Uptown recs?

I need to pick up my bike from Uptown Cycles (4600 or so Broadway) on Tuesday afternoon, and as long as I'm going to be up there, I'd like to get some good grub. I searched the board, and the best recommendation I found was Riques. Sounds pretty good, but I wonder if there are other great spots in the neighborhood.

Any cuisine is fine, but I want a place that's cheap, and no waiters! I hate sit-down style when I'm by myself.

Ba Le on Broadway & Argyle fits your requirements - $3-$4 for a nice fresh Vietnamese sandwich, and you order at a counter. There are a few rickety tables if you want to sit down.

I really like Playa Azul at Broadway and Irving Park. It is Mexican with a focus on seafood. They have really great fish dishes (I love the halibut wrapped in egg).

Ba Le is a good option if you're looking for something on the cheap.

Inspiration Cafe operates its restaurant which is open for lunch and benefits the clients of that worthy charity (Disclaimer: I am on the board of Inspiration). You'll find decent soups, sandwiches and entrees. I like the catfish. The real draw here is that when you eat lunch there, you support a great local charity and assist in feeding the homeless.

Stinky wrote:I need to pick up my bike from Uptown Cycles (4600 or so Broadway) on Tuesday afternoon, and as long as I'm going to be up there, I'd like to get some good grub. I searched the board, and the best recommendation I found was Riques. Sounds pretty good, but I wonder if there are other great spots in the neighborhood.

Any cuisine is fine, but I want a place that's cheap, and no waiters! I hate sit-down style when I'm by myself.

No offense, but how hard were you searching...

At 4600 Broadway, you could practically do the Hat Hammond-blindfold-stop ears-project and stumble into something good. Lotsa choices. Here's 3 all on Broadway.

Tank Noodle is much discussed on this board and their pho and Hue style noodle soups are outstanding.

Silver Seafood is reported to be inconsistent, but I was there about a month ago (and posted about it) and found it outstanding in the traditional HK style Cantonese catagory.

I consider Thai Avenue one of the best Thai restaurants in Chicago. With a bit of pressure you can get some food pretty darn blistering, but regardless of the heat factor, it is all prepared very well.

Vital Information wrote:No offense, but how hard were you searching...

Vital Information, you're absolutely right. I didn't do enough footwork before posting. After my initial post, I found mentions (didn't have to look far) of all of the Thai places you list. I decided to leave my post up unedited, though, to see what else popped up.

Please forgive me. I'm still new to the whole Chicago address thing, and even though the numbered grid is very simple, and everyone who posts here is great about addresses, it does take a little getting used to. I was searching for variations on "Uptown," which yielded my limited results.

Thanks for the recommendations, all.

Yup, check out the map rather than the hood. The little stretch of Argyle, known as Chinatown North (but is actually more of a little Vietnam, with Thai, Cambodian and a few others thrown in and a few Chinese holdouts) is at 5000 North on the grid.

I believe Ba Le was the only rec that did not have sit down/waitstaff (including Ricques). That said, you certainly won't feel out of place in most of the ethnic dining in this area as an individual diner.

My first rec option would be to walk the Argyle (5000N) strip. If you are not familar, the bakeries (like Ba Le) have quite a few savory items as well, which make for a great pop-in lunch. Chui Quon a Chinese bakery has dim sum, by the order. Most of the groceries do not have deli items, but you can get a lunch option at the Thai grocery.

More convenient would be to pop in to one of the Mexican taco stands that seem to be all over this neighborhood.

pd

just to add a little bit more variety to your recs (though I like all that have been suggested so far), a little bit further north on sheridan (~5100) is shan grocery (which also houses a few tables for pakistani food - I'm particularly fond of the brain masala, and a number of folks have been converted to eating brain here)

also a little further north on broadway (~5300) is mei shung, which does taiwanese stuff, I'm kinda fond of the tofu preps on the taiwanese portion of the menu.

First, thanks to everyone for the suggestions. Nothing like stepping off the train with 3 pages of posts printed out. How lucky I am to have bought a bike in such a great food neighborhood.

My first stop was Ba Le. What a great little shop. I went with the sausage and lemongrass sandwich, which was $3 including tax. I wasn't blown away by the sausage, but as a whole entity, the sandwich was quite good. Except for the very first bite, which was basically a mouthful of bread and cilantro, it was well put together. The bread was wonderfully crusty -- just the perfect sandwich bread. It seems to simple to make a basic roll like this, so why are so many of these kinds of rolls so mediocre? I was sorely tempted to get a little container of beef jerky. They have a few varieties, but the one that looked best had big dried red pepper seeds all over it. Agh, should have gotten it.

I only ate about half the sandwich so that I could give Thai Avenue a try. Again, a really lovely space, simple but pleasant. Based on the photo from this post, I had a hankering for some fried chicken. What a thing of beauty. I took it to go, along with a serving of papaya salad, and ate in a nearby park. (Eating there would have been fine, even alone, but I just don't like to do it.)

I'd gone through 2 and a half pieces of the chicken and was thoroughly enjoying them before poking around deeper in the bag and finding a little plastic cup filled with hot sauce. I won't make that mistake again next time. The chicken is fantastic on its own, highly crispy with generous chunks of meat, but the sauce adds serious flavor. I thought it was slightly sweet and nicely spicy, although by no means fiery, and kind of grainy -- in that Thai sauce kind of way.

As for the papaya salad, the woman taking my order asked me how hot I wanted it. At first I said "very hot," and then remembering VI's use of the word "blistering" (which can be nice, but I wanted to judge it on flavor, not just heat, at least this time out), and said something like, "Well, not too spicy." Then I got scared that she'd think I wanted it bland, and raised my hand flat, just above my forehead and said, "You know, not all the way to the top spicy, but hot. I like it hot." The result of all of that exertion was a higher-than-medium-but-not-mouth-burning salad. It was good, but didn't knock my socks off. I guess papaya salad always has a "sauce," but the best I've had seem to have a thinner, more dressing-like sauce, where this one was a little thick, which I think detracts from the refreshing crunchiness of the papaya.

Again, thanks for the reccomendations, and I'll definitely be back to try more of them. What a great neighborhood.