Taken from Conde Nast
Around The World in 80 Meals
by Susan Hack
One week, 32 countries, and an eyeball taco later, Susan Hack discovers that Chicago—not New York or L.A.—is the real culinary crossroads of the world
La Unica Grocery, Chicago, United States
Launch slideshow
At Tito's Tacos, a food stall in a gritty industrial zone next to the south branch of the Chicago River, a caballero in a white Stetson is ladling pieces of steamed cow's brains onto fresh-grilled tortillas. Despite lacking a press agent, a restaurant consultant, a TV show, a spin-off bistro, or even a proper building and regular hours (it's open only on Sundays), Tito's has managed to develop a cult following on dozens of Web message boards dedicated to celebrating America's ethnic food. Its house specialty is the $1.25 taco de ojo, the eyeball taco.
I'm not a professional gourmet or even an especially inventive cook, but two decades of journalistic life overseas (I live in Cairo now) have presented plenty of opportunities to conquer my gag reflex and broaden my palate. In South Africa I ordered—and enjoyed—mopane worms stewed in tomatoes (they look like white asparagus tips and taste like artichoke hearts). While in a Hanoi produce market, I resisted the temptation to barf while sampling a morsel of barbecued dog (think a combination of Peking duck and roast suckling pig).
Then again, I've always had an adventurous palate. As a kid growing up in Chicago in the 1960s and '70s, I once accepted my best friend's dare to try a spoonful of canned cat food (it brought to mind ham mixed with sawdust). In addition to a cast-iron stomach, I also had a big appetite, along with the eclectic eating habits of a Jewish-Lithuanian/Christian-Filipino household. The American-born children of immigrants, my parents belong to a generation that was encouraged to assimilate. Yet gefilte fish and pork adobo both appeared on our table (along with TV dinners), and I was raised to believe that no food was out of bounds. The Chicago of my childhood was hardly a culinary beacon (the city's most famous celebrity chef, Charlie Trotter, opened his eponymous restaurant in 1987), but it had its own specialties: Polish sausages from the pushcarts in Grant Park; whitefish from Lake Michigan, smoked or boiled Norwegian-style; and buckets of spring-running smelt caught, fried, and eaten by the lakeshore. Compared with New York and Los Angeles, Chicago had (and still unjustly suffers from) a reputation for Midwestern provincialism. But no matter: The nation's original multicultural city has always produced fresh generations of ethnic cooks and enthusiastic eaters.
So I'm taken aback when, in my own hometown, I end up meeting my Waterloo: Tito's ojo taco platter. The garnish of grilled onions, green chilies, and stringy shreds of brain looks appetizing, but the jawbreaker-sized mammalian orb, enveloped in gelatinous white tissue, turns out to be more than I can chew.
I change my mind and order something I think I'll actually like, a carne asada taco filled with grilled skirt steak and followed, on this crisp October day, with a champurado, that delicious Mexican hot chocolate spiced with cinnamon, almonds, vanilla, and brown sugar, and thickened to a near pudding with cornmeal. People of Hispanic origin now make up 27 percent of Chicago's population of 2.9 million, which means that the New Maxwell Street Market, southeast of the Loop and originally a bazaar for nineteenth-century stockyard workers, is evolving again. A former stronghold of Eastern European immigrants, it became a popular shopping destination for African Americans in the early twentieth century. Today, it resembles a Mexican carnival, one whose street stalls offer a south-of-the-border smorgasbord: goat soup and barbecued goat, Oaxacan tamales wrapped in corn husks and banana leaves, and churros filled with goat milk caramel. Around me, women pick over tomatillos, cactus paddles, and a rainbow of aromatic chilies at produce stands, while men bargain for tools and car parts and kids browse tables laden with plastic toys, hard candy, and pirated CDs.
I've never been to El Salvador, let alone Bosnia or Pakistan or Nigeria. But standing in the market, I marvel anew at how my old stomping ground, which I left at 18, now contains a world of dining possibilities. I set myself a mission: I will eat a different ethnic cuisine at each breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week. Other towns have their Chinatowns and Little Italys, but Chicago's 172-year history as a magnet for foreign labor has created a United Nations patchwork of ethnic enclaves. For new arrivals as well as deracinated fourth-generation residents who have intermarried and moved away from the old neighborhood, food is the amber that preserves languages, cultures, and family traditions.
