncommon at all these days, either.  But once you get into the tiki and Elvis, some people might start to wonder.  And that doesn't even touch on his fandom of pro wrestling, the greatest of sports, and how it has introduced him to his love of Japanese culture (now even Beth is starting to wonder).  Yes, Japanese wrestling is one of his favorites (and the root of his wish to visit Japan for his 40th birthday) and this love of the land of the rising sun extends to the food.  From eating udon at Tokyo Box Lunch to munching on delicious rice cake with bean paste candies, he has a definite fondness for Japan. So when Beth suggested some hole in the wall Japanese restaurant not far from the Magnificent Mile (aka Michigan Avenue), there wasn't much convincing required.  Ginza is a place you've probably walked by a bunch if you live in Chicago, and you might have even wandered by as a tourist due to the proximity to a number of tourist favorites and hotels.  From the outside, it and the attached Tokyo Hotel aren't much to look at.  The terms "hole in the wall" and "dive" may come to mind, as this place sticks out a bit amongst the shiny newness of much of the River North neighborhood.  However, once you get past the front door and pass through the curtains, you're transported to what I imagine (and many Yelp reviewers confirm) a small restaurant in Tokyo might look like.  Buy the ticket, take the ride, and off to Japan we go!

Jin: Chicago Thai That Escaped Argyle

Chicago is not short on places to find Thai cuisine, and our neighborhood is no exception, but we have the added cultural center of Argyle Street, a enclave of Vietnamese and Thai.  On Argyle, you'll find a dozen different restaurants from that corner of the world, offering a number of different variations.  We’ve enjoyed meals at Thai Pastry and many others on different occasions, but for the blog, we wanted to try something new.  Enter Jin, a new Thai place in Edgewater (livin' on the edge!) on Broadway.  It had been open for a few months, so this seemed like as good a time as any to try it, because it was a really hot day and we didn't have enough energy to venture very far from home.

Hing Kee: Not Your Average Ramen Noodles

While we are both big fans of the many delicacies that ballparks, stadiums and arenas have to offer, sometimes it's good to mix it up a little.  So, a couple of weekends ago we decided to get some lunch in Chinatown before heading to the Sox game.  We briefly discussed trying a new place, but quickly settled on Hing Kee, because it's hard to pass up a big bowl of soup with their homemade, hand-pulled noodles and a free floor show.  Chef Chang Ming Liu stands at a table in the front of the restaurant and makes the noodles while diners watch.  Best of all, he does it with the detached air of someone whose mastered this skill to the point where his hands just go through the motions while his brain is writing the next great American novel or unraveling the mysteries of black holes. As a side note, since this guy spends his days reducing enormous hunks of dough into miles of delicate noodles with nothing but his bare hands, his arms and upper body resemble Popeye's after he's had his can of spinach (tattoos included).  So, with visions of ramen noodles dancing in our heads (and hopes for a Sox win), we headed south on the Red Line.

La Fonda Latino Grill: Colombian for All You Can Eat

In the course of our culinary adventure, we've had lunch, dinner, and brunch, but this week we got to enjoy a first.  After returning from another culinary adventure in West Virginia (Neil got to eat all his favorites, pepperoni rolls, hot dogs, and Minards!), we had a rare chance for a week day lunch out.  Wanting to stay close to home, we picked a restaurant that is just a few blocks away from us, La Fonda Latino Grill.  We'd eaten here a time or two, but hadn't been in a while.   Knowing that it was Colombian, we decided to take a trip to South America and walked over on a beautiful afternoon.  We sat down and the waitress came over to greet us and ask if we were doing the buffet.  We didn't even know that they had a buffet!  After a brief description, we decided to give it a go and experience everything that a Colombian all you can eat lunch had to offer!

Adriatic Cafe Restaurant: A Nice Place for a Leisurely Meal

Adriatic Cafe is a place in our neighborhood that immediately was on our radar when we came up with this idea.  How many Croatian restaurants do you know about within walking distance of your house?  This place has a few things going for it.  The food has been pretty consistently good.  The wine list is exotic with lots of Balkan wines.  The patio is great on a nice day.  The issues?  Well, don't come on a day when you're in a hurry.  Service has certainly never been a strong point, so patience is necessary as we set out on another Balkan adventure, this time to Croatia!

Baghdad Kabab: Your 24 Hour a Day Iraqi Food Solution

Have you ever had a late night hankering for a kabab and/or perhaps some quality time with a cab driver or two?  Well, we've found the place for you, Baghdad Kabab!  We spotted this place from the Lawrence bus several months ago when we were on our way to check out Saravejo Restaurant and had been looking forward to coming back to try it since.  We hopped on the Lawrence bus and headed west to get our Middle Eastern fix!

Drinks

Baghdad Kabab is BYO and offers the usual coffee, soft drinks, and tea (free!), which Beth went with on a rainy Saturday.

Food

When you're judging the authenticity of a place, it's always a good sign when there is a page of the menu that isn't even in English, or an alphabet that we have any familiarity with!

