Doubt Conquered, Hope Shattered (Baume & Brix, Cantina Pasadita)

When Moto was in its hot early days and clients insisted that I take them there, my heart would sink. Test tube salads, ice cream that tasted like fried chicken - everything at Moto seemed like an experiment designed to produce something uniquely undelicious. Though I haven't been back to Moto in years, from what I hear it has evolved into something even more bizarre and less delicious. So, when I see "former Moto chef" on resumes, it doesn't exactly lead me to rush right over. It's pretty close to where I work and I have tried one dismal place after the next in the area, but Baume and Brix had barely made it to my radar screen before I finally tried it this week.

I cast doubt aside after eating the remarkably straightforward and delicious asparagus salad. Thin spears had been charred beautifully and served atop an intense asparagus puree. Asparagus is a strong and distinct vegetable, and I think it marries better with strong and distinct ingredients from other food groups than it does with other vegetables, which tend to get lost amidst the poweful greenness of the asparagus. The gamey chicken liver pate on the plate with it at Baume and Brix worked perfectly. Again, just a straightforward, gimmick-free pate topping some well-toasted bread. Sure there was a poached egg on the plate too, which they insisted on telling me was prepared at a precise 63 degrees in a circulator, but I can shrug that off and just acknowledge that this was one heck of a tasty plate of food with well-selected, carefully-prepared, seasonal ingredients.

The potato chip gnocchi was a bit more gimmicky, but no less delicious. The gnocchi were crisp and feathery, plated with a grown-up take on sour cream and onion potato chip flavors. There were sweet caramelized onions melted into a silky butter puree, thin chives, creme fraiche, and lightly pickled mushrooms that added sourness and a squeaky texture that served as a great contrast to the gnocchi. Good ingredients, thoughtfully combined and very well prepared.

Service was attentive and informed, though I should note that mine was one of just two occupuied tables during my lunchtime visit. I also found the wine list was well curated, with an especially wonderful and somewhat novel domestically-produced Gruner Veltiner which I enjoyed a lot. Baume and Brix surprised and delighted me, and I consider it among the very best of last year's restaurant openings.

------------------------------------

When I moved 6 years ago to my current home, there wasn't a single bar or restaurant that could just as easily call Lakeview or Wicker Park its home. Fast forward to now, with Leader Bar right on my corner and Pithfork a block away, this stretch of Irving Park could almost be Wrigleyville. Though I was happy when a Pasadita taco stand moved in a couple of years ago and have enjoyed it many times for a quick, just-fine snack, the largely-Gringo clientele add to a feeling that the neighborhood was trying to turn into Division Street between Ashland and Damen.

None of this bothers me at all, by the way. I like what it might do for my property value and I also like having a place on my corner to escape occasionally from a house of screaming kids to watch a game on some high definition TV's while drinking a pretty good beer. I also like margaritas. A lot. And I like drinking them outside in the sun. So when signs came up showing that Cantina Pasadita, a full-bar, table-service branch of the taco chain was taking over the space across from Leader Bar, with its nice sidewalk seating area, I was hopeful. I met the GM a few weeks before it opened, and he described the coming place as "high-end," with things like "tableside guacamole and a mixology program". He also said that they'd hired a chef with years of experience at well-known local restaurants. "It's going to be nothing like the taco stands," he said. I was skeptical, but really if all the place had were fresh chips and decent margaritas made with real lime, I'd be a regular.

The margaritas are fake and they suck. The chips are stale. There is crazy-expensive guacamole that's completely bland, and the table salsa tastes like ketchup. there's also something called "Cachos," described by my server as "authentic Mexican nachos". Whatever. More stale chips with some cheese, topped with cubes of watery chicken breast.

I hope potential buyers for my condo don't read this blog. Cantina Pasadita is horrible.