Indeed, Chicago's history and gastronomic diversity make one wonder how the stereotype of the bland Midwestern city began at all. America's third-largest metropolis has been a culinary crossroads since its earliest days as a Great Lakes Indian trading post whose first permanent foreign settler was a Haitian fur broker, Jean-Baptiste Point du Sable. During the Civil War, Chicago's vast stockyards provided leather and wool for the uniforms of the Union army; the slaughterhouses, tanneries, and textile factories attracted legions of Poles, Germans, Russian Jews, and others fleeing economic trouble or persecution in Eastern Europe. When the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed the city's business district, it was foreign labor that built the nation's first skyscrapers. Waves of African Americans arrived in the 1920s and the 1940s, bringing Southern soul food and creating a new musical genre, the Chicago blues. In the past 30 years, war and political unrest in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the former Soviet Union, and, lately, the Balkans has added new immigrants to the ethnic mix.
Soon after my encounter with the eyeball taco, it becomes clear that a week is not nearly enough time to explore the culinary prospects. How shall I structure my remaining meals? I've Mexico and El Salvador under my belt—should I continue to explore Latin America (Belize, Peru, Colombia, etc.) or should I switch gears and go by foodkoldunai, and Shanghai siu loong bao)? I could travel the world in 80 stews (Nigerian ojojo, Hungarian porkolt, Indian vindaloo, etc.) or drink a universe of coffees: Turkish, Greek, Arabic, even an Indonesian brew "predigested by civet cats." Bread alone could take up my week: The Yellow Pages lists Georgian, Ukrainian, Czech, Vietnamese, Thai, Israeli, and Swedish bakeries, to name a few.
So where and how should I continue my food odyssey? When it comes to important things in life, I consult Mom and Dad. A retired librarian and a theoretical physicist who have lived for 50 years in Hyde Park, the southside neighborhood that borders the University of Chicago, they never throw anything out, whether it's my kindergarten report card or piles of newspaper and magazine restaurant reviews.
We begin by comparing notes and maps over a breakfast of Swedish pancakes, something we've never tried. At Svea, a blue-and-white storefront tucked between the Victorian-style houses in the old Swedish enclave of Andersonville, the pancakes are thinner than the American buckwheat version but thicker than a French crêpe. They arrive folded into half-moons, sprinkled with powdered sugar, and accompanied by a paper cup of lingonberry jam.
Over chunks of Svea's Falukorv sausage, which resembles a more flavorful ancestor of an Oscar Mayer's, my parents and I decide on a methodology: We will eat pancake dishes all day. First, though, we stop a few doors down, at Erickson's, where Anne Britt-Nilsson is serving fresh potato sausage, glogg mix, and cardamom-spiced julekake cake in an 80-year-old deli that her mother bought from the original owners in 1978. At Christmas, the line goes halfway down the block as Britt-Nilsson feeds homesick Swedes from all over the country, including one man who flies his own plane here from Alaska every year just to pick up his holiday smorgasbord. Britt-Nilsson has been resisting an online store. "I need to see people taste things," she says, handing us bitter, gingery pepparkakor cookies and slices of hard, tart Vasterbotten cheese.
From Andersonville, we take buses across Goose Island and the north fork of the Chicago River, passing Greektown on our way to the border between the old Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport and the former German, now Mexican, neighborhood of Pilsen.
The section of South Halsted Street running between Bridgeport and Pilsen was an enclave for the Lithuanians who arrived seeking work in Chicago's vast cattle slaughterhouses. Though the community scattered after the odiferous Union Stockyards were demolished in 1971, Chicago remains home to the largest concentration of Lithuanians outside Vilnius. "Everything around us is changing, so this restaurant is my island," says Grazina Biciunas-Santoski, who came to the United States from Lithuania in 1948 and whose family took over the Healthy Food Lithuanian Restaurant, on South Halsted Street, in 1960. Opened on the site of a Lithuanian bank in 1938, the place is decorated with 1950s retro tables and has survived the advent of fat- and carbo-phobia. Our single Lithuanian blynai pancake—nearly two feet long (the batter has been poured onto a grill)—arrives folded into thirds around a homemade apple filling. We eat it with sour cream, oniony meat dumplings, and a bacon-spiked potato pudding. The sweet-savory blend of this high-fat second breakfast constitutes enough fuel for an entire week, making me even more concerned about how we'll pace ourselves (not to mention pass our next cholesterol tests). But "the food is healthy because there are no preservatives," Biciunas-Santoski insists. "My cooking philosophy is simple: If it doesn't taste the way my mother made it, I don't serve it."
