travel blog

Fine Summer Dining in Chicago’s Loop

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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.

My Wild Night in Brussels

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I thought that staying near the Brussels airport after close to a week in Flanders was a smart move. I was going to do serious sight-seeing in Ghent and Antwerp and had been to Brussels several times before. By the time I got to Brussels, I would be tired and all I’d want was a comfortable place to repack my bags, snooze, and have a last good meal.

I did not expect riot police.

But here’s what happened first:

No one at the hotel told me that the “few minutes” from the train station closest to my hotel were all uphill and also involved a couple of staircases connected to a highway underpass, followed by more uphill schlepping of my roll-aboard. Then the check-in clerk took my reservation for a 4AM airport shuttle the next morning but didn’t inform me that my room rate included a breakfast bag—I found out what I was missing from other riders en route to Zaventem Airport when it was too late.

My room hadn’t been dusted well, but then neither was the hotel restaurant, which also had a chunk missing from the wall near where I had a meal. Maybe a hungry diner had taken a bite out of it while waiting—my dinner took way too long to arrive, even by European standards. But I figured the good wine I drank would knock me out for a few hours of sleep.

I woke near midnight wondering if climate change had somehow made Belgium prone to earthquakes, because my bed and the walls were shaking.

It took me a minute to realize the culprit was thumping bass from a party somewhere in the hotel. The noise only got worse and I knew sleep wasn’t an option. Sitting down at the desk to catch up with email, I could feel my chair practically move with the beat of the one song whose lyrics I could make out: “Sweet Dreams Are Made of This.”

[Insert ironic comment here]

I was more than happy to leave, but when I got to the lobby at 3:45am, I found it filled with Belgian police in their distinctive bilingual vests.

Police cars were parked outside as if this were a crime scene. One cop in the lobby was wrestling with a drunken shouting woman he was trying to eject from the hotel. Other young revelers in tuxes and short sequined dresses were loitering drunkenly in the lobby and outside. One couple fled from an elevator as if being chased by the zombies in World War Z.

I asked a policeman in French what had happened and he said there had been a “fight” and was reluctant to say anything else. In all the confusion and clamor, there was only one man at the hotel desk, and the police seemed to be lined up partly to prevent the counter from being stormed.

I’ll never know all the details of what happened, but the chaos was a gift: For writers, everything is material.

Lev Raphael has been to Europe many times. He speaks French, German, and some Dutch. He’s the author of 26 books including the memoir/travelogue My Germany and most recently State University of Murder.  He teaches creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com.

Travels Through Europe’s Troubled Borderlands

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I was born in New York City to immigrant parents, and when I was young, the question “Where do your parents come from?” wasn’t an easy one to answer.

My father grew up in the easternmost part of Czechoslovakia which had different names over the course of his youth: Subcarpathian Ruthenia, Carpathian Ruthenia, and the Carpatho-Ukraine. But it didn’t belong there anymore. It had been absorbed by the Ukraine and was now part of the USSR.  His country of birth doesn’t exist anymore, either: it’s now two nations, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The city my mother grew up in northeastern Poland was Wilno, but as Vilnius, it was the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic. In her years there as a child and a young woman before the Holocaust, it was variously part of Russia, Poland, and Lithuania, but for the majority of those interwar years a Polish city. It was also twice invaded and ruled by the Germans in her lifetime.

Both my parents spoke a bewildering array of languages and lived in “borderlands,” as Pulitzer-winning author Anne Applebaum calls them in her dazzling travelogue Between East and West.

Blessed with fluency in Polish and Russian, the author records amazing interviews and fascinating, lost history as she travels from the Baltic to the Black Sea, visiting almost two dozen cities like Odessa and Minsk whose names are well known in the West. But she mainly stops at smaller cities and towns that have been swept up in endless wars, invasions, and border changes. En route, she also traverses some areas of Eastern Europe likely unknown to most Americas, each with its own dramatic, many-layered history: Ruthenia, Bukovyna, Moldova.

Some cities have been crushed by neglect, Sovietization, bombing—or all three. Others seem like lost jewels. Everywhere she goes, people from peasants to professors open up to her to reveal contradictory identifications. Russian speakers across these lands, for example, might think of themselves as Ruthenian, Polish, or Ukrainian. The locales she travels through have known immense suffering and chaos, and many of her interviewees come across as shipwrecked. Best of all, her grasp of complicated history in every location is faultless. She’s as observant, canny, and in command of just the right quote or anecdote as Rebecca West was in her masterpiece about the Balkans, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.

