Let’s imagine you’re traveling through Chicago, and let’s
imagine you’ve become stuck. Be it by the
caprice of some always-sudden and unfailingly massive Midwestern thunderstorm,
or the inevitable voyager’s travail of traveling through the world’s seventh
busiest airport only to find that air traffic is tangled—yet again—with all the
algebraic complexity of a Gordian knot, there you are, in some soul-crushing O’Hare
International lounge area, seated directly under a television monitor, loud
with that now-ubiquitous-in-airports CNN broadcast, and adjacent to that inexorable
won’t-stop-crying newborn, with five hours of daylight to burn before the next
available flight is able to carry you back home.
Were you elsewhere—Denver, Detroit, Dallas even—I’d declare
your situation beyond remedy, without hope, and direct you to the nearest
airport bar, where you might repair to a booth of worn Naugahyde, ply your doom
with few warm, flat, and way overpriced pints of Sam Adams Light, and wallow in
that unmistakably existential let’s-open-a-vein variety of despair endemic of
any particularly suck-ass American airport.
But you’re not in Denver. You’re not in Detroit.
You’re in Chicago, boy-o, a veritable wonderland of American gastronomy,
where culinary greatness abounds in virtually every neighborhood the city over,
and where a traveler exactly like you might hop on the El train, head downtown
on the Blue Line, and eat two remarkably delicious meals in the span of a few
hours.
Now let’s imagine this traveler is me.
Now let’s imagine this is exactly what I did.
Kinda sorta.
Lunch One – Publican
Quality Meats – West Loop
Anyone remotely familiar with Chicago’s dazzling food scene
will undoubtedly be familiar with the culinary wizardry of Paul Kahan. Blackbird, Big Star, avec, and his
latest brainchild, Nico Osteria, Kahan has long been at the vanguard of
Chicago’s perennially white-hot food movement. My last trip to Chicago (an impossible-to-believe and
way-too-long-ago three years) featured a glorious, deeply memorable meal (the
food being as remarkable as the beauty of the woman with whom I shared that
table) at Kahan’s fabulous Publican.
So when that same long-time Chicago resident and all-time-favorite
dining companion, with whom I dined that night at Publican, and whom I’ll now identify
only as X (cuz I’m still mad-crazy-crushing on her, yo) suggested we return to
Publican’s lunchier, and far more casual, charcuterie-obsessed sister
restaurant, Publican Quality Meats (and just across the street from its
flagship), I tossed an imaginary Lipitor and made haste, as they say, for a
spike-a-vein kind of rendezvous with the really, really good stuff. [Reader’s note: that I was convinced, and bodily, that
PQM would be good before I’d eaten
there should be indicative of Kahan’s own greatness. Not to mention I’ve worked with the guy at an annual charity
event here in D.C., so I’ve seen him work. And let me tell you friend-o, his slow-burn thing is something
to behold].
And like its sister-restaurant, Publican Quality Meats seats
guests at communal tables, picnic style, and elbow-to-elbow with their fellow
meat-loving brethren, be they millennials, or nose-to-their-iPhone’s business
professionals out for a midday meal.
X and I were seated in the extreme rear of the restaurant and greeted by
floor staff with the kind of warmth and hospitality that can’t be faked,
ever. We took menus and decided to
spelunk straight down into PQM’s carnivorous little heart: we ordered their much-lauded Butcher’s
Cold Charcuterie Plate. What we
received was a dazzling representation of everything glorious and good in Kahan’s
work as chef and proselytizing Pied Piper of how to best eat the nasty bits: venison salami, whipped chicken liver
pate, lamb neck terrine, head cheese pate en
croute—a proverbial mix-tape of charcuterie’s greatest hits and all-time classics,
each as robust and original as the next.
Following the charcuterie plate came a sandwich: Bildt’s Beef, an open-faced and
pleasantly imposing edifice of slagel roast beef, farmer’s cheese, and
marinated tomatoes on volkornbrot that X and I paired with a side of marinated
kale, the sum of which left us deeply sated with that kind of culinary afterglow
that charcuterie lovers and offal enthusiasts will well recognize when optimal
levels of organ meats and entrails have been calibrated and consumed. It’s why we eat the stuff. For that feeling.
That Paul Kahan decided to leave an early career in computer
science and, instead, become a chef, suggests, even to this culinary heathen,
that the gods of gastronomy will long be smiling on Chicago. To have a chef like Kahan, so
meticulous with his sourcing, so careful in his craft, whose restaurants are
breathtakingly consistent in their achievement, and so effortlessly hip, leaves
visiting eaters like me with bones of envy lodged in our throats. Kahan is a treasure, Chicago; take good
care of him.
