Dinner theater at EL Ideas

I was just in Chicago for a conference, and, having always meant to go to a highly touted experimental restaurant in the Chicago style, made a reservation — sorry, I mean “got tickets” — for EL Ideas.

To get this out of the way first — yes, the food was good.  Very, very good.  But I don’t actually want to talk about the food!  Lots of restaurants have good food.  What’s really interesting about EL Ideas is the way it merges the idea of “restaurant” with the idea of “theater.”

There’s no menu — each of the 24 diners eats the same thing at the same time, so that, as in a play, everyone in the room is having the same experience.  Before the meal begins, the chef/impresario/director/producer pops out from the kitchen to tell you that this isn’t going to be the usual stuffy expensive restaurant deal — he wants you to wander into the kitchen and ask what’s going on, he wants you to really get into it.  He warns that you should summon an Uber car rather than trying to walk home through the somewhat desolate neighborhood because if you did the latter “you might die.”  In other words:  we are the ones hip enough to be in this neighborhood, to feel a  little frisson of danger, though nothing you can’t dispel with an app!  (In fact, I cannot say the crowd looked notably hip — my dinner companions were younger than me, but most other people looked old and rich, one more thing EL Ideas has in common with the theater.)

Before each dish is presented, the chef gives a little introduction, during which you are supposed to be quiet — if you talk while the he’s talking, the chef warns, you might get thrown out.  Just like the theater.

You don’t exactly get a reservation here; you purchase the meal in advance, as with a ticket to a show.

And at the end everyone claps!

When I was younger, I used to go to plays a lot.  OK, not a lot.  But I probably saw three to five plays a year, and even then I think most people I knew weren’t going.  Now I never go to plays; for all I know, I may never see a play again.

But EL Ideas makes me think that there are things people want from plays, and these are things that people who never go to plays sense, consciously or not, that they still want, and so something wonderful happens — the theater, seemingly made extinct by other, nimbler forms of entertainment, spores out into the atmosphere and embeds itself in another cultural host.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The best breakfast sandwich in Madison is the Breakfast Ricardo at Cafe Cortadito

Brand new at 418 E. Wilson, sharing space with the Cardinal bar.  Madison has not had a really good Cuban sandwich the whole time I’ve lived here; this seems very likely to have changed, if the Breakfast Ricardo at Cortadito is any indication; it’s a lot like a cubano, except it’s on a round Cuban sweet roll instead of grilled bread, and there’s an egg on it.  It is worth a special trip.

Cortadito is still working out some kinks; my croquettes were cold in the middle, and the kitchen forgot the guava pastelito I ordered with my sandwich.  I was going to comment that the fried plantains were more like potato chips than the dark, sweet long-cut plantains I was expecting, but it turns out that’s just the difference between tostones and maduros, and both are totally reasonable interpretations of “fried plantains.”

But who cares about that because as I mentioned this is the best breakfast sandwich in the city.

 

Mean beef stroganoff

You know, my mom is a distinguished scientist, and she, too, made a mean beef stroganoff when I was a kid.  Of course, it was “skid road stroganoff” from Peg Bracken’s classic I Hate To Cook Book, friend to working scientists of all genders with small kids and twenty minutes to get dinner on the table.  Wouldn’t it be great if that’s what Yvonne Brill made, too?  I truly love this dish and I make it for my own family every once in a while, but the sad truth is that only AB and I actually like it, and AB is not picky.  

Skid Road Stroganoff

8 ounces uncooked noodles (about 4 1/2 cups)
1 beef bouillon cube
1 garlic clove, minced
1/3 cup onion, chopped
2 tablespoons cooking oil
1 pound ground beef
2 tablespoons flour
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon paprika
Two 3-ounce cans mushrooms
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup, undiluted
1 cup sour cream
Chopped parsley

Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Ad the flour, salt, paprika, mushrooms and tomato paste, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink. Then add the soup and simmer it – in other words, cook on low flame under boiling point – 10 minutes. Now stir in the sour cream – keeping the heat low, so it won’t curdle – and let it all heat through. To serve it, pile the noodles on a platter, pile the stroganoff mix on top of the noodles, and sprinkle chopped parsley around with a lavish hand.

Madison pastrami report, sadly brief

Stalzy’s is a new east-side deli that makes its deli meats in-house.  Stalzy’s pastrami is very good, but is not exactly pastrami.  It is, instead, what someone very skilled at making barbecue would make if someone gave them a recipe for pastrami.

Gotham Bagels remains the only real pastrami option, but I’m pretty sure they sell only by the sandwich, not by the pound.  Update:  Ben Tillman, in the comments, corrects me — Gotham does sell pastrami a la carte, at $18/lb.  So that’s next Passover taken care of.

Do not I repeat do not go to Ella’s.

Even Ian nods

Readers of this blog know I am a major booster of Ian’s Pizza, so I was thrilled a few months ago when Ian Gurfield announced he was opening a more upscale pizza place, S2 Pizzabar, just a few blocks from campus.  And S2 Pizzabar lived up to my expectations, serving individual-sized pizzas on a good thin crust with locally sourced toppings in a big handsome bricky room.  At last the cursed address, home to dead restuarants Opa, Maza, and the Saz, could serve lunch in peace!

But no — apparently even Ian couldn’t make a living at 558 State, and S2 Pizzabar will close on March 17.  The place was pretty full both times I ate there; I’d be curious to know in more detail what made this business fail so quickly.  Even Opa lasted longer, and Opa was always kind of empty and confused.

If you’re on State in the next couple of weeks, stop in and get a pizza while you still can; it’s good pizza and I’ll miss it.

