Favorite Things: MKE-Red Light Ramen

Today is Friday.  I don't work.  I presently have more than $30.00 to my name.  This combination of things sets up the near inevitability that at 11:15, you can find me frigid and shivering, waiting in line for a bowl of pure bliss.  That bliss manifests in Chef Justin Carlisle's tonkotsu ramen, an indulgent and milky bowl of pure pork essence that just so happens to be the perfect panacea for the winter blues.

Pairing beautifully (and hilariously) with the ramen is your choice of alcoholic slushy.  The mainstay in the slushy machine is the classically sconnie brandy old fashioned, but there is also a rotating flavor to choose from.  I have consumed an unholy and irresponsible amount of frozen booze in the depths of Red Light Ramen and have never had an unsatisfactory sip, but don't go too hard because these drinks will mess you up. Cab, Lyft, Über or designated driver are highly advised.  If you're too stuffy and/or dumb, or just don't want to ruin your morning, they are also well stocked with PBR.  It should be noted though that you are allowed to be sober at Red Light Ramen, just don't expect to be in the majority.

Anyone who is a little turned off by higher end dining (why are you reading this blog?) shouldn't feel deterred by the fact that Red Light Ramen shares it's space with the also excellent Ardent. Same staff and address and exact same space aside, these are two very different places  Once the lights dim and 2Pac starts blasting you can pretty much be assured that the staff has cut loose the shackles of serenity and are ready to fill you with as much heart-stopping comfort as you can handle. Perfect for foodies and philistines alike! That being said, please for the love of God, do yourself a favor and eat at Ardent.  Both establishments are exciting and precise and worthy of our patronage.  Anyways, off to do something healthy to preemptively make up for what I'm going to do to myself tonight. See you in line!

Red Light Ramen starts at 11:30 P.M. on most Fridays and Saturdays.  Follow them for all sorts of hilarity on Twitter @RedLightRamen

Lunch With Bup: The Yen Ching Edition

This Sunday I had the pleasure of eating lunch with my grandfather at Yen Ching; a long-standing Chinese restaurant on the outskirts of Milwaukee that calls it's food "fine Mandarin cuisine".  While I think the word "fine" may be a little lofty to describe the lunch I had at Yen Ching,  I did find the overall experience to be enjoyable.  Truthfully, I think a lot of the charm of Yen Ching was how definitively not fine it was. Outdated kitsch reverberated off of the walls, the five foot tall plastic buddha, the plastic flowers and the Chinese horoscope placemats.  Everything about Yen Ching's aesthetic stokes my imagination and conjures images in my brain of the kind of family depicted in "The Wonder Years" packing in a car and traveling to that fancy exotic restaurant that just opened up on Good Hope!  I can almost see the curmudgeon of a dad staring in befuddlement at words like "kung pao" and "crab rangoon" and wondering what the hell happened to this country.  These may sound like criticisms, but to me they are sacred accolades. 

Being that this is some sort of bastardization of a food blog I will of course be talking about my meal, but first a little bit about my grandfather, who will be called "Bup" from here on out.  Bup got his name as many goofily named grandfather's do, which is as a result of my oldest brother (the first grandkid of many) being unable to pronounce "grandpa".  Bup is a veteran of the Korean war as well as a veteran of more than six decades of intense labor, working for the plumbing company his father started in 1938. He traveled the world and lived richly with the love of his life until July 2nd, 2007 when my grandmother passed away from leukemia.  At 82 years old he made the concession to move in to an independent senior's facility where he plays cards and shares Korbel with his fellow compatriots in advanced age.  The reason this relates to the lunch I shared with him is because it adds immediate significance to the meal.  Egg rolls and fried rice can have substantial meaning when you are sharing them with unquestionably one of the greatest people you've ever known, as is true with any food.  On to actual lunch, which I should introduce by saying I almost decided to pass on in exchange for some lazy alone time.

I hopped in my sister's car and started our trek towards Yen Ching, a solid fifteen to twenty minute hike from our home in Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood.  After ten minutes on the freeway we got off on the paradoxically named Good Hope Road exit.  The paradox is the result of Yen Ching existing in the middle of a huge stretch of homogeny and empty abandoned lots, the type of landscape I find to be exact opposite of "hopeful".  Bleakness aside, Yen Ching breaks up the monotony with it's signature old school Chinese restaurant exterior.  Walking in to Yen Ching was instantly charming for me.  The restaurant decor is about as on-the-nose as you can get, even by Chinese restaurant standards.  To my left I noticed a decades old restaurant award from the Shepard Express, to my right, an enormous plastic Buddha.  When we were seated, given our menus and ordered all within about eight minutes.

