With finals and reading period a distant memory in my mind, as I am basking in the cool weather that is Seattle summer, here is my end of the year roundup!
Gioco (or longest wait ever for food)
Used up a Groupon for this. Groupon is one of my favorite websites because it gives you the opportunity of a coupon (or two) a day for Chicago businesses--whether it's restaurants, manicures/pedicures, or helicopter lessons. It's also fun to check and see what's the deal for the day. I got my mom to subscribe to it as well for Seattle-area things. In any case, the deal for Gioco was $20 for $40 worth of food...so I got Alice Li, fellow foodventurer and my especial foodtographer (she has a lovely camera) to come help me eat our food.
As a whole, the food was pretty good. We started off with the bread that they gave us (not bad) and some Calamari. I liked the calamari because instead of just having your normal fried squid, they also breaded and fried up some lemon and basil (both of which added some extra taste to the crunchy squid).
For the main course, I got the Bucatini con Gambero (Bucatini with Rock Shrimp in a garlicky, tomato-based sauce) and it was pretty excellent--shrimp was cooked to perfection and the sauce was good. Alice on the other hand, got the Pollo Arrosto con Erba Secco (Roasted Chicken with herbs and some mushroom sauce), but I felt that her chicken was a bit on the dry side.
So here's the thing that ruined the restaurant for me--the service. I am Asian, so I go to a lot of good Asian restaurants where service and customer satisfaction is not necessarily the priority of the owners (instead, food is the main thing), but Gioco's service was undeniably bad, even with that in mind. Our food took about 40 minutes (maybe more) to arrive--which is ridiculous given that I just had a pasta and Alice just had a roast chicken. Even when I followed up with the waiter 20-30 minutes into the wait, it took them 10 minutes to get our food out to us. Long story short, the horrible service turned the meal into an insanely long 90-minute dinner. I was so tempted to tip very little, but felt a bit bad (or at least Alice did and so I eventually did), so I'm just pouring out my dissatisfaction onto this review.
Bread (we had a lot of it while waiting)
Pollo Arrosto con Erba Secco
(the other two things--Calamari and my Bucatini con Gambero were too normal to take pictures of--also, I will add that for the bucatini that it took too long for it to arrive so I was relatively impatient to eat it when it did come)
Hai Yen (or the joining of foodventure forces)
The thing that's fun with meeting fellow foodventurers is comparing notes and then going to eat somewhere together. I met my friend Tiffany in Calculus but only started talking to her in Nutritional Science (which I was taking but she was auditing). Given our shared love for food (even though we do have different foodventure styles), we decided that we must culminate our foodventure bonding (of talking about what we've eaten over the weekend) and go eat somewhere before the year ended. We decided on Hai Yen (after going through many different choices and finding somewhere neither of us have been to) and trekked over to Lincoln Park on Memorial Day with Alice.
Hai Yen had pretty good Vietnamese food. It's not your typical pho and spring roll place, it took some French and Chinese influences into account when coming up with their menu. We all started off with their Vegetarian Spring Rolls, which were good and normal (nothing too spectacular--hard to beat Green Leaf's spring rolls, which have crunchy wonton skin in them).
For the main dish, I had the Bun Tom Nuong, which was a dish of steamed noodles with grilled shrimp and a spring roll on top. I liked their version of this dish, which I've had in different variations in various Vietnamese restaurants. What set this apart was that the noodles had more "bite" and were more "al dente" than in other places (thin and soggy-ish noodles). In addition, I liked the use of shredded basil which was mixed into the noodles and gave the dish a fresher taste. Tiffany got the Go Ngo Sen Chay--lotus root salad with tofu--and liked it as well. Alice however, didn't like her Pho or Vietnamese coffee too much. Overall, not bad for Vietnamese food in my opinion. It was refreshing.
Spring Rolls
Go Ngo Sen Chay
Bun Tom Nuong
Demera (or "food fun")
Another Groupon that we decided to use (we--me, Alice and Kevin). Two more people were supposed to join us, but because of rain, overtime practices and reading period-tiredness, it ended up being the three of us, and it was like a reunion of the Pilsen foodventurers. Demera is an Ethopian restaurant that I decided on getting the Groupon for because it's Ethiopian food, and I have had good recollections of Ethiopian food after eating in an Ethiopian restaurant in Seattle with my family.
Demera was fun, because of the Ethopian dance performers who were encouraging audience participation--people really got into it, it gave the night a fun atmosphere. Not only that, but the fact that we were not given utensils (so we had to eat with our hands) was a different experience from the normal restaurant setting.
Food-wise, Demera was just "meh." We ordered the appetizer platter consisting of the sambussa samplers and the ambasha. Sambussas were essentially meat or vegetable pies reminiscent of Indian samosas or Jamaican patties. I thought they were good (favorite part of the meal). Ambasha on the other hand was a traditional baked skillet bread that was served with their homemade cottage cheese. Flavor-wise, the bread was sweetish, and its texture was interesting--somewhat spongy but also a bit crumbly (Kevin really liked this bread; I really liked the sambussas). For our main dish, we ordered a messob platter with side dishes of vegetables, beef and lamb served on an injera bread (with a lot of extra injera on the side). Injera is the Ethiopian sour crepe that is probably most similar to sourdough pancakes/crepes but a lot more intense in its sour flavor (Alice did not like them). We also had Ethiopian coffee on the side, and I thought it was stronger and more heady than regular coffee. It had a subtle smokiness to its flavor, which was nice.
Appetizer platter: sambussas and ambasha with the homemade cottage cheese side thing
Vegetarian/Meat Messob platter served on the injera
Ethiopian coffee
Triple Crown Restaurant (or dimsum at 11ish in the evening)
Alice and Megan foodventure to celebrate the end of the year--even though at this time, Alice was still not done with one of her final papers. We took the CTA to Chinatown at around 11:45 at night and had dimsum and tea there for fun. Food was unremarkable, but it wasn't bad quality for that late in the evening. If you think it is really stupid for two Asian girls to be walking the streets of Chinatown that late in the evening, you are correct, since there were some drunk/crazy/creepy people in the CTA stations, but we had good company--namely, some of our other friends who were having an end-of-the-year celebration of their Bible Study group (and they were all guys--we had a lot of...henchmen/protectors I guess). This is why it is always helpful to have guy friends.
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