→ April 13, 2024
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Stick to baseball, 4/13/24.

I’ve got some new content coming up this week, with a new draft ranking due to run on Thursday and a draft scouting blog probably running Monday or Tuesday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed the collectible card game Star Wars: Unlimited – Spark of Rebellion, which I enjoyed even though I’m not generally a fan of deckbuilders.

I sent out a new edition of my free email newsletter, detailing a rather ridiculous dinner I had at the bar at The Publican, an acclaimed Chicago restaurant where, to say the least, one does not belch as loudly as one can.

I’m going to be on a new TV show, Diamond Dreams starting on Monday, April 15th, on the streaming channel Stadium. The show is a half-hour look at prospects around the minors and for the draft, and will be followed by a show on collectibles where I’ll also offer some comments on the prospects they’re discussing. You can watch via the app on pretty much any platform.

And now, the links…

  • There’s a big scam going around that has tricked a number of content creators into ceding control of their Facebook pages. It starts with what seems to be an invitation to appear on a big podcast, which of course is very appealing to most people trying to build their online audience.
  • Former SCOTUS justice Steven Breyer wants everyone to get along, like his former colleagues on the high court, even though some of those colleagues are busy destroying Americans’ basic civil rights, writes Elie Mystal of The Nation.
  • The Atlantic’s David Graham describes the “Trump two-step:” say something outrageous, claim that’s not really what he said or meant, and then quietly embrace the original statement.
  • Mehdi Hasan wrote in the Guardian that Justice Sonja Sotomayor needs to retire from the Supreme Court so President Biden can appoint a replacement, avoiding the possibility that Trump would get to appoint a fourth justice and give the court a 7-2 majority that would likely last decades. I’m not sure if I agree, but he at least offers a solid argument.
  • Here’s a great summary and index of economic research showing how consistently these sports stadium deals fail to live up to economic promises. If you’re writing about the topic, or know a journalist who is, this is invaluable, because the pro-stadium forces will always trot out fabricated numbers from consultants who give them what they want.
  • A senior editor at NPR wrote a bad-faith, error-filled critique of the public radio outlet on Bari Weiss’s blog. NPR responded, defending its hiring practices and its philosophy. You can find many takedowns of Uri Berliner’s original piece, but one fact that got me was that he accused NPR of downplaying or ignoring the lab-leak theory behind COVID-19’s origins, even when the evidence in favor of a zoonotic spillover kept mounting.
  • WFLA has the story of a young boy with autism who can no longer receive health services because Florida kicked him off Medicaid. We need more stories like this, showing everyday people getting badly hurt by state policies that cut funding for essential services like health care, education, and even school lunches for underprivileged people.
  • Chicago police killed Dexter Reed during a traffic stop where he fired first, injuring one officer, after which the cops fired 96 rounds in less than a minute. The Sun-Times reports that the five officers involved in the incident have been investigated a total of 41 times since 2019, and that the area where they stopped Reed has a disproportionate number of traffic stops. The cops have said they pulled Reed over because he wasn’t wearing a seat belt.
  • Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride is running to be our at-large Representative, vying to become the first trans person elected to Congress. She’s one of at least three Democrats hoping to win the primary, which is tantamount to winning the election in our very blue state. Full disclosure: I’ve met Sen. McBride and we often see each other at our local Brew Haha coffee shop.
  • Is social media really driving a surge in mental illness among teenagers, as Jonathan Haidt claims in his new book? The evidence is mixed at best, according to this review in Nature.
  • Eric Hovde, who is running for Senate in Wisconsin as a Republican, is now facing backlash over his comments from a previous campaign where he called for cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits, attacked single mothers, said alcohol should never have been legalized, questioned whether farmers work hard, and lots of other great stuff.
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→ January 16, 2022
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Stick to baseball, 1/16/22.

Still working on the prospect rankings – I started the actual writing this week, after several weeks of prep – which will run starting January 31st at the Athletic. I appreciate your patience. My podcast and my Paste reviews will return this week.

And now, the links…

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→ May 26, 2018
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Stick to baseball, 5/26/18.

My ranking of the top 100 prospects for this year’s MLB draft is up for Insiders. I held a Klawchat on Friday.

Over at Vulture, my ranking of the 25 best mobile board game apps went up last week.

Smart Baseball is now out in paperback! I’ll be at Politics & Prose in DC on July 14th and am shooting for an event in the Boston suburbs on July 28th. Throw a comment below if you think you could make the latter event.