For starters my grandfather and I got the obligatory egg drop soup. My sister ordered hot and sour soup, which we are pretty certain was just egg drop soup with a healthy pour of soy sauced added in. We also ordered egg rolls which were decent and entirely unremarkable; which is to say, exactly what I want in a spot like Yen Ching.  My sister and I were ensconced in some gossip when my grandpa, with a hint of dejection on his face, exclaimed at his egg roll "So what's supposed to be so good about these!?" My initial response was a polite snicker, but after mining my brain for merit, I came up completely empty.  The typical egg roll is really nothing but a big tube of bland that has a pleasant crunch-to-slime ratio, but that's about as big of a compliment I could up with the Chinese-American classic.  Thanks for unintentionally demystifying the egg roll for me Bup, I am happier and sadder as a result.

Oh, Tso Shiny

Next came my main course, the almost impressively reflective General Tso's Chicken.  I swear to God, I took at least ten other pictures of my lunch and this was the least glossy one of the bunch.  The lunch menu was pretty limited, keeping me from my usual vegetarian go-to when it comes to eating Chinese food.  My choice to eat primarily vegetarian when I eat Chinese isn't an ethical one, I just take great pleasure in the texture of crispy bean curd.  Anyhow, not wanting to just eat green beans in sauce I opted for the classic General Tso's Chicken.  I'm not going to lie, it was pretty damn delicious.  There was nothing delicate or refined about it, and I'm pretty sure it was absolutely hammered with taste enhancers, but it was a slightly elevated version of what is often consumed by blacked out nineteen year olds at four in the morning.

Frog and vase are friends

Uncharacteristic of me and my voracity I couldn't finish my lunch, so I sat there and nursed green tea and conversed with Bup and my sister while they picked at their sweet and sour shrimp and kung pao chicken.  It was at that moment that I decided that the lunch was entry worthy.  Simply sitting, having lazy conversation and a full belly, no particular urgency.  Sometimes life just feels warm and gratitude for one's own existence emerges out of the little things.  For me, I often find that feeling when I'm sitting around a bunch of empty plates and am stricken with the implicit coziness of a food coma.  It's something I could just as easily have not absorbed at all; hearing my Bup go in to extreme detail about a plumbing job he did fifteen years prior, then shifting conversation in to what we think the Brewers are going to do this year, and most sweetly hearing him give accounts of all of the things "Grandma used to like", but much like the lunch itself, I'm so glad I chose to participate.

After twenty or so minutes of priceless and irreplaceable small talk, it was time for us to part ways. Bup grabbed his cane and slowly made his way to his truck while Cait and I packed back in her car for the trip back to the city. It felt good to remind myself that the experience of eating can be as much about the quality of your company as it is the quality of the ingredients themselves.  It also felt good to be given the position to realize that you shouldn't reflexively pass up on great lunches with your grandfather, you little ingrate. Anyhow, the whole ride back we talked about what we always talk about; what we just ate and who we were hanging out with.  Today, it was Yen Ching with Bup, and it was fantastic.  

Four Hours And Fifteen Minutes In A Different Dimension: My Dinner At Alinea

If you're reading Rough Chop it's for one of two reasons.

Reason One: You're a fellow food geek.  If that's the case, you've seen the taffy apple balloons and the majesty that is hot potato, cold potato.  You've seen the YouTube clips of Chef Achatz deftly constructing desserts for his guests on their table, moving and creating in equal parts rapidity and precision.  If you've been to Alinea then you know the emotions that separate online spectator from actual diner; if you haven't been then you probably are the walking embodiment of anticipation I was a week ago, just waiting for your chance to experience what really goes down at 1723 N. Halsted Street.  Either way you don't need anymore food porn, so I won't be delivering any.

Reason Two: You know me.  If that's the case I've probably already harangued you with details about my experience.  Some of you have lectured me on the "insanity" of investing so much time and money and energy in to a meal.  Some of you have indulged me with relative disinterest as I prattled on about all the twists and turns my epic meal took over the sixteen courses I had the pleasure of experiencing... thank you for your patience. Still others of you relished in the details and geeked out with me about the taffy apple balloons and majesty that is hot potato, cold potato; which are realistically the only two courses we've shared.

It could be a combination of the two reasons.  Either way, you don't need to see another article with a course-by-course assault of pictures laden with superlatives and whimsical praise.  Don't get me wrong, I am packed to the gills with an almost maniacal level of appreciation for everything Grant Achatz does.  The man is worth every accolade, ever Michelin star, every bit of lionization that he's received.  He is a genius who's restaurant gave me, unequivocally, the greatest meal of my life thus far. But I don't want to simply review Alinea from the perspective of a diner, because that wasn't what I was when I was eating there.  Alinea was much more than that.

