Continued from this post about my recent "discovery" of Albany Park.
Our little Albany Park exploration (over one afternoon and one evening) was heavily Middle-Eastern. A day after the happy encounter with the Al-Khyam Bakery and Grocery, we went to the nearby Noon-o-Kabab for dinner. The recently renovated interior of the Persian restaurant featured Persian-themed tile work on the wall and a few colorful knickknacks like a hookah pipe and musical instruments on the display shelf above the bar counter. At around 7:30 on a Monday night, the dining room was pretty crowded. Quite a few Asian-looking diners (including me, I suppose), along with the usual suspects of European-looking and Middle-Eastern looking people, seemed to reflect the diversity of the neighborhood.
The thin, flavorful pita came with a small dish of onion, radish, parsley and feta. Patrick the cheese lover said the feta was great, but I liked the pita with onions. For the main, I tried Ghormeh Sabzi and Koubideh combo, while Patrick went for Koubideh and chicken combo. After reading Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, which traces the myriad origins of what we now grossly simplify as "Indian cuisine," I'd been curious to try some of the Persian foods that had a huge influence on the "Indian cuisine*" through the conquest of northern India by the Islamic and Persian-influenced Mughal Empire. Early Mugahli emperors, used to Persian cooking, brought expert Persian cooks with them to India, where they taught Indian cooks how to cook Persian food, and modified staple dishes to incorporate Indian ingredients and cooking methods. One of such influential items was the ghormeh sabzi--spinach, red beans and some beef bits stewed slowly until absolutely tender. It was an interesting experience; if no one told me that it was a Persian dish, I would have believed that the stewed dish was Indian.
The rest of the meal was fantastic. The dill rice was so light and fluffy that I ate more than half of the huge heap though I usually give up at around 1/3. (Cooking the rice light and fluffy, by the way, is another Persian influence on the Indian cooking. For example, biryani, which most Americans equates with Indian rice, actually originated in Persia.) Koubideh, a skewer of ground beef broiled over charcoal fire, was incredibly juicy and beefy, with a strong hint of smokiness. Although the chicken may not have stood up to the Café Suron's divine chicken, Koubideh was pretty darn good.
After the meal, I was so stuffed that I had to take a walk around the neighborhood. The sun had set, and the western sky visible beyond the busy Lawrence avenue was a dreamy mixture of pink, mauve, orange and indigo. We wandered into the Lindo Michoacan, a Mexican supermarket, where I picked up a molinillo (a traditional stirring stick to make champurrado) for a whopping $3.50. (I've seen molinillos for around $25 in gourmet stores--though these are much more elaborately made.) Along Lawrence, there were Guatemalan bakery, Mexican restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Korean kitchen store, more Middle Eastern places, and lots and lots of people of all ages and ethnicities. Some young men boomed along the street in a pimped-up ghetto mobile, while elderly couples took a leisurely stroll and families in sedans and minivans crowded parking lots everywhere. It was quite chaotic, in a Devon-avenue sort of way, but the vibrancy felt good. After all, Rogers Park wasn't the only neighborhood that's really diverse and down-to-earth, without too much commercial flair of Lincoln Park and Lakeview, I thought. (I do enjoy cool new restaurants and oh-so-cute stores in more hip neighborhoods, but I'm always pestered by a slight sense of discomfort when I'm in these neighborhoods. I don't know why.)
When the evening light surrendered to the indigo darkness of the night, we turned around and headed back to the car. With the nightfall, the area around the Brown Line's Kimball station was starting to be a little bit more exciting than we'd want ourselves in, but in the daylight, we'd definitely come back for more exploration. (I'd spotted a few Korean stores that seemed to sell some Japanese ceramics, which I have a constant hankering for.)
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* Though I now understand, thanks to the book's author Lizzie Collingham, that there's no such thing as homogeneous "Indian cuisine" in the regionally diverse culinary universe of the Indian subcontinent, I still don't know how to bridge the gap between the widely acknowledged "Indian food" and the yet-obscure regional varieties of it. Saying "Indian food" seems too violent of a simplification, yet what else could I say? I definitely need to more about the food of the subcontinent to talk about it properly.
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
We'd been to El Famous Burrito just down the street one too many times. Not that their food is bad (it's actually a pretty good bang for the buck), but we felt we should try some other Mexican joints that line the Clark Street between Pratt and Touhy. It's nice to have a favorite neighborhood eatery, but it's also fun to try new ones.
So, the other day for dinner, we went to Quesadillas y Mariscos Doña Lolis near Clark and Morse. A Reader article recommended something called champurrado, "a mixture of masa, chocolate or cocoa, cinnamon and other seasonings." Though we didn't have a faintest idea as to what that was from the description, we were game for it. (We thought it was a bread-like thing, mixed and then baked; in reality, according to this recipe, it's a warm, cocoa-flavored drink thickened with masa.)
The thing is, we didn't look up this info on champurrado before we headed out (too hungry). By the time we finished our seven-minutes walk to the restaurant, I had forgotten what their specialty was. The only thing I remembered was that it involved chocolate. Munching on the homemade tortilla chips loaded with frijoles, I looked for items with chocolate on the menu. None.
"Do you remember the name of their special thing?" I asked.
"Nah, I don't remember," said Patrick.
"I feel like it started with a P," I said (totally wrong).
We decided we were too hungry to remember, and went for the two dishes that sounded good: Patrick got a steak with freshly made guacamole, while I ordered meatballs in chipotle chili sauce. We devoured the thick tortilla chips as we waited for our food. The green sauce had a wonderful peppery flavor (I felt like I was cutting one up right that moment), but the fun part was the brown one. I tried to discern what it was made of, and had no clue. It was very smoky; almost exclusively so. We should have asked the waitress, but she seemed to be so engrossed with a horribly acted drama on one of the many manifestations of Fox Channel that I felt disinclined to interrupt. (Yes, it was something on Fox, not a telenovela on Telemundo. Was there any difference? Perhaps not.)
The food was very good in a rather homey way. My chipotle sauce had just a hint of heat, nothing to make you run for the second glass of cold water. Wrapped up in their homemade tortillas (served in lidded containers to keep them warm), the tender meatballs were quite comforting. Patrick's steak looked intimidating at first. It looked too much like the indestructible, flavorless beef I once had in Madrid, both in color and texture. But when I took a bite into the tortilla-wrapped, guacamole-slathered steak, the premonition immediately dispersed. The beef was on the tough side, that's for sure, but it had a ton of fbeefy flavor (i.e., that greasy goodness) that went fantastic with the onions in the guacamole. The two small quesadillas that came with the steak was a nice touch, too.
When we finished the hearty meal, we noticed a hand-written sign on the wall. "Champurrado," it said. Was that what the Reader article was talking about, I wondered for a moment, but I had absolutely no room for anything else. (We were so full we decided to take a neighborhood walk afterward, if you need an idea as to how large the portion is.) The bill came to just short of $20. You'd pay more here than at El Famous Burrito, but Doña Lolis has a better variety, and the quality of food seems better. So I'd say it's $20 well spent (except that we didn't get to try their specialty).
(Patrick took the steak photo.)
I'd definitely want to try the champurrado (which seems to have been ingrained in my brain by now) the next time we go there, but the meatballs and steak were very good in their own ways. So, hooray for the amnesia!
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Qusadillas y Mariscos Doña Lolis
6924 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL
773.761.5677
When I came home around five, starving, I found two tamales in the fridge. Patrick got a six-pack yesterday for dinner, and left two for me. I boiled some water in a pot, placed a Chinese steamer (the bamboo-made ones you see in dim sum places) on it, and steamed the tamales in it. Kind of an odd way to steam Mexican food, but hey, it worked.
The place we get our tamales is on Clark Street. It's a mom-and-pop place (I suppose I should call it mama-y-papa place, though) called Tamales: Lo Mejor de Guerrero, and it only has tamales. Well, they do have some other stuff like horchata, and they do weekend breakfast (which we haven't tried), but their main thing is the tamales. When the orange-awninged place opened up last year, we were pretty excited--it's always reliable when a restaurant really specializes in something. This place isn't an exception. Their tamales are gigantic, cheap (six giant tamales for a mere $5.45), and yummy.
Their tamales are moist and the corn masa still bears some lingering sweet, nutty flavor of the corn. There are seven different varieties, costing only a dollar each: hot or mild chicken, hot or mild pork, cheese with beans, cheese with jalapeño and sweet with strawberries or pineapples. My favorite (by far) is the boring-sounding cheese with beans. I do like the meat versions, but the cheese with beans hits that soft spot for simple, comfort food. None of the three ingredients assert itself too loudly (unlike the pork and the hot green sauce, which sometimes obscure the subtle flavor of the corn dough), and the richness of the cheese blends wonderfully well with beans and corn masa.
While the tamales steamed in the Chinese steamer, I opened a bottle of Kirin Ichiban (a Japanese beer) and took swigs from it. The green leaves of the big tree outside of our kitchen window, I noticed, had turned to the real, summer green from their nascent light green. After all, it was approaching mid-May. Finally done with all the papers for the semester and indeed with my BA work, I waited for the heavy cast of stress melt in me. It felt good to be done. It felt good, although it was only a beginning of my life outside of school--a life that I may not enjoy as much as I did all the learning and thinking inside of the academia, but for now, it felt really good to have no paper to write, no required reading that I'd have to rush through.
When the tamales were heated through, I placed them in a plate, took a few pictures and wolfed them down. I probably shouldn't have eaten both--they were pretty sizable--but they were yummy, and with the help of the beer, the tamales finally managed to undo the knot of stress that I'd been feeling for last two weeks of my last semester in school. Perhaps it's not too surprising that these tamales did such a great job of soothing my papered-out brain. In the back of the restaurant, there are several Mexican grannies (presumably from Guerrero) cooking the meat in sauce and stuffing the corn husks with masa. It's the kind of place where you order a few tamales and the girl at the counter walks into the kitchen, asking her "tia (aunt)" if she still had the kind you asked for--all in Spanish, presumably with Guerrero accent. It's very homey, and that relaxing atmosphere of a family-run restaurant certainly translates into the tamales they create.
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Tamales Lo Mejor de Guerrero
7024 N. Clark St., Chicago, IL
773.338.6450
We were very glad that this restaurant managed to survive the recent neighborhood fire unscathed. The fire consumed a few stores right next to the Mejor de Guerrero, which included another of our neighborhood favorite, a Colombian rotisserie place called Pollo al Carbon.
For culinary tidbits about the Guerrero region of Mexico (and where to get their specialties in Chicago), see this fascinating Chicago Reader article.
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