And now, the links…

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→ July 24, 2016
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Monteverde Chicago.

Fellow Top Chef fans will remember Sarah Grueneberg from season 9, where she was the runner-up to Paul Qui, who dominated the season like few other contestants have done, overshadowing her own skill set – especially when it came to fresh pastas. Chef Grueneberg left Chicago’s Spiaggia about a year ago to open her own place, Monteverde, in Chicago’s West Loop, and I finally got to try it out Friday night (and chat with Sarah herself) while in town for the Under Armour game. It could not have been any more impressive, not just for the pasta but for the quality of everything that went on every plate.

The menu is short but covers a lot of ground, from small plates to a half dozen pastas (three traditional dishes and three of their own creation) to a few substantial mains, and they accommodated me as a solo diner with some smaller portions so I could try more things. I started with the fiore di zucca, fried squash blossoms, a special right now since they’re in season and a very traditional Italian delicacy. The squash blossoms are extremely delicate and usually must be cooked within a day of their harvest; they’re stuffed with ricotta, battered, and fried, in this case with a tempura-like coating and served with a grilled vegetable relish and bright pea hummus underneath it. One was plenty – they’re so rich – but a plate typically contains three for the table. I rarely get to eat these so there was no question I was ordering it, and it met expectations largely because of the ricotta. I assume Monteverde makes their own but if not they’re using some of the best around because the texture is just perfect.

The single best dish I had on the night was the tomato salad, which is Monteverde’s riff on an insalata caprese, here using several kinds of tomatoes, some whole and some blanched and salted; apricot slices; burrata, which is mozzarella wrapped around a filling of cream that was decadent; basil; and za’atar seasoning. The tomatoes were singing – bright, sweet, just a hint of acidity, like they’d been picked an hour before. The best restaurants I’ve ever been to around the U.S. have all had one thing in common: they care about produce enough to get items like these tomatoes. And yes, the burrata was incredible, but it ended up playing second fiddle to the tomatoes.

That salad is one of the piattini or small plates on the menu, along with two other items I tried. The grilled artichoke crostini comes with fontina fonduta (fontina cheese melted with milk and/or cream and Parmiggiano Reggiano to make it into a sauce), more ricotta, a sweet Italian onion called cipolla di tropea, and shaved summer truffle. I had just one piece but the balance was perfect across the various elements because I could still appreciate the quality of the bread underneath, which had a creamy texture on the interior but the hard crust of good old-world recipes.

The other small plate I tried, specifically at Chef Sarah’s suggestion, was the fegattini calabrese, wok-fired chicken livers – yes, wok-fired – with tomato, peperoncino, corn, fava beans, shallot, and polenta ‘fries’ around the outside. Sarah said customers compare it to an upscale chicken parmesan, which fits with the tomato/chicken combination, but I also found it reminded me of the Ecuadorian dish lomo saltado, where steak is served in a stir-fried dish with French fries cooked in the same pot or skillet. It’s a true one-pot meal, with your protein, starch, and lots of vegetables within it, hearty like a winter stew, bringing richness from the livers and unexpected sweetness from the corn and the polenta.

Chicken livers with tomato, shallot, fava beans, corn, and polenta "fries" at @monteverdechi

A photo posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

Choosing one pasta dish at a restaurant known already for its pastas was not simple, but sitting at the bar I could see the two chefs making the pasta dishes to order, including the “twin” ravioli, where each piece contains two pockets with fillings, one with eggplant, pinenuts, and more ricotta, the other with lamb sausage, yogurt (very little), and charred onion. They’re served in a piquant red sauce with olive oil and a crushed pepper mix, although there’s just enough sauce to coat the top of the dumplings. The pasta itself remains the focus of the dish, as it’s an incredibly strong dough (they use whole eggs and egg yolks) that the pasta chefs roll out very thin for the dumplings; I’ve made pasta at home a bunch and I doubt I’ve gotten close to this kind of dough strength before, because if I rolled anything that thin it would tear. Of the two fillings, I preferred the lamb sausage and onion, which sort of gave the dish an inside-out pasta and meatballs connotation.

