Category Archives: Food & Beverage

Chicago Chinatown ’20

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One of these days, I might pop into the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Museum on S. Wentworth Ave. in Chinatown. It has to count as one of the more obscure museums in metro Chicago, and that adds some interest right there.

But when we went to Chinatown on Saturday, we took a pass on Sun Yat-Sen and had lunch next door instead, at a newish-looking place called Slurp-Slurp. Had some tasty noodle soups there.
Chinatown wasn’t the main destination that day, but it was more-or-less on the way, and always a dependable place to find something good to eat, and things to see. Even if there isn’t a parade.

We arrived at the Cermak-Chinatown El Station and saw something fairly new, visible from the stairs leading to the ground.
Done in hand-made ceramic tile by Indira Freitas Johnson, installed in 2015.

“The centerpiece of the upper panel features Fook (Fú in Mandarin), the symbol of good fortune or happiness,” the CTA says. “According to custom, the symbol is placed upside down and against a diamond-shaped background. Within the context of the stairway Fook (Fú) may be translated as ‘good fortune arrives.’ ”

Not far from the station is a screen wall.

It looks like there had once been a small sign in front of the wall to explain it, but that’s now completely blank. Not to worry, a very short amount of Googling tells me that it’s a Nine-Dragon Wall, a miniature version of such a wall in Beihai Park, Beijing (the Winter Palace).

Wiki tells us that there are various other walls of this style, including one at the Forbidden City that I have no recollection of seeing. Then again, it’s a large place. There’s also one at the Mississauga Chinese Centre in the Toronto suburb of that name.

Besides lunch, we did a short walk on Wentworth Ave., since the weather wasn’t too bad for the pit of winter. Not pit of winter-ish at all, with temps above freezing, though sometimes winds would kick up. Wentworth is the original hub of Chicago’s Chinatown.

Chicago Chinatown Wentworth AveThere’s evidence of continuing cross-cultural pollination.

About a half block off Wentworth is St. Therese Chinese Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the sanctuary was closed.
St Therese Chinese Catholic Church ChicagoSome distinctive Chinese features are visible outside.
St Therese Chinese Catholic Church ChicagoLater I learned that the church had been built just after the turn of the 20th century as Santa Maria Incoronata, to serve an Italian congregation. By the 1960s, the demographics of the neighborhood had changed enough for it to become St. Therese, serving a Chinese congregation.

7 & 17

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What’s good about February? Just that we’re shed of January, though winter so far this year hasn’t been that bad. Also, you can sense by now, even if you aren’t paying close attention, that the days are getting longer.

Ann got two confections recently for her 17th birthday. One was a pie. She asked for that, along with the question-mark candle. After all, who knows what comes after any particular birthday?

 

The usual suspects came over to celebrate and help her eat the pie.

The event was on the Saturday ahead of her birthday. On her birthday itself, her mother made her an artful creme-and-fruit cake. The pie was just a fond memory by that time.

This year being 2020 and all, I decided to look at my 2010 photo file to see what I had in the way of birthday pics for that year that I didn’t post at the time. The cake was a little different, I discovered.

So were the usual suspects, though most of them aren’t pictured here.

One thing that hasn’t changed: the essential cluttered nature of our dining table. But what’s a table for, if not to clutter it up?

Christmas Cake

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Christmas cake isn’t much of a holiday custom in the U.S., though it is more so in Japan, in as much as Christmas gets attention there beyond a modest amount of decoration and KFC. Actually, I don’t remember any to-do about KFC on Christmas in the early ’90s in Japan. Maybe it’s really a Tokyo thing — that’s often enough mistaken for the entirely of Japan by gaijin observers. Or maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

I digress. Yuriko made a Christmas cake this year.

Much chocolate, a healthy serving of cherries, and, you’ll see, a few dashes of edible gold. It’s so good it’ll hardly last until Christmas.

Everything You Need: Really Strong Coffee, Rhizomes & Pork Ears

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I avoid major retail properties this time of the year if I can. To borrow a phrase my mother used to use, it’s mob city at those places. But I still go to smaller shops and grocery stores. Business as usual there. Such as at the place selling this coffee.

Promises to be the “world’s strongest coffee,” a marketing slogan that’s the right blend of boasting and meaninglessness, so I’ll give them that. I looked up the company, which means that their ads will certainly follow me across the web for a while. Didn’t learn that much, except that its HQ is in upstate New York. More novel than Seattle or Brooklyn or the like, and that part of the state probably does need the jobs.

