Ignotz Ristorante Review

Once in a while, the Curry Fiend fiends for something else.  A recent addiction to microwavable popcorn aside, sometimes a hankering starts brewing for something familiar, something hearty, a meal that sticks to the ribs.

I am no longer a vegetarian.

The meal started innocently enough.  After a brief snafu entering the front door (it was locked...we briefly thought a private party was being entertained), we walked into a classic Chicago environment that more resembled a favorite aunt's home than a business.  Family photos adorned the mantle, harried waitresses carried steaming plates of seafood and marinara and in-the-know patrons sipped house chianti at the small ristorante located in the tiny strip known as Heart of Italy.  Settled in the early 1900s, the community is also referred to Little Tuscany in reference to the many Northern Italian immigrants who lived in the now predominantly Mexican area a few miles Southwest of downtown. 

This place was about as homey as you can get, with waitresses speaking heavily affected Chicago English who'll touch your arm while you order and call you "honey".  We were greeted with a fantastic freebie - a plate of delectable roasted garlic, which you can spread on freshly baked bread with a dab of olive oil and parmesan.  I settled on the simplest dish, a bed of spaghetti with marinara sauce.  I have this theory on restaurants that the best way to evaluate them is to order a really basic dish, like pad thai or a dosa or a plain cheese pizza, and if they execute the heck out of that, the rest is probably pretty good too.

But my pasta marinara never came.  Instead I was given spaghetti meat sauce, which looked to be about the most fantastic concoction I'd ever seen.  Generous chunks of meat market ground chuck floated in a sea of tomato red.  My food libido flickered like an old Miller Light sign.  "Send it back!", my companion urged.  "You are a vegetarian, for crying out loud.  You haven't eaten meat in 4 years, you could get sick".  My eyes, wide as saucers, were enraptured by this exotic, animal flesh delicacy.  If I send it back, they'll just throw it out, and it will be wasted, I rationalized.  People are starving; I'd just seen them myself in parts of Asia.  Just this once, I'll eat some meat.  Hints of garlic and oregano were hitting my nose and the spiced devil flesh lured me in.

I dug in.  That was one of the best pastas I've ever eaten in my life.  All of the notes were hit and the Ignotz fare was a perfect representation of Chicago Italian, just as they've been doing for decades.  No tricks, no trends, just perfect Italian the way Grandma makes it.  After scarfing down that plate in the time it would take a dog to lick clean an ice cream cone, my companion offered up some of her lasagna, which I nibbled down in a second moment of rapture.  Absolutely fantastic.

After we asked for the check (which was something like $28 for two, a heck of a deal), we were treated to a second freebie (USA, how I love thee!), a couple of chocolate-covered cherries drenched in homemade whipped cream.  That put me over the edge, with my toes curling and my eyes rolling back into my head.  In the words of the governor of California, I'll be back.

Ignotz Ristorante
2421 S Oakley Ave Chicago, IL 60608
(773) 579-0300

9/10

Painting by Numbers

I haven't been to any Indian restaurants lately, but I just heard about a new one on Milwaukee near my house.  Instead, I've been cooking it up myself.  The dish above is a regular sambar, with eggplant, radish, and potato, as well as a blend of lentils and spices.  It's usually a first course of a South Indian meal, and it lends itself nicely to an accompaniment of plain long-grain rice and maybe a raita.  You can make it a dozen ways, but the only downside is that it takes like an hour and a half to cook the lentils!  I guess I could cut corners and make it with canned lentils or something, but at this point in my Indian cooking career, I usually stay pretty close to the recipe and paint by numbers all the way.  Sometimes the instructions are a little ambiguous, but cooking Indian food gets easier and easier with practice.

This pot of goo is called Masala Beans Poriyal.  It is pretty darn easy to make.  The only annoying part is chopping up a boatload of green beans...my knife skills are not up to par!  The rest is pretty easy.  You just have to make a tempering out of chiles and coconut and some mustard seeds and dal and it comes together in like 20 minutes.  I would give it a 4/10 in the Indian cooking difficulty level and a 6/10 in the taste department.  Not so sure about combining coconut with green beans!  The South Indians put coconut on everything though.

