Fine Summer Dining in Chicago’s Loop

On my first trip to France, I spent a week in the Loire Valley based at a chateau hotel whose restaurant had a Michelin star. Everything was impeccable and the first night, when the owner asked how I liked my meal, I surprised myself by responding “J’ai tombé en extase” (I’m in ecstasy). It’s a line I must have read in one of my many French classes over the years and suddenly remembered.

Well, I felt like that this past weekend dining out on Catalan tapas at Mercat a la Planxa on South Michigan Avenue, a few blocks down from the Art Institute, on the second floor of the Blackstone Hotel. The setting couldn’t be more different: it’s a large, high-ceilinged crescent-shaped room with mosaic tiles on the wall above the kitchen which match the room’s decor of browns and orange.  You step down into the dining area and feel that you’re both cozy and on stage. The food was appropriately theatrical in presentation and dramatic in taste.

I sampled figs wrapped in bacon; cannelloni filled with short ribs, foie gras, and truffle béchamel; potatoes with salsa and chili oil; and several more. All of them were mouth-wateringly delicious, and my server wisely suggested I go with an Albariño, a sturdy, dry white wine I’d had once before at a local tasting dinner in Michigan. My dessert was an outrageous crème brullée topped with a scoop of pistachio ice cream and there were Marcona almonds in the mix. It was chewy, sweet, and salty.

I was on a mini-vacation after having written three chapters of a new mystery faster than I expected, and this felt like a fitting reward for hard work, and inspiration to keep going.

There was more fine dining ahead. The next afternoon I had lunch with old friends at Terzo Piano at the top of the new wing of the Art Institute. It’s a cool, clean space of white and grey which in a way matches the elaborate stonework of the Gilded Age buildings you can see on Michigan Avenue. It’s like an aerie.

The menu was small and select and while waiting for my friends I feasted on goat cheese fritters which were so good I made sure to save some for them–though the temptation not to was strong. When my friends arrived, two of us ordered crispy eggplant with a cashew dressing. It was very subtle, the presentation and service lovely, eye-catching.   I had just seen the Institute’s sublime Manet exhibition of late portraits and still lifes and felt that I had entered a painting myself, perhaps a David Hockney.

The restaurants were unique in style and cuisine, and each offered a celebration of fine food beautifully and lovingly prepared.

Lev Raphael loves to travel and he’s the author of 26 books in genres from memoir to mystery, most recently State University of Murder.  He teaches creative writing online at writewithoutborders.com.

Dazzled at the Art Institute of Chicago

Walking into any museum is always partly a trip to an enchanted part of my childhood. My very first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was to see its newly acquired Rembrandt: “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer.” The painting was making headlines not just because of the artist, but because its 2.3 million dollar sale price was the highest ever paid for a painting sold privately or publicly.

I didn’t know what the painting was about or anything about Rembrandt but I was awed by the crowds and determined to share in the spectacle.  I actually crawled under people’s legs to get to the front. The painting stunned me: it was so solemn and mysterious.  That day, the door to great beauty was opened to me and it’s never closed.

Because we visited museums so often when I was a kid, I grew to have “friends” in New York museums, like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” at MOMA.  Whenever I’m in Chicago, I go to the Art Institute and at some point pay homage to Caillebotte’s enormous, haunting “Paris Street: Rainy Day” which was recently cleaned and looks beautiful (much better than my photo shows).

I was captivated by the artist’s most famous painting the first time I saw it, perhaps because of my long years studying French, my trips to Paris, and my love of the period it evoked.  It came to move me even more after the Art Institute’s 1995 Caillebotte exhibition which revealed his depth as an urban Impressionist capturing the loneliness we can all feel in a big city.

But after re-acquainting myself, I wander off, whether there’s an exhibition I had specifically come to or not, because I know I’ll end up being surprised by joy.  Especially when there isn’t a crowd of people standing in front of a canvas, statue, or glass case (I’m too old to crawl).  There’s always a treasure around a corner or across a gallery–something I’ve missed before or never really explored.  Like Manet’s moody portrait of his fellow artist Alfred Sisley, which seems almost painted in the subject’s style.

Or this moving, “Entombment” by baroque painter Guercino who I don’t remember encountering before visiting the Art Institute.  It’s an enormous canvas, and the rich blues and reds serve to heighten the sorrow of the scene.

Paintings like these make me sit down on a bench, study them, let myself stop worrying about time or anything else, and just disappear into whatever world the painter has created.  In those moments, I feel as a writer that something is being written on and in me.   I feel filled, transported, healed–and sent off in new directions that I couldn’t even have imagined just an hour before.

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-five books in many genres.  He’s been teaching creative writing at Michigan State University and offers writing workshops on line at writewithoutborders.com.

 

 

Food Fun in Chicago

Because of my Russian heritage, when I’m in Chicago I like to eat at Russian Tea Time near the Art Institute. I’ve never been served a bad meal there, and having lunch or dinner, scraps of my parents’ conversations in Russian come back. The enjoyable present makes for a warm connection to my past, and I feel my late mother’s presence very strongly because she was a wonderful cook and used to make her own borscht.

But this past weekend I felt like changing things up. I’ve had several book tours across Germany and in Vienna where I became very fond of the food, the wine, and the beer. So Berghoff seemed a natural choice. It’s been in business for a century.

The wood paneling and stencils on the wall felt familiar even though the clientele was multi-national. I’d eaten many a schnitzel on my book tours so I wanted to see how their Wiener Schnitzel compared. Served with spaetzel and creamed spinach, it was delicious, and so was the German Riesling. The apple strudel, though, was a bit too sweet and looked deconstructed.

There was a band playing blues in the bar, but I didn’t mind the commotion because I was reflecting on how my life had changed so dramatically after I found a distant cousin by marriage in Magdeburg, where my mother had been a slave laborer in a munitions factory. Germany had always felt taboo to me until that discovery, and I’ve been there five times now, visits recorded in my memoir/travelogue My Germany.

For breakfast I picked Le Pain Quotidien on Michigan Avenue and that also sparked great reminiscences. My tasty avocado toast with smoked salmon seemed very American, but the coffee came in a little pitcher and I got a bowl as opposed to a mug. It brought back more pleasant memories, this time of research trips I’d done in both the French and Flemish speaking parts of Belgium. The coffee was smooth and strong, the staff friendly.

I had planned lunch at a trattoria but got the days confused and it was closed, so I found myself drawn ineluctably to the nearby Russian Tea Time where I had two specialties I’d never tried before.  The excellent mushroom barley soup was tomato-based and filled with vegetables, while the duck strudel (yes!) was terrific and unusual.  I had two glasses of a sweet red from the Republic of Georgia and wished my mother could have been alive to dine with me there.

Food and writing often go together for me, and this trip gave me ideas for fiction and much more. I was alone for most of my time in Chicago, and that can sometimes make me miss being home, but memories and new enjoyments were great company.

Lev Raphael is the prize-winning author of 25 books in genres from mystery to memoir, including Writer’s Block is Bunk.  He’ll be teaching an online memoir writing workshop this summer at http://writewithoutborders.com/workshops/