Nguyen "feed me!" L.'s Profile

Is it Korean?  Is it a taqueria?  No, it's Korean fusion BBQ!  Combine the succulent marinated meats from Korean BBQ with popular dishes like the Mexican Taco or the Vietnamese Banh Mi (sandwich) - that's what you get at Del Seoul.  

I've loved Korean BBQ for years.  What's hard with Korean BBQ is that it's such a huge meal.  You leave the restaurant, looking like you're pregnant.  And your clothes and hair smell like burnt meat for the next week.  The neat thing with Del Seoul is that you get the BBQ goodness, but in small portions.  Just serve it like a taco, or stick it in a French baguette, and voila!  Yummy.  You can stop in for a snack, a lunchtime meal, or an informal dinner.  All under $10!  

Del Seoul is not the first place to fuse Korean BBQ with the taco.  I think it came from Southern California?  On food trucks, too!  I'm glad they brought the craze to Chicago.  And they expanded by adding Vietnamese in the mix too, by putting kalbi or spicy pork in the Vietnamese Banh Mi.  Haven't seen banh mi with Korean food before, but it makes perfect sense.  I hope to see more and more creative combinations of great ethnic food from Del Seoul!

Hooray, it's finally open!  Beer lovers and fans of Pete Crowley have patiently waited for Haymarket to open for many months.  It's obvious that Haymarket is a work-in-progress, but from what I have seen so far, it's pretty darn cool.  In fact, I've been there 3 times in the last 10 days!

The Randolph/Halsted area of the West Loop (my hood) has needed a good bar for years.  The all-too-generic Bar Louie, which used to occupy this property, was dead.  No surprise Bar Louie closed up most of its city locations to find green pastures in the suburbs and other mass-produced lands.  In the meantime, the West Loop has flourished with newer, upscale, superstar-chef-name restaurants.  Amazing places like Avec, The Publican, and The Girl and the Goat are drawing great crowds and attention to the area.  But it's just restaurants and not much else.  Now there's a great bar, right in the center of it all (actually, two new bars, with Maude's Liquors).  Not to mention, you now have a place to go while you wait for 90-120 mins for a table at Avec or Girl and the Goat :)

Haymarket doesn't look fancy or flashy (especially since they don't have a sign up front yet hehe).  It actually looks a little like the old Bar Louie.  You won't see all the dressed up people you'd see at Market or in River North.  What you get instead is a relatively diverse, unpretentious crowd that enjoys its beer.  It was pretty packed the other Friday evening - enough that we hid in the back room to find a seat the bar.  Yet it was nice and roomy to catch football games last week.  

On to the food and drink.  The food menu is regular bar fare, though some items have a cool twist to them.  For example, you don't get hot chicken wings - you get hot chicken legs instead.  The tater tots are made from sweet potatoes.  And the riot sandwich is a homemade pork sausage patty with gardiniera.  The tasty pizza is ginormous - better split that with your friends.

Where Haymarket shines, of course, is the beer.  When the famous brewer from Rock Bottom starts up his own gig, you gotta check out the beer.  For starters, you get a ton of bottled beers to choose from.  What's on tap is even better.  There's about a dozen craft beers available, from great breweries like Founder's, Dogfish Head, Metropolitan, Victory...  It seems that they may rotate through their draft beers quickly, so you may see a bit of variety.  For example, I had a Dogfish Head Poppaskull the first night, but it was no longer available for my friend the other day.  Last Wednesday, they finally tapped their own brews.  There are currently four home brews on the menu, each of which are quite tasty.  I had the fortune of being among the first to try the first batch of the Ombibulous Double IPA, which was awesome.  There's liquor and a category of "American crap" beer, if you are afraid of the beer list...

As I said in the intro, it seems like they're still working out the kinks at Haymarket.  The first Friday I was there (the 2nd evening they served dinner), the service was a bit slow and disorganized.  I think they were a bit surprised by the horde of people trying to pack themselves in to the new restaurant.  The last two times I was there, the service was fine.  The servers I had were super friendly and spent time to talk to us about the food and beer.  One of the servers even stopped by to say hi, after we came back a few days later.  They probably need to balance out their beer list too; it's currently very heavy on the hoppy side (luckily, that's what I like haha).

I may be a bit biased since I live down the street, but Haymarket has the promise of becoming one of the shining stars of the West Loop.  I plan on coming back on many more occasions!

I'm not in Oak Park too often, but when I'm there, somehow I always end up at Poor Phil's.  It seems like the place to be in the OP!  Great restaurant/bar place.  Lots of room, good bar area with TVs, and also al fresca tables.  Seems like there are a decent number of Oak Park regulars who come often, even some who just go by themselves and have a seat at the bar.

The food is mostly Creole/seafood.  Yum!  They make great etoufee, crab cakes, gumbo, etc.  They also have seasonal deals like a whole lobster for $15 - yum!  There's other bar food too, if you fear the crustaceans.  I'm told they have a good burger (but I can't have anything but seafood there).

The other great thing about Poor Phil's is the beer.  They have a great rotating selection of draft beer, especially craft beers and imports.  Even compared to city places, I can only think of a few bars that have as good or better of a beer selection (Hopleaf, Map Room, Publican, etc.).

After going to Sweet Station or Chi Cafe seemingly every week, I have to update my review and give them some better props.  Sweet Station is a great place for good, modern, and cheap Chinese food.  