I tweeted some pics while I was at the restaurant and several of you said I had to try the cannoli (but to leave the gun). Monteverde makes its cannolis in-house and fills them to order with sweetened ricotta, dipping one end in dark chocolate bits and the other in bright-green Sicilian pistachios, with a painted swipe of chocolate sauce and some bitter orange bits (candied, I think) on the plate. I grew up strongly disliking cannolis, because most Italian bakeries on Long Island didn’t make their own shells, which meant they had all the texture and flavor of fried wonton strips, and used lower-quality ricotta that gave the filling a cheesy flavor rather than a sweet one. Monteverde does it all from scratch and it shows, and the part with the chocolate bits brought me back to eating straciatella (chocolate chip) gelato in my last trip to Italy in 1999.

Ricotta cannoli with pistachios on one end and dark chocolate on the other @monteverdechi

A photo posted by Keith Law (@mrkeithlaw) on

As you’d expect Monteverde has a long wine list, but I’m not much of an oenophile and went for their cocktail menu instead. They do a take on one of my all-time favorite cocktails, the negroni, using mezcal in place of the gin and Luxardo bitter in place of traditional Campari (although Luxardo and Campari are very similar, with Luxardo bringing a more bitter and less sweet profile). It was a good way to riff on a classic, preserving the essential features, with the bitter flavors out front, with a subtle change underneath I doubt I would have identified as mezcal if I hadn’t known ahead of time.

So, I had a pretty good meal at Monteverde and while I did receive some special treatment I would have said the same things about the food anyway. I can’t imagine anyone who enjoys high-quality food, let alone high-quality Italian food, walking away unsatisfied. There’s enough diversity on the menu for just about anybody (I think you could be gluten-free here pretty easily, in fact) and every dish I had was just one bright flavor after another. I’ll certainly be going back.

The rest of my trip to Chicago featured places I’ve been before; I had coffee at Intelligentsia, as I always do when I’m in Chicago, and then stopped the Tortas Frontera location at O’Hare on my rebooked flight out (my original flight on Southwest out of Midway was cancelled). Frontera is one of the best airport food options in the country, with tortas, a pressed Mexican sandwich on spongy telera bread, made to order inside of ten minutes. I tried a new option this time, the vegetarian torta with mushrooms, black beans, arugula, and goat cheese, because I had to atone for my gluttony the night before. I’ve never had a bad sandwich at Tortas Frontera but I do find their sandwiches with meat a little heavy, whereas this turned out to be just right, especially since my flight was delayed over two hours by thunderstorms and I was on the plane for close to five hours in total.

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→ August 20, 2014
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Chicago eats, 2014 edition.

I’ve got a few recent pieces up at ESPN.com, including an early postseason awards preview, a report on a few Binghamton Mets prospects, and a recap of the Under Armour All-American Classic. My last Baseball Tonight podcast as guest host included some great guests, including Bizarre Foods star Andrew Zimmern.

My trip to Chicago for the Under Armour game was, as always, too brief – I was on the ground only about 24 hours, spending seven of them at the ballpark and another eight or so asleep in the hotel (I was so tired I passed out at 11:30, in my clothes, on top of the covers, while trying to read The Magic Mountain). I did get to one new restaurant for lunch, plus revisited an old favorite after the game for a quick dinner.

A friend whose identity shall remain hidden introduced me to a new fried chicken joint in the Avondale neighborhood just west of Wrigley Field called Honey Butter, so named because you get a little cup of soft honey butter that I’m told you’re supposed to smear on the outside of the fried chicken before eating it, and really, who am I to argue with custom? Honey Butter serves boneless breasts and thighs as well as drumsticks (not boneless – that would be difficult), plus a variety of fantastic sides, with a huge emphasis on local, responsible sourcing, including antibiotic-free chicken from a farm in Indiana. (If you want to make one difference in the world based on how you eat, just one simple switch, demand antibiotic-free meat wherever you go.)

The chicken itself was spicy and crispy but still completely moist on the inside; Honey Butter fries at a lower temperature, 315 degrees, to crisp the skin by rendering out more of the fat than a higher temp would, which also helps avoid drying out the exterior part of the meat. As good as the chicken was, however, it was the sides that would send me back to the restaurant: schmaltz mashed potatoes, creamed corn with Thai green curry, roasted garlic grits with scallions and “chicken crust crunchies,” roasted sweet potato salad with cilantro-lime dressing, and kale/cabbage slaw with yogurt-cumin dressing and dried pomegranate arils. The creamed corn was my favorite by far – I would never have thought to mix corn with coconut milk and basil, but the combination was bright and avoided the heaviness I associate with creamed corn. I believe my friend would have voted for the mashed potatoes, another excellent choice, one of which I believe Michael Ruhlman – who wrote an iPad ebook about the fat, one later published as a hardcover – would approve. I’d probably skip the kale salad, especially if they have the collard greens, which weren’t available the day I went.