 

Olive oil and nuts beat a low-fat diet that’s not low-fat

Great-looking results from a big randomized diet study reported today in the New York Times:

About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study has found….

Scientists randomly assigned 7,447 people in Spain who were overweight, were smokers, or had diabetes or other risk factors for heart disease to follow the Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one.

Low-fat diets have not been shown in any rigorous way to be helpful, and they are also very hard for patients to maintain — a reality borne out in the new study, said Dr. Steven E. Nissen, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.

Now, I am not a low-fat dude.  Long ago I dated somebody who was into Dean Ornish and every time she “sauteed” onions in water a little piece of me died.  I pour a lot of olive oil on things, because I like it (especially Frantoia, which the guys at the Italian grocery in the Trenton Farmer’s Market turned me on to when I lived in Princeton) and because mainstream nutritional wisdom has been promoting monounsaturated fats for a long time now.  But I do think low-fat gets kind of a bad rap from the NYT piece.  Even more so in some of the other coverage, like the LA Times, which headlines their story “Mediterranean diet, with olive oil and nuts, beats low-fat diet.”  The Times, at least, points out far down in the piece that the “low-fat” group, while counseled to reduce fat, didn’t actually do so.  To get numbers, you have to go to the supplemental material of the original paper.  There, you find that the Mediterranean eaters were getting 41% of their calories from fat, while the “low-fat” arm got 37%.  A low-fat diet is 22%.  Random googling suggests that most vegans are getting 20%-30% of their calories from fat.

In other words, the study doesn’t really show that the Mediterranean diet is better for you than eating low-fat; it shows that hardly anybody is capable of eating low-fat, which is a different thing entirely.

Mabuhay is worth a try

Years ago I wondered where all the Filipino restaurants were.  Now there’s one in Madison!  Mabuhay, at 1272 South Park in the same strip mall with the Taj, is a small operation, no waiters, just a husband-and-wife team and a small buffet. The atmosphere is very casual (mismatched plates, bottles of sauce still with the price tags on them from the supermarket) but the food is pretty serious.  Not fancy, but homey and good.   I liked a fried, smoky fish something like a big sardine, and the split pea soup with fish chunks and vegetables, but my favorite dish was a simple one, just little chunks of grilled meat in a sweet, dark brown glaze.  I could have eaten three plates of this stuff (where I hope it’s understood that  ”could have eaten” means “did in fact eat.”)  None of the dishes are labeled so I don’t know what it’s called, but it looked a lot like the Filipino barbecue described here; if that’s what it is, then the glaze is made of soy sauce, brown sugar, lemon juice, ketchup, and a lot of 7-Up.

Now that is home cooking.

Update:  On my last trip I asked the chef and she confirmed, yep, it’s 7-Up barbecue I was eating.  While researching this point I also learned that 7-Up contained the mood stabilizer lithium citrate until 1950, which makes you wonder why they didn’t call it 7-Neither-Up-Nor-Down.

Mabuhay also sometimes serves laing, which is much better than the linked photo makes it look.

Blogging as competitive eating

I’m told that one trick to the astonishing feats carried out by world-class competitive eaters is that your satiety sensor is on something like a twenty-minute delay; so you can really pack an immense amount of food into your body before your brain realizes you’re doing something your stomach doesn’t want you to do.

I was talking to a colleague who wants to start a blog and asked for some advice, and I realized that blogging is kind of like this, too.  My math posts are very casual and full of mistakes, and the reason is that my practice is to write a post as soon as it occurs to me — I then have about a half hour before my brain says “Wait, you’re supposed to be working right now.”  So in that half hour I have to write as fast as I can, like Kobayashi smashing hot dogs into his mouth.

Yes, this is me blogging:

Is this a good time to mention that I once drank a gallon of milk in four minutes?  Here are my tips for success at this important task:

• Filling and chugging and refilling and rechugging a glass, rather than drinking straight from the jug; this makes it more like doing a normal thing ten times in very short succession, rather than the abnormal and stupid thing that you are actually doing;
• Not knowing it’s supposed to be impossible;
• Being 16.

Beef Rendang

Mostly so I don’t forget:  this beef rendang recipe was sensational.  I tweaked it a lot — no chilis because my wife and kids don’t eat spicy, no fennel seeds because I have no fennel seeds, and I cooked it in the crockpot, which made the texture more like a rich beef stew than classical rendang.  But it tasted great and both children were into it, so into the rotation it goes.

Corn and sweet potato chowder

Dinner tonight, cobbled together from various recipes found online:

4 cobs sweet corn

1 medium sweet potato

1 onion

2 cloves garlic

2 scallions

1 red pepper

1 jalapeno

1/4 c butter

1/4 c flour

4 c whole milk

salt, pepper, cumin

Recipe:  Preheat oven to 450.  Scrape corn kernels off the cobs.  Melt butter in pan, add flour, cook until it is roux.  Add a little more butter if needed and saute diced onion and garlic about 5 min until soft.  Add milk and kernel-less cobs.  Remove ribs and seeds from jalapeno and add it whole.  This is going to simmer about 30 mins. and meanwhile you are cutting up the sweet potato and red pepper and scallion and roasting them with the corn kernels until everything is slightly charred and smoky.  That being done, take some of the sweet potatoes and puree them with some soup to make a nice orange-brown paste.  Throw out the cobs and the jalapenos and put the sweet potato paste, red peppers, corn, and scallions in the soup.  Heat through, season with salt, pepper, cumin to taste.

Notes:  It’s not clear to me that the jalapeno added anything.  Also, it was too thick; next time I might skip the roux.

Update:  Skipped the roux, dropped the jalapeno, added a chopped/seeded Anaheim to the red pepper, even better.

Soup looked like this: