Where Should I Eat Out On The Best Day For It (Today)?

Super Bowl Sunday is, without question, the best day to eat out at a restaurant that usually draws crowds and does not have televisions. The busiest place in Chicago will be deserted, you can just waltz right in, bring your rowdy 4-year-old, take a leisurely 2-1/2 hours dining (unlikely with the 4-year-old, however), and enjoy yourself completely and comfortably.

Of course, it's Sunday, so a lot of candidates for this, such as Blackbird, are closed anyway. Still, that leaves an awful lot of the city as your oyster, or at least mine. So what restaurant, that's normally packed and hard to get into, should I go to tonight?

You don't watch the Superbowl??? Aren't you a guy? As far as tv's go, i can't remember eating in a restaurant that had one.Even when they do they're always behind the bar and not in the dining area- and you can't hear them so who cares?

HI,

The only thing I am attracted to the Super Bowl is the opening ceremony with Aaron Neville and Arethra Franklin, after that it is of zero interest. I will probably miss that because I do plan to go the Soulfood meeting in North Chicago posted on the Events board.

While I don't yet have any thoughts on restaurants to visit. In my past experience, I have found visits to museums on Super Bowl Sunday to be a breeze. The children's area at the Science and Industry Museum just let the kids play there for hours. Usually they meter the fun into one hour slots.

This is really a Super day for adventuring without meeting too much humanity. Though a lousy day for food shopping, if it is not lines then it is picked over.

Regards,

I'm heading to Chinatown for lunch later at noon, though it might not be significantly less crowded than a normal Sunday because I don't think the Chinese population really cares about watching or preparing for the Super Bowl. Here's hoping to get some yummy dishes at good ol' Lee Wing Wah.

The Berghoff? (or are they closed on Superbowl Sunday?)

How about Avec? It's usually crowded but even there has to suffer with Super Bowl on tonight. It opens in the afternoon (at around 3:30 p.m., I think), so you can go early if you want, or you can while away the evening over stellar wine and small plates. I fell in love with the crispy short ribs.

I've been there on a regular early evening and it's not unusual to find kids there - however, given the probable dearth of people there tonight, I doubt it would be an issue to linger into the regular dinner hours with the kids on the communal tables.

grant wrote:You don't watch the Superbowl??? Aren't you a guy?

And didn't your grandfather play under Knute Rockne at Notre Dame???

You don't watch the Superbowl??? Aren't you a guy?

And didn't your grandfather play under Knute Rockne at Notre Dame???

Yes, and every year on this day I make sure he gets rotated in his resting place.

grant wrote:You don't watch the Superbowl??? Aren't you a guy?

Ah, grant, (insert head-shaking emoticon) what can I say? If watching the Superbowl made someone "a guy" things would be a lot different in every sphere of endeavor. It's clear to me that there aren't enough Mikes in the world. But there are more than we sometimes realize. And that brings me around to reporting my intial reaction while reading the topic line: marvel at the non-issue that tonight's game was when I invited some friends over for dinner tonight. There was not a mention of the event in the planning phase. And even though my friends seem to look forward to my cooking, I doubt that that that explains it. For lots of guys, (might I add, guys particlularly appreciated by the majority of the other gender), believe it or not, the Superbowl doesn't even register on the radar screen.

I was at a movie at the Film Center at the Art Institute once during the Super Bowl. At halftime the usher opened the door and shouted in the score. Immediately the crowd booed, shouted "No one cares!", etc.

However, it did make me want to someday halt a Bears game to announce over the loudspeakers the winner of the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Another non football watcher here. Although to clarify I do like the Premier League, that's REAL football, not this namby pamby pads and rest breaks every 40 seconds

Not sure what I'm doing today but I haven't been out eating much so some clams in black bean sauce sounds good.

stevez wrote:The Berghoff? (or are they closed on Superbowl Sunday?)

Don't know about SUPERBOWL Sunday but they are usually closed on normal Sundays.

