Therapy

It's too easy for me to forget that this blog exists. I'll get on a roll for a few months, build up some momentum, then "reward" myself with a "break" and subsequently disappear for half a year or more. I can't say for sure why I drop off like that. I enjoy writing. I see putting my thoughts down and sharing them as a healing act, and when the going inevitably gets tough, this is the logic that I'll use as a prod to jab me back in to the game; but said logic means nothing to whatever sick entity was put in charge of scripting 2016. This year has been nothing but one devastating vicissitude bleeding with an almost competitive malevolence in to another. The reflexive result is my subconscious defensively extricating itself from any true participation in the world.

This is heartbreaking for me. Going out in to the world is what I love. Going to desperate and impractical means to enjoy life's most premium experiences is what I do. I use my insistence on participation, on not being bored ever, as the only real blueprint for escaping my blistering depression. It feels damn near impossible, however, to run tantivy in to the nurturing and inspired arms of cuisine and revelry when the hurdles I have to leap are the bodies of legends and friends maimed or killed off by illness at an age where most of us are entering our prime, my dead dog, and a formidable and growing golem of small personal defeats. The idea of spritzing in a few curative instances of luxury just feels wrong.

Defying the mandates set forth by this shitty year to stay miserable, myself and a sizable group of friends who, for their own reasons are mutually eager to bid adieu to 2016, recently set out to Madison for a midweek trip. The plan was simple enough: dinner at Forequarter followed by Car Seat Headrest playing at the Majestic. As it turns out, simple wouldn't do. The alchemized effect of this specific group of people, our commensurate measures of frustration and irrepressibility culminated in a full-scale takedown of Forequarter's menu (which it just so happens was otherworldly in it's deliciousness) and enough wine to provide the foundation for at least one near black out. After filling up on puffed beef tendon, seared scallops, steak, chicken, lamb... literally the entire damn menu with several items doubled up on plus desserts, we made our way to the show. I walked out in to perfect weather, ethereally drunk and full enough to be stoned; and if you can empathize with the latter of those two states of intoxication, we can almost definitely be friends.

The rest of the night hovers in a flickering ether for me. Fleeting moments of don't-give-a-fuck fun leading up to sloppily passing out on a friends air mattress. I closed my eyes with the spirit of a 19 year old, waking up very much in my thirties with horrible pain in my joints and head and GERD intense enough to produce a panic attack. Ultimately, I emerged from this self-induced chrysalis/iron maiden hybrid refreshed. As grey as life had been leading up to that night, was immediately hellish after, and lame as it has been ever since-it was proven to me over the course of those several hours that escape is possible.

Obviously this isn't meant to be a review of a restaurant or even a narrative of my evening. This is a reminder to me and whoever else it might resonate with that dread doesn't have to win. Fight like hell to keep the jaws of circumstance from snapping down on you; but if you start to feel consumed, it might be better to blast your way out with dynamite than negotiate with nightmares you don't always have control over.  Since I started writing this another one of my friends passed away, and another person who I didn't know personally but was close to many of my other friends also died. It's more a reminder than anything for me to continue to get out and actually enjoy life instead of letting the downsides (not matter how drastic they may be) beat me in to submission. More to come. 

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

Maybe it's some sort of mental dysmorphia but I live in a constant state of self doubt. I feel like I'm treading on a thin strand of luck and the slightest of circumstances could buffet me off the rope in to the abyss I deserve to live in. This isn't to suggest I believe I've done something cosmically immoral, but it is to say that I'm presently living a life I have a hard time accepting I'm worthy of. I have a job that is actually fun to go to, I have an insistently loving and supportive family, I have enough money to sustain the maintenance of two dogs who I adore and enough extra to manage a date night here and there. My wife is the loyal, sweet, incisive and hilarious breadwinner of my house who puts up with my neurotic bullshit with more patience than I had previously assumed was possible. That doesn't even touch on her beauty, which exists on such a scale that otherwise mature and tactful adults who meet her for the first time feel compelled to tell me they don't understand how I, of all people, ended up with her. The life surrounding this teeth-gritting, fatalistic, catastrophic curmudgeon is by definition a good one; one that could be categorized as enviable for a lot of people

So what's my stupid problem then? Well, I'm so nervous about the fragility of my very nice life that instead of enjoying it I become a hypochondriacal wad of nervous energy. I consider the logic of doomsayers predicting the end of the world, I convince my body it has cancer or some anomalous neurological condition, I remind myself constantly that at any minute someone I love could die in a car accident and joy itself could become rendered an impossibility forevermore. In short, my last name is "Ciaccio" and I am imbued with a genetic condition that makes me, at times, a grumpy and petulant old man who loves life too much to invest in it. Caution begets anxiety which begets self doubt which begets depression which begets me sitting around and playing my PS3 for hours instead of doing anything remotely useful, like cleaning up my house or writing on this here blog. It's lame and inexcusable. That's why I'm sorry.