Oh, they have cherry pie!

We were surprised to see that they had multiple soups on the menu.  That isn't something that we've run into before at Middle Eastern restaurants, so we gave it a shot.  Neil went with the white bean soup.  It had a tomato based broth and terrific flavor with nice spices.  You know it's good, when Neil uses the pita to clean the bowl up!

White Bean Soup

Beth went with the okra soup.  It had big chunks of okra along with big chunks of garlic.  No worries about vampires here, and the soup was great--flavorful and creamy.

Okra Soup

We ordered a side of dill Royale rice.  Good to know that they don't skimp on the portions!

Dill Royale Rice

Neil's entree was kallaya lamb, a finely diced lamb sauteed with onion, tomatoes, and green pepper.  The flavors mixed together well and the sauce went great over the rice.  This was a tasty dish!

Kallaya Lamb

Beth originally ordered a dish with potato dough filled with meat, but they were out of this.  She settled for schwarma chicken with rice.  The tender, boneless chicken seemed to be thigh meat and was seasoned with a mix of spices.  Behind the counter along the side of the restaurant were two giant, slowly spinning cones of meat. We think that one of those was this chicken.

Schwarma Chicken with Rice

Overall
Baghdad Kabab is a comfortable and welcoming space.  Since it was Saturday, I'm pretty sure our waitress was the high school age daughter of the proprietor.  The menu is fairly extensive and offers some things that we hadn't run across before in Middle Eastern restaurants, such as the soups and the fancy potato thingy that they were out of.  The food was all really good and well seasoned and the portions guaranteed that we would get multiple meals out of this lunch!

Foreign Factor
8 out of 10  One thing we've learned when exploring ethnic restaurants is that a place with a TV showing programming in the native language is a good sign--and often entertaining.  Since we were there in the middle of the afternoon, the place wasn't busy but the other folks there appeared to be native speakers.  The menu features a page in the native language, so this place gets the foreign seal of approval.

What We Learned
Iraqi food isn't the same stuff you run across at every Middle Eastern restaurant.  With the mix of herbs and spices, the food is really flavorful and satisfying.  The soups were something we didn't expect but turned out to be a real highlight of our trip.

More

They deliver, which is always a plus!
While it's not a surprise when you think about, the Iraqi culinary tradition goes back a ways!

Mt. Everest Restaurant: An Exotic Excursion to Evanston

When we decided to start this blog, we set out to keep our restaurants limited to the Chicago area.  But the question remained, were we just going to be in the city limit?  The limit of the CTA?  Cook County? We've decided to throw together some mix of the three, so Evanston definitely counts!  A simple ride up the red line to the purple line delivered us to the relative quiet and calm of Evanston.  What's exotic in Evanston?  Mt. Everest is a restaurant that we'd walked by lots of times but never stopped in.  The menu is dominated by Indian food, but they also feature Nepalese cuisine and you don't find that every day!  After a trip to our favorite movie theater in Evanston, we walked over to Mt. Everest to give the food of the Himalayas a try!

Tien Giang: A Taste of Argyle

One of the charms of our neighborhood is that a few blocks away are over a dozen Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai restaraunts along Argyle Avenue and that area.  For years, we had a favorite that was right by the El.  The food was always good, there was lots of room, and the service was dependable.  The fact that the owner looked like the bad guy from an 80s Chuck Norris movie was an extra plus for Neil.  Sadly, the place burned a few years ago and we've been meandering between a number of places for Vietnamese and Thai since.  Imagine our surprise recently then when we noticed that the name on a tiny Vietnamese place on Broadway looked an awful lot like the name of our old favorite.  After consulting an old menu we had laying around, we confirmed that our favorite place had indeed been reborn a block away for who knows how long without us even knowing it.  Excited to try it again, we set out for Tien Giang to take our food adventure to Vietnam!

Hema's Kitchen: A Taste of Devon

Even though Devon Ave. is about a 20 minute bus ride from us, we had never made the trip to the strip of this street that is packed with Indian and Pakistani stores and restaurants.  A sunny spring afternoon convinced us that it was time to get off the couch and do so.  We had heard about the Indian restaurant, Hema's Kitchen, from a friend, so we thought that would be our target lunch destination, although we also wanted to wander around to see what else we might find.  We weren't necessarily strangers to Indian food, although we had been reading recently about the differences between the cuisine in the northern part of the country vs. that in the south.  It seems the northern region was influenced by Turkish and other cultures that enjoy grilled meats, and that the southern region was influenced more by southeast Asia and tended to be more vegetarian.  Since the owner of the restaurant is from Hyderabad towards the southern part of the country, we thought her restaurant would give us a chance to sample some cuisine specifically from that region.

