Friday, October 1, 2010. Chicago's Answer To The Roast Beef Poor Boy. A French-Vietnamese Dinner. Jilly's Piano Bar. It's another beautiful, sunny day in Chicago. Back in New Orleans, the weather is precisely the same, including the seventy-degree highs. I slept until eight, went down for a plate of fresh fruit in the South Water Kitchen, then came back up to write a newsletter.
The Eat Club lunch plan today is a search for a good Italian beef sandwich. I didn't discover that Chicago treat until my last trip here in 2006, when Jimmy Bannos took me around town to try a bunch of them. Jimmy is the owner of a small chain (of course) of casual cafes called Heaven On Seven. The original is on the other side of the el train tracks, around back of Marshall Field's big downtown store. It's on the seventh floor of an office building, hence the name.
The Heaven part is that they serve New Orleans food. They really do. Jimmy is a fan of our cuisine and understands it. We had an Eat Club dinner there last time, celebrating the release of my cookbook, and the menu could well have been served back home.
The places Jimmy showed me last time were all out in the suburbs. Getting the Eat Club out there would be a challenge. But the concierge at the Hotel Monaco said we'd be happy at Portillo's, a big Italian beef and hot dog emporium about eight blocks away from the hotel.
Portillo's is enormous. It has several different menus working in the same building. It was like a food court, except all the restaurants were Portillo's this or that. We joined one of several lines after figuring out which one was for Italian beef. About twenty people were ahead of us, but a unique service system moves things long. An order-taker working upline gives you a paper bag with your order written in code on the back. The cashier decodes the bag and takes your money. Then you join a third line alongside an open kitchen, where you see your food being assembled to order.
Unless my memory is unreliable (it probably is), the flavor of Portillo's Italian beef was as exciting as the best of the four places Jimmy Bannos showed off last time. The sandwich looks like a New Orleans roast beef poor boy. The bread has a denser texture and a soft crust (sort of like supermarket French bread). The beef is sliced thin and served hot. The gravy is much lighter than ours. And instead of lettuce, tomatoes, mayo, and all the usual poor boy dressings, an Italian beef is abetted by "hot and sweet peppers." The former are indeed hot, like those little green peppers packed in bottles of vinegar here. The sweet ones are roasted bell peppers. The flavor is irresistible. I wouldn't say it's better than the best roast beef poor boy, but it is better than a mediocre roast beef poor boy.
Portillo's started out as a hot dog stand. Hot dogs are a very big deal in Chicago. Portillo's were big enough to stick out both ends of a toasted bun, and were dressed with pickle spears, sauerkraut, and the hot and sweet peppers again. A great dog, no question.
Carol Charvet grabbed the coded bag and paid for all of us. We had two hot dogs and two Italian beefs for the five of us, plus five iced teas. Plenty enough food. "I think there's something wrong here," he said. "It's $18.53 for all of this!" About $3.50 a person. I would have paid twice that.
Mark said I had to see the McDonald's across the street. It had the original kind of golden arches, the ones that vaulting above the whole building. It's a relatively new shop, but it has a story. McDonald's as we know it was the brainchild of Ray Kroc, who opened his first franchise in the Chicago suburb of Des Plaines. It was torn down a few years ago, and this one was built as a sort of McDonald's museum. The food's the same, but they have a timeline on the second floor, complete with cups, menus, and Happy Meal toys throughout the decades.
Interesting. But not as much as Portillo's Italian beef.
I dispatched the final radio show from the Hotel Monaco's lobby, with another well-attended free wine hour. I had no plans for the evening. I failed the Eat Club in not having whipped up a dinner strategy for tonight, after all attempts to penetrate Rick Bayless's empire came to nothing. But, as Mary Ann is always telling me, these are adults who surely can figure out what to do with themselves on a free evening. And they did.
Mark Chambers and Vic and Barbara Giancola happened to be in the lobby during the show, and the five of us hatched a plan to go to a place Mark thinks highly of. Le Colonial is a Vietnamese restaurant that makes much of that country's French heritage. Its food, service, and surroundings are rather grand. Pho is the first item on Le Colonial's appetizer list; neither it nor any of its variants appear elsewhere on the menu. This is the kind of Vietnamese restaurant I wish we had in New Orleans.