----------------------

Baume & Brix

351 W Hubbard St
Chicago, IL 60654
Neighborhoods: Near North Side, River North

Cantina Pasadita
2958 W. Irving Park Road

Foods I Like (Yes, you read that right)

People tell me that I have a reputation for hating everything.  Though the pages of this blog already show that such criticism is unfounded, I’m devoting this whole post to a bunch of stuff I’ve had and liked recently.  It’s the first beautiful Spring Friday of 2013.  Here’s a little extra sunshine:

Jerk wings and festival from Jerk – Modern Jamaican Grill Food Truck.  This truck is one of the first in Chicago to cook onboard, and they’re doing a fantastic job with a simple menu that uses just a grill and a deep fryer.  Wings are juicy and fresh, and have hot, no-holds-barred jerk seasoning with an especially  potent garlic component.  Hand-cut fries are well-seasoned but a little limp and greasy.  Skip those and opt instead for a side of festival  - crisp, slightly sweet corn fritters that do a great job cooling down all that spice.

Smoked whitefish Caesar salad from Bavettes.  Most of the time when people mess around with toppings on a Caesar salad, they ruin a good thing.  The salty, slightly-smoky fish here was an exception.  It tasted great and had a firm enough texture to hand up to the crisp greens.  This was a well-executed salad with a little something to take it up several notches.  This dish stood out even at a meal where I liked just about everything that was served (except the” creamed spinach”, which had cream and spinach, but was not creamed spinach).   

Lentil soup at Salam.  The food at Salam is generally much better than at any other local place serving similar food, and this soup is a real highlight.  It has a refined, creamy, extra-strained texture you’d expect at a French restaurant, with lightness and balance unmatched by other lentil soups.  I love it, and it’s my 3 year old’s favorite delivery food (mango lassi is a beverage, not a food).

Smoked salmon at Jam.  I will never understand why Jam serves a piece of frosted chocolate cake as an amuse bouche for dishes like this, but recently I’ve been able to put that incongruity aside and simply enjoy the good things about the place.  The smoked salmon dish is a real standout.  House-smoked fish with great flavor and texture, a brilliant béarnaise sauce, crisp potato pancakes, gorgeous, gooey poached eggs, and some nice crunch from salsify slaw.  A dish of beautifully contrasting colors and complementary flavors.

Granduca cheese from JP Graziano.  This Sardinian pecorino is incredible.  It’s hard and I suspect intended mainly for grating, but I’ve just been eating it straight with young, cheap Southern Italian wines.  It’s very nutty and only mildly salty as compared with other pecorino cheeses, but what makes it so special is the underlying flavor of high-quality goat milk with complex, but not overpowering funk.

Jekyll & Hyde at Howells & Hood

If you order the seafood salad at a massive, corporate-looking sports bar at the bottom of a downtown Chicago office building, you deserve the mushy, tasteless fish with gloppy dressing you’re likely to get.  It is a marvel that at Howells & Hood, the dish rivals the best versions at seafood-focused restaurants in places like Boston and San Francisco.  Tender, well-charred octopus mixes with a variety of delicately poached shellfish, all adorned simply but robustly with lemon and oregano.  Eat this and you can reasonably imagine being at seaside restaurant in Sicily.  You’ll have to tune out the very-American couple next to you as they order their burgers to be made without salt, and the very American sorority girl a few feet away as she requests a round of Sex on the Beach for her table.

The good vs. evil theme suggested by my post title is inaccurate.  Howells & Hood is not 2 things.  It’s not 3 things, 4 things or 5 things.  Howells & Hood is everything.  It’s a restaurant for locavores, run by a chef who passionately espouses things like rooftop gardening and hyper-local cuisine.  It’s a sports bar for the heavy-drinking frat crowd, such as the ones who, during one of my visits, did shots of Jack and high fives every time their school’s basketball team hit a 3-pointer.  It’s the place where 14 office workers grab lunch together and ignore the gigantic beer list while they drink diet cokes and make fun of the boss.  It’s where tourists go to lay out their guidebooks before planning their Mag Mile shopping adventures.  It’s the spot for beer geeks who want to explore what must be the city’s largest tap beer list. Howells and Hood has high tops and low tops and medium-sized tops.  Indoor bars and outdoor bars.  Booths, tables, and semi-booth-tables.  It has everything.

