The Ram Restaurant & Brewery

I was asked to pick out a restaurant near Allstate Arena in Rosemont this past weekend. The in-laws were taking the family to a Chicago Wolves game, and while I opted out of joining them (because sitting in the Allstate Arena is near impossible for me), they wanted me to join them for dinner. The only problem was Rosemont is basically expensive hotel restaurants and subpar fast food. Well, that’s the only Rosemont I’ve seen. It’s O’Hare Airport’s city, so it almost comes across as a transient place to live. So many people travel THROUGH there you almost forget people live there, too. Needless to say I didn’t know where to take them.

On a good day, it’s a tough call to randomly pick a place. When you’re trying to not let down an entire clan, there’s even more pressure you put upon yourself. While they’re far more adventurous in dining than my family is, I wouldn’t want to take them to an unknown foreign food restaurant and hope for the best.  You don’t want to hope for the best in some circumstances.

What I found was The Ram Restaurant and Brewery. It’s not a local place, but a chain found in 5 states, getting its start in Washington. What surprised me was it’s a restaurant founded by the same group of people who founded Shakey’s, a fond restaurant memory of my youth. I used to love going to Shakey’s with my family. It’s where I learned such a thing as a pizza buffet existed. It’s where I learned the upper limits of how much pizza a human body could handle.

It turns out that for a chain restaurant, the food is far above average, although I can’t necessarily say the same for the beer. Nothing much struck my fancy, with their seasonal Big Horn S’No Angel Winter Weizenbock being my favorite of the ones sampled. It was a bit darker than I prefer, but the spice went well with the food.

The appetizer we went for was almost a dare. I mean, they were called Armadillo Eggs. Made with chicken, fresh chopped jalapeños, pepperjack cheese, “secret sauce” and seasonings, they tasted mostly like deep-fried cream cheese. You couldn’t much taste the chicken (oh yeah, I eat chicken now). But for a cheese lover, I wasn’t complaining. I love jalapeno poppers and these were a tasty distant cousin to those.

Like a lot of chain restaurants, their menu is massive. They have an ample selection of burgers, sandwiches, salads and more. My choice was the Chicken Amber Ale, a chicken breast marinated in an amber ale marinade, Porter BBQ sauce, slaw, tomato, onion crisps, roasted tomato-chipotle mayonnaise and a pretzel bun. They had me at onion crisps and sold me at pretzel bun. The chicken was tender and well marinated, and the sandwich itself was a sloppy mess with all those sauces. It ended up being a fork and knife situation by the end.

While the food was tasty and received accolades all around, there was one big problem. Most, if not all, of the burgers came out under prepared. Medium Well came out mostly pink in at least 3 situations. Luckily, the people who received the mis-cooked burgers didn’t mind the extra bit of pink, but it seems like something they should pay a little more attention to something like that.

Most of us agreed we’d still go back, and with the comic con coming up in August, I now have a place to direct my friends when we need something to eat. It’s a much better alternative to walking down to McDonald’s or ordering a $7 pizza from the convention center.  I’d most likely steer them away from the burgers, just to be safe, but otherwise it’s a nice place to have a meal.

Plus you get to tell people you ate Armadillo Eggs, and that’s always worth the price of admission.

I do not like your recipes Biggest Loser

We’ve been attempting to eat healthier, and to do so we invested some money in the Biggest Loser cookbook collection. We’ve also discovered the problem with many of the diet cook books: The food is bland. Chicago magazine’s food section, Dish, had a great quote from Andy Rooney (something I never thought I’d say):

“The two biggest sellers in any bookstore are the cookbooks and the diet books. The cookbooks tell you how to prepare the food, and the diet books tell you how not to eat any of it.”

Diet cook books as a rule tend to rely on only the essential ingredients for getting you everything you need to survive. But in many cases they also sacrifice flavor in place of weight loss. I’ve always felt that you lose weight because you end up hating what your new image of food is in your head. Most of us that are overweight love the TASTE of food.  Even with a salad wouldn’t you rather have the one that includes goat cheese, cranberries, candied walnuts and apples over spinach instead of the one that’s merely lettuce, tomato and cucumber? Of course! There’s different flavors blending together. The goat cheese’s bitter mixes with the cranberries’ sweet to provide you with something that tastes good rather than just filling not only your belly but your dietary need for vegetables.

Yet all those little extra things add up calories, and that’s not even counting a dressing if you get one. All those extra calories, even at 10 here or 20 there, soon snowball into you eating far more than your daily intake should be. For someone my age height, I’m told I should weigh 200 pounds. My current LoseIt calorie limit is 2000 calories. Man that seems like more than enough food for one day!