Honey Butter also serves little half-dollar-sized corn muffins with their meals, a little sweet with an excellent crust all around the exterior, and they offer beer, wine, and cocktails as well. They are closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, so plan your visit accordingly.

When I appeared on First Take the day after the trade deadline, Skip Bayless came to greet me off set beforehand, and the first question he asked me was, “Have you been to my brother’s restaurant?” (I know Skip doesn’t have a great reputation online, but I’ve enjoyed working with him, and I find him to be both friendly and thoughtful when we talk off air.) That was all the prompting I needed, because while I had been to Frontera Grill before, it had been way too long – over five years, in fact, too long to go without visiting one of the most important Mexican restaurants in the country, especially when it was within walking distance of my hotel.

Rick Bayless was a pioneer of authentic, regional Mexican cuisine in the U.S., and remains dedicated to that cause, even bringing his vision to a tortas stand at O’Hare Airport, a setting where you would never expect to find anything of that quality or focus. Frontera, his flagship, offers a number of Mexican dishes you’d more or less recognize, but prepares them with top-notch ingredients and surrounds them with smaller dishes, like street food, that are probably less familiar to American diners. Since it was late and I’d already had a large amount of meat at lunch, I decided to sample a few of those smaller dishes around a serving of ceviche, which was more than a meal’s worth of protein in itself. Their “tropical tuna cocktail,” served in a martini glass, comprises sashimi-grade Hawaiian bigeye tuna, mixed with a mango salsa and served over a tangy, creamy tomatillo guacamole, with fresh tortilla chips on the side to take the place of utensils. The fish was pristine – I expect no less at this kind of restaurant – but the guacamole was the part I remember most, with enough acidity to balance out the fat of the avocadoes.

For side dishes, I went with the raw jícama salad I posted on Instagram and my Facebook fan page, as well as the callejero-style grilled corn with serrano mayo and cotija. The jícama, tossed with with a chili-lime dressing and served with a little bit of sliced cucumber as well, was shockingly bright and juicy, more than any other jícama I can remember having. It’s served with extra lime wedges, which I thought it needed to bump up the acidity, since jícama itself is more texture than taste. The corn was absolutely ridiculous, sweet and salty and a little spicy with a little acidity from the cheese, decadent with the fat from the cheese and the serrano mayonnaise – the best thing I ate during the visit, even though it’s a dish I’ve had a dozen times at other restaurants.

I sampled the dessert my server suggested, an almond brown-butter cake with almond-cream cheese frosting, a quenelle of toasted almond ice cream, and some almond crumble scatted over the plate. I’d take a cone of that ice cream to go, and the cake itself was moist and had that nutty flavor of the browned milk solids from the butter (in addition to the flavor of the almonds). I could have done without the frosting, but I’m not a huge fan of cream cheese in any form; the tangy, slightly off flavor I always detect in cream cheese dominated even with all of the sugar and almond flavoring added to the frosting.

I also made a pair of visits to Intelligentsia Coffee‘s Millennium Park location, because their coffees are some of the best I’ve ever sampled. They offer a standard espresso made from their Black Cat blend, but also (for an extra dollar) offer a single-origin espresso that changes daily, which I prefer because I get to sample beans from more regions that way. Just be prepared for a little wait, as it was pretty busy both mornings I was there – a good sign given the proliferation of lesser coffee places that don’t offer this kind of quality or this level of income for the farmers.

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→ August 27, 2013
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Chicago eats, 2013.

My trip to Chicago was very brief, by design – I flew in on Saturday morning, had lunch, went to the Under Armour All-American Game, had dinner with Old Hoss, and flew home that night – so time was short and I had to leave a few Chicago places I’d love to try for a future trip. In the meantime, I at least accomplished two small goals: I got to one of Top Chef wniner Stephanie Izzard’s restaurants, and can cross yet another pizzeria off that Food and Wine list.