That night we have dinner at Berghoff's, the Loop landmark that has been owned by the same German family since 1898. The restaurant's old-world dark wood paneling, leaded windows, and black-coated waiters make it feel like a Germanic theme park, one from which tourists exit clutching souvenir Berghoff's beer steins, baseball caps, and gift baskets. The menu lists stuffed Peking duck and veal marsala along with Wiener schnitzel and tangy sauerbraten—a nod toward America's more global expectations, I guess. I order Rahmschnitzel, a breaded pork loin in a white wine, tomato, and mushroom sauce and, keeping to my theme, a potato pancake on the side. But the pancake comes cold and is as hard as cardboard. Not even sour cream can redeem it.
According to Rick Bayless, chef-owner of the upscale Mexican restaurants Topolobampo and the Frontera Grill, Chicago's diverse population and historic role as the hub of America's food transportation network mean that it has "perhaps the best availability of traditional ingredients in the United States." He's right: Today, Ecuadorian restaurants serve roast cuy, or guinea pig; and at least one of the remaining butchers on West Randolph Street, the gentrifying meatpacking district, supplies the main ingredient for authentic Puerto Rican bull's penis soup. But if eating a guinea pig is not to your taste (think frog mixed with chicken), you can be a guinea pig and sample the wild concoctions of what Chicago magazine dubs the "techno-chefs," like those of 29-year-old Homaro Cantu, a Mexican-American transplant from Oregon who reigns over Moto, near the old Fulton Street fish market, and 28-year-old Grant Achatz, who opened Alinea last spring. Given the city's love of eclecticism, it's not surprising that Chicago has become the American epicenter of the sci-fi cuisine pioneered in the late 1990s by Spain's Ferran Adria of El Bulli. At Moto, where the waitstaff wear black lab coats, Cantu styles himself as a "food engineer" and has been experimenting with helium to make food float in the air. His crab "chowder" consists of a mouthful of crab and four consecutive syringe squirts of Peruvian potato, cream, carrot, and garlicky leek soups. Alinea's narrowing metallic entrance hall made me think of a posh-tech Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole. Our 12 magic pill–sized courses included a deliciously geeky creation of ham, snap peas, and emulsified tofu served atop a deflating linen cushion of lavender-scented air, while diners who opted for the 25-course menu ate bison meat strips off a bonglike apparatus, which the aromatics-obsessed Achatz had filled with burning cinnamon sticks.
Places like Moto and Alinea keep you coming back to see what's new. Ethnic cuisine, by contrast, is about nostalgia, about preserving childhood memories through foods whose very tastes evokes home.
Returning to my all-ethnic mission, I head on day three for Irazu, Chicago's only Costa Rican restaurant, which opened in 1990 and is named after a volcano in the Cartago Province. When I ask what's in the yellow Costa Rican sauce on my $1.90 taco tico, my waiter brings me a glass bottle from the kitchen. "This is the key to cooking in my country," he says proudly. Lizano sauce—which contains cauliflower, cucumbers, turmeric, molasses, and vinegar—is what glues the ketchup, mayonnaise, lettuce, and juicy marinated skirt steak into its crispy shell, and gives it its subtle, almost Indian heat. I love Irazu's sunny interior, its folksy volcano mural, and its Avena shake—oatmeal blended with milk, ice, and cinnamon—which has the thickness and flavor, but not the fat, of vanilla ice cream.
Then it's off to my ethnic grocery store tour with Evelyn Thompson. A tai chi expert who teaches a course on food and culture at the University of Illinois, Thompson is the Margaret Mead of food shopping. She takes field notes and keeps a small cutting board and knife in her purse so she can dissect culinary discoveries with clients on the spot.
We follow the elevated train track running north from the Loop to Argyle Street, Chicago's new Chinatown, settled by Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian, and other immigrants who fled Southeast Asia in the 1970s and '80s. From small storefront markets, we gather steamed banana leaf–wrapped bundles of jackfruit and sticky rice (Cambodia), fried sesame balls stuffed with sweet red bean paste (China), and hot sweetened soy milk. At the Vietnamese Ba Le Bakery, we join a beat cop buying, instead of doughnuts, a sack of Vietnamese cream puffs. The grocery stores display horned water chestnuts, saw coriander, pennywort, banana flowers—produce I've seen across Vietnam but not on the tables of upscale Indochine restaurants in Paris and New York.
