chicago: no. 2 King's on 5th

Several years ago, my mother told me my great-grandfather had a restaurant in Chicago. I thought perhaps I’d come by this restauranting we do honestly. No one is still alive who knew what kind of restaurant he owned, or what kind of food he served. Since my great-grandfather was originally from Stockholm, we wondered if there was a variation on a smorgasbord, or if the Friday night special was Swedish meatballs.

We did know the restaurant was named King’s. And we did know that it was “across from the newspaper”, the newspaper presumably the Chicago Tribune. We knew that it had been offered as a morgue when in 1915 the ill-fated and poorly designed steamer The Eastland capsized in the Chicago River and over 800 people died. We knew that the building was somewhere across the river from the now-famous Merchandise Mart. We knew that the restaurant itself had gone under when the Depression hit Chicago hard. We knew that my great-grandfather had died shortly thereafter, and my great-grandmother had come to live with my mother’s family in Evanston.

What we didn’t know was that the restaurant had been across from the first penny daily called The Daily News that was regarded as the best broadsheet in the city until the Tribune absorbed it in the mid-sixties. We didn’t know that Charles Henry Weegman, once President of the Chicago Federal League Baseball Club, came to Chicago for the 1893 World’s Fair from Richmond, Indiana, and was so inspired and impressed by the city, he came back to live and started out as a coffee boy at King’s. He went onto start his own restaurant chain of lunch counters that thrived in the city. We didn’t know that King’s was the newpaperman’s haunt all during it’s life, and we didn’t know that the Chicago Press Club, one of the official founders Mark Twain, took the floor above King’s for a year while they looked for more permanent digs. We didn’t know that the building that had once housed King’s, long gone now and replaced by a monolith, had been at the corner of Wacker and 5^th, and that 5^th Avenue in Chicago is now called Wells Street. We didn’t know anything about my great-grandfather’s business partner, Charlie King. And we still don’t. We can only guess that he is the mysterious man in a handful of photos that my mother found in a dresser drawer. A man with a mustache, looking out from beneath his eyebrows, looming next to my great-grandfather, jaunty porkpies shading their heads, a palm tree in the background.

--Deirdre

chicago: no. 1

We arrive in Chicago to blue skies and intense heat. The first thing I say getting off the plane is “This feels like home.” I grew up eight hours south of Chicago, and our summers were marked by long, hazy days. After several weeks of gray and rain and mist at home in Vermont, this feels divine.

Lunch is at Reza’s in River North, just a few blocks walk down Superior from our friend John’s apartment. It is in a huge space that looks like it could have once been a dancehall or a train station. The walls are painted a deep mauve, the trim is dark wood. Massive, gold-framed mirrors hang. Fantastic turn-of-the-last –century light fixtures with pressed metal details of fruits and vegetables suspend from the very high ceiling.

Reza’s has an all-you-can-eat middle eastern buffet for $9.99. I feel like it’s Christmas in July, even though it’s just June. Caleb orders the vegetable sampler, and I go for the buffet. I fill many plates with Greek salad, a Persian salad of tomatoes and cucumbers with herbs, hummus, falafel, tahini, and highly spiced meat dishes made with lamb or beef and a hot bean dish in a smooth tomato and pepper sauce with lots of cumin. We finish with Turkish coffee and cannelles soaked in syrup. We are in heaven, and I wonder if somewhere in my own lineage there is some beautiful Persian woman who could cook like a god as these flavors seem to suit my palate so well.

It is late in the afternoon, but we are not the only ones who need to come in from the heat for a bite and respite. A handful of families fill a few tables in the cavernous dining room, all of middle eastern descent. All the women wear head scarves, and a sign at the door encourages patrons t o make reservations for Ramadan now. Another couple who is not middle eastern sits by the window. The waiters are both middle eastern and not. I wonder if Reza’s caters to all middle eastern communities in Chicago. Is Yom Kippur celebrated as well as Ramadan? Are tensions here lessened because of the desire to share in these dishes that travel from one place across one amorphous border to another, where the ingredients and recipes are rather fluid between all these peoples? As the buffet closes, the waiters, dressed in their black pants and white shirts with black vests, sit down and eat at a long table together.