Izzard is most famous for her flagship restaurant The Girl & the Goat, which I still have yet to try, but I’d heard good things about her diner, The Little Goat, in the same neighborhood but offering more comfort-food fare while serving breakfast and lunch as well as dinner. I popped a photo on Instagram of my meal, the Fat Elvis Waffles – two waffles with sliced bananas, peanut butter butter (a compound butter with peanut butter blended into soft unsalted butter), small bits of bacon, and maple syrup. It sounded amazing, looked great, and was thoroughly disappointing – only the peanut butter butter lived up to expectations. The waffles were dense and soft, difficult to cut with a butter knife, and lacking flavor. Waffles should be airy inside and crispy outside, period. If you don’t use enough fat, you won’t get that. If you skimp on leavening, whether it’s an acid/base reaction or yeast or an egg white foam, you won’t get that. The Little Goat didn’t. Even the bacon fell short, as I thought I was going to lose a filling when I bit down on one piece. I’d take a pound of the peanut butter butter to go, though.

Dinner with our favorite syphilitic pitcher was more successful, at Bar Toma, one of three Chicago places on Food and Wine‘s best U.S. pizzerias list. (The others are Burt’s Place, which does that vile thing called “deep dish” pizza, and Great Lake, which has since closed but may reopen this fall.) The odd thing is that Bar Toma doesn’t get high marks from locals – I’ve not gotten great feedback from readers or friends in Chicago, and its ratings online (not that any of those are terribly reliable) aren’t strong. I thought it was solid, and that’s without adding points for Lucy, our rather gorgeous Irish server who probably received a few more questions from our table than was appropriate.

We ordered two pizzas, the August special, with duck sausage, goat cheese, and red chili flakes; and the off-menu burrata pizza, recommended by our darling Lucy. The burrata pizza was by far our favorite; it’s topped with burrata (large balls of fresh mozzarella with cream inside), truffle oil, and arugula, and the crust on this pizza was better than the one on the duck sausage pizza, crispier at the edges and underneath as well. The duck sausage pizza was a little unbalanced, with too much red pepper, too much tang from the goat cheese (which was soft like chevre but tangier than goat’s milk feta), and nothing on the other side. The duck sausage even got lost a little beside those other ingredients.

We started with a kale salad, which was topped with a medium-boiled egg and contained bread crumbs and an anchovy vinaigrette; it was outstanding as well as moderately healthful and actually quite pretty with the mix of purple and green leaves. Bar Toma also makes about a dozen flavors of gelato in-house; I went with the chocolate and amaretto, both with excellent texture, served just warm enough to begin melting at the table (that’s a good thing – gelato shouldn’t be too cold). The chocolate was a little underflavored for me, with texture and flavor like Belgian milk chocolate, but the amaretto was like tipping the Di Saronno to the head like a forty. I’m not sure why its local reputation is mixed – it’s good, probably a 55 if we’re rating the burrata pizza, a 60 if we give points for Lucy, and infinitely preference to that tomato-cake nonsense Chicagoans like to eat instead.

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→ August 21, 2012
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Chicago eats.

I wrote about Bryce Harper’s struggles today for Insiders, and about Twins prospects Miguel Sano and Eddie Rosario yesterday. My post on Saturday’s Under Armour game should go up in the next 24 hours.

If you follow me on Twitter, you saw my photograph of 2 Sparrows‘ maple bacon donut, which is on the short list of the best things I’ve ever eaten, not just for the bacon, but for the absolutely perfect donut at the heart of the $4 dish. The maple glaze is very sweet, like pure maple sugar, so the donut beneath it has little to no sweetness of its own, instead shining for the crispy exterior and a soft, light interior. The bacon crumbled over the top is house-cured, with the salt well balanced with the glaze’s sweetness, and some texture contrast with the soft donut. I admit the plate seemed a little gimmicky, but the execution across the board is tremendous.

The duck confit hash was less successful, however, primarily because of texture – every item in the hash, which is mostly duck and sweet potatoes, is soft, with the duck actually the least so, even slightly tough in comparison to everything else in the dish. I also find duck meat in general and confit in particular slightly sweet, at least relative to any other protein, so the combination with sweet potatoes felt unbalanced.

My dinner with Old Hoss Radbourn on Saturday night was also a huge hit, as we went to The Purple Pig, a restaurant that promises “cheese, swine, and wine.” We went heavy on the swine, going for pork liver paté, fried pig ears, and the “JLT,” with pig jowl standing in for the bacon – as well as two vegetable dishes and dessert. Dish by dish:

* The pork liver paté was unreal – as smooth as a dessert mousse, with a pronounced smoky undertone and a thin layer of high-quality olive oil on top, served with thick slices of grilled country bread. The server even brought more bread so we could finish every last bit of the paté, and even though I’m not even a huge fan of liver, I’d order this again in a heartbeat. The dish is one of a handful of “smears” they offer, including one made from lardo, cured pork fat that melts into whatever hot item is underneath it.

