That’s Matt Smith, Blue Valley Gardens
Right now, I am missing the last outdoor Dane County Farmer’s Market. I’m in Chicago to take Al out to dinner for his 27th birthday, which was just a little over a week ago. I’m not doing so well at taking pictures – and, even worse, looks like I never even posted about my last Chicago trip. That one was in mid-October. I got the 1:00 bus from Madison on a Tuesday afternoon, and we went to see the Chicago Symphony that night. There was a guest conductor, Semyon Bychkov, and he had big hair, curly, and the soloist, Renaud Capuçon, violin, also had big hair – he was very French, big forelock.
On Wednesday morning I met Al for coffee. I had lugged a foot bath and bag of accessories (probably handmade soap) an early birthday gift from (his girlfriend) Emma’s mom on the bus, and I wanted to deliver the stuff. We went to a place I’d never been to before, that’s a Chicago limited chain – Dollop. I got a PB&J with my coffee and it was pretty much like what I would’ve made at home, bread sliced off some kind of whole grain boule, toasted, with natural peanut butter and black berry jam. The coffee was good too. I came back to the apartment and graded websites for as long as I could stand it (actually what I’m supposed to be doing now, too). We went to dinner with our friend Joe, who’s on sabbatical, so he can travel around to places where people he likes live, at Viaggio. Which turned out to be a good, traditional, Italian Chicago neighborhood place. Bread with powdery Parmesan, olive oil, roasted peppers and olives. They’re known for their meatballs, which are the fluffy kind. We all started with salads and then had pasta – Joe got the vodka sauce with sausages added, Mark had Bolognese, and I had the Sunday gravy – shredded pork in tomato sauce with a blop of ricotta in the middle.
What’s reminding me of all that is that last night, we stopped for dinner at Cochon Volant, a newish place in a Hyatt on Monroe St. I wanted to go there because I read that the executive chef is Roland Liccioni, who, 25 years ago when I lived in Chicago, had a fancy prixe fix restaurant in Wheeling IL, called Le Francais – that we always talked about going to, when my parents visited, but it was a 2-hour seating and long drive and what would we do with the kids ….. Cochon Volant sounded ever so much more accessible. And it was, good French bistro food. We split a Caesar, that came with potato chips on top, and then we both had stuff with frites, moules for madame, steak for monsieur. The waiter, like our waiter at Viaggio, had a restaurant French accent (the Viaggio guy was Italian American – he even said badda bing at one point) that we assumed had to be fake. Is there a school for waiter accents in Chicago? Tonight we go to BellyQ, a hip Asian place, so we’ll have to see what their waiters sound like.
