National Restaurant Association Show 2009: Artisanal, sourced and green are big trends

Some trends and random delights from the NRA’s annual industry mega-event.

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If you want to see where things are headed in the restaurant business, this is the place to do it. The National Restaurant Association’s annual show is the biggest of its kind, attracting a worldwide audience of more than 2,100 exhibitors and 70,000 attendees. According to the NRA, “restaurants are the nation’s largest private-sector employers, generating an annual economic impact of $1 trillion.” This is where these legions of industry professionals come to see what’s new—what they’ll be serving, how they’ll be cooking it, what they’ll be serving it on, even how they’ll clean up after.

In past years, it’s included such pre-packaged ersatz delights as jalapeño poppers and other fat bombs. And with good reason. On the way to the show, Marion mentioned something she’d read in The New York Times food section. In “In New York, the Taste of Victory,” an article on competitive cooking in New York, amateur chef Nick Suarez advised that a heavy hand with fat and salt was an asset. “If the audience is only getting one bite,” he said, “you have to pack as much flavor as you can into that bite.”

That approach to attracting the audience of potential buyers was deliciously in evidence as we sampled our way through the show at Chicago’s McCormick Place—plenty of salty, fatty treats to tempt us. But this year, there was something much more interesting going on. A few words normally heard in the hippest, healthiest, hautest new restaurants were echoing throughout the giant exhibition halls. Continue reading “National Restaurant Association Show 2009: Artisanal, sourced and green are big trends” →

140 small space solutions, a blogger meat and greet and a do-it-yourself ice cream store

A host of home furnishings and accessories for cramped quarters, hanging out in a swell steakhouse with fellow food bloggers and an ice cream/frozen yogurt/sorbet store that lets you design your own flavors.

Okay, show of hands. Who out there doesn’t have square footage issues? The clever welcome mat above, available at Manhattan’s Tiny Living, says it all for most of us. And it’s one of nearly 150 different items chosen for space-challenged homes and apartments in a recent New York magazine online Shop•A•Matic. There are collapsible measuring cups and nesting measuring bowls for the kitchen; all sorts of storage boxes, units and racks; stackable and foldable chairs…everything designed with a small footprint in mind. And honestly, not everything is strictly speaking a spacesaver—I mean, throw pillows and curtains? But it’s all charming. And while some shops featured are solely New York stores, others like Urban Outfitters, Crate & Barrel, CB2 and Anthropologie can be found elsewhere. There are plenty of online shopping opportunities too. Continue reading “140 small space solutions, a blogger meat and greet and a do-it-yourself ice cream store” →

Chicago’s Vella Cafe: It’s not just for breakfast [and lunch] anymore

The popular Bucktown breakfast/lunch/brunch spot now serves up pizza three nights a week.

Looking at Vella Cafe’s airy, inviting space, its high ceilings festooned with a dozen or more vintage school light fixtures, it’s hard to imagine the place began as a panini stand under a 10-foot by 10-foot tent at Chicago’s Green City Market a couple of years ago.

Owners Sara Voden and Melissa Yen soon expanded their repertoire by hosting a crepe brunch at Kitchen Chicago in the summer. Later, they expanded again, trading their tent for a space with four walls and central air, tucked up against the Blue Line el tracks at the Western Avenue station, offering breakfast and lunch weekdays and brunch all day Saturdays and Sundays. Vella Cafe’s menu runs the gamut, from crepes and quiche on the weekend to panini, egg dishes, pancakes, a delicious sweet potato hash, house baked pastries and coffee. There are always vegetarian offerings too. On their website, they say their goal is “to become a part of the community by providing friendly service, a comfortable atmosphere and good, affordable food.” I think they’ve already achieved that.

Now they’ve expanded again, offering dinner three nights a week [for now]. From 5pm to 9pm Wednesdays through Fridays, Vella serves up a mostly pizza menu, along with salads, mac n’ cheese and desserts. Pizzas are the definite stars, 11-inch hand tossed pies with generous toppings and big flavor. Vella claims these pies serve one or two—we found that they easily serve two, especially if you split a salad as well. But go ahead and order one per person—they’re a mere 10 or 11 bucks each, and there are worse things than leftover pizza the next day. Vella Cafe is BYOB, which makes it an even bigger bargain.