In the Middle Eastern Bakery, on West Foster Avenue, the chocolate baklava launches Thompson into a discussion of how traditional foods have been adapted to the American palate. "We're losing knowledge as well as authentic flavor," she says with a sigh. "Take something as familiar as cheddar cheese. Producers even out the color now, which used to be the clue to the difference between cheeses made from summer or winter grazing." Our last stop is Devon Avenue, one of the most international streets in America if not the world: Here, Orthodox Jews, Iranian and Iraqi Assyrian Christians, Pakistanis, Indians, Cubans, Mexicans, Bosnians, Croatians, Georgians, and others have colonized successive blocks. At a table at the back of La Unica Grocery Store, we sip strong Cuban coffee, thicker than espresso, and nibble on some starchy yucca that has been tossed with garlic and onion mojo sauce. After the tour ends, I lunch at a storefront on Devon called, simply, the Afghan Restaurant, where the raisin- and carrot-studded rice conceals an entire lamb shank, and the pumpkin, braised in a red pepper–parsley sauce made milky with yogurt, is its own revelation. For dessert, I pop into Ambala Sweets for Indian barfi, a cardamom-infused pistachio dessert that tastes, happily, nothing like what it sounds like in English (barfi is the Hindi equivalent of fudge).
Later, at dinnertime, my dad theorizes that Everest, on the fortieth floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange, is "a place for fancy people" requiring a suit nattier than any of the ones he owns. So Mom and I ditch him. We're unable to resist a restaurant that by its mere name lays claim to the apex of Chicago's fine dining scene.
As it turns out, the clientele is more expense-account than fancy-pants, but the setting is certainly spectacular: Our window table has a vertiginous view of the highest skyscraper in Chicago, the Sears Tower, and, after sunset, of streetlights marching westward into the flat Midwestern prairie. Chef Jean Joho's seven-course dégustation menu is a marriage of Alsatian technique and American terroir: consommé of Michigan pumpkin; roasted Maine lobster on potato fingerling salad; paupiette of Wisconsin pheasant wrapped and braised in cabbage; artisanal Midwestern cheeses; and caramelized Michigan apples dressed up with green apple sorbet and accompanied by a hazelnut croustade. The meal is excellent, and at $89 per person a bargain compared with what you'd pay for the same cooking in France. But the real discovery here is the 27-year-old sommelier, Alpana Singh, a daughter of Indian immigrants from Fiji who began learning about wine while waiting tables in her hometown of Monterey, California. She is the youngest American (and South Asian, for that matter) to ever pass the Master Sommelier exam given by the Britain-based Court of Master Sommeliers, and her encyclopedic knowledge is exceeded only by her friendliness and ability to put customers at ease.
Originally an Indian trail and one of America's first toll roads, Milwaukee Avenue by the 1870s was the heart of a 200,000-person-strong Polish community—nicknamed Bucktown after the goats the Poles liked to keep. Since the Poles had been beaten to New York by Irish Catholics escaping the potato famine in the mid-1800s, they leapfrogged to Chicago instead, where they could find jobs—and appealed to the Vatican to send priests who could hear confessions in their mother tongue. A new influx followed the collapse of communism, and Polish is still widely spoken in Chicago today.
At the Polish Museum of America, on North Milwaukee Avenue, I learn about a colony of Polish Highlanders out by Midway Airport. On day four, at dinnertime, my parents and I pull a rope bell to enter a windowless chalet. A transplanted hunting lodge, the Szalas Restaurant is decorated with a stuffed bear, a stuffed deer, seats made from antique sleighs, and a menu of food from Zakopane, a town of 28,000 in the southern Tatra Mountains. Triangles of shepherd's bread, salty sheep's milk cheese, and a silky pork pâté are followed by cheese pierogis topped with sour cream and green onions. When I ask what's in the pâté, the waitress has to go back to the kitchen to retrieve the words in English. She returns with a triumphant smile on her face. "Lard!"
So many cuisines, so little time—and apparently so much weight to gain. While Mom and Dad sleep off the lard, I rise on day five for an early breakfast at the Georgian Argo Bakery, which I'd spotted on Devon Avenue during my tour with Evelyn Thompson. There, four bakers fold cheese into hachipuri pies, stuff lobiani rolls with red beans, onions, and garlic (the result tastes surprisingly meaty), and slap rounds of dough against the walls of a beehive-shaped oven near the cash register. The pillow-shaped wheat bread, which is pried off with hooks once baked, is fragrant, dense, and chewy. "You'll have to come back for the imeretian," one of the men says when I ask about a sign for a pie stuffed with eggs and a special sour milk cheese. "You have to order it two hours ahead of time and eat it hot. No good for taking home."
