From the Ledge

All my close friends know that I am as passionate and as intensely curious about food and cuisine, from sourcing to plating, as I am about theater, film, and art, but I rarely write about them on this blog (in the two years and change that http://www.fromtheledge.com/ has been alive and kicking, I’ve posted approximately 16 food-related entries as compared to 143 for theater and 57 for film).  There’s only so much time and intellectual capacity that I have in a year to write about all the things and experiences that have made an indelible impression on me, so sometimes culinary matters get shunted aside in favor of other blog topics.  And, as I have said previously, there’s so many other people in this gastronomy-obsessed city we live in who can write about food more authoritatively and vividly than I can (plus have more gut-capacity and better digital-photo-taking skills than I have) that unless the culinary experience was quite unique, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it.  So my dining end-of-year-list has always been my attempt to share the myriad of dishes and dining experiences that left an impression on me during the year past.  I’ve tried very hard to keep the list to my Chicago dining experiences this year, unlike in previous lists, but I had to make an exception for the arguably singular, but also ambivalence-inducing, dining pilgrimage I made to The French Laundry in the summer, where some of the dishes stunned me into speechlessness, but where the overall culinary point of view felt somewhat old-fashioned.  Here, then, are my top ten dining memories of 2009:

1. X-Marx Chicago – I have written about the underground dining scene in Chicago since the beginning of this blog, but it’s only been in the past year that I’ve been able to attend dinners held by X-Marx Chicago, which TastingTable.com recently proclaimed as one of the city’s “best high-concept, nomadic supper clubs”.  In a highly memorable spring collaboration between X-Marx, ex-Alinea chef de cuisine Jeff Pikus, and Perman Wine Selections which focused on reinvented Vietnamese street food, the sophistication, imagination and wow factor of the 11 dishes and 8 wine pairings proved beyond any reasonable doubt that underground dining has the potential to blow away traditional, “aboveground” dining any time it wants to. It was one of my most favorite dining memories ever.  And Pikus’ elevated version of the robust, salt-of-the-earth, farmer’s soup bun bo hue was nonpareil, the best dish I had this year.

2. The French Laundry – Let me just reiterate what I’ve told friends and readers who read my blog post on possibly the most famous American restaurant and detected not a whiff of frenzied genuflection:  if you have the time, the money, and the opportunity to go to The French Laundry, you should.  It’s a must-go for any serious foodie. Although I felt that the overall sensibility of the restaurant was a little too staid and old-school for me, the service was flawless and I had two of the best dishes I’ve had in recent memory:  a simply, but perfectly, poached piece of lobster tail served with delicate white asparagus and passionfruit mousseline, and a simply, but perfectly, grilled piece of rare Snake River Farms wagyu beef served with an exacting bordelaise and marvelous bone marrow pudding.  Both dishes were luxurious, sensual, highly pleasurable, and just plain delicious.

3. Rick Bayless’ Pozole – And no, it wasn’t the one that’s served at Xoco, one of the city’s hottest restaurant openings of the year, but the one he generously, energetically ladled out into Styrofoam tumblers at the first indoor Green City Market of 2009- rich, kick-ass, unapologetically porky, a powerful antidote to the bitter cold of January 2009.

4. La Cebollita – My friend Sarah and I trekked through the Pilsen neighborhood eating tour in early fall, Buen Provecho, which showcased 28 of the restaurants in the ‘hood, from defiantly hole-in-the-wall taquerias to the smart and smoldering Nightwood, the latest foodie destination from the owners of Lula Café.  By the time we came to La Cebollita, an inauspicious storefront on Ashland and 18^th, we felt like force-fed geese ready to be foie gras’ed, but one taste of the restaurant’s amazingly light, sweet-savory tamales, in both green and red sauces, banished any thought of food coma away and we downed them as ravenously as if we were Sumo wrestlers just off a hunger strike.

5. Stephanie Izard’s Wandering Goat dinner -  Top Chef Chicago winner Stephanie Izard, whose previous seafood restaurant, Bucktown’s Scylla, was glorious, plain and simple, held one-night only supper clubs in various locations throughout the year while preparing for the winter 2010 debut of her much-awaited new restaurant, The Girl and the Goat.  In the fall, her second Wandering Goat dinner, held in the airy loft space of the new Kitchen Chicago in the West Loop, celebrated all things bacon in eleven plus courses.  But it was her wondrous, succulent, flavorful baby barramundi, grilled in their entire head-still-attached glory served over a languidly tasty summer salad of peaches, corn, tomatoes and bacon, which demonstrated not only the confidence and chutzpah, but the soulful, genuine talent, of a Top Chef.