I'm not sorry to you, my reader, whoever you are. I'm really grateful that you've tolerated my indulgent self-effacement long enough to get to this sentence, but I'm not sorry. I'm also not going to apologize to myself because my inner snob resents my inner sloth too much to let me get away with contrition. I dedicate my lament to the static sense of fulfillment that I've been shutting out the last several months by looking at my laptop and saying, "Why bother?". Knowing that I've exchanged something I personally find enriching for hours and hours of forgettable non-life isn't something I want to apologize to myself for, but it is something I want to regret. Even if life isn't as fragile as my brain would like me to believe, time itself is a non-renewable resource.

So here is this post, in all of it's immodest and maudlin glory, obliging me to keep writing. There may be a lot in this world that I thumb my nose at, but food and writing don't fit in to that vast bracket. Whatever this blog is the product of; be it a talent, a gift, a delusion or whatever else, it is with out a doubt a more logical means to a satisfying end than all of the nothing i've been doing. So, with Wisconsin's pertinacious winter looming, let's get cozy, and I'll fill some of your time with what I think about the great (and not so great) world of gustation.

Writing About Writing About Food

I've been writing this blog, with varying degrees of prolificness, for almost exactly half a year now.  My love of all things gastronomic hasn't burnt out in the least, but I keep hitting very serious walls that make writing about my objective experiences with food very difficult.  In an attempt to grease the wheels I'm going to go stream of conscious a little bit and try and unlock some of the reasons why.

To me, the process of eating food can be a sacred thing. I don't mean to come off as desperate or lachrymose when I use the word "sacred", but there is an inherent romance attached to good food.  It can be something I've eaten a hundred times in my life, but if it's a good product that took consideration to make, I owe it my consideration as it's being consumed.  Let's use the very basic example of fresh cheese curds. Any self-respecting Wisconsinite has experienced the majesty that is opening the twist-tied bag of cheese curds and popping a fresh chunk of squeaky cheddar in their mouths and just slipping cozily in to bliss. For me, the sensory experience given to be by cheese curds immediately brings me to my grandparent's farm, where I have a distinct memory of my late grandmother and I sharing a bowl of cheese curds on the front porch while Amish buggies clopped by. The fresh air, my grandma's voice, Uecker on the radio all hum back to my by proxy of a taste I can connect through memories over time. That is what is sacred.

So why is this difficult to write about? It's hard to say. Maybe I'm protective of memories like that, or perhaps I'm nervous I won't do them justice. Maybe it's difficult for me to communicate deeply personal moments that leave me feeling slightly vulnerable. Being that I am, to a fault, pretty open with how I feel about things, I think the difficulty is more in trying to relate personal experiences than anything else.

To draw a comparison, the experience of eating food for me is like being in love. I have proud, precise feelings when it comes to the love I have for my wife and my family and friends, but it's an unquantifiable and amorphous experience that is individual to me. Everyone loves differently, even my wife loves me in different way than I do her, so really how accurately can I describe the experience of our relationship and it's depth to someone who I haven't even met? The same goes with my own personal attachment to food and dining. Given the insatiable ardor I have in my heart for gastronomy, I'm probably something of an authority, but really how much of one? My experience as a diner is pretty deep but certainly not in comparison to others food writers out there. My experience as someone who's worked in restaurants is a decade long but that's mostly front of house and odd job work that doesn't actually pertain to making food, the parts that do pertain to making food are fucking laughable. I cook at home but I'm a bronze medal finalist behind my wife and roommate.

