One of our favorite breakfast (and late-night dessert) place is the Taste of Heaven in Andersonville. Patrick took me there early in our relationship, and there's a good chance that this place won me over for him. Joking aside, this is a great neighborhood bakery café to nurture your romantic relationship, to start the first chapter of that epic novel you've been planning to write for years, or to just have a chat with friends over a cup of coffee and tasty treats.

Between the two of us, we've tried pretty much everything on the menu, and we're deeply fond of most everything. One of our perennial favirutes us the Silverland Breakfast, a sort of a modern take of the classic biscuits and gravy. Biscuits and gravy is relatively new to me (a recent expat from Japan), and I still hesitate when faced with some of them, especially when the gravy looks mucousy and contains unidentifiable gray meat. But the Silverland Breakfast is now high on my list of Awesome American Food.

As you can tell from the photo, their gravy is thinner than most, and has a nice kick from a blend of spices. I seem to taste some tomatoes in it, but I'm not 100% certain on this. It's served over scrambled eggs and two corn biscuits, and the biscuits are truly a piece of art: they're flaky, slightly sweet, and absorb the gravy wonderfully.

A recent discovery is this homemade granola with greek yogurt. I'm not a granola person. I'm not a yogurt person, either. I'm not even a healthful woman when it comes to breakfasts. I'm more of a gluttonous eater who wants her breakfast nice and greasy (eggs, bacons, potatoes), or nice and sugary (pancakes, French toast, you name it). But one day, I was in a rare mood for something lighter and refreshing, so I settled for the homemade granola.

When the granola showed up in one of their signature blue cups (that are at least as big as ramen bowls), it looked so good I stared at it, saliva dribbling down my chin, before I started digging in. The golden-brown granolas were dotted with generous amount of dried cherries, juicy strawberries and plump blueberries. The combination of the striking blue cup, red strawberries and snow-white yogurt was beyond appetizing.

And when I started munching, it was even better. The granola's honey sweetness, tart cherries and refreshing strawberries--it was rather heavenly. The portion was a bit more than I'd wanted (they're notorious for their gigantic portions), but I finished it all. Ah, well.

Although we tend to go there for breakfast, Taste of Heaven is pretty versatile. For lunch, they have soups and creative sandwiches (though I wouldn't go for the meatloaf sandwich--I've had better ones elsewhere). For dinner, which they recently added to their operation, I love the old-fashioned beef stew served on potato pancakes, but there are other options in the comfort-food department (like sandwiches, super-popular spinach lasagna, etc.) as well. And it being a bakery, Taste of Heaven is good for light munchies as well. Though I'm always tormented when it comes to picking one from their wide array of baked goods, I'm particularly fond of their humongous slice of white cake with whipped cream cheese and lots of berries. Ahh, just writing this makes me drool all over my keyboard!

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A Taste of Heaven
5401 N. Clark St. Chicago, IL
773.989.0151