Moving along: food from Thailand. Calling it “rhizome” is curious, since a lot of plants have rhizomes, including “Thuggish Landscape Plants That Spread via Rhizomes,” which conjures up quite an image.

In this case, ginger rhizomes. I didn’t buy that either. Or this.

But I can’t say I wasn’t intrigued.

Thanksgiving Dinner 2019

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December didn’t arrive with a blast of snow, but instead gray skies that gave up rain from time to time, which — by Sunday just after dark — had turned into light snow. In other words, weather like we’ve had much of the time since the Halloween snow fell, followed by the Veterans Day snow.

Come to think of it, we had Palm Sunday snow this year. Seems like a year for named-day snows. But no Thanksgiving snow. Or Absence of Color Friday snow (well, maybe).

Took no pictures of 2019 Thanksgiving dinner. Will there be a time when it’s socially mandatory to take a picture of every special-event or holiday meal? Or every meal? Sounds like a small component of dark tale you’d see in Black Mirror.

This year’s meal looked pretty much like this plate — same kind of fish bought from the same place — and was just as good, with the food prepared mostly by my daughters’ skilled hands. Chocolate creme pie for dessert, also from a store, and one we’ve enjoyed before. I did all cleanup, a multi-pan, multi-dish, many-utensil effort, but worth it.

Tintinabulation &c

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A classic November day outside my window today. Slate gray sky, rain in the morning, chilly but not freezing, gusts of wind pushing leaves around. At least week’s ice and snow are gone. They’ll be back. A brown Christmas would suit me fine, but I can’t count on it.

Back to posting after Thanksgiving, around December 1, after a week-long holiday from posting, but not from work this year. Still, being off on Thursday and Friday — which will include no special consumer activity on my part — ought to be pretty sweet, as always.

We will probably hit the grocery store on Tuesday or Wednesday evening. Meat, carbohydrates, sweets, etc. Exact menu to be determined in conference with the rest of my family in the near future.

Here’s Phil Ochs’ adaption of Poe’s “The Bells.” Didn’t know about it until recently. Nice.

I have a big book of Poe’s work from the library that I’ve been grazing lately. Read “The Bells” again, among other things, after many years. I’d forgotten most of it. Somehow I didn’t notice when I was younger that the poem progresses from silver to gold to brass (brazen) to iron bells — from merriment to happiness to alarm to death, or at least what I take for death in poem, though not the song:

They are Ghouls:
And their king it is who tolls;
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A pæan from the bells!

Last night I read “Hop-Frog,” which I hadn’t before. A neat little revenge story, like “The Cask of the Amontillado,” though not quite in the same horrifying league. I guessed the ending — what violence Hop-Frog was planning. No matter. Poe’s usually worth a read. The influence of even that minor story seems to turn up in odd places.

Recent Eats

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During Open House Chicago last month, we saw this.
Taste of Thai Town ChicagoNothing to do with the event. It’s a Thai shrine of some kind. Not sure whether it counts as a spirit house, but the building behind it (from this angle) is a Thai restaurant — Taste of Thai Town at 4461 N. Pulaski. Previously, the building housed a Chicago PD station. We ate lunch there and were well satisfied with the meal.

In Virginia last month, Ann and I ate at Moose’s by the Creek in Charlottesville. It’s a large diner, decorated with a couple of enormous moose heads, many antlers and other reminders of sizable members of the deer family. Had some good sandwiches there, and when I paid, the woman at the register — it might have been co-owner Melinda “Moose” Stargell herself — said she wanted to take our picture under a major pair of antlers.

For Moose’s by the Creek’s Facebook page. Lots of customers have their pictures there. She said we were free to download it for ourselves, so here it is.

Moose by the CreekI had to be careful not to bump up against any of those points. Moose’s by the Creek also gave us some stickers.

We had dinner the first evening in Richmond at Belmont Pizzeria in the Museum District, a pleasant old neighborhood not too far from VCU, so maybe students eat its pizza too. Mostly it was takeout, with the large kitchen completely visible from the ordering counter, but there were a few tables, so we sat down to eat as a parade of people came in to get their orders. It was a popular joint, full of wonderful smells, and when we got our pizza — which had shrimp on it — we found it to be wonderful too.

Belmont Pizzeria has a curious bit of wall art on the outside.

Belmont Pizzeria Richmond

Even without the art, it was the best meal I had in Virginia, though the hipster waffles were a close second and, as I said, Moose’s was good too.

A Motley Thursday Assortment

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Congratulations to Geof Huth, who will be a grandfather come 2020. The latest of my contemporaries to do so, but hardly the last, I bet. Who are my contemporaries? People who could have gone to high school with me. An idiosyncratic definition, but I’m sticking with it.