Since discovering this little gem under the el tracks, we’ve eaten there countless times for the weekend brunch [which is not your typical overblown, overpriced affair, a plus in our book]. The food is unfailingly delicious and the entire staff is wonderfully welcoming. Now that we’ve tried the pizza, we know we’ll be back for that. You should get there too, before pizza nights are as bustling as their weekend brunches. You’ll find their complete menu [minus the daily specials] on their website.

Vella Cafe
1912 N. Western Ave.
773/489-7777
Monday – Tuesday, 7am – 3pm
Wednesday – Friday, 7am – 9pm
Saturday – Sunday, 9am – 3pm
Delivery available

Forget “Walk Like an Egyptian”—it’s time to eat like an Aztec

Ready to think way outside the bun? Chicago’s Field Museum is teaming up with more than a dozen area restaurants to give us a sampling of truly old school Mexican food, a Taste of The Aztec World. This weeklong, multi-venue celebration is part of their exclusive exhibition, The Aztec World. Acclaimed and up-and-coming chefs and mixologists will create dishes and cocktails with the Aztec empire’s cuisine in mind.

That cuisine, it turns out, has a lot in common with what we think of as traditional Mexican food. Plenty of maize [or corn] for tortillas, tamales and pozoles [soups or stews], for example. Lots of legumes, vegetables and fruits. And maguey, or agave, a native Mexican plant with broad, long, spiked leaves; it resembles a cactus plant, but it’s not—in fact, it’s related to lilies. I’ve seen these large, impressive leaves [often two feet or more in length] in produce departments of Mexican supermarkets in my Logan Square neighborhood and wondered what they were for. I’m still not clear how home cooks use the leaves, but agave nectar is a very sweet syrupy liquid that you can use like honey—in tea and coffee, on pancakes or French toast or in desserts… Agave is also used for making high-end tequila as well as mezcal and pulque, fermented maguey juice whose boozy origins actually predate the Aztecs. Seafood was also an important part of the Aztec diet, as it is in modern Mexican cuisine. Continue reading “Forget “Walk Like an Egyptian”—it’s time to eat like an Aztec” →

Champagne, a missing cat and Abbott & Costello

We moved last weekend. Actually, the process has been ongoing in earnest for a few months now, but Saturday morning the actual movers came with the truck. We’d hired them to move the big stuff—furniture, mainly. That meant we were moving everything else, carload by exhausting carload.

Friday night we made two runs, then packed the car again to drive it full when we led the movers to the new place. We ended up getting to bed at 3 o’clock Saturday morning and got up at 7:30 to finish getting ready for the movers arriving at 9.

I don’t recommend moving on four and a half hours’ sleep.

We’d heard and read all kinds of horror stories about movers showing up late or not at all, but our crew arrived about 15 minutes early. Which was the cue for our 17-year-old cat Cosmo to add to the drama of the day by disappearing. He’s been an indoor only cat for the last ten years, but springtime always awakens the prowling gene in him, and he starts hanging out around windows and doors, sniffing the air and looking hopeful. We were afraid he’d already managed to slip out somehow—or would do so once the movers were going in and out. Finally, though, he nonchalantly sauntered out of a room we had each searched top to bottom, twice. How the hell do they do that? We promptly confined him in the room he’d just exited, and the move got under way.

The movers were amazingly efficient; when they finished unloading on the other end, it was only noon. And Marion and I were only getting started. We made another run to the old place, picking up another load, this one including Cosmo. Once he was safely installed in the new place, we unpacked boxes for a few hours, then made a run to what I’ve dubbed the holy trinity: Target, Home Depot and Petsmart [otherwise known as the cat food store in our household]. By the time we’d hit all three, it was eight o’clock and no dinner plans had been made, other than we needed to eat some. Fast. Continue reading “Champagne, a missing cat and Abbott & Costello” →

Can I get that to go?

