Traditional to Trendy, Vegan Eating in Chicago

As I mentioned in my last post, I spent last week in Chicago at a conference. I hadn't been to Chicago for a long time, so it was fun to see how much the city has changed in the intervening years. The last time I was there was about nine years ago and my checked bag contained a huge fish costume which I was forced to wear throughout much of the Midwest...um, actually, don't ask... Suffice to say, things are different now, with Chicago and with me.



I was struck with the beauty of this view as I crossed the bridge from the conference one day. Chicago, I thought, you do not look real. It was just too pretty. I promise that this photograph is untouched and truly captures the colors and tranquility of the scene. It was a beautiful day and the sparkling aqua-blue of the water bolstered my tremendously good mood as I walked from the conference hotel to catch a bus to a far fancier hotel so I could experience something I've been excited about for months now: a fully vegan afternoon tea spread at the Chicago Peninsula Hotel.



I love tea parties and have cultivated some strange affection for the tradition of tea time. Tea time calls up stuffy and colonialist images for me, but I can't help romanticizing crumpets with strawberry jam or scones and clotted cream. So, when I found out that the Lobby at the Peninsula Hotel offered a vegan tea service I could not prevent myself from calling to make a reservation. It seemed a very rare chance to engage in the pageantry of tea time as a vegan and there was no way I was going to miss out.

Reservations are always requested for afternoon tea, but it seems the hotel does especially like some advance notice to prepare the vegan menu, which does seem to vary. The sample menu they showed me was not what they actually served, which was fine since what they served was so good.



It could probably go without saying that everything was beautiful. The huge windows streaming in beautiful summer afternoon light, the airy and richly appointed room (...speaking of colonialist overtones...), the stunning yellow protea on the tables. There were tables and tables of shining silver and crystal and well-coiffed people in tea-time jackets and dresses and shawls, the effect of which was somewhat damaged by dudes in flip flops and Hawaiian shirts, women in jeans and touristy t-shirts. I mean, I'm most comfortable in my Scum Brigade t-shirt (Destructive Hardcore, Negative Youth US tour, summer 2000) and cutoff black shorts too, but if you're going to go to tea at the Peninsula Hotel, couldn't you put just a little effort into playing along for the afternoon? The slobby dressers struck me as party-poopers stuck in among the perfectly up-tight waiters and the bridal shower attendees all wrapped in pastels.



I ordered a pot of wonderfully dark China black and vanilla tea. It was comfortable and floral, a little sweet, but with a slight bite. I appreciated the chance to use a silver strainer to pour my tea through, but by the lower third of the pot I was missing the removable pot-strainers that teashops use elsewhere. I'm sure it's not as "classy" to pull a big honking strainer full of tea leaves out of your pot and leave it on the table, but as the tea steeps and steeps in these pots, it becomes just too strong to drink.



Our tea tray arrived in full majesty. I'm pretty sure my jaw dropped when the server brought it out and settled it on the table. Three levels of vegan treats--I was in heaven.



Since I'd skipped lunch to save room for this eating adventure, I started with the sandwiches to build a solid base upon which to build with the other two levels of sugar. This tofu salad sandwich on white bread was nothing special though. I've spent my full 27 years without white bread and can safely plan on going 27 more without eating it again. It was boring, tasteless, not to mention nutritionally void. The salad was, likewise, a little flavorless and lacking in texture, though the olives were a nice salty addition.



The cute little aparagus sandwich on sourdough was much better. The asparagus well-done and tender, the tomato spread delicious. I had to pick out the onions, but they were reportedly very good.



This sandwich though, the wonderfully chewy and textured multigrain bread, the smoky roasted red pepper hummus, the great slices of tomato and the out of control good balsamic portabello mushroom, was the favorite. When our server came around to inquire as to how sir and madams' tea was, I took the express highway to Uncouthsville and requested more of these sandwiches. I'm not sure it's policy to provide more of anything, but it's probably more a policy to not argue with the guests and though they may have grumbled in the kitchen, the waiter brought around another plate without a word, which we promptly devoured.



Sandwiches safely stowed in the rapidly filling stomach position, we embarked on the cookie plate. There were three different kind of miniature cookies. Two, the walnut cookie and the chocolate chip cookie, were very good, crunchy and rich, not overly sweet and generally highly enjoyable. The third, however, was outstanding, a gingery cookie, it was intensely flavorful and crunchy on the outside, soft and chewy on the in. I considered pushing my luck with the server on these too, but as I cast my eye over the work left to be done on the tea tray, thought better of it. The cookie level came with fresh fruit skewers too, nothing special, but a pretty way of serving a few berries.