Everything I listed up there are all things that make me question myself in to the role of "hesitant authority". It sounds cocky to consider oneself an authority at all but if I didn't then why the hell write about anything at all?  I know my love for food is genuine. Literally almost everything about the experience of "food" is exciting to me. Where the food comes from, who is making it, how it's meant to be eaten, what it's meant to be paired with, the kitchen it came out of, etc. The trick comes in capturing that thought and holding it in my brain long enough to transcribe it in to words, and then convincing myself that I'm making it good and real enough to click the bright orange "Publish" button that's mocking me from it's perch in the upper right corner of the site.

Wow, this is all sounding a whole lot less confident than I am as someone who writes about food. The point I'm trying to make is that accurately describing a personal experience and trying to relate it to people in a very general way can be very difficult. This truth is magnified when it involves a topic so dear to me that I consider it as much a cornerstone of my existence as the people I love. The implicit challenge is equal parts exciting and intimidating, a combination that serves as an adequate enough inspiration fuel for me to keep writing and hoping that I never come off as trite or mawkish.

If you've read this far I guess it's safe to say that you vibe with Rough Chop, and for that I sincerely thank you. I always thought it was a bit of a lame platitude to readers when other bloggers have described their work as a journey shared with the writer, but in a way I understand where that feeling comes from. I hope you want cheese curds as much as I do now.

Best of Ten-Pho-Round One: Hue

Last week Friday on one of the most frigid days of the year the haggard husks of myself and my friend Lisa sauntered in to Bayview's popular Vietnamese restaurant Hue in search of some pho.

Hue's Bowl of Beef Pho

I was on four hours of sleep after quite an aggressive shift the night before.  Lisa, having just gotten off of her overnight shift, was on zero. You may notice that none of the pictures on this post will feature either Lisa or myself.  Our egos aren't quite deluded enough to think that we need to do this Best Of Ten project with a degree of anonymity to keep it from being corrupted. We do however have just enough pride to not want willfully appear to be deranged sociopaths on the internet; and our circumstances yielded just that look. Between the exhaustion and the glacial conditions Milwaukee was experiencing, we were in dire need of some edible solace. Mercifully, the good people at Hue let us in.

Note: Our two experiences were written separately with no knowledge of what the other was going to say. Anything oddly similar should be chalked up to coincidence

Tommy's Experience

The restaurant itself was a little more chilled out than I expected given that it was lunchtime on a cold Friday afternoon.  Maybe ten other diners were in attendance during the hour or so we were eating, which is totally fine given Hue's cozy vibe. We had picked Hue because we felt it made a good baseline to draw from moving forward. There isn't something overtly "authentic" feeling about Hue, but it doesn't stray too far from it's roots that it treads in to novelty territory. Also, the restaurant's popularity will give previous diners who are reading this a good comparative grasp moving forward.

Anyhow we were greeted, seated and given waters pretty much immediately.  We were sat at a two-top parallel to the bar. This is cool except for the fact that they had a TV with ESPN on and I had Skip Bayless's hideous face scowling for most of my lunch; but this isn't Hue's fault so whatever. The service was appropriately casual and efficient, nothing too over-the-top and not in any way incompetent or lazy.  While Lisa and I looked over the menu, pretending we might be getting something other than dueling bowls of beef pho, the server took our drink order.  Fresh off of a shift, Lisa ordered the Hue lager.  The Hue beer is made in Vietnam and has no connection to the restaurant outside of it's name.  I ordered a Vietnamese coffee, which I had never had before.  The coffee was rich and delicious and came with a side of sweetened condensed milk that you dabbled in to the coffee with a spoon. The coffee was good beyond expectation, so defying my anxiety and common sense I pounded a couple of these back over the course of my meal.

Then came the focal piece of our lunch, a giant bowl of beef pho. The pho itself was the pleasantly basic combination of beef, noodles and an herbaceous broth. I'm pretty sure the noodles aren't made in-house (because that would be insane) so let's focus on the dynamics of the other two components. The brisket and steak were cooked well done but maintained a degree of tenderness. I'm not familiar enough with the traditions of pho to know whether or not that the beef is traditionally prepared that way, but it worked well enough for the occasion. If I were attempting to make pho at home I would probably use raw beef and let the broth cook it, but that's just me.  Then there was the broth. I don't like aggressive criticism of someone else's cooking, but the broth is just not for me.  Something about Hue's broth just reminds me of a very mild beef flavored tea.  I think it speaks for itself that we were both murdering our bowls with sriracha and hoison sauce.

