As the summer sun started to bake the region, Patrick and I joined Danielle and Margarette of Slow Food Chicago for a food tour of Little Village Today. We were ten minutes late to the meeting spot, in front of the Panadería La Baguette on the 26th street, but managed to join the tour before they headed into the Mexican bakery. The walking tour was along the 26th street, which gives you the impression of being in Mexico, with its Spanish signs and lots of street vendors of tamales and horchata. Many of the businesses we stopped at--La Baguette, Dulce Landia (a Mexican candy store chain), El Milagro tortilla factory, among others--weren't extremely new to us, since we live in a Latino-heavy neighborhood in Rogers Park. But we did get to try things we'd never had enough courage to try before.

Fresh-baked sweet bread waiting to be displayed at Panadería La Baguette

A worker at El Milagro tortilla factory swiftly packs bags of tortillas behind a large container of fresh masa

The fresh-off-the-oven tortillas we nibbled on in front of the tiny El Milagro store were wonderfully moist and flavorful. Though they demanded that we eat them with some salsa or mole, the yellow and white tortillas just baked in the factory at the back of the store were quite far from the stale ones you might find in your local Jewel store. Patrick and I usually get our tortilla fix from the Morse Mart, which stocks very fresh tortillas, but still the ones right off the factory tasted better.

As Chicagoans might remember, the shopping mall in which La Baguette does its business was recently in the news. In April, INS conducted a heavily armed raid on a storefront fake ID manufacturer in that mall. This raid had left a deep gash in the community of Little Village. According to some of the business owners, the area, which used to be always packed like festival days, are now deserted. "Everyone's scared," one of them said. Indeed, as we walked down the 26th street around 10 in the morning, it was eerily quiet. The mall's parking lot was only half full, and the wide sidewalks seemed vastly empty. Food vendors stood empty-handed at street corners, without customers.

"So we just made her day," someone joked, as we sipped champurrado from small plastic cups. "We might be her only customers today." She laughed, but there was something chilling about what was meant to be a joke. The champurrado itself--an Aztec-style hot chocolate thickened with masa and flavored with cinnamon--was quite good, though I'd prefer to have it during winter. We crossed the street and tried little bit of horchata--sweet drink made with rice flour--from another street vendor.

An horchata vendor at the corner of 26th and Kedzie (or Sawyer)

Dulce Landia feels like a dream jungle of various candies and colorful piñatas suspended from the ceiling.

We also nibbled on some imported Queso Oaxaca from Cremaria Santa Maria, a few gorditas from Aguascalientes (they allegedly invented this poor-man's feast of cooked meat and cheese in corn-based pocket bread) and a few different Mexican candies from Dulce Landia. Again, none of this was news to me, but it was fun to actually try things I'd been aware of but never tried. Sometimes it requires a lot of chutzpa to walk into ethnic stores and restaurants that seem to only cater to the people of that ethnicity, as if I were intruding in their private sphere. Being a part of a tour partially numbed that sense of intrusion (I don't know if it's a good thing of not, though), and made it easier to enjoy the unfamiliar food.

If I were to choose one "most fun" place from our tour, I would pick Dulce Landia. With hundreds of different candies piled high and lots of colorful piñatas (those paper dolls stuffed with sweets, which blindfolded Mexican children attacks fiercely with a stick on festive occasions) hanging from the ceiling, it reminded me of the candy stores I went to as a kid in Japan. Danielle, who was volunteering to give a tour, recommended two traditional sweets: goat milk caramels (called "cajetas") and a chewy candy made of tamarindo and sugar, coated with chili powder. I liked the tamarindo candy a lot. Sweet, sour and spicy at once, it reminded me of something I'd had before. Though the sense of palate nostalgia was quite wonderful, I couldn't locate the memory of that flavor. I might have had something similar in my childhood in Bangkok, or maybe I was conflating it with a similar Japanese candy made from sugar and pickled plums. Either way, those tamarindo candies were addictively distinctive. Another pleasant surprise was marzapan-like sweets made from peanut powder. Fragile and delicate, it burst with the nutty peanut flavor when put into my mouth. Since there's a Dulce Landia within a few minutes' walk from our apartment, we'll probably revisiting them pretty soon.

I was curious how an American Slow Food movement would establish its identity in a country where there is no truly "traditional" cuisine that lives on as a part of our everyday life (as there are in Italy). I still need to process what I heard and saw during the tour to really wright about this, but joining the tour was definitely an interesting experience, both in seeing a community I'd never been to and in hearing a small part of what the Slow Food people are thinking right here in Chicago.

A family waiting to get their cups of cool horchata