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.