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

The overall best bakery in Chicago may be the Red Hen Bakery--or it may be the bakery section of the M. Henry. And I'm sure there are other hidden gems, like that elusive baking genius who purportedly sells his divine bread on the streets of Chicago (I searched for this guy, but couldn't find the article...) But when it comes to turnovers, the winner is the one that keeps a low profile.

The bakery is in a desolate stretch of car dealers and strip malls in the Lincolnwood suburbia. Tucked between a Mercedes-Benz dealer and probably a small factory of some sort, it looks like a small factory itself. And that's not too far from the truth: Rolf's Patisserie, the awesome bakery in question here, is basically a baking facility with a nondescript store attached to the front. Even the store section doesn't show much attention in the decorative department: white linoleum floor, fluorescent lights, no cutsy baskets with red-and-white checkered cloth. But that's okay, because their turnovers are to die for.

The filling is nice; tart, sweet and cinnamony. But the true charm of Rolf's turnovers is the crust. It's flaky, but not dry and crumbly. The crust still has the resilience that's a proof of a good pie crust. Just one bite into the buttery crust is enough to tell you of the high quality of the butter they use (and of the generous amount of it, I presume). There's just enough icing on it to give it a sweet kick. I've never had a better turnover in my four years in Chicago, if not in my whole life. My another favorite is the twisted and pretzel-shaped almond pie with lots of sliced almonds and thin thread of icing. Patrick loves their chocolate croissant.

Rolf's seem to do a lot of business outside of their storefront shop. I've seen their out-of-this-world butter cookies and a few European-style cakes in Whole Foods, and can easily imagine other gourmet grocers and restaurants doing business with them. (Come to think of it, I think I first visited their store after utterly amazed by the butter cookies I got from Whole Foods.)

When we go there for the pastries in the morning, we often encounter local elderies chatting away with their pastries and cups of free coffee (when you buy pastries) in front of the large glass window. The store women usually congregate behind the counter filled with colorful cakes, chatting and giggling as they bag cookies and pack cakes into large boxes. Customers come and go, often picking up their special order of birthday cakes and trays of petite fours for get-togethers. It's thoroughly low-key, thoroughly unpretentious--and thoroughly delicious.

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Rolf's Patisserie
4343 Touhy Ave., Lincolnwood, IL
847-675-6565

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

I know I've been writing about bakeries a lot, but I can't skip this one.

This morning, we went back to one of our recent finds--Tre Kronor ("three crowns" in Swedish). Chicago Reader's restaurant review summarizes Tre Kronor as an "Albany Park Swedish restaurant very popular for breakfast, and they're right. When we arrived there around 8:45, the restaurant wasn't open yet. One of the wait staffs poked her head through a crack of the door and told us that they'd be open in about ten minutes, so we killed the time peering into the windows of a Swedish shop across the street (little red rocking horse, plates and bowls with Moomin Troll illustrations, boldly patterned fabric from Marimekko, etc). Then Patrick noticed that there were at least four other groups milling around the restaurant. We quickly returned to claim our place in the semi-line.

The restaurant opened about five minutes before nine. By then, there were six parties waiting (including us). By 9:05, all but one table on the first floor were taken by happy patrons sipping coffee and chatting while waiting for their food. By 9:15, even the seating upstairs became full. Two guys who came in around that time decided to wait outside; there's a convenient bench on the tree-lined street next to the restaurant. So, the Reader review isn't lying. Tre Kronor is extremely popular for breakfast. I'd recommend being there before nine, or aim at the time when the first wave of diners has subsided.

Another good idea, when you're someone like me who gets grumpy when hungry, is to get one of their Swedish pastries to nibble on. We got a cinnamon roll, which kept Patrick and me gracious enough while waiting for the real meal (not that they were slow; we were VERY hungry this morning.) On a normal day, one of their cinnamon rolls and coffee would be a perfect breakfast. Tre Kronor's fluffy cinnamon roll has a refreshing twist. The warm glaze was scented with citrus--probably lemon. I'd much prefer this cinnamon roll over Ann Sather's hyper-sugary version.