Jackie Shen, a Hong Kong–born chef whose restaurant, Red Light, is a star of Chicago's pan-Asian food scene, has recommended that I visit Shui Wah, a modest strip mall storefront in the original Chinatown, south of the Loop. Shui Wah's following stems from its "best dim sum in Chicago," according to Jackie, and its late-night menu of chiu chow dishes originating from the south Swatow district of China's eastern Guangdong Province, according to the www.chowhound.com food nerds. I make the mistake of going alone and can't read the Chinese character menu. Rather than resorting to pointing at other people's dishes, I walk across the mall to Joy Yee's Noodle, where the menu has pictures. Customers are lining up for "bubble tea," a drink that has swept east from Taiwan. Invented, the legend goes, by a street vendor who shook her tea because children liked to see the bubbles, it has evolved into a milk shake–like concoction whose bubbles are actually sweet black tapioca balls that are sucked up through a wide straw. Given a choice of 100 flavors, I decide on taro, which is slightly malty and so delicious that I never want it to end.
By week's end, I've eaten my way through Armenia and Greece, Laos and Croatia. If I throw in incidental snacks and beverages, I've tried tantalizing tidbits from 32 countries. The holy month of Ramadan enables me to sneak in an iftar dinner. ("The sun sets tonight at 5:52," advises the reservations clerk at Reza's Iranian restaurant, who recommends fesenjen, Cornish hen simmered in pomegranate sauce and crushed walnuts.) I never get up the nerve to try bull's penis soup, but I do drink a bottle of Korean "sexy drink," which has a phallic piece of ginseng root floating inside it.
For my last big blowout, I go to Arun's, which the New York Times once deemed "the best Thai restaurant in the nation." My dining companions at this 20-year-old establishment are Thai fans and food industry veterans. My old high school debate partner has managed America's largest food-testing company and knows more than most people want to about the incidence of food-borne disease. His wife, an expert on American breakfast habits, used to work for Quaker Oats.
Chef-owner Arun Sampanthavivat originally came to Chicago to study art and political science and wound up winning the James Beard Foundation award for Best Midwest Chef. He's also resolved one of ethnic dining's biggest dilemmas—what to order from an unfamiliar menu—by adopting the French dégustation concept. Before beginning the mandatory 12-course tasting menu's ornate serving process, a hostess asks if we have any food allergies and what level of spiciness we prefer. Thai food is a game of balancing sweet and salt, hot and mild, but our meal gives me a jolt—not only for its succession of unfamiliar presentations (such as the chicken-and-coconut salad wrapped in bite-sized betel leaf packages) but also for the $85-per-person price tag, which brings the tab for three (with wine) to nearly $400. Parisian chefs have begun admitting—sacre bleu!—that Asian cooking can be more complex and nuanced than French haute cuisine, but the stereotype of cheap Asian street food (and restaurants) persists. "Omigod, omigod, omigod!" we overhear a female diner wailing. It's not that she's seen her bill: A jewel box of paintings and Thai antiques, Arun's is a special-occasion kind of place, and her boyfriend has just proposed.
Despite its dozen courses, an Arun's meal leaves room to spare, so after dinner I convince my friends to join me at the Winds Café, a few blocks away, where cook Antonio Torres serves up a mean Puerto Rican jibarito, a huge sandwich of tender, garlic-marinated steak slices spread with garlic mayonnaise and grilled between sheets of fried plantain instead of bread.
Wiping jibarito juice off my chin, I reflect on the city I swore I'd quit for good. New Yorkers may have a wider variety of West African food in Queens, and Californians access to more Asian flare, but Chicagoans have a bit of everything, as well as the guts to explore it all. I'm reminded of the wisdom of the French vendor at Disneyland Paris who commented, when I bought a brownie and fresh lemonade for my four-year-old daughter, that he "would never dare eat those two things together." Not everyone would follow fine Thai cuisine with a jibarito chaser. But this is America, the land of plenty, where tradition and the boldness to throw tradition out the window exist side by side. Chef Joho has it right: Chicago is the nation's culinary Everest. We eat these foods because they're here and, just as important, because we can.
Thanks to its nineteenth-century history as the nation's rail hub and the city's post–Great Fire architectural renaissance, Chicago is home to America's highest concentration of skyscraper hotels. I liked the convenience of the elegant Allerton Crowne Plaza, a refurbished 1930s gentlemen's club (701 N. Michigan Ave.; 312-440-1500;
A fascinating look at why Chicagoans are extremely lucky people.> |
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