6. The Publican – With this fall’s Big Star opening (see number 10) hogging the headlines of a busy restaurant opening season, it’s sibling restaurant, The Publican, last year’s hot new opening, could have felt, well, so last year.  But the buzz and the vibe continued to be feverish, and more importantly, the food continued to be startling.  Its monthly family-style beer dinners, co-hosted with hip, hot, high-caliber artisanal breweries, showcased Chef de Cuisine Brian Huston’s comforting creativity, and in a summer dinner co-hosted with New Holland Brewing Company, reached dizzying heights with an unforgettable seared sand dabs and sweetbreads dish, the masculine, salty fleshiness of the fish marvelously complemented by the assertive, earthy flavor of the organ meat, both tempered by the sweet breeziness of in-season artichokes and corn.

7. Mangalitsa Pig Dinner at BOKA – Izard, Perennial Chef Ryan Poli, Vie Chef Paul Virant, and BOKA Chef Guiseppe Tentori collaborated on a unique six course dinner using the never-before-eaten in Chicago Mangalitsa pig, or what many serious foodies consider as the “Kobe Beef of Pork.”  The Mangalitsas, raised using free-range techniques and a diet of acorns, apples, and organic grains, were the fattiest, most luxuriantly meaty porcines that you could have, and the four chefs splendidly honored all parts of the pig in a variety of preparations (including a surprising flourless chocolate cake with pig’s blood in it), first at Virant’s Vie, and then Tentori’s BOKA on the following night.  But it was Chef Tentori’s indescribable, diaphanous, enveloping headcheese served with a parsnip puree and pickled radishes that defined the evening for me (see accompanying photo).

8. Chicago Gourmet - After hearing all the brickbats it received from those who attended its inaugural run in 2008, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from Chicago Gourmet, our fair city’s attempt to create a world-class food event that was at par with the Aspen Food and Wine Classic.  I’m not sure it still is yet, but its 2009 make-over made gluttony sexy (well, definitely sexier than Taste of Chicago).  The best dishes I had:  new Iron Chef and Mercat ala Planxa executive chef Jose Garces’ perfectly roasted, melt-off-the bone suckling pig and Chef Graham Elliot Bowles softly mesmerizing, teasingly savory sweet corn panna cotta with cilantro chips.  The best dish I didn’t have (or anyone else for that matter):  Top Chef New York finalist Fabio Viviani, whose immaculate made-for-reality TV good looks looked even better beside the inebriated, food-comatose masses.

9. Thai Congee at Me Dee Café – It was possibly one of the most top-secret semi-discoveries of the year (since no one really read the Chicago Reader that much anymore):  a tiny, unassuming restaurant right around the corner from where I live in Lincoln Square actually still had an untranslated, foodie-undiscovered Thai menu, which the servers would refuse to hand over to anyone who looks even vaguely un-Thai.  In a tenuous combination of needling, flirting, groveling, and trading on that mysterious empathetic quality of “Asian connections”, I managed to not only get hold of the menu but have the servers translate the items for me.  It was a menu for Thai congee, a late night staple in Southeast Asia for a post-party/bar/dance club stop.  Me Dee Café served it only from 9 pm to 2 am nightly, but it was worth losing some sleep for- some of the delirium-inducing congee accompaniments included a sharp crispy Chinese sausage dish with Thai fish sauce and chilis, an addictive sweet-sour pickled radish with egg and vegetables, and an-off-the-spice-charts Asian greens with crispy pork.

10. Big Star – Yes, it was the hottest opening of anything this year.  Yes, it was crowded with a perplexing, but harmoniously co-existing, mix of Wicker Park hipsters who usually scoffed at anything resembling something edible, and red-blooded foodie scenesters with man-tits and belly bulges who usually scoffed at anything resembling Wicker Park hipsters.  Yes, you had to eat the delicious Mexican street food courtesy of Chef de Cuisine Justin Large standing up unless you could rugby crotch grab and shove out of the way that hipster or foodie scenester before he or she grabbed hold of those last two empty bar seats.  But I personally would stand up for eight hours straight if I was continuously eating Large’s amazingly flavorful, robust and assertive Tacos al Pastor or Pork Belly tacos (and that pineapple pushed that taco over some undefinable edge).

Tags: , Big Star, BOKA, Chicago Gourmet, Girl and the Goat, Graham Elliot, Green City Market, La Cebollita, Me Dee Cafe, Perennial, Perman Wine Selections, The French Laundry, The Publican, underground dining, Vie, Wandering Goat, X-Marx Chicago, Xoco. Mercat ala Planxa