Yet I’ve yet to find a great cookbook that learns how to balance weight loss and taste. Skinny Bitch in the Kitch has some great recipes, but I can’t vouch for how diet friendly they truly are. Weight Watchers has a vegetarian cookbook, but man, most of those recipes are just not good. And as I’ve mentioned, The Biggest Loser books have some great ideas with just okay results.

Instead, like the recipe below, we’re learning to adapt things to have a little more flavor. Sure the calories may increase, but at least we’re trying to make a difference in our lives. The recipe started as a healthy Biggest Loser chicken cheese steak sandwich. The closer we got to finished, the more we realized this was going to be a bland meal. So what started as a cheese steak turned into a shredded chicken BBQ sandwich. We switched out fat-free cheese with fresh Muenster. We added salt and pepper. We made it taste better at the sacrifice of strictly adhering to the idea of losing weight. But how many sacrifices do you make before you’re once again fighting over what you weigh and what you want to weigh?

Anyone have any good weight loss/diet cookbook recommendations?

Shredded Chicken BBQ Sandwich

• 1 cup white onion, quartered and thinly sliced
• 16 oz Trader Joe’s Chicken-less Strips
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp pepper
• 1/2 cup BBQ sauce
• 4 slices cheese of your choice
• 8 ounce baguette, or sandwich roll of choice
• 2 tablespoons olive oil

Heat the oil in a pan. Once hot, add the onions and cook over medium heat until soft, about 9-10 minutes. While the onions are cooking, shred/slice the chicken into thin strips. Add the chicken to the onions once onions are soft.  Add BBQ sauce,  salt and pepper. Mix thoroughly and cook until chicken is hot throughout.  Slice the bread into 4 equal servings (about 2 ounces per roll) and heat in the oven or microwave. Fill each roll with chicken mixture and lay a slice of cheese on top. Heat in oven or microwave until cheese is melted.  Serve.

Makes 4 sandwiches (3 if you were as hungry as we were)

Tilted Kilt – Chicago, IL

p. David Kadlubowski - The Arizona Republic

I don’t even know if I can accurately review Tilted Kilt, the recently opened Loop sports bar at 17 N. Wabash.  I mean, for someone like me, I know how to search for all the T&A I need online.  And the best part is it’s free.  I don’t feel obligated to buy an appetizer or beer so I don’t feel quite so skeevy going in to gawk at the breasts and butts on display.  Let’s be honest, that’s pretty much the only reason this bar exists.  It’s like the dream bar for someone who wanted a slightly higher class Hooters; while also harboring a dark fetish for short kilts.  And it is a fetish, because that’s the closest thing to Celtic or Irish that exists in this place.

Don’t get me wrong, you can never go wrong with the baring of flesh, but in today’s world when burlesque shows and strip clubs are so mainstream, do we have to masquerade our need to see boobs under the thin disguise of being a sports bar?  At least when you go to a strip club everyone knows the score.  You’re there to see nudity; and the women (or men) are there to take your money.  At Tilted Kilt you can’t help but feel just the slightest bit dirty trying to covertly sneak a peak at some cleavage, or gawk at the legs on display underneath the kilt.  It upsets the balance between restaurant and strip club.  You want to stare but you feel like you’re breaking the unwritten laws of not leering at your restaurant server.

The food is tertiary to the drinks which follows a distant second to the T&A.  The service is what it is.  In our case, it was mediocre at best.  The waitress was eager to serve, stopping by several times while we looked over the menu.  But once the food arrived she disappeared, which was a problem since the order was wrong.  Katie’s pulled-pork sandwich, ordered without coleslaw, looked like the kitchen realized after they put it on the sandwich it shouldn’t be there.  Pieces of coleslaw seemed hidden inside the pork.  It took 10 minutes to flag down the waitress, and another 30 minutes to finally get a replacement burger which we asked for to go at that point.

p. AZ Central

Vegetarians, unless you’re looking for a “celtic” restaurant that serves pizza, give it a pass.  The pizza was good, but nothing memorable.  I probably would have enjoyed it more if I wasn’t so pissed that I had to eat my meal in front of Katie while she waited for the sandwich.  Once she finally did get her pulled pork she was pretty disappointed, giving it the “it’s a sandwich alright” review.

Sure it’s fun to be titillated, and the short plaid skirts fill out the school-girl fantasy most men are ashamed to admit they have; but when the talk in front of a restaurant/bar is “DUDE, I *TOTALLY* saw some nip!”, eventually the lure of boobs will wear off, and what will the place be left with?

17 N Wabash Ave
Chicago, IL 60602
(312) 269-5580‎

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Cafecito – Chicago, IL

Cafecito Menu

Being a vegetarian, I cannot tell you if the South Loop’s Cafecito is a place to get a good cubano sandwich.  Many people would even wonder why I would try to review a place with a culture so heavily based on a perfectly made ham sandwich.  Well, I’m here to say that while I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the traditional cubano, I can say that their Jardin sandwich is probably one of the better all-vegetable sandwiches I’ve eaten.

But before I discuss the food, let me tell you about the ultimate reason to venture down to Congress and Wabash: the hot chocolate and the cafecito.  Without any hyperbole in my heart, I am not afraid to say Cafecito’s Hot Chocolate may be THE GREATEST HOT CHOCOLATE IN THE WORLD.

Sweet to the point of no return, using only whole milk, and with hints of cinnamon, vanilla and almond, the drink is the perfect type of cold weather comfort beverage.  When I spoke with the owner he told me his original plans were to shave chocolate fresh, but realized his customers could get antsy waiting for that kind of service.  Instead he searched around for everything he was looking for but in a hot chocolate mix.

The cafecitos are small, but priced accordingly.  It was 1.59 for a double cafecito.  The best part was that it held the bitter of the coffee, yet was incredibly sweet thanks to the tablespoon of sugar used in each cup; a perfect mix for someone like me who still can’t quite get past the coffee taste of coffee.

Katie went with the traditional cubano, a pressed sandwich full of pork, ham, swiss, pickles and mustard. Sans pickle (because as stated previously they are of the devil) the sandwich earned several orgasmic eye rolls and a couple thumbs up along the way from her.  And she’s not alone, Time Out Chicago has voted it the best Cuban sandwich in town.

You’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t get a Jardin sandwich either.  Pressing the vegetables still cooks them evenly, but saves them the terrible fate that suffers most veggie sandwiches: tasting like grill.  The individual flavors of the eggplant, roasted peppers, arugla, mushrooms, mozzarella and jalapeno hummus actually get a chance to do their jobs to a delicious end.  My only complaint is that I would have preferred a little more hummus to ramp up the spice a degree or two.

Cafecito also offers nearly a dozen types of salad to go along with your sandwich, from caprese to hearts of palm.  All come in a generous portion for the price.  The hearts of palm salad had a little too much vinegar for my tastes, but I’ve always had more of a sweet tooth.

What may be the best thing that Cafecito has going for it though is the friendliness of its owner, Philip Ghantous.  He took the time to not only explain his drinks to us, but also his pastries.  He originally forgot my salad, apologizing profusely, letting us know that his parents had just stopped in causing his brain “to forget how to work.”

With affordable prices, perfect for the college area location it resides in, friendly service, and good food, Cafecito has earned a couple repeat customers.  And I’d like to think that my reward for walking down to the South Loop is that delicious hot chocolate and it’s unhealthy caloric intake.

26 E. Congress Pkwy
Chicago, IL 60605
(312) 922-2233

De.li.cious Cafe – Chicago, IL

If only I were a coffee-nerd.  I think I’d feel right at home at De.li.cious Cafe up in North Center if I enjoyed coffee as much as Kevin Porter does.  Because, the dude loves coffee.  He has that glimmer in his eye when he describes the Chemex system they have.  I had to nod my head as if I knew what he was talking about.  I have a Senseo machine at home that I got for free.  I don’t love coffee as much as Kevin Porter.  But I’m okay with that.

Even if you don’t love coffee, there’s still plenty to like about the small cafe that took over the old Stubbs stomping grounds.  The menu is simple and affordable, and between Kevin and his wife Chelsea there’s enough friendliness to go around.

The sandwiches are something your mom would make, from the easy grilled cheese, to the artery clogging PB&J with bananas.  I personally went for the tofu eggless egg salad.  I have a history with tofu versions of egg salads.  I don’t like most of them.  But I have to say, Chelsea succeeded where places like Whole Foods failed.  It wasn’t over seasoned, and relied mostly on the texture of the salad to win you over.  Mission accomplished.  Achievement unlocked.  I’m a fan.

The desserts are awesome;  brought in from the soon-to-open Fritz Pastry (www.twitter.com/fritzpastry).  We know the propieters-in-waiting for Fritz, so we expected nothing less.  The chocolate cake was absolutely delicious, sweet but not overly so.  The best part?  Treats like cupcakes aren’t 4 dollars a pop.  They’re actually affordable at TWO DOLLARS.  You can get TWO cupcakes for the price of one couture treat.  Spend 4 dollars and you get an ENTIRE cake slice.  Who ever heard of affordable pastries in this crazy couture world?

I can’t wait to see how De.li.cious grows.  There’s already talk of coffee tastings, but I’m interested to see if the menu expands.  I’d love to see some vegetarian soups to go along with the sandwiches.  It would be a great little lunch combo for vegetarians.

And how was the coffee?  Let me just say that Katie, avowed coffee hater, quite enjoyed the sip of my latte.  So that should say something.

Eggless Egg Salad