This is the finished product.  I tossed some chopped coriander on the sambar and added a dollop of sour cream with paprika for dunking as if it were a chili.  I liked the sambar a lot but the green beans were not executed as perfectly as I had hoped.  I give myself a 7/10 for this effort...but on the 2nd try I'm expecting a little more umphh!

Cooking up some dosas

Cooking up the flavours

After three largely unimpressive meals at Devon Street's Indian restaurants, it was time to try my hand at cooking up some real deal South Indian Veg food at home.  Don't get me wrong, I'll still try to to complete my mission and eat at all of them (probably complaining the entire time and hopefully coming up with more hilarious ways to express my dismay), but on first glance Chicago's Indian scene seems very weak compared to other cities I've eaten it in (London, Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore, Melbourne, to name a few).  I ordered a book to guide me through, and headed up to Devon Street to haul in all the spices and whatnot, most of which I never heard of.  "It'll only take 30 minutes, we'll definitely be back in time for the Bears game," I told my companion, which turned out to be completely false.  Our trip ended up being a fiasco resembling Supermarket Sweep, racing through Patel Brothers and another store to beat the clock. 

 Our race against time included the following phrases:

"Fried gram flour, what the hell is that?  Is that yellow lentils?" 

"Where do you keep your asafoetida powder?" 

"Do we buy fresh tamarinds, or do we just grab this tube of sticky stuff and hope for the best?"

Following complete mystification, and many clueless circles around the fragrant aisles of a couple stores, we returned home with armloads full of product.  I now had packages of ginger root, bay leaves, coriander powder, poppy seeds, turmeric, fenugreek, and a number of other seriously pungent provisions. My companion started to get scared of the potential for stinkage.  "Make sure to open a lot of windows and use the fan,"she urged as we took a whiff of the extremely fragrant asafoetida powder. 

I decided not to join Jamie's revolution after all

You would not believe what you get for $115 on Devon Street!  The regular grocery stores sell stuff for about twice as much.  I didn't think it smelled that much, but all fans were set on high just in case, and I plunged headfirst into my object of desire, the Masala Dosa.

I decided to cheat a little bit on my first attempt and use a package of dosa flour instead of making my own.  You have to soak rice and dal overnight, grind it, and let it ferment for 10 hours to make the flour, and it sounded like a serious hassle.  So my first task was making a coconut chutney.  This was easy enough, and my finished product composed of coconut, gram flour, chiles, and lots of spices looked almost exactly like the picture.  The quoted time of 20 minutes prep time was way off for my clumsy self though, and it took me about twice as long.  The key of the operation was making the potato masala.  This involved boiling potatoes, cooking up a tempering of 7 seasonings and spices, and combining that with a saucepan full of onions, tomatoes, and peppers.  I handled that pretty ok too, and I was starting to feel pretty confident.  So far I'd spent about an hour and a half, and all that remained was mixing up my dosa batter and cooking it up on my griddle.  The mix couldn't have been easier - I tossed in a couple cups of powder and water and was good to go.

Cooking the dosa shell

I kept making the dosa shell too thick and too small though.  It was a tough art to master - a quick twist of the wrist creating a thin spiral of dough on the heated griddle.  Oh well, I was so hungry and the smell of the chutney and the potato masala was tantalizing the heck out of me.  After about three botched attempts, I was able to produce this:

The finished product

It was almost legit!  The flavors were all there, and I just needed to get a sambar going and make the shell a little more thin and long and I'd be rocking out some quality dosa. 

YES!!  I can do this!

I was really excited because my companion thought it was better than the ones we'd eaten up on Devon, and with a little practice, I could be eating close to the same thing I got addicted to in India anytime I wanted!  It's extremely cheap food too, and hardly any fat.  I only used a thimble full of ghee (clarified butter), and the dosa has tons of protein and complex carbs.  Full of confidence, the next time I decided to make my own batter.  But I had another thing coming!  It was much harder than I thought, and even after chopping the living heck of out the rice and black urad dal, my batter was rough in texture, and I ended up with thick, unappetizing dosas.  Maybe I'll just stick to store-bought flour for now!