* I would never have guessed I was eating fried pig ears if I didn’t know going in what we had ordered. They’re slow-cooked, julienned, then quickly fried like french-fried onion rings, served with fried kale, pickled cherry peppers, and a fried egg on top. The pig ears have just a hint of tooth to them, but aren’t tough, and the frying makes the kale crispy while setting its deep green hue. It’s like the perfect bar snack for food snobs like me – and with a Belhaven stout in front of me I had no trouble finishing my half of the dish. You can find the recipe if you want to try this at home.

* The JLT was incredibly awkward to eat, but when I could get all the flavors into one bite, it was masterful, with huge flavors all in perfect balance. The jowl is the pig’s cheek meat, cured like bacon but thicker and much more tender; those of you familiar with regional Italian cooking may have had it as guanciale. The heirloom tomatoes are sliced nearly an inch thick, which contributed to the construction issues, although they were extremely bright and provided the one sweet element in the dish. The duck egg … perhaps I’m a philistine, but I doubt I could have identified this as a duck egg rather than a chicken egg, and either way, a runny egg makes every dish better. The lemon aioli tasted more like a cold bearnaise sauce, providing the one acidic element, while frisee adds a slightly bitter note. As a whole, the dish has a complex mixture of colors, textures, and flavors, and if it was a little easier to eat it would have scored an 80 for me.

* The broccoli with roasted garlic and anchovy vinaigrette was another winner, with the broccoli also roasted and the umami-filled vinaigrette coating the vegetables (florets and I believe julienned stalks) perfectly, but without the fishy taste the description might lead you to expect. The charred cauliflower with toasted breadcrumbs, cornichons, and parsley was our least favorite of the five dishes, even though it might have been the prettiest thanks to the use of green and purple florets; the flavors were all muted and compared to the strong flavors in every other dish it felt bland.

* Both desserts were excellent; the mixed berry crostada had a textbook flaky/tender crust that could have stood on its own, while the salted caramel soft-serve ice cream was very smooth and had the complexity you expect from that flavor, even if it’s become a little hackneyed at this point. I’d take the crostada over the ice cream just because it was more unusual. Good call by Hoss on this place, especially since I figured there was even money we’d end up at a brothel.

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→ August 19, 2008
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Chicago and Ann Arbor.

Ann Sather is a small Chicago chain known, with good cause, for its cinnamon rolls. I went to the 70-year-old Ann Sather restaurant one El stop south of Wrigley Field (it’s right outside the Belmont station off the Red Line) before the Under Armour Game on Sunday for breakfast. The cinnamon rolls – two constitute a single side order – are very good, with a soft dough that’s somewhere between cake and brioche in texture. The cinnamon-sugar-butter filling was heavy on the cinnamon (good), although it tasted a bit like cheap cinnamon (not good, but, in their defense, it’s cheap). Every egg plate comes with your choice of two sides, and two cinnamon rolls constitute one side, so it’s a pretty good deal. I went with two eggs scrambled, which were prepared without the slightest adulteration from salt; the hash browns “well done” (my waitress’ suggestion), which means they have a crisp brown crust that breakfast potatoes should be required by federal law to have; and the “Swedish potato sausage.” I asked my waitress what that sausage contained and was told pork, veal, and potatoes, and that “it’s pink.” I’m thinking, okay, pork sausage usually has a pink hue to it, but what came to the table was dead pink in the center, and in my book, that’s raw. I didn’t eat them. That platter plus tea came to about $11.50 before tip.

In the mini-mall attached to the Renaissance Hotel on West Wacker is a fast food-ish place called Wow Bao which I really had to try. I’ve had authentic Chinese dumpings – both bao zi and xiao long jiao zi – in Taiwan and in the U.S., and I think they’re out of this word, particularly the latter kind. Bao zi are giant puffs of a simple yeast dough usually stuffed with a meat filling and steamed; the texture of the dough is very soft, almost pillowy. Jiao zi are smaller dumplings with a thinner dough and a higher filling-to-dough ratio; the fillings are juicier and part of the experience of eating one is getting the burst of liquid that comes with the first bite. (Think of jiao zi as a Hershey’s Kiss: the dough is the foil wrapper and the filling is the chocolate. That gives you a rough idea of the construction, at least.)