A quick heads up—today’s post is potluck. After you read it, I expect you to bring a comment to share with everyone. Also, I’m doing a double post today, the second in honor of Valentine’s Day. So be sure to scroll down.

If you’re a regular at Blue Kitchen, I figure you either like to cook or are a friend or family member who feels honor bound to visit. Or maybe you’re C.) all of the above. But there are times even those of us who loooove to cook either don’t have the time or the energy or C.) all of the above. What do you do then? Drive through? Pizza? What are your defaults? Your delights? I’ll go first.

For us, if we’re not up to cooking, it’s usually because we’ve worked late or have umpteen things to accomplish after dinner. If that’s the case, we also don’t have the energy or time to go someplace and sit down for a nice relaxing meal. So it’s got to be fast and on the way home. Cheap is good too. Our defaults, driven more by geography and speed than desire, are usually Chipotle or Taco Bell. I know. Shut up.

But then there are the guilty pleasures. We recently rediscovered one: Egg foo yung, those pancakelike deep-fried patties of egg, vegetables and meat or seafood. A longtime staple of rather suspect Chinese American restaurants, they’re often found next to those ersatz Chinese dishes, chop suey and chow mein on the menu. And in St. Louis, they’ve even invented something called the St. Paul Sandwich—an egg foo yung patty on white bread with lettuce, tomatoes, mayo and pickles. So I was stunned to recently discover that egg foo yung is actually based on an authentic Shanghai dish.

Before going any further, I have to say that Marion and I are regulars at more than a couple of restaurants in Chicago’s Chinatown, places where we would probably not be allowed back if we ordered egg foo yung. And we tend to avoid generic food court Chinese food at all costs, in no small measure because the foods they serve tend to feature the same gloppy brown sauce that is a key ingredient of egg foo yung. But there’s something about egg foo yung that transcends national origin to become one of the world’s true comfort foods.

And never was it more comforting than one night a few years ago. In a fit of temporary insanity, we had agreed to our older daughter’s request for a sleepover birthday party with six guests. A total of seven girls, including the birthday girl, who needed all the caffeine and sugar buzz we’d also intelligently provided like a shark needs swim fins. They weren’t being bad, mind you—it was just the perfect storm of noise and energy and gross out humor. Silly me. I thought having daughters, it would be all Barbies and tea parties and I would escape the various bodily function jokes of my own childhood. I’ll wait while my women readers enjoy a good laugh at my naivete about now. That’s okay. I deserve it.

Marion and I were hunkered down in our room, grimly watching Saturday night TV and each privately longing for a tranquilizer dart gun as the party raged on outside our door.

And then we remembered the late night Chinese take-out place not two blocks from our house.

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting in our room with wonderfully satisfying plates of egg foo yung, steamed rice and gloppy brown sauce. I think we must have also had a couple of glasses of some modest white wine. The world was suddenly a better place.

Okay, your turn. What’s your default take-out or delivery? What’s your guilty pleasure? Try to stick with fast and cheap and, if at all possible, greasy this time. I’m sure we’ll talk about fancier options in a future post.

Note to self: Get organized

I keep promising myself to put together an editorial calendar for Blue Kitchen, mapping out topics I want to cover, especially around the holidays. If I’d done that, last week you would have read about some romantic Valentine dinner or a sinfully rich dessert in time to perhaps actually plan for it tonight. But I didn’t. And if I’d gone ahead and written about something like that for today’s post, you’d just be pissed that there was no time to get things together. So instead, I wrote about egg foo yung.

Just so you know I’m not a total doofus, Marion and I won’t be eating egg foo yung tonight, assuming the winter weather cooperates. I made dinner reservations at one of our favorite little Chicago bistros, Red Rooster Wine Bar and Cafe. Sharing the kitchen with the [only slightly] more formal Cafe Bernard, the tiny Red Rooster offers exquisitely prepared simple French cuisine in a relaxed country atmosphere. If you ever find yourself in Chicago for dinner, you could do far worse than this cozy, friendly place.

Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone.