Chicago Foodies

Gourmet Wine Cellar – May 17th

Gourmet Magazine is hosting their 4th annual Wine Cellar event to benefit the Greater Chicago Food Depository. It sounds like a fairly informative evening with emphasis put on cooking demos and seminar style discussions. Chefs include Gourmet’s Sara Moulton, Grant Achatz, Rick Bayless, Homaru Cantu, Jason Paskewitz and many others.

Thursday May 17th 6-9pm
River East Art Center
435 East Illinois Street
Chicago, IL 60611

TICKETS: $100 per person
Available for purchase online
or 1-800-679-0397

Dining Out for Life this Thursday April 26th

This Thursday, the 26th, is Dining Out for Life night. A portion of the bill for any meal out – breakfast, lunch or dinner – at the participating restaurants will go to AidsCare. AidsCare assists Chicagoans with advances HIV/AIDS with housing, care and support services. Visit www.diningoutforlife.com or www.aidscarechicago.org for more info.

Kurt Vonnegut

"And the people would eat up all the food, gobble, gobble, yum, yum, and it would become excrement and memories."

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
novelist
11/11/22-4/11/07

Adobo Grill: Regional Mexican

Adobo Grill in Old Town is a huge place.  Massive.  And crowded. There's a reason why:  they do Mexican food very, very well.  It's actually a small chain--if it can even be called a chain (Wicker Park and Indianapolis are the other two places). The bright, open airy place has splashes of rich red colors and Mexican folk art, a nice counterpoint to the crowds who pour in here on weekends, and it’s whimsical enough to not be a cliché of a Mexican restaurant.

Pastoral Artisan Cheese: Always worth going out of my way

I know this isn’t the first article on Pastoral here but I find it so hard not to write about this place. Whenever I’m in Lakeview I almost always go for the inevitable visit to Pastoral. This place always sucks me in…it’s the friendly staff, the fact that they have a few cheese wheels out in the open waiting to be sampled, some good caricature, a nice selection of olive oils and balsamics, and a wine selection. Oh, yeah, and there’s also an olive bar and an assortment of artisan dairy products.

Vong's Thai Kitchen

I’m a Thai food junkie and Chicago is just the place to fuel that addiction.  I’m sure you could go to a different Thai restaurant every day for at leas a year, that’s how many Thai restaurants there are in the city.  One place in particular that I have passed quite often but had never been in was Vong’s Thai Kitchen.  I think I’ve always stayed away because it is a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant and the prices are much higher compared to authentic Thai restaurants – entrees are around $15.00 versus noodle and rice dishes under $10.00 at most places.  That being said I decided to give it a try for lunch. 

Green Zebra: Veggies in East Village

Green Zebra has been referred to as an “edgy veggie” restaurant in some review somewhere a couple years ago. My best friend from college is a vegan and doesn’t always have the chance to have vegan entrees in a fine dining restaurant. The atmosphere is sleek and contemporary, definitely not your neighborhood hippy-dippy vegetarian restaurant. The concept is wonderful and sorely lacking in meat-centered Chicago.

Before I make any commentary on this restaurant I’d like to say that this was my second time visiting (I was there a year and a half ago), and when I visited Spring (Sean McClain's the other restaurant) almost two years ago I had one of the most incredible meals of my life. I haven’t been to Custom House but had a positive impression at both Spring and Green Zebra.

From Cockroaches to Coyotes...?

Alligators in the sewers? Coyotes at Quiznos? This past week they actually found and detained a real live coyote at the Quiznos in the loop on Adams.

Is it just me or is finding a coyote in a Quiznos on Adams downtown a little strange? It's not like he crawled out of a drain. I don't think I've ever seen even stray dogs downtown.

The best part is that a couple customers hung out eating their lunches and taking pictures of the wild beast... who was apparantly pretty docile. Can we surmise that with their heightened sense of smell Quiznos gets the coyote endorsement?

As a kid I really got into the movie Alligator and even still can picture reptile invasion far easier than coyotes or wolves.

Freakin' mix of Jumanji and 12 Monkeys... that's what it is.

Le Colonial: What were we thinking?

When my fiancee and I took her parents to Le Colonial, the "what were we thinking" had more to do with "Why haven't we come here more often?" not why would we ever come back.  In this Gold Coast restaurant prices are a bit higher than what you find in the north side neighborhoods, but reasonable for the immediate area and overall, good value for money.  The atmosphere is tropical, bright and airy with white woods and ceiling fans, purportedly to evoke the colonial era.