Anyway, Wow Bao serves enormous bao zi for $1.39 apiece or $7.99 for a six-pack; I tried several kinds, the barbecue pork being the best if a bit too sweet, the whole wheat with edamame being the worst with an overpowering taste of scallions, and the chicken and curry also scoring well despite perhaps a lack of authenticity. I highly approve of their homemade ginger ale, which tastes like … ginger. One big negative was a poor ratio of dough to filling, which, since the dough on most of the dumplings comprised only white flour, meant for a bit of a food coma not long after I ate.

Shifting locales, I’ve been remiss in not writing up Zingerman’s Roadhouse in Ann Arbor, Michigan, from my trip to see the Tigers and White Sox last month. The fried eggs were cooked flawlessly (over medium) while the thickly sliced bacon was excellent and also correctly cooked. The grits … well, I’m not a huge grits fan, but these were pretty good, with a fair amount of salt in them. Not as good as even mediocre polenta, of course, but good for grits. The big bonuses for me: real tea; and a small plate of donut holes for us to try, obviously just fried and out of this world, as just-fried donuts usually are. There were five of us there and the waitress was absolutely hellbent on splitting the check for us – she wouldn’t take no for an answer – but I suppose that’s better than the waitress who takes your order and disappears for an hour.

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→ August 31, 2007
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Chicago eats.

So I had some ups and downs in Chicago, but I’m glad to say that after some mediocre meals to start, I finished strong.

The Oak Tree Room is in the same building as the Four Seasons, at 900 N Michigan Ave. I had read that they offered excellent cranberry-pecan pancakes, and I wanted to get some exercise, so I walked up there … and was disappointed. The pancakes were dry and flat, and the dried cranberries tasted more like candied fruit than dried.

Vong’s Thai Kitchen on Hubbard (near the Billy Goat Tavern) was another disappointment, not least because the service was comically bad. I still have no idea who my server was, and I ended up waiting about ten minutes to order (past the point where my menu was closed) and ten or fifteen minutes for someone to realize I was done and offer me the check. A waitress, maybe “my” waitress, did eventually come and ask if I wanted to try one of their “mini” desserts (which are apparently about $1.50) each, but by that point I was annoyed enough to just want to leave. Plus I had a gelateria in my sights for the afternoon.

Anyway, the food at Vong’s was also disappointing, since it’s not so much Thai food as haute cuisine served on a bed of Thai food. I skipped the pad thai, my usual bellwether dish for Thai restaurants, fearing it would be too sweet – let’s face it, there were no Thai customers in the place, and that’s not a good sign for the authenticity of the food. I ordered panang curry with “pulled” chicken, and the chicken part was very good, still moist and indeed resembling pulled chicken. But the peanut-dominated sauce was heavy and slightly bitter, and there wasn’t much else in the sauce besides the chicken and some peas. The complimentary salad of shredded daikon and carrots in a “Szechuan” vinaigrette (can we just call it a sesame vinaigrette? Is that so freaking hard? And why would I want a Szechuan vinaigrette in a Thai restaurant?) was very good, but a poor harbinger of what was to come.

Just across the street from the Oak Tree Room is an Italian deli called L’Appetito that purports to sell gelato. They don’t. That stuff is ice cream, a claim I can support by pointing out that I couldn’t get my plastic spoon into the stuff. Next.

I had dinner with a longtime email correspondent and regular on Baseball Think Factory, who goes by the handle “Shredder.” He suggested La Creperie on Clark, which is close to Wrigley Field without being right on top of it. Their savory crepes are all made with buckwheat, and I went with a chicken, goat cheese, and tomato crepe. It was delicious; the goat cheese was the dominant flavor, and it worked nicely with the béchamel sauce that filled the crepe. The chicken was white meat, a little overcooked (I assume it was cooked first before it was added to the crepe), but since it was sitting in the sauce it wasn’t a big deal. The tomatoes were fresh, but really, I could take or leave tomatoes. This was about the goat cheese, and the crepe itself, which was delicious, slightly nutty but not overwhelmingly buckwheaty.

Thursday’s breakfast was at Lou Mitchell’s on W Jackson St, near Canal. They’re known for their homemade pastries, so I asked the waitress what one pastry I should order, and I got this answer: “They’re all good.” Yeah, you’re a big help, sweetheart. I can see why you’re not in sales. I went with a coconut donut, which was one of the daily specials; it was a cake donut, very moist, but the glaze was sickeningly sweet and I only ate about a third of it. The Greek bread that came with the meal was a much bigger success, almost like a challah bread with a soft interior and a very crumbly exterior. As for the meal itself, I went with my usual EMPT, going for two eggs scrambled with bacon. The “two eggs” bit is a joke; the meal came in a seven- or eight-inch skillet, and the scrambled eggs took up half the skillet, which has to be at least four eggs considering how thick they were. They were cooked through, a touch dry, but good overall. The potatoes were sliced very thinly and appeared to be cooked solely on the flat-top in a pile, so that some were just steamed while others were nicely browned. Total $10.42 before tip.