Another tiny gripe I have about my experience was the totally meager portion of accouterments given to tweak our pho with. In my limited experience with pho, I've gotten pretty heaping portions of different things to season or add texture to customize my pho experience.  Between the two of us we got two twigs of thai basil, about half of a jalapeño cut in to coins and probably no more than twenty sprouts.  This want to seem like a kvetch about silly and minor things, but part of pho's appeal is the gargantuan portion it comes in, and a dinky little garnish plate just doesn't fit with that. This really isn't a huge deal for me, it just feels like a weird little cost management thing that gets under my skin.

The Verdict: Not bad but not especially memorable.  I would totally go to Hue and eat pho again but not because i'm in the mood for some exponentially thoughtful or memorable meal. Picking up a friend from the airport who you haven't seen in a while and want to catch up? Take them to Hue. Do you have an older relative who wants to try something new without traveling too far from their comfort zone? Hue it up. It certainly doesn't boggle the mind, but it's a decent $20.00 lunch.

Lisa's Experience
(In which Lisa valiantly attempts to avoid making infinite pho puns so Tom doesn’t kill her.)
Hello, dear readers. This is Lisa, Tom’s partner in gluttony and the pursuit of food obsession. Tom and I finally got our acts together and met up for some pho last week, and now that my work week is over I actually have time/mental energy to immerse myself in the resultant indulgent pho musings. Let me set the scene: it’s Friday morning, and it’s cold. Like numb fingers, I-can’t-bear-to-peel-myself-out-of-my-flannel-sheets cold, even by the truly depraved standards of the average Wisconsinite (although to be fair, I did see a husky white guy wearing shorts, which I suppose means it’s still within the realm of normal Midwestern frigidity). 

As Tom mentioned in his previous post, I’m a nurse, which pretty reliably translates to “I have a weird schedule” (among other things, i.e. I have a slightly deranged sense of humor, am almost impossible to gross out, etc), and I’m no exception. I work ten-hour night shifts for seven days in a row, then have off for a week. So, on the freezing morning in question I was 40 hours deep into my work week, had left work three hours before, and had allowed myself a 45 minute nap before meeting Tom. What I’m trying to say is that I was exhausted, freezing, and mildly delirious. In my experience, that’s the perfect time to eat pho. Granted, given that I am in the throes of a fairly overwhelming pho obsession (really holding back a pun here), I tend to be of the opinion that any time is the perfect time to eat pho. Do other people wake up thinking about pho, and how they can work it into their schedule that day? So far, I’ve found that isn’t typically the case, so this project is pretty much a dream come true (thanks for feeding my addiction, Tom).

Anyway, back to our frigid morning. Tom agreed to my request that we start at Hue, so together we hurtled through the increasingly forceful snow toward Bayview. Hue was the natural starting place for me, since at a mere ½ mile’s distance from my apartment, it’s currently my go-to pho place. It also, while not the first place I tried pho, was definitely where my obsession defiantly declared itself to me one hungover afternoon, and has continued to declare itself on each of my near weekly strolls for takeout. Tom and I arrived at about noon and were seated by the friendly server who always seems to be working and probably thinks I have a problem. We both got the basic beef pho, and I, feeling slightly deranged and emboldened by going out to eat when I should have been sleeping, also got a beer, while Tom stuck to Vietnamese coffee and its condensed milk decadence. 

The place was pretty deserted, given the cold and the fact that it was a weekday and most of the normally-scheduled world was probably working and not traipsing around eating Vietnamese noodles. We sat at our little table and sipped our respective beverages, while the Talking Heads or something else sort of blandly agreeable played quietly in the background. Blandly agreeable is actually a fairly accurate description of Hue’s ambience overall: a little too bright, modern but not offensively so, and clientele that as far as I can tell is pretty consistently 100% white. Now, as an extremely white Midwestern girl myself, I don’t feel that I have the right to gauge the “authenticity” of a Vietnamese noodle joint, but if I had to hazard a guess I would say this place is pretty Americanized. There aren’t “icky” things like tripe or tendon or weirdly gelatinous little buns or things you can’t even identify while looking at a picture menu or, you know, Vietnamese people. There are crab Rangoon and the Talking Heads and a girl with face tattoos. To put it another way, if you want the sort of dingy-hole-in-the-wall-but-authentic-hidden-treasure feel, this is not your place.