The modern Hong Kong diner decor never wears on you.  I don't know how I tolerated so many years of visiting ugly-looking Asian restaurants.  This must be what it feels like to eat in Hong Kong these days? :)  Also the crowd is cool.  Lots of younger, hip-looking Asians - don't know where they are during the day, but they seem to congregate in Chinatown Square at night.  They are open pretty late too, like til 2 or 3am.

It's the food that really does it for me.  After eating over a dozen dishes at Sweet Station, I can really say that they do most of them very well.  Many dishes are your normal Chinese dishes, like beef/pork/chicken/noodles.  But they also have awesome HK-style baked spaghetti, plus various mini-woks of tasty delights.  You can even order a plate of roast pork or duck as an appetizer.

Chinatown Square is the place to be for Chinese food!  So much good food, and even more restaurants opening up all the time.  One of them is Tasty City, which I believe opened up this summer.  It's got the Hong Kong Diner look - modern and well-decorated - just like Chi Cafe and Sweet Station.  None of this ragged old mom-and-pop storefront with hand-written paper signs (like Happy Chef hehe).  Another interesting thing is a big sliding window for smoothies, just like Joy Yee.

When you open up a store that looks like Chi Cafe/Sweet Station and Joy Yee and is in the same alley as these excellent restaurants, you had better come up with something good.  And you'll have to live with the comparisons.  Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the food decently.  Good enough, cheap enough.  But it was a notch below Chi Cafe/Sweet Station.  Their menu is more old school Chinese (pork, chicken, beef, noodles, etc.) without the newer HK dishes.  As for their smoothies... well how can you NOT get a smoothie from any place but Joy Yee?  

Maybe the one thing they have going for them is that they are the first restaurant on the east end of Chinatown Square, so newcomers could come there.  Not to mention, they're open til something like 4am, so you could stumble from the new club upstairs (yes, there's now a club in Chinatown Square!) and get a nice bowl of chow fun to soak up the alcohol.

To sum it up, Tasty City serves pretty decent Hong Kong diner-styled Chinese food, but is simply a copycat of some great restaurants just a few feet away.

There are all sorts of coffee shops around, but how many places in the city are tea houses?  Saint's Alp is a Chinese-styled chain does their tea well.  You can get hot tea, iced tea, tapioca bubble tea, milk tea, oolong tea, agar tea, tea with jelly, etc... I sound like Forrest Gump.  It's a cool place for dessert after a nice meal in Chinatown.  I'd definitely stop by there more often if there were one in the Loop.  I'd rather visit Saint's Alp over Starbuck's any day.

Btw, what is a "Saint's Alp" anyway??

Cemitas Puebla is a bit of a dive in Humboldt Park, but it delivers yummy food.  The Cemita is a sandwich (torta-like?) from Puebla.  It's meat and cheese on a toasted bun.  Great fresh ingredients.  There are various types of cemitas (with pork, ham, etc).  You also need to try the tacos arabe - super tasty sauce on them!  

My buddy, who's from a different region in Mexico, put it well.  Where he comes from in Mexico, you can't get Puebla food.  But in Chicago, you can find it all :)

Mmmm.  Juicy, huge, creative burgers.  Awesome made-to-order mac-n-cheese.  I imagine Kuma's was once more of a dive-ish place for peeps who like metal music and tattoos.  You still see a bit of it, but Kuma's is now flooded with city yuppies too (like me? ha).  They seem to take it in stride.  Nothing can truly live up to all the hype, but you should leave with a smile on your face, a brick in your belly, and a strong desire for a nap.

I've been to Vegas a dozen times, but I never went off-strip to find Asian food til this last time.  I found the "Chinatown" on Spring Mountain Rd.  So many choices, all in one area!  I kind of randomly picked Pho Vietnam and tried it out.  It's a little out-of-the-way, being on the 2nd floor, but it's next to Ranch 99 so you can't get lost.  

From the outside, I thought it was a small place since it was so quiet, but it's actually quite big.  Then I realized that it's only half Vietnamese food.  The other half was Chinese.  Then I noticed the staff yapping in the middle of the restaurant in Cantonese.  That was a bit distracting - it felt like eating at relatives' houses haha.

My pho turned out alright.  It came fast - like within 2 minutes.  The food was pretty good.  Can't say it was the best pho, but it was fine and really hit the spot.  Next time, I'll probably try the other Vietnamese places in the area.  Wouldn't be disappointed going back there though.

Only a semi-woo for Woo restaurant!  The concept is pretty neat: Chinese fusion with smaller plates, tapas-style.  You gotta share dishes to enjoy it.  Luckily, I took a bunch of customers out to Woo, so we were able to order a lot and try a lot.  

I enjoyed the honey/tamarind glazed ribs, yellowtail, seared tuna, and lobster tail.  The food is a bit bland in general though.  Maybe they wanted to cater to tourists not used to real Asian food.  

The location/decor was a bit disappointing.  You'd think that being in the lovely Palazzo, it would be awesome.  But the place is hidden in a corner on the 2nd floor of a really quiet shopping area.  So I guess I'm thinking you could do much better than Woo.  It is an A-OK place, don't get me wrong.  It's just that you'd expect things to be super swanky or unique in Vegas, and Woo just wasn't enough.