Lunch was at the Frontera Grill, accompanied by Jayson Stark. I went with the tacos al carbon, and asked the waiter whether I should get the skirt steak (traditional) or the duck, and he said it was a coin flip but he’d take the duck. Thank God for someone with the cojones to answer one freaking question. Anyway, before the meal came we had some chips and two salsas, one green, the other a dark red with some sort of roasted peppers in it, and both were outstanding, with the red salsa spicy but not at all hot, and both boasting gorgeous bright colors. The tacos al carbon ($15) came with a delicious and clearly fresh guacamole that had never seen the inside of a food processor, with good chunks of avocado still in it and hints of garlic and cilantro that didn’t overwhelm the fresh avocado flavor. The duck was delicious, but unfortunately had some gristle in it, something I haven’t encountered before, although to be fair I usually go with duck leg rather than breast. The meat was medium-rare, but more rare in some parts (where the gristle was) and medium in others. The best part of the dish was something I can only call a Mexican version of baked beans (frijoles charros), with red beans perfectly cooked (soft but al dente) in a reduced, smoky-sweet sauce redolent of bacon. Jayson ordered a shrimp dish ( camarones en salsa verde con hongos) that he said was one of the best things he had ever tasted.

My last meal in Chicago was probably the most interesting of the trip, mostly good, some less good. The place is called Twist, and it’s a tapas bar (tapas here meaning “small plates,” not Spanish food) down Sheffield, a block or two south of Wrigley Field. Overall the food was good, made from fresh ingredients and prepared right in front of anyone who sits at the bar (as I did). I ordered three dishes: braised beef tenderloin on a corn cake with feta and a spicy aioli, dates wrapped in bacon, and grilled “vegetables” (zucchini and yellow squash, as it turns out) on crostini with goat cheese. The last dish was the biggest hit for me; the bread used for the crostini was delicious, and there was just a dab of goat cheese sitting on a small spread of roasted red pepper purée sitting on the slab of squash. It was perfect, with accent flavors from the toppings complementing but not overwhelming the flavor of the squash, finished with a nice crunch.

The dates wrapped in bacon were excellent, except for one thing: the dates themselves were sugared, making for a bizarre, sweet note to finish the dish, not a flavor I’m used to experiencing in a savory dish. The bacon was perfectly cooked, and the dish came with a thick balsamic-based sauce with a gravy-like consistency, although I couldn’t tell you how much it contributed since “sweet” was the dominant flavor.

The big question mark for me was the beef tenderloin. The beef was marinated in something strong and acidic, most likely a red wine concoction, and was served shredded in a mound on a corn cake (very soft, with a consistency more like grits than polenta, and oddly enough, no actual corn kernels), with large hunks of feta cheese, chopped red onion and tomatoes, and then lines of a spicy “aioli” that was really mayonnaise with chili oil or hot sauce added. (True aioli doesn’t have egg yolks in it, but this sauce did.) Think about that flavor combination: the beef, cheese, onions, and tomatoes are all acidic and tangy, pleasant flavors in small doses but overwhelming in large doses. The only other flavor in the dish is the heat from the spicy aioli. The corn cakes weren’t sweet, and weren’t really salty, although it’s possible that all the sour/tangy/spicy numbed my mouth to the point where I couldn’t taste what they offered. The shame of it all is that the ingredients in the dish were good and the concept was as well: a piece of braised beef tenderloin, preferably served whole, on a sweet corn cake with corn in it, with a spicy aioli or mayo would have been perfect, simpler, cheaper to make, and less of a mess on the plate. There was a good dish hiding in here, but I couldn’t make it out because they went overboard with the additions.

All that said, I’d definitely recommend Twist as a pre-Cubs game hideout. At 5:40 on a Thursday game night, there was no wait, and the place wasn’t full when I left. The food was good, the place is nice, and you don’t have to deal with Cubs fans or tourists who view the game as an excuse to get hammered. I’m just hoping that the Twist chefs simplify some of their dishes to let the clean flavors of the ingredients come through.

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