The food came after only a few minutes, and all conversation effectively stopped and was predictably replaced with slurping, chopstick clinking, etc. The broth at Hue is lighter in color and sweeter than many places, with a strong anise and cinnamon flavor and just enough fat to it to make it sort of shimmer, while not being at all thick or heavy. I think that the broth could stand to have a more assertive feel to it, more spice or meat flavor or something, but I just compensated by adding all the available fixings (basil, sprouts, jalapeño, lime, white onion I demanded the server bring me because I need it to be as stinky as possible) along with serious amounts of sriracha and hoisin sauce. Without any of that, I think the broth would be too sweet and mild for me, but with everything added it was a pleasant combination of heat and sweetness. 

The steak and brisket were tender and plentiful (although I’d love to see them served a little more rare, I’ve yet to encounter that in Milwaukee), there were appropriate proportions of noodle to broth to meat, and even after talking shit to Tom about how I was so hungry I was going to eat my entire giant bowl, I still had enough to take home another meal’s worth. The price of $11 seemed a bit steep for pho, but given the huge servings, clean atmosphere, and the prices of the surrounding restaurants, it didn’t seem appalling or anything to me. 

Verdict: a good basic pho, I would probably come back here even if it wasn’t an 8 minute walk from my apartment.

Hipsters: Gastronomy's Make Believe Pincushion

The culinary world is undeniably and inextricably associated with competition.  From farm to table, cook to writer, kitchen to keyboard it seems like every element of dining has to have some heir of megalomania attached to it.   This isn't always a bad thing, of course.  Assuming it's escorted through the proper channels, rigid competition plus self-inflation can equal excellence; however as with any industry, you don't have to dig too deep to find the service industry's stupid.  It's easy to pick apart undeserved egos and call out backbiting harbingers of gossip that pepper the world of gastronomy, but, that is not unique to gastronomy alone.  I want to talk about something symptomatic of deluded and painfully basic, non-dimensional thinking. This thing is truly alarming, given it' permeation in an arena built on creativity and culture.  That thing... is hipsters.

I know, I know, I know... I just said that I wanted to write about something unique, and that the word "hipster" is about as ubiquitous as the word "chef" when discussing food, but that's exactly my point. That very ubiquity has disintegrated whatever a "hipster" is in to complete ambiguity; and yet, as if it means anything, that stupid word keeps popping up.  "Hipster" has become nothing but an amalgamate of what people consider quirky and different.  Fact: I had to re-write that sentence like fifteen times because I couldn't find a satisfying enough description for a label as vague and general as what I'm talking about.  Essentially think of anything younger than 60 (I mean, Bourdain is a hipster, right?) then give them literally any amount of intellect and/or individuality and there you have it, your hipster.
So why does this bug me so much?  Why do I find it harmful?  That's a good question, and if one wanted to simplify, they could probably deduce that my generally irritable nature is at the heart of this entry.  Beyond that and more specifically though is that my sour mood is easily provoked by boring and unnecessary hatefulness; and let's face it, the word hipster doesn't conjure anything particularly positive in your mind.   If you closed your eyes and were told to imagine a hipster, you would probably imagine a person reduced to a mascot used to represent everything you think is wrong with young people these days.  That's because "hipster" has become the official brand for pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectualism.  The complication is that everything and everyone that is not painfully normal is effectively a hipster, and therefore a pretentious pseudo-intellectual.

Hipster making the most pretentious pizza of all time.

This insipid/insidious thought process annoys me to my core when it pertains to restaurants.  Reading Yelp reviews can become a practice in masochism if you dare venture in to anything that's been independently opened in the past decade.  Seriously, no matter what city you're in, type the "H" word in to the search bar and watch the paranoid accusations fly.  Milwaukee alone has TWENTY TWO pages worth of results and few-and-far-between are the entries where "hipster" affiliated with anything positive.  The shit of it is, is that these accusations are often being hurled at restaurants my friends work at, eat at, and even own.  Those "pretentious bearded hipsters" are quite often parents who don't care about anything besides giving you food or getting you drunk.

It seems like nothing is safe from the branding iron of the insecure and out-of-touch.  Ramen, sushi, pizza and hot dogs are all served in places in Milwaukee that I've seen described as alienating in their hipness. If you think that slice of pizza you're eating is going to somehow taste worse because some punk rock kid made it for you, it isn't because that kid's fault, it's because you're either insecure, an idiot or both.