Here she is in discussion with a fascinating Ukrainian linguist with a Turkish surname who tells her he feels like an outsider in his own country:

“And that, he said, was the most Ukrainian thing of all: to read the history of your country as if you were reading it through an outsider’s eyes. It is the fate of borderland nations always to know yourself through the stories of others, to realize yourself only with the help of others.”

Between East and West is one of the most compelling and thought-provoking travelogues I’ve read in years—and vitally important cultural/historical background now that places like Crimea and Ukraine keep blasting into the news.

A veteran of university teaching, Lev Raphael now offers creative writing workshops online at writewithoutborders.com.  He’s the author of the forthcoming mystery State University of Murder and 25 other books in a wide range of genres.

My First Trip To Canada

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I grew up in a wildly multilingual family and Canada’s bilingual nature fascinated as soon as I started learning French in elementary school.  It was just a short flight from New York, but felt as distant and exotic as Belgium where my parents had lived for awhile.

I eventually became my high school’s star French student, thanks to tutoring from my mother whose French was perfect. Even the subjunctive somehow sunk in. I received a certificate of achievement from the Alliance Française in New York, so a trip to Montréal seemed ideal after I graduated high school and was feeling almost bilingual (unlike my older brother whose French was not very good).

He put me in charge of hotels and I picked one on Place Jacques Cartier which was then somewhat ramshackle and noisy, but exciting for a student like me. Just being able to use French outside of a classroom–and be understood–was thrilling. I’d been studying it for eight years but in a hot house—now it was alive, transactional.

Getting into the country was unexpectedly dicey. It was 1971 and both of us looked like hippies. Clean hippies, but hippies just the same. And I didn’t realize that joking with Passport Control was not a good idea. When I was asked by a suspicious agent if I had any money with me, I emptied my wallet onto the table and made some remark like “Ai-je assez?” (Do I have enough?)

My brother claims that we were taken aside for an hour and interrogated. I have no memory of that. What I do remember was the superb food everywhere we went in Vieux Montréal and the wonderful feeling of being a different person when I was speaking and thinking in another language. Oh, and how difficult it was walking in stalked heels on cobblestones (it was the early 70s, remember?). I

I knew then that I’d be back—and in more suitable shoes.

Lev Raphael is the author of twenty-five books in genres from mystery to memoir, He is an assistant professor in the English Department at Michigan State University and also teaches creative writing on line at http://www.writewithoutborders.com

Is Ghent a Better Travel Destination than Bruges?

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Bruges and Ghent were never on my radar until my first trip to Paris when I came across a travel magazine with a big section on Bruges and the amazing canals had me spellbound. I didn’t get there as soon as I hoped (author book tours in Germany sidetracked me), but when I did, it outshone my fantasies. My timing made it possible to see the famous Holy Blood Procession that had been going on there since medieval times.

In Bruges, my wonderful B&B host and I discussed other cities in Flanders and she dismissed Ghent as not up to the standard of Bruges. She thought that it was worth—at the very most—a day trip. That was also apparently what her other guests told her after visiting Ghent.

Having  spent a week there myself, I don’t agree. Bruges is magnificent, thanks to its death in the 14th century as a port city and to being relatively untouched by war through the centuries. The core of the city is beautifully preserved, and the further you get from the crowds, the more tranquil you find it. But it’s definitely “preserved” and in many ways feels like a giant museum.

Ghent on the other hand is a very dynamic city. It has its fair share of canals and gorgeous buildings, as well as ancient churches and beautiful art. Bruges has the Michelangelo Madonna and Child, Ghent has the Van Eyck altarpiece. I think it’s a draw there, and the same goes for the food. I ate just as well in each city, savoring Flemish/Belgian specialties like waterzooi, carbonnade, vol-au-vent, moules-frites, stoemp, and of course made only a tiny dent in the amazing variety of amazing beers (there are apparently over 1,000).

Where Ghent outweighs Bruges for me is the fact that it’s a university town that’s friendly, entertaining, and alive. Ghentians call their home “The City of Trust and Love” and I found that attitude in people of all ages.

There’s a reason Belgian novelist Georges Rodenbach wrote a book called Bruges-la-Morte (Dead Bruges). Bruges might be more picturesque, but Ghent is livelier and, perhaps best of all, attracts fewer tourists. Not surprisingly, it’s widely called one of Europe’s hidden gems.

Lev Raphael is the author of two dozen books in genres from memoir to mystery, and is currently working on a novel set in Ghent.