It's strange how spotty one's familiarity with her city of residence can be. As for me, I frequent only certain parts of Chicago and feel as if I knew Chicago pretty well. But every once in a while, the city opens up a whole new neighborhood in front of me and grins, challenging my rather arrogant notion that I already know the city. It's a good thing, I suppose, for finding yet another face of this city keeps me busy (with stores and restaurants to explore) and entertained. Albany Park has been one of those blind spots for me--and for Patrick as well. It's fairly close to Rogers Park, but somehow we'd totally missed the area. That changed last weekend, when we decided to bike down California after lunch at a fantastic Georgian bakery on Devon, just to see what it's like along the road.

Soon we switched to the bike path along the river, and found ourselves on Lawrence. Remembering that we'd seen a short, heavily Middle-Eastern stretch on Kedzie in a neighborhood that otherwise seemed mainly Latino and Korean, we decided to bike down Kedzie from there. Within a block or so, we saw the long, green awning of the Al Khyam Bakery and Grocery. Inside this dimly lit Lebanese grocer were row after row of Middle Eastern ingredients: grape leaves conserved in olive oil, bags of semolina flour (this seemed to be under their own name, along with many other grain-based products), myriad jars of spices and spice mixes, colorful boxes of sweets (which, of course, includes many flavors of halva), and various teas, just to name a few. In the back, huge chunks of zabiha/halal beef and lamb sat quietly in a large glass case, along with bucket-sized containers of different olives and pickles.

Lebanese butter cookies. Uh, they were divine!

The largest attraction of them all was, however, along the street-facing windows. By a tall, ancient iron oven, there was a few long showcases full of Middle-Eastern sweets, all of them gleaming with dewy honey. Some looked like familiar baklava, and some sported shredded philo dough delicately warpped around some divine mixture of nuts and honey, while others were shaped like flowers, with twisted philo dough gently cupping a few pieces of pistachios in the middle. They all looked absolutely gorgeous, but my eyes were pegged to a large, round, flat cake that I'd never seen before. When I asked the dark-haired guy behind the counter, he confessed that he didn't know how its name (that sounded like "kenafa") is spelled in English.

"I know it in French, Française," he said and smiled. He pointed at the cake in a large, shallow pan: "It has cheese inside." Wow. Cheese in Lebanese cake? I never knew.

"I'll probably be able to look it up online," I said. Certainly Française would be beyond me. Trying (in vain) to remember what crooked, colonial relationship Lebanon and France have had in the recent history, I jotted down "kenafa" in my notebook and asked for a small slice. (Later, through some googling, I found out that it was knafe, a Lebanese specialty made with fresh cheese called kenafa, semolina and honey.) Patrick asked for a piece of baklava.

"That's not baklava," the guy corrected. "It has cream in it." Cream? Wow.

Al-Khyam Bakery definitely extended beyond my limited knowledge of Middle-Eastern baking. Using dairy products (other than butter, I mean) in pastries was of course novel, but that was not all: they also had sublime butter cookies called "grhybe" or "ghoraibi." (It took me quite a while to figure out the correct spelling from what I scribbled in my notebook from the kind baker's pronunciation: goravy.) Both knafe and the cream-filled baklava impostor were very, very good, but the grhybe was a notch or two above them. I'm not sure how they make these awesome cookies, but it seemed to have two layers: the rough, nutty inside and the incredibly delicate, melt-in-your-mouth outside that resembled snow ball cookies. They were sweet, but not overwhelmingly so. Mary Luz Mejia of Suite 101 says that good Lebanese pastries can stand up against the world-renowned French pastry making, and I have to agree with her. The grhybe I had from the Al-Khyam was nothing short of excellent.

Al-Khyam had a small restaurant attached to it, and I'm curious to try their food in the near future. Also, according to this article, Al-Khyam's thin, Lebanese-style pita is a favorite of many Middle-Easterners living in the Chicago region. I have to try those, too... A day after we explored a bit of Albany Park, we went back to the area for a nice Persian dinner, but I'll write another post for that one; I suppose this is long enough.

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Al-Khyam Bakery and Grocery
4746 N. Kedzie Ave., Chicago, IL (just south of Lawrence)
773.583.3099