Vegetable Korma and Mixed Vegetable Curd Salad

My next dish was a lot easier.  I decided to follow up my dosas with a typical South Indian dish with a nice salad on the side.  After making the more-complicated dosa, this seemed pretty easy.  I got the hang of it - temper the seasonings, cook the veggies, combine.  This wasn't my favorite, and I undercooked some stuff, but once again it was a decent stab for a beginner I guess.  Next up, some eggplant and some sambar!

Uru Swati Review

I ducked into Uru Swati recently for a quick snack.  Two things were a bit unsettling off the bat.  I observed an all-female kitchen staff (in India I found mostly men doing the cooking), and the really scary thing?  I saw a white guy in the kitchen too!!  What in tarnation?  I was pretty sketched out at that point, but I still ordered my Masala Dosa.  Nothing special.  The flavor was pretty bland and I'd be reluctant to order it again.  The menu was pretty standard, featuring dishes from all over the country.  Billing itself as "Healing Through Food", just another average place in the average Chicago Indian landscape...quickly tiring of the local Indian options, my jaunt into cooking up this stuff starts next week..I bet it's a lot harder than I think!

4/10

Udupi Palace Review

Udupi Palace Site

Udupi Palace, 2543 W Devon Chicago

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Please give me some Indian

That doesn't smell like poo

Now that I have un-whetted your appetite and alienated every female reader, let's talk about Udupi Palace.  Named for a town in Karnataka in Southern India along the Arabian Sea, it's also the namesake of a type of cuisine cooked in India's Vedic tradition.  Udupi cuisine typically brings together a wide range of fruits, vegetables, and grains and excludes onions, garlic, and all types of meat.  The venerable masala dosa is indigenous to the Udupi cuisine, and it is very representative of the Pure Veg South Indian food I have come to know and love.

I wanted to try the avial, a unique concoction of carrots, pumpkin, potatoes, and coconut that I hadn't eaten before, but my waiter talked me out of it.  "I do not like", he cryptically explained, making me think he wanted to steer me in a direction he believed more suitable for a western palate.  Instead he recommended a starter of the Udupi Special Assortment appetizer and a Masala Dosa.  I explained that I'd just eaten a dosa and wanted something else, and settled on the Dal Makhani, a dish that was not South Indian in origin, but from the arid Punjab region in the Northwest of the sub-continent, sharing its geography with Pakistan.  Punjab food is often heavy on the beans and features fewer vegetables than its South Indian counterpart.  

Udupi Special Assortment

The waiter-recommended Udupi Special Assortment appetizer was probably the most disgusting thing I have ever been offered in an Indian restaurant.  Thick layers of haphazard deep fry covered possibly frozen vegetables, and there was no flavor whatsoever.  Composed of a vada (fried lentil donut), an alu bonda (fried potato dumpling), a vegetable samosa, a vegetable cutlet, and an onion pakora (more deep-fry in chickpea batter), this basket direct from the bowels of hell nearly made me sick to look at.  There was no artistry or craft whatsoever in the food, and all of the fried turds appeared to have been sitting in a ziplocked bag in some freezer, waiting to be deployed in a murky vat of boiling oil.  My companion and I were unable to finish a single piece, and expectations vastly diminished, we awaited our bowl of beans.

Avial

In the meantime, the waiter returned with a tiny sample of the Avial, which he wasn't too keen on.  "Want to try?", he asked.  I sure did!  The dish had the most curious flavor and texture, a mix of coconut oil and fiery chiles, with a whiff of Indian eggplant.  There was also some stringy vegetable I couldn't identify, and it was both weird and memorable, but probably better as a side accompaniment in a thali than as a main dish (in fact I think I saw it included in several thali combos).

Dal Makhani

The Northern Indian Dal Makhani dish ended up being the star of the show.  Garnished with chopped coriander, the dish was moderately spicy and filling, with the classic Indian flavors of fennel, turmeric, chilli, and cumin, as well as ginger and garlic.  My companion and I found the dish rich and hearty with a tiny bit of cream, and I think it would be especially tasty on a cold winter's evening by the fire.  The texture was rich, and the array of sauces brought out with the dish added a tremendous complement to the flavor.  

Assorted sauces

 All in all, this was an ok place that was redeemed by a tasty bowl of beans from Punjab.  I would never order the appetizer again, and the Avial was curious, but not quite what I'd want for a main dish.  I will return, and hopefully get some dishes from the Udupi region next time to check out the specialty.