Not surprisingly, Howells & Hood even has a burger.  A very, very bad burger.  At about 6 inches tall, this burger is inedible as a sandwich unless you pull some of the parts out first.  I started with the inch-thick onion rings, breaded so thickly that the batter inside was still gooey and raw.  I took out the tasteless tomato next, and then brushed off some of the slaw-like shredded lettuce.  I was barely able to get my mouth around the thing now.  Then I sneezed.  The pepper in this monstrosity was ground very coarsely, and there was so much of it that my nostrils were not able to cope.  The next flavor to hit me was carbon.  The exterior was blackened with a burnt crust that obliterated all other flavor.  I had ordered the burger medium rare and there was indeed a corner of the thing that was cooked that way.  The rest of the burger ranged wildly – parts of it were reddish pink and juicy, but more parts were totally grey and dry and there were some parts in between – signs of a cook that doesn’t understand how to manage a fire.

I’ve been to Howells & Hood several times, and for the most part I’ve liked the food.  The seafood salad is special, and I expect to find other gems as I continue exploring the menu.  Howells & Hood is everything, so it takes a bit of time to sort through it all to find the somethings you like.  I work steps away, and with the limited options for good food around, I will be happy to keep exploring.  One can eat at The Purple Pig only so many days in a row.

 

Howells & Hood

435 N Michigan Ave.  312-262-5310

Flour and Stone

"We're running a lunch special.  A pizza for one and a salad for $19".  This was the start of my dialogue with the Flour and Stone staff, and at prime lunch hour I witnessed several other conversations that started the same way.  I stayed for lunch, but more than half of the others left with various levels of huff and head-shaking.

I'm not sure what Flour and Stone is trying to be, but whatever it is, I don't think it's going to work.  There is a huge and captive business/ tourist lunch crowd in this area, with a whole lot of crappy choices for them.  It's hard for me to imagine shunning this crowd the way Four and Stone does.  When the place first opened, it was dinner-only.  That really baffled me.  Now they're open for lunch, but a solo luncher would be hard-pressed to get change back from a 20.  If they're shooting for some sort of upscale restaurant vibe, neither the counter-service setting nor the sparse decor are going to make that work.

But readers don't want paragraph after paragraph analyzing decorations and business models and what might or might not be going on in the mind of a restaurant's owner. The Sun Times would still have a food section if you did.  You want to know how the pizza is, and I'm going to tell you - not that good.  The crust is thick and overly bready.  It's got more char than Pizza Hut, but it's in the same ballpark.  The sauce is tart and watery, and could use salt.  Toppings include onion and garlic that are still raw after coming out of the oven, and mushrooms that are bland and need more cooking time too.

I saw an interview somewhere, where a Flour and Stone Owner said, bizarrely, that what he is describing as Brooklyn-style pizza is based on the style of pizza he ate growing up in Rochester, NY.  I believe him.

Flour and Stone
355 E Ohio St  Chicago, IL 60611
(312) 822-8998

Naha in 2013

With the tsunami of internet and reviewer activity every time some hot-named chef so much as blinks in the West Loop, I wonder whether there are stalwarts languishing in other neighborhoods as they try helplessly for attention in an era when only the newest places seem to get any press.  Erwin. Crofton. Trotter’s.  Once-famous places run by chefs once seen as the best around seem to be dropping out rapidly and suddenly in this environment.

It was with concern about this phenomenon that I paid three visits over the last few months to a stalwart that I’d put in the same mix as the places above.  I’ve been eating at Naha for almost a decade, and did so with regularity in the early years.  It was among my favorite places, but for no good reason it had been three years since my last visit, and I started to wonder whether I’d been playing a role in the demise of the type of restaurant that puts great food and great service before great social media strategy. 

