A guide to Hyde Park
...by someone who has never lived, studied, or worked there
Short updates:
We’re expecting a 2nd child in October.
Hyde Park, for those not familiar with Chicago, is a neighborhood in the South Side best known for housing the University of Chicago campus. I’d visited Hyde Park before I moved to Chicago, and since moving here, my girlfriend-then-wife has been working at the university, so I’ve spent quite a few days in the neighborhood1.
A big gap in my knowledge is what happens there at night. I’ve never lived in Hyde Park, and it’s not a regular dinner destination for us. Also, my exploration is mostly around the university, and there’s lots happening around 53rd Street that I’m less aware of.
With these caveats out of the way, here’s what I like to do in Hyde Park. I would love to get other people’s favorites as well.
Map of the places I talk about below.
Coffee
As you can expect for a college town, there’s tons of coffeeshops in Hyde Park, including some run on campus by students. But Plein Air Cafe stands above the rest, serving some of the best coffee in the city.
I trust a small minority of coffeeshops to make actually good espresso, i.e. you can drink it without adding a lot of other flavors to hide the bad coffee taste. Plein Air is one of them. From their pastries, I usually get the hazelnut beignets since I don’t see that anywhere else. Breakfast and lunch are mostly what you’d expect for a cafe—sandwich, omelet , etc.—but they’re also very good.
The only downside here is that it does get very busy at times. When the weather is nice, you can sit outside, looking right at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House (which has tours).
Books
Plein Air is in the same building as the Seminary Co-op, which may be the best academic bookstore in the US.
The bookstore was founded by students at the Chicago Theological Seminary and was located in the basement of the seminary, hence the name. It was in that basement until 2012, when they moved to a way better-lit space next door (photo above). The previous location definitely had more character (below).
The Co-op also runs 57th Street Books, which is a great bookstore for general readers. There’s also used bookstores, which I haven’t really explored recently.
Lunch
The most fun lunch option on campus is to grab something from the food trucks on Ellis Avenue just north of 59th Street. I believe this is where I had Fat Shallot for the first time.
Now that Fat Shallot has permanent locations in Merchandise Mart and Lincoln Park (and more), I’m trying other trucks. The university newspaper ranked the food trucks in 2019 and 2023, and one thing to note is that a lot of the 2019 food trucks have done well enough to have physical locations now. My wife used to be a regular at the Izakaya Yume food truck that served sushi burritos (“sushirritos”) and got to know the chef’s wife who was regularly working at the food truck. They are busy cooking at higher price points now.
There’s at least 2 other nice dining options that are hidden away on campus. One is HaiSous chef Thai Dang’s Cà Phê Đá in Eckhardt Research Center. They serve pho, banh mi, and multiple kinds of Vietnamese coffee.
The other one is Wazwan2 in Reynolds Club. This one is especially sneaky, because you need to use the campus dining feature on Grubhub (as a guest, for most of you) in order to get the food. THC3 sando is their signature dish. (Update 2024-06-17: Apparently Wazwan has left Reynolds Club.)
Museums
I’ve now been to all 3 museums affiliated with the university: Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures (ISAC) Museum, Smart Museum of Art, and the Renaissance Society. I talked about the Smart Museum last time. I haven’t been to the Renaissance Society recently, and I’ll just say it’s cool that there’s a contemporary art gallery in an 1892 neo-Gothic university building (Cobb Hall).
That leaves us with the ISAC Museum, which impressed me when I finally went inside last year. ISAC used to be called the Oriental Institute, and that is actually specific and accurate—they study ancient West Asia and North Africa. There’s a well-organized collection from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Persia, and so on. I learned a lot4.
There’s also a lot here that made me think, “wow, I knew archaeologists back then just took stuff home, but I didn’t know they were in Chicago too, and not just London and Paris and New York”.
Dinner
It’s hard not to start with Virtue, a Southern restaurant on 53rd Street. We’ve been there twice, and the standards have been high on every dish. Their portions can be quite big for a fine dining restaurant. That might be a positive for some.
During the pandemic, we got takeout from Nella Pizza e Pasta once, and it was very good. My wife has been back multiple times, but I need to go eat on site. They do serve pizza and pasta, and the pizza is Neapolitan.
One map of Chicago
I can’t not talk about this if I have a whole post on Hyde Park.
There’s a saying that there is one map of Chicago. If you plot any kind of socioeconomic variables on a map—income, crime, education, anything really—you end up with a map that shows a clear divide between wealthier, predominantly-white areas vs poorer, predominantly-minority areas in the city. Here’s one I saw recently.
Blue and green are the college graduates, and yellow-orange-red are people without college degrees. There’s a clear divide between the North Side vs the South and West Sides. Easy question: find Hyde Park on the South Side. It’s actually the bluest part of the map, in the middle of yellow-ish areas.
I know a lot of UChicago students are told not to step outside Hyde Park because it’s dangerous. It is true that the crime rate is high outside Hyde Park, and that they would probably be ripe targets. But stepping back, it’s also a self-perpetuating phenomenon. Nice neighborhoods are nice so they get more people and money. Bad neighborhoods are bad so they don’t.
Hopefully I’ll have more to say on this.
What I’m listening to now
Recently someone asked me what my favorite concert ever was. I had to think for a bit, but I went with the time I saw Chick Corea and Béla Fleck together5.
This was in 2019, and they were scheduled to play at the Symphony Center; I don’t think I had tickets for it. As it turns out, there was a strike by the Chicago Symphony musicians at that time, and all shows at the Symphony Center during that time were cancelled. Chick and Béla played instead at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Lincoln Square. Old Town is my favorite concert venue in Chicago, and we had seen Béla with his wife Abigail Washburn in 2018. I’m sure his connection was a big part of how they got to play there on somewhat short notice.
A huge implication of this change in venue was that they were playing in front of maybe 400 people instead of 2500. We got to see them from 25 feet away. This also ended up being the last time I could’ve seen Chick Corea, who died in 2021.
Remembrance is the last album from their collaboration that was released last month. There’s pieces written by both of them, along with Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” and “Scarlatti Sonatas”, a take on classical music from 2 people who like jumping over genre boundaries.
“Bemsha Swing” is definitely a highlight. I remember Béla during the concert saying how Chick taught him a lot of Monk, and I’m pretty sure they played this piece then. I like how much Chick’s solo in the first half plays off of Béla’s banjo. Béla follows with an appropriately angular solo, then after trading solos, there’s a segment where they’re both improvising.
The 5 “impromptu”s also show them improvising together. Watching them throw ideas off of each other was so fun live, and listening to these gets close.
I ran a 5K in Hyde Park now that I think about it. My wife and I also went there on the first day that we met.
The website is for Lilac Tiger, which replaced Wazwan in Wicker Park with the same chef.
Tandoori honey chicken. Sorry to disappoint.
Although I’m still not clear on the geography of Iran/Persia and why cities arose where they did.
It gets tougher the more I think about it. How about the first time I saw Toumani Diabaté, in Seattle? Or when the opener Rhiannon Giddens upstaged Béla Fleck in Northampton, Massachusetts? Weyes Blood in Thalia Hall, opened by Helena Deland?
Solid guide ;) I might have also included Court Theatre and the site of the first ferris wheel. And the Carillon, and Promontory Point, and MSI, and the Nuclear Energy Sculpture, and... :P
Congrats! I really love the food at Daisy's Po-Boys (owned by the same chef who runs Virtue). The pan pizza at Medici on 57th - a Hyde Park classic - and Powell's right down the street is an amazing book store for new and used.