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.
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.
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
© Copyright 2007 - All Rights Reserved. Don't even think about trying it!