In 2013, Carrie Nahabedian doesn’t get the kind of press that someone like Stephanie Izard gets, but their cooking styles are similar.  Both marry sweet with savory flavors in ways that might at first sound odd, but end up working.  At Naha, bacon is served lacquered with syrup in a pastry crust with pineapple and fennel.  Chicken thighs are treated with middle eastern liqueur and served with sweet oranges.  Even a burger gets an extra dose of sweet via a slow roasted tomato and deeply caramelized onions. 

Izard does it better.  Her flavors are bolder and more sharply contrasting.  At Naha, the sweetness dominates rich-tasting but otherwise muted broths, sauces and marinades with spicing that’s too subtle to work the kind of magic that happens on Randolph Street.  In the bacon tarte tatine, the bacon had sticky-sweet lacquer, the sweet pineapple was caramelized to make it even sweeter.  Fennel added an even further sweet note, and there was just nothing to give an Izard-style jolt to what became palate-tiring dish after just a couple of bites.  The chicken thigh tagine sat in a sweet, anise-flavored broth with raw honeybell slices.  The dish needed the advertised coriander seeds and “Turkish spices” to add some complexity, but they’re way too far in the background.  An heirloom squash soup had deliciously deep squash flavor, but garnishes that included herb spaetzle and horseradish cream needed more oomph.  I couldn't taste any herbs or any horseradish, and as good as the squash flavor was, it was one-dimensional and I wasn't interested in coming close to finishing the soup.

The pastry chef's name was printed in bizarrely big, bold letters at the top of the dessert menu.  Something like "Our Famous Pastry Chef So and So Introduces The following Desserts".  I'm sure he's a respected guy even though I'd never heard of him, but this sort of showmanship seemed out of place at Naha.  Perhaps it should have warned of a chef interested in glitz and glamour over taste.  I had an almond dacquoise.  Actually, it was barely a sliver of dacquoise amidst a veritable kaleidoscope of garnishes.  There were white powders, off-white stick-shaped things, tiny purple berries, a flavorless tan gel that might as well have been aspic, some greenery, and surely more.  Other than the aspic, nothing on the plate tasted bad.  None of it made any sense to me either.

I'm not sure whether Naha has declined or my tastes have just changed since those days when I loved it.  You'll probably find me contemplating that question with everyone else at the next iteration of Fulton-Market-Buzz-Restaurant.

Phil Stefani 437 Rush Under Christian Fantoni

Almost a decade ago, Christian Fantoni ran the kitchen at Fiamma, a Michelin-starred Italian restaurant in New York City with a big following.  A few years later, he was making wedge salads and chicken parm at a Portillo’s branch in Aurora.  It’s been a strange career, but with knowledge of his early accolades I was intrigued when I learned that he’d taken over the kitchen at Phil Stefani’s 437 Rush, normally the kind of business lunch, try-to-please-everyone place I avoid.  In 3 meals during the early part of 2013, I saw a tiny glimpse of what might have been the Fiamma Fantoni, but for the most part I still see the same Phil Stefani 437 Rush that’s always been there, with perhaps even a slight decline in basic execution.

A delicate bibb lettuce pesto was crisp and bright without overpowering the meticulously-prepared clams and tender cuttlefish that were the stars of the dish.  These ingredients sauced  flavorful potato gnocchi that, while not as light and dreamy as those at places such as a Tavola and Spiaggia, were well-crafted  - not the gummy, leaden balls found at most restaurants.  Textures and flavors worked in harmony here, and I started to see why a NYC Michelin reviewer or James Beard House representative might have taken notice.

Then I tried the butternut squash soup and imagined a multi-gallon vat of premade glop adorning a Portillo’s quick-service counter.  It was thick like spackle and utterly devoid of flavor, but for some crumbled cookies used as garnish.  It was a vile bowl of food. 