Intermezzo – Nick’s
Beer Garden – Wicker Park
The digestif. That time-honored tradition developed
long ago by the French, now sacrosanct ritual of industry careerists, food
obsessives, and binge eaters alike, who invoke its charms to best regain
metabolic equilibrium—with alcohol—and move one step closer to culinary
nirvana. For my digestif, I returned to Wicker Park, to
Nick’s Beer Garden, a place I had frequented twenty years ago, when I lived in
Chicago, and would hang out with fellow rockabilly musicians from Hi Fi and the
Roadburners and Three Blue Teardrops in their filthy, rat-infested,
abandon-all-hope-ye-who-enter-here rehearsal space in the dungeon-like basement
of the Flat Iron Building. But
those twenty years have changed Wicker Park in ways that on my most recent
visit, made me want to throw up in my mouth. Gone were the hookers.
The crack heads. The gang
members throwing signs. Everything
that made the neighborhood thrilling was gone. In its place:
Starbucks, Lulu Lemon, Belly Dance Maternity, and sundry other harbingers
of the fast-approaching zombie apocalypse of bo-bo economics.
Lucky for me, one place from the bad old days yet
remains: Nick’s Beer Garden. When it opened in 1994, Nick’s was, for
us broke-ass rockabilly musicians, a friendly (if non-descript) place to down a
quick shot of rail whiskey, warm our bones, before moving on to Wicker Park’s
occasionally-excellent Double Door, still very much extant, and back then, more
our speed with musical lineups featuring bands like Squirrel Nut Zippers, or
local greats, the Riptones.
But seeing that Nick’s Beer Garden has managed—for now—to
beat back the quickly-rising tide of douchbaggery that’s consumed Wicker Park compelled
me to visit. I sat on a stool,
alone (X had something to attend to at her place of business), and ordered the
special: a PBR and shot of rail
whiskey. Total cost: $5.
If there’s a more two-fisted drinking town in America than
Chicago, I’ve yet to encounter it.
I’ve thrown down any number of times in New Orleans and San Francisco,
and while my fellow inebriants there might get all the ink and attention on
their drinking habits, Chicago, Chicago, dude, with its nearly around-the-clock
bar scene and ability for local motorists to purchase, say, liters of Jim Beam
while gassing up at the BP, is the tipsiest of these megalopoli. These Chi-Town tipplers mean
business. They do it hard.
Of my can of PBR and a shot of blindness-is-a-possibility whiskey,
there’s sadly little to report that hasn’t been written before on the subject
of drinking in low places. Suffice
it to say that in a life graced with far, far more than my fair share of
Willett and Pappy Van, it’s always nice to come home to one’s own humble
beginnings and revel in that from whence one first came. The burn-inducing hooch performed
exactly as intended. It cleared my
head, piqued my appetite, and readied me for more.
Lunch Two – Freddy’s
Pizza & Grocery – Cicero
This was X’s idea. This place.
Beyond glorious. Beyond
good. Freddy’s Pizza &
Grocery: the apotheosis of
neighborhood eating in Chicago and precisely the kind of establishment whose
very existence locals will covet and protect with awe-inspiring ferocity lest
that variety of must-photograph-my-food-before-I-eat-it eater ever descend,
plague-like, with their white belts, their ironic beards, their snarky Yelp
posts poised like knives at the ready.
X and I ordered:
Ricotta-stuffed ravioli in red sauce; Italian sausage with red peppers
and rosemary potatoes; an uber-Chicago-like take on cioppino (purists, though,
best look away). All of it dished
onto paper plates by the Italian mother you always wanted and never had. All of it carried outside to the patio
and consumed al fresco with the kind
of primal, moaning pleasures heard in such non-culinary, non-Scorsese classics
as, say, Deepthroat and Behind the Green Door. Such pleasures were these. To undertake description of each
individual dish would be foolhardy on my part, for the mysteries shrouding the
all-too-rare successes of red-sauce gastronomy elude me, profoundly, and often
exceed my capacity for culinary comprehension. Just know that eating food this “local,” this good, with a
woman as beautiful as X, and under a highly non-ironic portrait of Sylvester
Stallone is, in fact, my idea of this side of heaven.
(Good call, X.
You rock.)
So.
Chicago. Go there. Get stuck there. Eat there. But you already knew to do this, didn’t you?
