Chicago, Illinois: Long
Weekend Vacation - Part 3 - by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget
The
next day, my tutor, her son, and I got up early and went to eat breakfast at
the Hilton Café next door – pancakes, fruit cups, and hot chocolate.
We
did two cultural institutions in the morning till about 1 and went back to the
hotel. We went swimming for two hours
and then ate salads at the Essex Inn Café with quiet, reading time after that.
Our
little group ate in Chicago’s Greek Town that night. We all ate in Detroit’s Greek Town, so we
knew what the items on the menu were.
I
tried dolmas, which seemed to be a larger version of dolmades – stuffed grape
leaves with different ingredients.
In
Detroit, dolmades are stuffed with rice and flavored with mint with a lemon
sauce called avgolemono on them. In
Chicago, I saw that large dolmas come stuffed with rice, raisins, and lamb with
just the lemon avgolemono sauce on them – no mint.
I
was further impressed with food in Chicago when we went to the Bakery
Restaurant in the City’s Lincoln Park neighborhood. The chef-owner was Austrian, who loved the
best of all European cuisines.
The
owner served dinner in two shifts with a selection of 3 main dishes based on
market and pantry combinations for the season.
We
ate vegetable terrines with tomato coulis around the slices as a starter
followed by Beef Wellington, roast beef baked in a crust. For dessert, we ate apple strudel with black
raisins and golden Sultana raisins.
I
thought our meal there was the best one I had ever eaten in my short life at the
time.
When
I graduated from the University of Chicago more than a decade later, my mother
held my graduation dinner at the Bakery with my family’s paterfamilias (who was
a winning quarterback at the Rose Bowl for Northwestern in his youth) and my
first employer, who organized the first Super Bowl in the People’s Republic of
China (also a University of Chicago alumna).
On
our last night together after a few days of intense museum going and reading,
our group went to Ann Sather Restaurant for a dinner of Swedish meatballs,
spaetzle (German egg noodles), and rotkohl (sweet tasting, braised, red
sauerkraut). We took home boxes of
cinnamon rolls, so we could get up early and make it home by lunch.
As
we left town, I looked back at the sprawling Chicago skyline and loved how the
city found space for the wonderful museums, parks, and art amidst the office
buildings.
By
Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
Click here for: Ruth Paget's Amazon Books