Two more pasta dishes failed to invoke any of the joy I felt with the gnocchi.  Orecchiette with rapini and sausage were cooked pleasantly al dente, but the advertised broccoli puree was either non-existent or flavorless.  Neither the rapini nor the sausage had much flavor either.  It was the kind of bland, inoffensive dish you’d expect to find at a place like this.  Nothing more.  Worse yet were ravioli, advertised as being stuffed with ricotta and herbs, then sauced with some kind of lettuce pesto.  The filling was indeed green as if herbs had been used, but I tried really hard and failed to taste anything beyond plain ricotta.  The pesto was a vile, separated mess of flavorless green oil in a massive pool, and flavorless clumps of dry greenery with sliced almonds that hadn’t been pulverized at all.

Fantoni hasn’t been at the helm here for too long, so there may be some hope that he will influence the menu and execution in a positive way.  My confidence about that isn’t high though, and after the dreadful soup and ravioli it’ll be a while before I try again.

Four Midwestern Bagel Service Atrocities

I tried to leave my New Yorkers know best attitude at the door when I left to become a Midwesterner 16 years ago, but there are some things that people in these parts really need to learn from Gotham.  That your legs don’t stop working when you step onto an escalator is one.  Another, which will be the subject of this post, is bagel service.

Mind you, bagel service is not complicated.  By no means am I implying that only New York minds could come up with the proper way to serve a bagel with cream cheese.  We can’t even figure out a reasonable way to transport people to our airports, for goodness’ sake.  No, serving a bagel with cream cheese the right way is so easy that even a PS 169 grad like me can do it.  You slice the bagel and you put cream cheese on it.  That’s it!  There’s nothing more to it, yet there are countless ways in which Midwesterners overcomplicate the process and ruin it.  I’ve listed some of these egregious errors below with the hope that anyone with bagel service responsibility will heed  my warning, and that anyone who knows a person with such responsibility will pass it on.  After 16 years, I’m getting angry about this. Do not keep screwing up my bagel with cream cheese. 

Four Common Midwestern Bagel Service Atrocities:

4. Double slicing.  A bagel should be sliced across its equator so that cream cheese can be applied.  Under no circumstances should it then be sliced again longitudinally.  I don’t know if it’s the more heavily Christian population here or what, but this cross-pattern slicing has got to stop.  The cream cheese oozes out of the center and it’s a mess to eat this way.  Stop it. Really.

3. Cream cheese on the side.  If a man orders a bagel with cream cheese, he wants a bagel with cream cheese on it.  This practice of handing over an unsliced bagel with a plastic tub of cream cheese and a flimsy plastic knife is insulting.  Those flimsy knives can’t even slice a ripe, peeled banana.  They’re hopeless against a bagel, and even more hopeless in spreading the rock-hard cream cheese in that tub you took directly from the ice box.  Do you give these knives out because you’re worried about customers having weapons to use against you?  Continue this cheese on the side practice, and such worry might become justified.

2. Calling the thing a “schmear”.  This is the only one that makes me think, maybe Midwesterners really are less intelligent than New Yorkers.  “Schmear?”  You’re an adult, for Willett’s sake!

1. Toasting.  Toasting ruins a bagel’s chewy reason to exist.  Toasting is for, well, toast.  A bagel is not toast.  Stop this.  If you encounter customers who insist on having their bagel toasted, I’ll allow you to decide whether or not you want to accommodate such misguided people.  If you’re the kind of place that allows people to add grilled chicken breast to any salad on the menu, then you should go ahead and accommodate this equally ridiculous request too.  But so many places toast by default, without even asking if that’s what the customer wants.  Stop this.  People complain to me:  “But what if the bagel isn’t fresh?  Isn’t it better toasted then?”  If you’re eating or serving a stale bagel, stop reading this blog and think about what your life has become.