End of season berries were also presented in this shooter of orange juice with a sugared rim. Again, nice, and a clever way of serving fruit, but I think this took the place of a rum cheesecake that was promised on the menu, so really, no comparison--I would have rather had the cheesecake. To make up for the lack of cheesecake and the delay on our poppyseed scones, however, the waiter brought us complementary glasses of a lightly fruity rosé champagne (you can see it in the background above--it was pretty), which was highly enjoyable, but, again, not cheesecake.



It was hard to really miss the cheesecake though in the face of this excellent raspberry compote cobbler. The soft sour-sweet fruit was warm and juicy, the cookie was crisp and spiced. I thought the bowls were amazingly cute plays on Asian soup spoons too.



The flaky scones were last to arrive and there was hardly room for them, but I did manage to load them up with the array of jams provided ( apricot, sour orange and blueberry) and enjoyed the light crunch of the poppy seeds and the mellow sweet and buttery taste of the scones. Our server conveyed the chef's excuse that the scones were not properly set in the middle "because they were vegan." I wanted to say that my vegan scones never had that problem and that blaming it on the veganess of the item seemed off. It was an irritating jab that made me feel like the chef found vegan food to be inferior, which likely s/he does, but it certainly wasn't something I wanted to be communicated to me in the midst of my tea time. It was the only lightly gray rain cloud in the perfect blue sky of an otherwise lovely experience.



While I was in Chicago I stayed at Ray's Bucktown B&B. The whole place was full of interesting things, but I was particularly enamored of this okra that Ray had gotten from his parent's garden. It was the best, most beautiful, and certainly the biggest okra I've ever seen.

Given a choice I will always opt to stay with friends, at a bed and breakfast or in a short-term rented apartment while traveling as opposed to staying in hotels. For one, I am not a person who can wake up and go about their day without breakfast. I need to eat in the morning, sooner is better than later, and sometimes hunting around for a place to have vegan breakfast is challenging, as is waiting until 10 or 11am for places to open on the weekends.



The very nice people at Ray's did an admirable job accommodating me with fresh veggies and different spreads of fruit every morning. The plate pictured above was a typically tasty breakfast of asparagus, peppers, mushrooms and tomato served with beans, pico de gallo and a fresh flour tortilla.



So I did eat lots of good veggies to mediate my tea time indulgences, but I also spoiled myself with a trip to Vosges, a wonderfully decadent chocolate shop in a frighteningly posh mall located on the "Magnificent Mile."

The Vosges link above will bring you to a page with their cool chocolate bars, not their homepage, which has the unfortunate image of a piece of bacon on it right now to advertise their new bacon chocolate bar. No need to thank me. Bacon chocolate aside though, Vosges has some amazing vegan chocolates, which I got to sample and delight in at the store.



I have gotten some Vosges bars in Boston, but I'd never seen the Cadlindia bar, which has dried plums and walnuts and cardamom and is certainly one of the best chocolate bars I've ever had. I got the amazing looking Aztec chili spiked drinking chocolate as a gift for a friend's birthday and rewarded myself for giving a gift I would have truly liked to have kept for myself by buying myself the red fire chocolate chips that have ancho and chipoltle chili peppers as well as cinnamon in them. Expect some devilishly good cookies soon.



With the bed and breakfast located a long but leisurely from Earwax Cafe, I found myself eating several meals there, all of which were good. The cafe itself was a really comfortable and low-key place with no-nonsense good food and seitan that everybody liked a lot, which is not always the case. The bbq seitan burrito pictured above was a good, if simple, lunch one day. The completely ordinary looking corn chips that came with it turned out to be uncommonly good in a way that I cannot account for. Perhaps they were fresh made. The real winner at Earwax though was the Tuscan Seitan sandwich. I ordered it on Marleigh's recommendation and I'll tell you, she did not steer me wrong. Give that girl a gold star and a bottle of pisco. This sandwich also deserves some kind of award. It was a deliciously flavorful sauteed seitan with basil, garlic, green olives and escarole, served on Italian bread (the only not perfect element of the sandwich--it was too...I don't know..dense? bready? something) with roasted red peppers, and sun dried tomato pesto. No picture, sorry, I was in the ecstasy of eating, plus it was dark on the outdoor patio.



