Short updates:
Last month, I dropped my personal laptop and broke the screen, which led to me not having access to my computer for more than a week, which led to me re-evaluating and rearranging my routines. We’ll see how that goes now that I have my computer back, but I did finish 3 books while it was gone.
In the coming weeks, you might hear about Chicago in the context of the US President sending in troops, supposedly to fight crime, and increasing immigration crackdowns in the area. I just want to make a few comments. 1. Sending troops for civilian law enforcement is illegal. 2. Even if it was legal, troops aren’t trained to deal with crime so that’s not a serious solution. 3. Crime has been going down in Chicago1. 4. Immigrants make Chicago great, and America great.
OK, end of rant, and back to the regular programming.
Last summer, I wrote about going to Dear Margaret for our anniversary.
We really enjoyed it, but I also wanted to go back at a different time of the year because their menu highlights seasonal produce. So where else to go this time? I mentioned that there was a place that we’d wanted to go where we couldn’t book a reservation. We made it there this year.
Maxwells Trading
A big reason we wanted to do Maxwells Trading for our anniversary was that Erling Wu-Bower runs this restaurant, and he was the chef at Nico Osteria, a now-closed Italian place where we had our wedding lunch. He’s actually not working in the kitchen, and we saw him, in a dress jacket and obviously not cooking, greeting guests during our visit, but he’s involved in developing the menu.
It’s been more than a month, and the menu has changed a bit. I’ll go through 3 out of the 5 savory dishes we had that are still on the menu, since those also happen to be highlights.
My understanding is that the suzuki tartare is their best-selling dish, and it’s always on the menu. Compared to my expectations given that information, the chili was a lot stronger. And the lemongrass was a lot stronger. It’s a really interesting dish to be the best-selling one.
Out of the dishes we tried, the brûléed Japanese sweet potato seemed the most emblematic of Maxwells Trading. This had sweet (sweet potato and the caramelized sugar), sour (pickled onion/shallot), spicy (Thai red curry), and even bitter (some of the scorched sugar). The brûlée thing might look like it’s just for show, but it was doing a lot of work.
The best thing I had, though, was the Japanese eggplant with confit tomato. This was a dip served with their homemade bread. Tomato and basil are a classic combination, and here you get a huge boost of umami from the eggplant. It tasted like summer.
I really enjoyed the meal. It’s clearly fusion cuisine with strong Asian influences, but I didn’t feel like any of the interesting combinations were forced. Proxi is the only other place that comes to mind that does something similar in Chicago at a very high level, and I preferred my Maxwells Trading experience.
Interestingly, 4 out of our 5 savory dishes and the dessert (Basque butter cake) came with basil—you can see how much they put on the eggplant dish. I told Julie that their rooftop must be drowning in basil. It was a joke but it really must have been true. The restaurant does have a rooftop garden, and some of what’s served comes from there.
You probably couldn’t do this in a buzzier part of town. Maxwell Trading is technically in West Loop, but it’s on the far western end of the neighborhood between Ogden and Ashland, where there really aren’t other restaurants. The development of West Loop could be the topic of a whole another post.
One final comment on the restaurant is that we saw 2 groups with kids eating here, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves just fine. It’s always nice when a fine-dining restaurant makes an effort to be welcoming in this respect—we might take advantage someday.
Confit tomatoes
Now, I want to get back to those confit tomatoes.
I’ve been looking more into preserving and pickling recently2. There’s multiple ways of saving tomatoes, but making confit is one of them—confit (with a silent “t”) meaning cooking slowly in oil. With this method, it’s really magical how concentrated the flavors become. This is an algorithm for saving the abundance of summer for the leaner seasons3.
has a really nice recipe. He says to cook it on the stove, but I highly recommend putting the ingredients together in an oven-safe pan and cooking in the oven—it’s less work.Once you make these, you could use them as a dip, like Maxwells Trading and Ottolenghi. You could make pasta sauce with them. You could use it as topping in a sandwich, omelet, etc. Or you could also just have them as a side dish.
What I’m listening to now
Tabla Dhi, Tabla Dha is a new album from the Japanese musician U-zhaan, who plays the tabla, which are Indian drums4. The title seems to be a reference to, well, tabla, obviously, but also the way they use spoken syllables to describe notes on the instrument—there’s a lot of different tones that the musician achieves by hitting various parts of the drums in various ways.
U-zhaan plays in all the tracks, but the diversity of the music here is something else. The album starts off with a track featuring the Japanese hip-hop artist Chinza Dopeness, who begins by reciting the Japanese ABCs5. The interplay between the guest and U-zhaan’s tabla is very pleasing, and that’s a constant feature of the album.
The 2nd track was my entry point to this album because of Cornelius, the Japanese experimental pop artist who is featured here. It does sound like a Cornelius track, but with Indian percussions.
There’s the silly but well-executed ode to going out to an izakaya with friends (track 5), a remix of a song with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto (track 6), another hip-hop track but with a Bengali artist (track 7), cover of an old-school anime theme song (track 8), and finally a more traditional collaboration with a sitar player (track 9).
This was a really fun album with all kinds of music.
I shouldn’t have to say this, but crime is a problem in Chicago, which has more murders than New York City, which is still less safe than any big Japanese city. What I’m saying is that a serious person cannot say the problem is getting worse, and that someone who talks about sending the military is not seriously interested in solving the problem.
Update: Just after publishing this, I read Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s op-ed in the New York Times. It’s a good piece that talks about what the city has been doing.
One thing I forgot to mention in the “rebranding” post for the newsletter is that I should write more about home cooking.
Making sure to submerge the tomatoes in the cooking oil, you can keep them in the fridge for weeks, and in the freezer for months. One caveat is that if you use a recipe with garlic, there’s a risk of botulism, which likes anaerobic and non-acidic environments, so you don’t want to store that for too long.
My only other real exposure to the tabla is through the late, great Zakir Hussain, whom I saw play with Béla Fleck et al. at Millennium Park last year.
This part reminded me of “Aiueo”, the last track of Happy End’s masterpiece Kazemachi Roman.