I just returned from a visit to my hometown of Chicago. I get back to Chicago about once a year to reconnect with friends and relations and, on this trip, spend Thanksgiving with my kids. My secondary agenda, however, is getting my Chicago food fix.
Probably most of us have an emotional attachment to the food of our childhood. I grew up on hearty European fare with my mother’s Hungarian recipes, my great-uncle’s homemade sausage and the culinary richness of Chicago’s ethnic diversity.
Not that Albuquerque is a gastronomic desert. New Mexico has its own regional variation of Mexican cuisine and a growing variety of other restaurants, but many of the immigrant groups that have nourished Chicago never made it to the Southwest.
So my annual visit to Chicago includes a checklist of my favorite foods that are unavailable or inadequate in Albuquerque. This year’s chow-down included:
German food – sauerbraten and strudel at the Brauhaus and lunch at the Berghof. The crusty, ex-Wehrmacht waiters at the Berghof are gone but the food is still great.- Greek food at the Greek Islands: lamb with artichokes, Roditys wine and Saganaki (photo at left). This flaming cheese appetizer originated in Chicago. The waiter sets the stuff on fire and everybody yells “Opaa!” which may be Greek for “the cheese is burning.”
- Czech food: roast duck and dumplings at the Riverside restaurant.
- Two different Chinese restaurants.
- A half-pound burger on rye bread with a compressed brick of onion rings at Hackney’s.
- A new experience with Indian food at the Curry Hut.
- Italian beef sandwiches, mostly unavailable outside Chicago.
- And no visit to Chicago would be complete without deep-dish pizza.
Chicago also has memorable Italian restaurants, but so does Albuquerque. I don’t even bother to visit Chicago’s excellent Mexican restaurants… coals to Newcastle, you know.
When I took a side trip to Madison, Wisconsin, my recovering-vegetarian son took me to a lively brew-pub for a hearty Walleye sandwich. Inexplicably, they did not serve bratwurst. You’d think this would be some sort of zoning law in Wisconsin.
This 12-day pig-out was culminated with my daughter’s Thanksgiving dinner. Now that I’m back home, I will be spending next week at the gym. Then I’ll be ready for a green chile fix.