And speaking of ecstasy, I must say: Chicago Diner brunch. It's not even fair to show the picture of my "beverage" because it will only serve to make you cry over the fact that you were not able to drink it yourself. Seriously: Temptation soy ice cream cookie dough milkshake with peanut butter and chocolate sauce. What? I know, I know.



The food portion of brunch was pretty kicking too. I didn't realize the volume of food that was implicated in my order because it cost less than ten dollars. It actually involved at least two meals though--with a delicious potato and tempeh hash, a really unusual tofu scramble with tahini, sesame seeds and sunflower seeds, a whole bevy of buttery biscuits covered in mushroom gray, and a little pile of fruit salad on the side. I didn't eat for the rest of the day after I finished that plate.



Oh, ok, so I did maybe have just one bite of this mocha chocolate cake, which was good, though not as coffee flavored as it should have been and served cold, which I never am a huge fan of. I prefer my cake soft and room temperature, not cold and hard and dry. I brought home a piece of cookie chocolate cake though and tried a bite of it later at room temperature and that bite convinced me that Chicago Diner cakes are truly great. I just wish they wouldn't serve them cold at the restaurant.



The final food treat that I wanted to share was a trip to Green Zebra, a highly trendy, slightly pretentious and definitely delicious restaurant. I started with a pink peppercorn and thyme soda that was a little too sweet, but intriguingly spicy and herbal. I've got a bumper crop of thyme in my window boxes that I'm looking forward to experimenting with in beverages. Granted my restaurant experiences are not particularly extensive or extremely cutting edge, but I haven't seen much of this kind of drink experimentation with spices and herbs around Boston, and I really liked it and hope to see more of it.



Soon after our drinks arrived we were offered a "bread service." There were blank looks all around as we took a moment to translate the needlessly obfuscating trendy restaurant speak to determine that we were being offered bread. Their sourdough was wonderful though and came with a bowl of fruity olive oil that was so good I hated to leave even a drop behind.



The "amuse bouche" (a French expression that can be translated loosely to mean something like "to amuse your mouth"--usually a small portion of something that is less an appetizer than a tiny showpiece from the chef) was a white asparagus puree with shaved beets and candied walnuts. I immediately wished for a cereal bowl full of it, but a taste was all we got. Like most amuse bouche, if I understand things correctly, the variety of textures was as important as the variety of flavors and together this whole spoonful sang perfectly.



It's tomato time all across the US right now and Green Zebra, itself named for my favorite heirloom tomato, was celebrating them with a special heirloom set menu, which could not be made vegan, so I contented myself with this outstanding salad. It was baby heirloom tomato pazanella with a crisp bread soaked in more of that great olive oil and scattered with mint, basil, garlic, fennel greens and garlic chives. It all rested on an intensely creamy puree that I was baffled by. I couldn't pin down the taste or texture--it was like nothing I've ever had. The waiter confirmed that it was vegan though and said it was a bread puree, consisting simply of bread, olive oil, garlic and salt. I've looked around for recipes like this, but haven't found anything analogous except perhaps a British/Irish bread sauce that is made with bread crumbs, milk, butter, cloves and onion and sounds way less appealing than this sauce was. Fortunately, a brilliant reader, Lara, pointed out to me that this sauce sounds like a Catalan sauce, picada, I think she must be right.



Green Zebra is a small plate kind of restaurant so I got to order a number of dishes. This was probably my favorite though: a savory stack of chickpea pancakes with basil and piperade (which is a recipe that comes from the Basque region and involves tomatoes and peppers), served with fried chickpeas on top. I also ordered a dish that made me think Tofu 666 (I even imagined that the chefs at Green Zebra took their inspiration from that blog). It was a plate of crush puy lentils with summer squash and roasted peppers, topped by a tempura squash blossom--very Tofu 666!

There was, properly speaking, no room for dessert, but I somehow managed to delight in sharing a dessert of chocolate coconut ice cream cake with chocolate and coconut sorbets and a chocolate sauce with passion fruit and coconut foam. Foam was a common addition to the dishes at Green Zebra. It was my first experience of what I guess is molecular gastronomy. I appreciated it for the experience, but would rather take my coconut straight up in the future.

So now, I'm back and settled in Somerville and looking forward to doing some baking tomorrow, though of course, my favorite cusp-of-fall kind of weather that we have been enjoying will give way to 90 degree fare tomorrow...I know I should be pleased with summer's last hurrah, but I'm ready for fall. Bring on the autumnal colors, the apples, the squash, the cider donuts!