--Deirdre

wild strawberries

Their long tendrils have always snaked and twined through the perennial garden, a hold over from the fact that our first efforts at gardening were gone about backwards. Our gardens are in a field thick with native grasses, clover, madder, goldenrod, buttercup, sensitive fern, and apparently wild strawberries. When we first broke the land that is now a terraced rose and flower garden, we didn’t know about nifty machines that scrape the top layer of sod from areas in which you’d like to garden. We knew about solarization—when you mow the grasses and weeds, wet them, and cover with sturdy clear plastic, digging the ends down into the earth to trap the vegetation so that after six to eight weeks of high sun the meadow growth is dead. But I am too impatient, and wanted to get started “right away”. So each year we wage the constant battle of weeding and digging invasive weeds out of the flower garden. Each year the weeds gets a little less, but I think there will always be a ghost of the field appearing between the rugosa and lady’s mantle.

Along with the wild mint that invades the beds, wild strawberry has always been present, and the two get pulled-up throughout the summer. I have never seen one of these culprits bear fruit. But this spring, I found a beautiful specimen looking full and pretty with yellow blossoms, and I thought, why not see if anything happens? At the same time, our daily walks through the field that is now becoming the vineyard, we see and name the things growing because we know these will effect not only the growth of our grapes—indicating the health and type of our soil—but also the flavor. We find an intricate and almost hidden network of alpine strawberries with tiny white flowers spreading across the top of the meadow floor. I am pleased at the thought that my wines may have “wild strawberry” somewhere in their flavor profile.

Just a few days later, I am clipping the grasses and weeds from the vine rows by hand, crouched down with a Japanese scissors, and I see a little flash of red. A wild strawberry! I pick and taste. It is lush and delicate at the same time, bursting with bright flavor. I see another spot of red, and another. The field is covered in fruit. I call Caleb to drop his work in the green house, and after the sun has slipped behind the crest of the Chateauguay above us, we pick strawberries for dessert.

I am still waiting on that succulent-looking plant in the rose garden.

--Deirdre

queen of the nile

This is the first year they’ve bloomed, these iris colored the deepest black with a dark purple fur at their centers. Two years ago, they caught my eye at one of my favorite local nurseries. They stood tall, majestic, and elegant. As if they were always dressed for a formal party. At the time, I was working on a bed that hugs a stone wall in a terraced garden. I had planted woody hydrangea with loose white panicles for structure, backed by arborvitae for winter interest (provided that the local deer who never pass through our meadow don’t develop a nose for these sweet evergreens and decide to follow the scent and find themselves suddenly in a veritable cornucopia and demolish them for dinner).

Between the evenly spaced hydrangea, I planted catmint and transplanted wild daisy because they make such pretty points of white that seemingly float above all else and because they cost nothing. I thought the black iris would provide contrast and look grand against the haphazard shapes of the stone walls made from the numerous collapsed stone walls encircling our property. The same stone walls that hellbent farmers from so long ago built from the constant supply of stones that came up through the meadow that used to pen sheep or wheat or corn, hellbent in that they thought they could eventually rid this land of all this rock.

I brought these iris home, these Queen of the Nile, a proud collector of something exotic for my fairly traditional collection of flowers and foliage, and planted them in that terraced bed. The following year they did not bloom, and I thought perhaps they were some kind of tongue-in-cheek joke that you might find in a book of cartoons by Charles Adams. Here are the black iris, appropriately named after the wicked Cleopatra, bought by the Adams Family and planted in their poisonous garden, and look at them! Aren’t they delightful? They look horrible and straggly, and of course will never bloom!

But this year, they’ve proved the joke wrong. They have bloomed and keep on blooming, new blossoms traveling up the strong spine of their stems until they are unleashed from the green almost palm-frond textured envelope of the bud casing. They are almost as tall as the hydrangea, and they do, indeed, look grand.