For the main fair, I got a Belgian waffles with seasonal fruits and whipped cream. The fruits turned out to be about one whole pack of strawberries and one whole banana, and I can bet my best hat to the whipped cream being a whole carton of fatty goodness. Shouldn't have finished all of it, but I did, with a help from Patrick's cosmic stomach. Patrick had an omlette with spinach and blue cheese, served with breakfast potatoes. I refrained from most of it, due to my mild dislike of blue cheese, but Patrick said the melty blue cheese was awesomely aromatic. (Stinky, I'd say, but we all have different tastes, I suppose.) The spinach looked very fresh, and barely cooked.

One possible reason (beside the fresh ingredients, inventive creations and cute Swedish decor) for their popularity is the reasonable price. The Belgian waffle went for $6.95, while blue cheese omlette was only a dollar more. The last (and the first) time we were there, I got an orange-vanilla French toast (another recommendation), whose damage to our wallet was a mere $5.95. When we got out, the morning sun shined on the young green leaves of the trees in the nearby North Park University campus. Several people walked their dogs. A dog sniffed at a dandelion on the foot of a blooming cherry tree. Tre Kronor is a wonderful little breakfast place in a relaxing, green neighborhood, perfect for starting a lazy weekend. And of course, keeping up with their meaty tradition, they have things like potato sausages, veal sausages and cured salmon, so those of you carnivores, don't worry!

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Tre Kronor
3258 W. Foster Ave. Chicago, IL
773.267.9888

My parents live in Glenview, a north suburb of Chicago. It's a pretty boring suburban village with lots of chain stores in posh-looking malls. Not much tasty food when it comes to the bang for the buck, and no coffee house to speak of (well, that's not a surprise, I suppose).

The village has recently seen a sizable change, since the redevelopment of the huge Naval base now called "The Glen." Lots of expensive-looking stores and restaurants moved in, and the traditional downtown area is feared to be drained of its customers. Downtown Glenview is not that interesting, anyway (an old town feel without the old town charm, I should say), so I haven't been there for a long time.

In that context, you can imagine my surprise when we walked into the Sweet Dreams Organic Bakery & Café, just to see what it's like, well prepared to be disappointed. We'd noticed the bakery before and figured it'd be just another storefront bakery, but since I'd started this blog, I figured we should at least take a look. I pulled into the narrow parking lot behind the brick building, while a guy in a black Audi backed up to let me pass (with a pastry in his hand, I noticed). Squeezing between the car and a dumpster, we walked into the store through the back door; it was a whole another world.

The first thing that jumps to your eyes when you walk into the Sweet Dreams is its pink walls. Then you'll notice the carefully arranged, comfy-looking armchairs (some are woven wicker, others are leather) around a fireplace. Then comes the showcase. When we visited the bakery, the two showcases on both sides of the register were brimming with appetizing goodies like peanut butter cookies, flaky apple strudels, loaves of chocolate pound cakes, flourless espresso torte with its top cracking open, orange sponge cake with lots of berries and whipped cream, dense cheesecakes--the list goes on and on. Some of the cakes and cookies were vegan or gluten-free, and others were 100% organic. After drooling around for a while, we decided on a veggie strudel and a slice of chocolate & walnut torte with espresso butter cream.

Unfortunately, though, the food looked better than it tasted--at least that was the case for what we got. The organic veggie strudel had a nicely flaky, buttery shell. Inside was shredded carrots, zucchini and shiitake mushrooms with soy sauce-based seasoning. The strudel came with thick and rich peanut sauce. Each of the three component were all very good. The sad part is that the didn't work together too well. The stir-fried veggies were great by itself (I can imagine eating a ton of it with a bowl of steamed rice--yum!), but didn't go well with the buttery shell. The peanut sauce, on the other hand, had too much of a kick to complement the strudel. It probably needs something with a stronger flavor, like beef, to balance out the peanuts.

The torte, though beautifully presented with a geometric doodle of chocolate sauce on a white square plate, left a spacious room for flavor enhancement. The cake part--chocolate sponge and walnut sponge--tasted like normal sponge cake without chocolate or walnuts powder. Even more disappointing was the espresso butter cream, which, if they hadn't told me it was supposed to be espresso-flavored, I wouldn't have guessed it in a million years. I might be being a little bit mean--for a family-run bakery in the United States, their baked goods were pretty good. It's just that they look so good that the actual flavor and texture cannot live up to the expectation that their appearance creates.