La Ciudad: Mexican Food without the Sombrero

Recently, someone asked us how we would choose the one restaurant to visit for each of the popular cuisines, like Italian or Chinese or Mexican, and we didn't have a good response (some of our friends have mistakenly assumed we've put lots of thought into this project, and that's adorable!).  This past weekend we came up with the answer: we opted for La Ciudad for Mexican cuisine because it was a nice afternoon and the restaurant was an easy walk from our place.  We weren't that familiar with the restaurant, but we were aware that the place had been featured on Check, Please!, so we strode off confidently, knowing that the liberal media wouldn't steer us wrong.

Isla Pilipina Restaurant: Heaven in a Strip Mall

When you don't own a car, you learn the charms of public transportation quickly.  Besides your colorful fellow commuters, one of the perks not driving is being able to look around and see what is passing by outside your window.  Several months ago on our way to Sarajevo Restaurant, we spotted several promising looking places while enjoying the 81 - Lawrence bus, including an Iraqi place that you'll probably read about in the coming months.  Another place that looked good was Isla Filipina.  On that particular night, people were lined up out the door, so we took that as a good sign.  This restaurant is an unassuming place in a small strip mall, tucked in near a Little Caesars and several places catering to Eastern Europeans.  So this week we hopped back on the bus headed to Isla Filipina to get a taste of the Philippines!

Tre Kronor: Non-Muppet Related Swedish Food

One of the charms of this little adventure is trying places that we've seen many times and always remarked that we should try, but never did.  This week we ventured to Tre Kronor, which is straight up Foster Avenue towards O'Hare Airport from us.  On just about every trip to and from the airport, one of us would remark that we should try Tre Kronor, a Swedish restaurant, to see what Swedish cuisine was all about when it wasn't prepared by the Swedish Chef on the Muppets or served in Ikea's cafeteria.  On a sunny, warm March day, we decided to hop on the Foster bus and check out our first Scandinavian country for lunch.   Tre Kronor, show me what Sweden is all about!

Den Den Restaurant: A Taste of Eritrea, a Country Since '93!

We've encountered some skepticism that we'll be able to achieve our goal of eating the cuisines of 52 different countries in a year (you know who you are, M.F.), but we have gone confidently forward, knowing Chicago will provide for us.  And Time Out magazine just served us up an easy one!  Beth was thumbing throw an issue and read about Den Den, an Eritrean restaurant in Rogers Park.  Where is Eritrea you ask?  Or you might also ask, is it really a country, or perhaps the name of some lesser known internal organ located, probably, near the appendix?  Well, according to extensive Internet research (aka Wikipedia), up until 1993, it was just the northern part of Ethiopia along the Red Sea, but they gained their independence after a 30 year civil war.  Our first question was how this food would be different from Ethiopian, but the Time Out article helpfully pointed out that this part of Africa had been an Italian colony for many years and that link had influenced the cuisine.  With images of injera bread and meatballs dancing in our heads, we set off on the 151 bus to discover the tastes of Eritrea!

Sarajevo Restaurant: Come for the Food, Stay for the Color

When you frequent only the fanciest restaurants, you get used to making reservations.  Luckily for us (us = Neil), we usually don't frequent the fancy places and most of the places we've checked out so far haven't had much of a wait.  That's one of the reasons we were surprised when we showed up at Restaurant Sarajevo on a Friday night and were told that there was no room at the inn.  We wandered off disappointed, but we gave it a try the the next Friday (making a reservation well in advance) and got ready to check off our first former Yugoslav republic off of the list.  Bosnian cuisine, here we come!

Manny's Deli: A Chicago Tradition, or Rumination on the Culinary Heritage of the Jewish Diaspora

When we sat down to write out a list of international cuisines, we weren't sure about how to address Jewish cuisine, and in particular where the quintessential Jewish deli fit in.  But since we had been wanting to visit Manny's Cafeteria and Delicatessen for a while, we decided it wasn't too much of a stretch to include them in our project.  Plus, yet another unsuccessful trip to the DMV (don't ask) left us with a rented I-GO car and some time to kill.  We already knew all about bagel and lox, matzo ball soup, and a good deli sandwich from excellent sources--Woody Allen and Larry David--but we wanted to learn more and learn it first hand.  With its cafeteria line and ample seating, pictures of visiting presidents on the walls, and tables full of old men shooting the breeze, Manny's feels like what you want an old school deli to feel like, so let's take in the wonders of Jewish delicatessen cuisine!

Barba Yianni - Greek Food in a German Neighborhood

On an unseasonably mild February night, we set out with a Bosnian restaurant in mind.  It must be good, because when we got there, they were full for the evening already!  I'm sure we'll be back, but luckily for us, on the bus out there, we saw a number of interesting looking restaurants, some of which I'm sure we'll make it back to (that Philipino place looked good!).  As we looked the various ethic offerings, we decided to pick a Greek place in Lincoln Square in keeping with the region we originally had in mind.  It looked pretty empty for a busy Saturday night, but we didn't let that deter us.  In we went to begin our Greek experience at Barba Yianni, which translates to Uncle John.  I hope he's back there cooking!

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!