News items pop up on my phone — misnamed, isn’t it? — my communications-information-time sucker gizmo, the work of bots and algorithms that are as mysterious as the Sibylline Books. Usually, it offers nothing I want to read, since the ways of bots and algorithms may be mysterious, but they’re still pretty dimwitted.

Sometimes, though, the offering is just downright bizarre. Recently the phone told me that one Susan Kristofferson had died. Given the name, I thought she was some relation of the singer of that name. I was just curious enough to check (on my laptop), and no — nothing to do with the singer. Nothing to do with me, either. Neither friend nor relative nor even nodding acquaintance.

So why did the phone tell me about her? Only the bots and algorithms know, and they aren’t telling.

Looks like Tom’s Diner in Denver, whose 1973 atmosphere I enjoyed in 2017, will soon be no more. Too bad to see a good diner go, Googie or not.

Late last year, I groused about a Chicago joint that serves $8 slices of pie, a price that compares unfavorably even to Manhattan. In Lansing, Michigan, recently, I paid about $8 for creme pie — but for that price we got two slices that we shared.

Tasty pie. Served by the Grand Traverse Pie Co., with 15 locations, all of which are in Michigan, except for an oddball in Terra Heute, Indiana. Sure, it’s cheaper to operate in a small city, but that alone can’t account for the difference between $4 and $8 slices.

Until recently, I hadn’t heard “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits in years. You might call it advert-scat. It’s funny.

I first heard it in college, because my friend Dan had some Tom Waits records, most memorably Small Change. Listening to it now, it occurs to me that some of the phrases have mostly passed from common use in the advertising world, such as please allow 30 days for delivery or the heartbreak of psoriasis or no salesman will visit your home.

So in 100 years, will the song mostly be 20th-century gibberish? Maybe. Still, with a light beat, steady bass and driving sax, I’d listen to Tom Waits sing gibberish.

See All the Hip New Joints!

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If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, I’d think that Lonely Planet is straying away from its backpacker roots into travel articles infused with that wan emotion felt by wan people, fear of missing out.

Take this article about the Scott’s Addition neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. Not long ago, I wrote about an apartment development in the area, and in the course of my research discovered that the district is hip, up-and-coming, the haunt of millennials who have more adventuresome tastes than all previous generations, etc. That wasn’t something I’d known. On the whole, that’s probably good: economic and real estate development for the area, new businesses, people walking around, maybe even a few older buildings saved.

Still, the tone of the article is offputting. Here’s how it starts: “Passionate entrepreneurs have muscled onto the scene: hot art-themed hotels are wowing guests, bold chefs are shaking up the culinary landscape and brewers offer sours and saisons in brand-new tasting rooms.”

A sentence that could be published in precisely any travel guide about anywhere thought to be hip. There’s nothing distinctive about it. Remember in Masada, when one of the other Romans was committing a particularly heinous act, Peter O’Toole’s character stopped him while yelling, This is not Rome! My urge here is to declare, This is not Lonely Planet!

Lonely Planet cares not for art-themed hotels or bold chefs or brand-new tasting rooms. Lonely Planet might take a look in the hotel lobby, but then it finds a cheap lunch and eats it on a bench as life on the streets goes by, which Lonely Planet watches with delight. Lonely Planet smiles at the thought of bold chefs who create must-have creations. How do we know that they are must have? Everybody says so. Guaranteed to be expensive too, and Lonely Planets cares not for that.

That’s not my only beef with this particular article. It’s called “36 hours in Scott’s Addition, Richmond’s new hotspot.” It should be called, “36 hours in Scott’s Addition, Richmond’s new hotspot, while well and truly drunk.”

The following is an outline of the article’s suggestions: First, go to a distillery and drink. Then drink cider made from apples so rare only one secret tree in Serendip grows them. Then have dinner, with “craft beer and adult milkshakes” at a “postmodern diner.”

See some art, because art is good, then resume drinking — Chinese food with craft beer. Then more beer. And some more after that, at very arty places. Or maybe saisons or farmhouse ales. Then stagger to another brewery. Don’t forget to eat after that, because the food’s special around here, but also finish things off with more beer!

It’s definitely the tone that bothers me. No doubt all of the recommended places are quite good, if that’s what you want. Some of my old friends have epicurean and gourmand tendencies, after all. The tone of the article, on the other hand, is Hit! All! The! Special! Places! or your trip will be crap, your time wasted and your soul unnourished.