The five of us uncrammed ourselves from a single cab on Rush Street, in Chicago's Gold Coast. The hostess said we could be seated within minutes, but that we could get a better table if we had a drink in the bar first. No further persuasion was needed. I had the house martini, made with a ginger liqueur and scraps of pickled ginger in lieu of olives. The bar was cool and comfortable, and we were almost disappointed when our table opened up.
We got over that as soon as the food began to arrive. None of it was unfamiliar in its ingredients or recipes. But we'd never seen or tasted Vietnamese food like this.
We passed appetizers around. Dumplings of chicken and mushrooms in slippery white skins covered with peppers and fresh herbs. A salad of rice noodles and seared scallops, sprinkled with lemongrass and lime. Spring rolls filled with shrimp and mushrooms. All light and sublime.
The most dramatic of the entrees was a whole red snapper with a chili sauce and cilantro. The best tasting was bouillabaisse, made with more pepper than any in my experience, loaded with lobster, fish, shrimp, scallops, and mussels. Also on the table were big shrimp with asparagus and green onions--also spicy. (Vietnamese barbecue shrimp?) I don't know who ordered the filet mignon and shrimp with tomato rice, but I would not have taken a bet that that person could eat it in its entirety. The entree prices hovered around $30, but seemed generous at that.
The skill of French-trained Vietnamese bakers is legendary, and they showed it off well in the dessert course. Just look at the pictures.
This was a superlative dinner. When we repeat this eating trip in a couple of years, I will certainly include Le Colonial on the list.
Mark Chambers is from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and has been a regular visitor to the fleshpots of Chicago all his life. He suggested a nightcap at an interesting bar he knows a block from Le Colonial.
Interesting wasn't the half of it. Jilly's Piano Bar is one of a chain (yep) around the country that grew from a saloon Ermenigildo "Jilly" Rizzo opened in Manhattan in the 1960s. Jilly had an auspicious regular customer: Frank Sinatra. Jilly became one of Sinatra's best friends. (His name is even mentioned in a number of Sinatra recordings, notably "Mrs. Robinson.") Jilly looked exactly like what you would imagine, and was supposed to have been a real character, a load of laughs.
The narrow room--most of whose floor space was taken up by the oval-shaped bar--was packed. A table just inside the door had a reserved sign on it. Mark slipped the tall, statuesque blonde waitress a tip that was apparently of some size, because she gave us this table. Somewhere in the back of the bar, a singer-pianist was singing Sinatra-style songs. My kind of music! In my kind of town! I went back there to get a look, but I never could find the source of the music. Moving around was tough.
Except for one detail, this scene was identical to the one I remember from the singles-bar era of the 1970s. Everybody was drinking and checking everybody else out. The difference was that instead of being in their twenties and thirties, these people were mostly in their fifties and sixties. (Our own table fit that demographic to a tee.)
We ordered a round. The single-malt Scotches were poured generously for a reasonable price ($13). From our spot just inside the door, the people-watching was nonpareil. We began playing a game we called "Find The Millionaire." A bevy of beautiful young women would come in, escorted by a guy who looked like. . . well, for example, like me. Find the millionaire! Aha! He's that guy.
Jilly's has a unique way of pumping up the crowd. Every now and then, a waitress grabbed a pile of cocktail napkins and threw them into the ceiling fans. They blew all over the place, and suddenly it was New Year's Eve.
We stayed until the music veered into disco and became much louder, at around one. On the way out, I asked our waitress if I could take her picture. She was the kind of woman Mr. Sinatra probably had in mind when he sang his most impassioned songs. She refused. I added a ten to her tip. No. Another? No. Another? Okay. She posed. I kept pushing the button. The camera it wouldn't take the picture. Serves me right.
I can't explain why we found Jilly's so entertaining, but we did.
Portillo's. Chicago: 100 W. Ontario St. 312-587-8910.
La Colonial. Chicago Gold Coast: 937 N. Rush St. 312-255-0088.
Jilly's Piano Bar. Chicago Gold Coast: 1007 N. Rush St.