Croatian-style pastries, which Mary Spocic, the owner of the bakery has been baking for most of her life, both in her native country by the Adriatic Sea and in the United States, might be a better choice. The grilled veggie sandwich that a guy was having when we walked in looked very tempting as well. Given the extremely cute and cozy interior (and don't forget the free wi-fi), I might go back there just to give it another try, maybe in the savory food department next time. It is just very nice to see an environmentally conscious café--and a very cute one at that--open in an otherwise bland suburbia where I frequent, and I do feel an urge to support its business. (Another bonus point is that they serve fair-traded coffee from Intelligentsia--an award-winning roaster in Chicago.)

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Sweet Dreams Organic Bakery & Café
1107 Waukegan Rd. Glenview, IL
847.657.1092

Every first Sunday of the month, from 2 pm to 4 pm, they have a free tasting event. Awesome!

For Monday lunch, we went to the Sweet Occasions, a bakery/ice cream shop in Andersonville. We didn't get one of their many varieties of the Chocolate Shoppe ice creams for lunch. (We're not that bad--though we were tempted a bit.) What we had instead was their sandwiches.

Aside from serving one of the best ice creams in town (though the ice cream comes from Wisconsin) and a pretty wide range of baked goods (which we haven't tried yet), Sweet Occasions does gourmet sandwiches. I got the French Traditional, while Patrick went for the greasy goodness of the Clark Street Mess. The French Traditional, served called, features hams and two generous, creamy slices of Brie cheese, both sitting on top of (not in between) a thin French baguette. The baguette by itself is pretty tasty. It becomes hard to beat when they slather it with French butter, freshen it with slices of ripe tomatoes and garden greens, and mount it with ham and brie. To top it off, they sprinkled scallions and freshly ground black peppers onto the brie.

I have to say that the ham and thick slices of brie do get a bit too salty after about half the sandwich. (I had to remove a few slices of ham and give a chunk of brie for Patrick's reliable stomach.) But otherwise, the sandwich, which comes with chips for $6.99, was wonderfully refreshing, bringing the sense of wholesomeness. It makes you feel like you're eating a home-made sandwich on a picnic in a spring field somewhere in the French Provence, instead of grabbing a quick lunch when working from home. Tender greens fresh off your own veggie garden, soft and creamy brie you got from the village marché, baguette baked only a few hours ago in the hearth of your neighborhood bakery, that sort of thing. For all this fantasy, $6.99 is too cheap. Right?

The Clark Street Mess, which essentially is a panini made with just the right amount of meats (ham, turkey and soft salami) between two slices of grilled Italian bread, turned out to be much less greasy than their ubiquitous cousins around town. Although I teased Patrick a great deal about going for the greasy option, the few bites he offered me proved otherwise. The bread was toasted crispy with a hint of oil, not soaked in Pam spray; the cheese wasn't overwhelming or overflowing; and the mayonnaise came on the side (a nice touch for those watching their calories--not that they should be eating the Mess anyway). The not-so-greasy panini also came with chips, and the damage was $7.99.

The sandwiches were not gigantic (unlike the football-sized ones at Perry's), but they were more than filling. Even Patrick didn't think of getting a cone of ice cream after lunch--which is a pretty rare thing for us, especially when the ice cream is of the Chocolate Shoppe variety. With other mouthwatering offerings beckoning us from their handwritten blackboard (like Italian Traditional made with Mozzarella, Italian salami and EV olive oil; and Latin hot sandwich, made with ham, Swiss cheese, tomatoes and of course, fresh cilantro), I'm sure we'll go back there before long. It's on the pricier side for lunch, but the extra few dollars is not too hard to justify when you consider the quality of the food you get (and the irresistible images of French country life that it ignites in your brain if you have an excessive imagination like I do).

Ten brownie points goes to the store guy who kindly gave us big cups of cold water (with lids and straws!).

Sweet Occasions
5306 N. Clark Street, Chicago, IL
773.275.5190