Seattle vs. Pittsburgh isn't really an epic battle of titans nor is it drawing on a particularly large fan base. While many still plan a social event around it and will therefore be at someplace other than a restaurant (excluding those that have their own Big Game Parties) during the game I wouldn't be surprised if some of those 'should be empty' places are a little less empty this year. Further, 5 PM seatings aren't typically all that hard to get are they?

We were going to go to Vinci, but they are apparently not open tonight (and Meritage is also closed "in honor of the superbowl"). So we'll be going there Wednesday for their wine dinner.

The Superbowl is the biggest single sporting event in "our" country.I'm not a fan of either team but i'll watch it.I walked over to Jewel this afternoon and saw the cashiers all wearing their favorite jerseys and tons of people getting ready for the game.My wife is in Prague right now,and she's Chinese,and i think she's watching the game lol.BTW Aaron Neville oughta retire,not happening-at all,any more.

grant wrote:The Superbowl is the biggest single sporting event in "our" country.

Oh, that must be why I have no interest in "the game."

I pretty much consider it a personal deficiency that I have no interest in who's playing, what the score is, etc. At the gym, I sometimes work out in a room with a television, and every now and again some normal guy will ask me if I've seen "the game" (sometimes it's basketball, sometimes something else), and I say "you know, I don't really follow (fill in the blanks)" -- and it just doesn't compute. The normal guy does NOT hear that I don't follow his game, and he will continue with questions/comments like "That Alexander was unbelievable, hunh?" or "Did you see that pass in the third quarter?" SuperBowl Sunday always makes me feel like a foreigner in the country of my birth.

That said, I'm muting the game and watching the commercials, and it really ticks me off when they run those black-and-white spots featuring football players with the trophy. Jeez, if I wanted to watch football, I'd watch the damn game.

Hammond

I did indeed take Aschie30's advice-- Avec-- along with Cathy2's advice-- visit a museum; and both were perfect choices for what to do on a day when 90% of the rest of the city would not be out and about. The Shedd Aquarium was populated entirely by football-oblivious Latinos and Russians, as we strolled around it from 3 to 4. And Avec basically wasn't populated by anybody, it was like visiting the ski town bar out of season, a small number of individual patrons sitting and not chatting with each other at the bar, one other table occupied, otherwise the place empty, the staff as happy to see someone, anyone as your childless aunt is when you finally visit her after cancelling twice. (It was getting a little busier as we left around 7:30, but still was a shadow of its usual self, I'm sure.) They clearly aren't exactly used to kids there, but adapted quickly enough and sucessfully suggested things that would go over with them.

I've always felt that Blackbird was the three-star restaurant that could be a four-star restaurant but chooses to take things a little easier and be a little more of a casual place, not a temple of cuisine; and Avec is the two-star place that could be a three-star restaurant but would rather be a bar and just offer you stuff to nosh, except that instead of buffalo chicken wings it's something better than 99% of the restaurants in town. Surely these two are the answer to the complaint that Chicago doesn't have enough restaurants like Craft in New York or whatever; I might agree that our bench strength of such places does not run as deep as this or that other city, but if these two aren't world-class artisanal-food restaurants within their price/fanciness/cuisine categories, I don't know what would be.

We had:

• Focaccia with talego cheese and herbs ("Do you want the truffle oil on the side?" We did, but Myles loved dipping in it anyway, thus getting at 7 an exposure to a taste I didn't have until I was probably 25). This alone basically took care of the kids, I enjoyed it too.

• Salumi plate. This was what I had always wanted to try at Avec, being in a charcuterie mood these days, only to hear some months back that they'd stopped making it, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it back on the menu. Might be tough to justify as a value (the tissue-thin slices were probably about a buck apiece, or a couple of hundred dollars per pound, which made it hard to watch the kids scarf them like Oscar Mayer summer sausage) but this is fantastically good charcuterie, the real funky taste of European sausage as I've bought it in the markets in France or Italy.