--Deirdre

in the garden

Memory of springtime travel in Paris and Italy is gone. For the moment. We have been pulled by the flurry of activity planning and traveling for our two new books, crisp black-jacketed beauties, one with a blue spine, the other with a red spine: Libation: A Bitter Alchemy (www.chelseagreen.com/.../libation_a_bitter_alchemy:hardcover) and In Late Winter We Ate Pears: A Year of Hunger and Love (www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/in_late_winter_we_ate_pears/). Organizing. Scheduling. Driving. Flying. Teaching. Reading. Signing. Cooking. Pouring. Speaking. Inventorying. Serving. Washing. The restaurant is also full of the new season, and we go from one thing to another without much time to stop.

With all this motion, coming home roots us, and we find that we cannot keep away from the gardens or the vineyard which is a good thing because they need our attention the days we are here. There is the hoop house to clean out, the rose garden to weed, the peony hedge to mulch and stake before the big, fat blossoms sigh to the ground. The rain has been almost constant, and Caleb takes the temperature of the soil. The seedlings are slow because the earth has yet to warm up adequately. But the radicchios love the weather; the roses love the weather. The tomatoes, newly planted in their new bed, must be moved into the green house where it will be warmer.

It is a pleasure to be out in all this verdant work. The perennial garden is always at its best at this time of year. Everything is in bloom: the squadron of iris, the rugosa roses, the fragrant chive, the scented geranium, the clamoring veronica, the arching bridal wreath. Even the first of the lemon lilies which smell like citrus blossoms when you walk past. Here, we catch a fragment of memory, of walking in a springtime orange grove in Calabria, the bees from the nearby apiary buzzing amid all the perfume. But then the memory is gone, and our climbing grape vines catch the corner of my eye. It is time to trim the grass beneath their armature.

--Deirdre

sunday lunch

After the Brancacci Chapel, there is lunch. The Trattoria del Carmine anchoring one side of the piazza has been calling to us all weekend. Little did we know it’s one of our good Livornese friend’s favorite spots in Florence. It is perfect inside. Simple, and warm on the cool, rainy day. The tables are packed with locals. Families out for lunch—they’ll be ordering the beefsteak; or tables for two with older couples out on dates, smiling, flirting and holding hands. We have been eating, eating, and eating, and while we are hungry, we cannot eat too much. We order with reserve. A half carafe of red wine. A plate of prosciutto, a cup of consommé (I haven’t had comsomme since dining at my grandmother’s when I was sixteen!), grilled dorade with lemon expertly filleted by our waiter, tableside. A plate of spring asparagus with a fried egg. I finish with a selection of cheese which is delicious, but proves too much. Caffe at the finish. We take the long way home to walk it all off, and I think I will never be able to eat again, or at least I need to lie down right here on this cobbled sidewalk and take a nap. At least until I find a pair of spring green driving shoes on sale in a store that flauts the convention that all stores are closed on Sunday afternoons…..

noir

Noir appears like an unexpected mirage on the side of the street. What attracts is the crowd of people leaning against and sitting on the wall front on the river Arno. Glasses of white wine, of Campari Americanos, thin flutes of prosecco catch the fading light. On embassy row, next to the British Embassy, Noir rocks it’s early evening crowd with a dj and club music that sound like the summer beach dances on the island of Ibiza.

I order a Campari, Caleb a gin and tonic. The aperitivo buffet is full of platters of couscous, cured meats and cheeses, olives, rice salad, anchovies, cornichons, Russian salads, breads. Young bariste replace the quickly emptied dishes with new or bring trays of little bite sized crostini or sandwiches out to the revelers on the river. It’s Friday night and it’s the city of Florence. Men and women dress for each other, dress for themselves. Fashion asserts itself: black boots, black jackets, freshly pressed shirts, loose, almost careless hair. The sun sets over the bridge casting pink reflections in the smooth water only rippled by the lone swimming nutria below us. The clouds call to mind 18^th century painters. The last glow of light catches the cigarette smoke and the tango between dancing eyes of men and women out on a Friday night.