funventures and yumventures

Yay! Today I made $22 and got a free ticket to see a Cubs game!

That made me happy. Free things are always the best, even though I do understand that there are uncounted costs within the "free" umbrella that make things not totally costless.

So. Yesterday my mom sent me a bunch of Anthony Bourdain clips from Youtube and my mouth just watered (I WANT DIMSUM AND PEKING DUCK AND CHILI CRAB--yes, I was watching Asia-located shows).

Combine that with my friend and I looking at various Chicago restaurants and seeing (dreaming/imagining) which ones we would go to if money was not an issue. Oh Alinea, Charlie Trotter's, Spiaggia and contemporaries, how I want to visit you...

Here's where I went last week though:

Sunshine Cafe, somewhere in Andersonville for a glorious foodventure/yumventure/tongueventure/tumventure/nomventure (we discussed the various permutations of this expedition) with ALICE LI (shoutout!) and as always, Yelp did not disappoint. I went here once before with my mom and my cousin's cousin and so decided to go again because I was craving Japanese noodles. Yumyum. Japanese food is one of my comfort foods, having eaten it pretty regularly as a child.

Sunshine Cafe has really nice Japanese food. I say "really nice" as opposed to something like "so extremely amazing" or "I would die because this is so overwhelmingly good" because it was just that--nice. In other words, it was very simple, very comforting Japanese food served in a homey environment. A better description would be to say: if I were Japanese, this is the type of food that my grandmother would serve me (since she would be a good cook--of course).

So, here you go, and these are from my own camera (which is pretty bad--especially if you look at the picture of the potato croquette--my apologies, I am just a poor college student):

Interior of Sunshine Cafe: it was around 5:30 on a sunny, Saturday afternoon when we had dinner so there were not a lot of customers yet--while we were eating though, there were a LOT of people who started to arrive and so the place was pretty full at around 6-6:30ish.

Tea and the chopsticks cover with their name on it: their tea was pretty good green tea (pretty standard but it had matcha in it so that made it nice), and the waitress refilled it a lot while we were eating so my cup always had tea in it during the entirety of the meal.

Grilled Eggplant: who knew eggplant could taste so different when it was grilled? The thing with grilled eggplant is, a lot of the time it's cut too thick so the middle part is quite raw in a sense and so the whole eggplant experience is not that great. However, this eggplant was cut pretty thinly, so the flavor came out quite nicely. Paired with the shaved ginger and the sweet sauce on the side, the eggplant was pretty delicious. :)

Potato Croquette: We ordered this because a lot of the Yelpers were raving about it. The potato croquettes were very...fresh. You could taste that they just were just fried, and the panko crust was still crispy, which contrasted with the mashed potato inside that was combined with carrots and other good things. To be perfectly honest though, as good as this was, I thought that the attention accorded to this was largely overblown. Compared to the eggplant, the eggplant wins in my taste test.

Pork udon: I've always loved udon for its chewiness and the simplicity of its broth, and this bowl of udon was good on all those levels. Not much else to add about this udon, but that it gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling of comfort, which I think is always a good thing. It was simple food that was executed well (which in some respects encapsulates the entire Sunshine Cafe experience).

Oh, to add: my friend that I was with ate their Tonkatsudon. It was good tonkatsu, which is hard to find especially it is very dry and unseasoned in many restaurants that I've been to. She said that this udon was better than the udon that she had in the Japanese airport. Also, my other friend who's part-Japanese said that the broth was good after tasting the leftovers of this meal--after which I can conclude that since if it tasted authentic 2 days after, it must've been really authentic while I was eating it.

We walked around in Andersonville after, later going on to Argyle (Vietnamtown is there!), which was about 10 minutes away. Food, friends, sun=fun. :)