Chicago, Days 3-4

(August 13th-14th, 2012) With the start of the work week, and my attention turning to the actual point of me being in Chicago, my culinary excursions became significantly fewer and farther between.  Sure, we had a few interesting stops, such as at Chef Luciano's, but not too much worth writing home about.  One of the big reasons was that the conference center was extremely poorly located.  The number of places that you could go out to during your short lunch break were quite pitiful.  If you gave up the notion of making it back in time for the first session after lunch, though, you could head down to Chicago's Chinatown and enjoy a restaurant like Lao Hunan.

Lao Hunan has character.  No question about that.  The wall is adorned with an image of Chairman Mao on one side, and famous people from Hunan on the other.  And the waitresses?  They're all in red guard uniforms.  To complete the theme, pictures aren't allowed.  Seriously.  But, of course, here're a few:

Basil Eggplant

Spicy and Crispy Chicken

I ate at Lao Hunan twice (it was worth going back, plus I was determined to take some pictures after not getting any the first visit).  First time was with Mike Starr and a colleague of ours from England...we ended up ordering the winter melon in mashed dual chili sauce (if you can picture that, it's definitely not what you've got in your head...), Chinese broccoli in oyster sauce (a favorite of mine, yum!), and boiled fish fillet in spicy Sichuan sauce (probably the best of the three dishes).  The second time I went was with my two German colleagues, Bernhard Stingl and Pascal Reuss.  After learning my lesson with Mike about how many dishes to order, we just went with the two pictured above.

Another small side track one evening during the early part of the week was to Flo and Santos.  In an effort to compromise and make everyone happy, we ended up making a sub-optimal choice.  I mean, who goes to Chicago and gets thin crust pizza?  We did apparently:

Flo and Santos Pizza

It was a pretty good experience overall though.  I satisfied a pierogis craving that's been with me since a few weeks after the last time I was in Pittsburgh, and somehow, letting Mike choose the meat pizza for Rob and I to eat didn't backfire.  We ended up getting: pierogis - 2x potato and cheese, meat, and sauerkraut and mushroom served with sour cram and apple sauce; Flo's Polish pizza with polska kielbasa, sauerkraut, apple wood smoked bacon; Na Ma's Veggie pizza with spinach, tomatoes, onions, green peppers, black olives, mushroom.  Pictured above are the two pizzas...the pierogis didn't last long enough to be photographed.

The rest of the week in Chicago was much more relaxed...instead of the conference and it's rigid schedule, we had a workshop to attend...and here I caught myself before it was too late and I started going on about work...the nice thing about the workshop was that it afforded us a bit more down time to actually enjoy the city (aside from all the running I was doing at the crack of dawn).  The fifth day in Chicago (tomorrow's post), was especially relaxed as it was only a half day of conference with the workshop not starting until the next day...