6/10

Udupi Palace

2543 w. Devon ave
Chicago, IL 60659

773-338-2152

www.udupipalace.com/  

Mysore Woodlands Review

Mysore Woodlands Restaurant, 2548 W Devon Chicago

I began my quest for Chicago's best Indian food at Mysore Woodlands in the standard Devon corridor in Rogers Park.  Known for its vegetarian South Indian fare, Mysore Woodlands had received high marks from eaters at Yelp and Citysearch.  As I neared Devon, my appetite for Indian food was nearly rabid, and I couldn't wait to dive into a dosa.

A little about what I am looking for: Indian food is all about taking a few mostly modest vegetables, spicing them, cooking them with love, and turning out incredibly delicious food.  Freshness is key.  Eating out at some of the finest Indian restaurants in India, I often found that the tastier places would run out of certain menu items.  This indicated three things to me: the food was made fresh, likely with crisp, new vegetables.  The meals were not mass-produced.  And most importantly, I needed to show up a little earlier to get the goods!

Dosas, a breakfast staple in South India, should be savory, with a tender pancake shell that's fluffy in the middle and crisp on the edges, not tough, and made with new batter.  A dosa is easily ruined with overcooking, and the potatoes should be similarly fresh and not stored in a steam table or refrigerated overnight.  The chutney should be made daily and the sambar should contain potatoes and exude a mixture of glorious spicy smells.  Triangle shapes aren't really the real deal - we are looking for cylinders here. 

Mysore Woodlands failed in a number of my lofty expectations.  The dosa shell was tough and not shaped into a cylinder; it was just folded in half.  Old dosa batter seems to be the likely culprit. It was far too chewy, and not savory as it ought to be.  Strangely, the chutney was served in a massive dish, and it seemed to be mass-produced.  Dole out the chutneys in tiny servings, guys!  You can't just slop a trough with chutney, you got to ration it out!  The sambar accompaniment also seemed tired and dated and overall the dish didn't seem to be cooked with much passion, essential to all cooking but especially South Indian fare.  The potato filling was the saving grace with the tumeric powder shining through.

My final item was a bowl of Mulligatawny soup.  This is more of an Anglo-Indian dish and I don't recall encountering during my travels in South India, but it sounded interesting and tasty so I decided to give it a try.  It tasted like lentils and possibly some carrots, but again it didn't appear to be made fresh.  It was completely homogeneous and the texture was boring, although the spice was slightly interesting and flavorful.  I probably wouldn't order it again, but it would be reasonable to warm up on a cold winter's night.

Overall I was not very impressed.  If this restaurant was located in India, it would be closed down within a week, and much more passion should be coming through with the flavors. My biggest concern was with the freshness of the food.  If the freshness improved, this restaurant has a chance of being quite tasty, but it's nowhere close to the proper South Indian food I enjoyed so much in Tamil Nadu and other locales.  I'll return and hopefully I can revise my opinion.

4/10

Mysore Woodlands Site

2548 W Devon Av
Chicago, IL 60659

Phone: (773) 338-8160

History Of The Hankering

Following over sixty bus rides, twenty-four flights, and countless taxi rides (many of them haggled for), I found myself right back where I started, in Chicago, Illinois. 

Wheeeeeew!

What in tarnation just happened?

Long story short, I got a chance to travel around the world and I gladly accepted.  Piling all of my clothes into my trusty red Kelty backpack, I plunged headfirst into Cochin, India, located in the far southern state of Kerala.  After a couple months in the subcontinent, I showered off the dirt in ultra-modern Hong Kong, sunned myself at the beaches of Boracay, Philippines and helped myself to world-class street food in Singapore.  I partied all night in Phuket, climbed the highest peak in Peninsular Malaysia, and watched the sun go down at the temple of Borobudur, Indonesia.  Weights were lifted in Bali, trails were trekked in Nepal, and beers were drunk at a footie stadium in Melbourne.  Capping off my six month la-di-da was a few weeks of hiking around New Zealand's fiord area in the south of the island.

But the smells I smelled in India never left me.  The unbelievable tastes of Pure Vegetarian South Indian still haunted me.  My addiction to those beautiful spices and lust for eating off a banana leaf has taken over my brain.

I am the curry fiend.