I want to begin the review portion of this entry with a preface that contains one overarching sentiment that I want to be considered throughout the rest of the post: to each their own.  It feels a little funny to begin discussing a revolutionary and game changing restaurant with what could be considered a trite and played out platitude, but I think it's appropriate.  Alinea may not be for everyone, and I understand that.  It's certainly not my job, as a guy who lives in dual-income household with no kids, to outrightly oblige anyone to spend hundreds of dollars on a meal.  That being said, I do oblige absolutely everyone to consider what's at stake by categorically shunning experiences like this one out.

The solitary shared experience for all Alinea diners. The napkin.

Preface aside, the meaningful part of my review is essentially this: what I experienced at Alinea in a sensory sense was unprecedented up until the moment it happened, on almost every level.   There were so many tastes, smells, textures and ideas that I had never even approximated in my life that by the tenth course I felt literally stoned.  Try as you want to analyze the flavors as they happen, predict the next move by the kitchen or the waitstaff, guess in what capacity the next course will arrive or even come close to what it will taste like; you will run in to failure at an overwhelming capacity over and over again.  Alinea is not about analyzing, it is about experiencing the ride as it happens.  Even if words could do the meal justice (they can't), the ever-evolving nature of the establishment wouldn't allow it to be duplicated, so there is literally almost no point in reflecting my personal experience on to you, because it won't happen for either of us ever again.

Hence my urgent suggestion that you consider what you'd be missing if you never invested in an experience like this.  The willful forfeiture of non-replicable experience feels like a tragedy to me. Simply describing Alinea to another person is like describing a color they've never seen before, it's simply something that must be experienced in order to be understood. Perhaps affording yourself a meal like this seems ludicrous if you reduce the logic down to "it's just food", but that logic is dangerous.  That same train of thought would suggest that Beethoven or Miles Davis are just musicians, not giving any credence to the complexities and genius that set them apart from the pack.  It's that genius and those complexities that forge the enormous chasm between what simply consuming food and what Alinea is.  Again, it's not for me to tell you what you or anyone else should invest your money and time in; but if you are going to give yourself a fair assessment of what "worth it" is, attempt to consider everything that a restaurant like this is.

Owen and the Incredible Taffy Apple Balloon Montage

I leave you with a couple pieces of advice if you do decide to take the plunge and purchase tickets to the best meal of your life.

First: go with people you truly love, who you know will appreciate what's going on.  Of all the pictures I took that night, the one headlining this article is my favorite.  My wife smiling, a glass of chablis in one hand and chopsticks used to pluck gurnard lionfish off of a plank of a barrel that was used to age brandy, and later fish sauce.  One of the funnest parts of the night was watching her and my friends faces as they explored the uncharted frontier of flavor that I myself was enjoying for the first time ever.

Second: Don't overthink it.  Don't linger on anything too long. My specific menu took four hours and fifteen minutes to get through but that time flew by.  The menu is impeccably paced, and part of the fun of everything is letting yourself be surprised every now and then

Third: Don't consider the expense, at all.  Once you click "purchase" just let any financial tension drift away.  The ticket system is implemented to make the actual dining experience completely stress free.  As soon as you get to the door, just let the restaurant go to work.  Money comes and goes, once in a life time experiences are titled as such for a reason

Fourth: Reflecting the third thought-if you are a drinker, GET THE WINE PAIRINGS.  I can't stress enough how much an additional $150.00 investment enhanced my dinner.  Again, if you've already made the investment, I highly highly recommend going a little further.

So, that wraps up my thoughts on dining at Alinea.  I will concede that eating such an establishment may not be for anyone.  That being said, and assuming you have the means, if you've already decided that it's not for you, I implore you to take a step back, consider what you are choosing to miss out on. There are a whole lot of things happening in that unassuming building in Lincoln Park, I'm incredibly grateful to have been a part of them.

Begin Again

I'm going to preface this post by saying that you really, really don't have to read this specific entry. This is mainly me talking to myself and laying out what's taken me so long to write another post.  If you are interested in that specific process, please read ahead.

Alright, I've decided that, after some necessary reconfiguration and perspective tweaking that it would be worth it to do this again.  I realize that it might seem silly to mentally restart a blog that was only three posts in to begin with, but a lot has happened in between the now obliterated "Weekend In Wicker Park: Day One" post and the post that will follow this one.  I've decided not to lock down mentally on writing from the character I'd established myself as; which is to say a jaded and aging semi-functioning member of the service industry.  Frankly speaking I felt that that specific role was a dull caricature that undermined my ambitions and perspectives.  I currently am still making a living in the role of marginally competent kitchen worker, but that is not something I see as a fixture in my life, even for the short term.  When I locked in to that perspective to write my initial entries I burned out quickly.  Writing non-fiction from a mindset that is even remotely disingenuous burns you out really quickly.

So, here goes nothing... or maybe something... or maybe a million things.