• Salad of apples and some hard cheese. This was okay, not that exciting. I heard later that they recommend it to go with the brandade. It seemed like half of a dish in some ways.

• Pork shoulder with sauerkraut, applesauce, and lardons. Not my first choice for an entree type thing, more a compromise that everyone would probably eat some of. The pork was a tad bland by itself, much better when you did it up with some of everything-- the applesauce and kraut, a pungent brown mustard with wine in it, and a bite of the lardons (which were terrific).

• For dessert, white and dark chocolate bark, and an almond cake with blood oranges and some very yellow and rich vanilla ice cream. The latter was really wonderful, I don't even like almond much but I am impressed by desserts that score on delicacy rather than excess (which is an admirable quality in a dessert, but easy to achieve) and this was really an eye-openingly light and wonderful end to the meal.

As we were getting ready to go a woman got up from the bar and came over to tell us how cute the boys were and how nice it was that we had thought to take them to a place like this on a night when the place would be empty and it would be easy to get in. I was thinking, it was almost like she had read this thread and the reasoning behind it... and then she said, "You don't happen to be from LTHForum, do you?"

Turned out she and her husband had read the thread, liked the suggestion of Avec as a place one could easily get into on this night, and had come up from the far south side (they actually live near Tacos del Pacifico, which she said she had also enjoyed thanks to reading about it here). So congrats, Aschie30; your suggestion for Super Bowl Sunday was enjoyed by two different sets of total strangers tonight. Maybe it's the start of a new tradition for this day.

Avec
615 W. Randolph St.
312-377-2002

Mike G wrote:• Salumi plate. This was what I had always wanted to try at Avec, being in a charcuterie mood these days, only to hear some months back that they'd stopped making it, so it was a pleasant surprise to find it back on the menu.

That's the best food news of '06 so far to me. I think I'm going to celebrate the completion of our March issue (we're already paying our printer late fees) by scooting over there after work sometime this week.

Great idea; I'll have to keep it in mind for next year myself.

My husband and I ventured up to Mitsuwa today thinking that it might be a little less busy than the past weekends. No luck. The foodcourt was jampacked and even the checkouts were busy. I half suspected people were picking up sushi trays for tonight. I saw quite a few people running around with the big family sized trays.

Mike -

Glad to hear you took up my suggestion and that it went well. I'm not a "big game" watcher either, but I use it as an excuse to make a yearly pot of chili. After suggesting Avec to you, and started thinking about the wine and noshes, I almost dumped the half-made chili in the disposal and took off for the place. I held firm and ultimately enjoyed it, however. If I did go, there would have been at least three LTH-ers who would have met up on am impromptu basis.

Hi,

A gentle reminder this year we have two Super Bowl level football events, where those who don't care about football can get into hard to get into restaurants.

It is also a good day to visit a museum. The often crowded Science and Industry will have so few people, you can pretend you own the place.

Regards,

Cathy2 wrote:A gentle reminder this year we have two Super Bowl level football events, where those who don't care about football can get into hard to get into restaurants.

But no longer Avec.

Watch the Superbowl at Avec

Cathy2 wrote:A gentle reminder this year we have two Super Bowl level football events, where those who don't care about football can get into hard to get into restaurants.

That's this Sunday's game and then the actual Super Bowl? I learned on a recent ill-planned visit to Haymarket on a Saturday of a Packers game that my sports crowd-averse self needs to start paying more attention to these things.

happy_stomach wrote:That's this Sunday's game and then the actual Super Bowl?

Yes, this is indeed what I am referring to. From listening to the media, the Bears and Packers meeting in a championship game hasn't happened since the 1940's. This was 25 years before the Super Bowl.

When whatever tickets were left were sold via phone and internet on Wednesday, the tickets evaporated in 60 seconds.

Grocery and liquor stores may be a madhouse on Saturday and Sunday with people loading up for their game watching parties.

Regards,

True and don't even think about ordering pizza.