This probably sounds as insecure and accusatory as the people I'm bashing, but it's difficult to broach this subject in a non-hostile manner when I'm marginalized right off the bat based on glasses or a t-shirt or whatever.  This isn't a blanket defense of every young person who has an offbeat aesthetic.  Some people are pretentious assholes, some of them own crappy restaurants who make lousy food and have horrible service.  What this is a defense of is someone's right to be different without having that difference be the sole identifier for who they are.  That thinking stunts progress and discourages true innovation.  This is also a proclamation that doling out extremely general judgements on anyone by applying blanket titles to them is a really lame way to go through life. If you can't criticize in a specific and constructive way, you should probably consider whether or not you are capable of that criticism in the first place.

I should mention that I realize I'm not actually marginalized. I revel like a fat hog in the most privileged sector of society probably on the planet.  Besides, factually speaking, as a heavily domesticated 29 year old Wisconsinite/unabashed Taylor Swift fan with very little discretionary income I've dipped far out of the orbit of anything anyone could consider hip.

Oh and one last thing. You know that painfully hip couple up there? That's my mom and dad, holding my brother who is now 33 years old.  If the body of water that is hipsterdom is three decades deep, whatever "hip" is probably needs to be redefined.

Family Dinner: Cheese And Wine Valentine's

The spread

Last night's family dinner theme was Cheese and Wine Valentine's.  Family dinners pretty much always occur on Sundays so missed Valentine's Day by one day.  This is actually a beneficially fortuitous circumstance given the amount of regular attendees (myself included) are embedded in the service industry.  Successfully taking off Valentine's Day, especially one that lands one a weekend, is pretty unlikely.  On actual Valentine's Day my lovely wife and I went and had a very nice romantic pizza lunch and then I went and had my ass kicked at work for nine straight hours.

Ass kicking foreseen, I decided to schedule a less labor intensive dinner for the following day.  Still wanting a romantic vibe, we hosted a cheese and wine themed "dinner".  This was less of a dinner and more of an array of snacks, as pictured above.  Apples, crackers, fresh vegetables, breads, spreads, figs, desserts and of course a vast selection of delicious cheeses festooned our dining room table.  Accompanying these ambrosial assemblage of treats was enough wine to fill the bottles that in turn fill two large bags which are now sitting cozily in the recycling bin outside of my house.

The night transitioned as it usually does.  First mingling, then drinking (this goes on until the night ends), then consuming way too much food, then gratuitous immaturity in one form or another.  Last nights ridiculousness apexed in the form of a Mad Libs session which really everyone in the room should be simultaneously ashamed and proud of.  After a few more hours and a few more glasses of wine I hit the bed hard and woke up to a pretty merciful stack of dishes to do. Mission accomplished.

Family Dinners

The "Family Recipe" spread.

In late November of 2013 I found myself sitting alone and disenchanted outside of the cafeteria of the Milwaukee Area Technical College's Mequon campus.  A combination of things led to that disenchantment.  First, Mequon is equal parts extreme wealth and cultural destitution.  As snobby as that sentence sounds, there are but a few decent restaurants in the entire city to cater to the surrounding elite.  The few saving graces that do exist are integrated in to the indistinguishable and sprawling network of strip malls that line Mequon's eponymous main road.  Credit is due to the actually good chefs working to make Mequon a better and more delicious place, but unless you're Todd Solondz, you're not wrenching anything inspirational out of the blank landscape that is Mequon.

Adding to that was my schedule. Class during the day and work during the night left little time for me to exist as an individual.  The few days that allowed me any free time became a balancing act of sustaining something of a social life, spending time with my wife and simply finding time to complete the general errands and tasks necessary to exist in this world.  A reality that necessitated rigid scheduling and cold pragmatism was fiercely at war with my spontaneous brain and my impractical heart. I'm impatient and spasmodically manic so the foundation of my plan to just put my head down and work for a few years may as well have been built on pudding.

With an impending meltdown afoot, I needed to supplant the static boredom that was my life with something.  It needed be something intimate and galvanizing, something special.  Food, being an obvious obsession in my life, often served as an escape for me.  I would spend hours reading food blogs, or fantasizing as I pored over reviews of the greatest restaurants in the world.  It didn't take for it to add up that this mania could be used as an avenue for something far more fulfilling.

Judah and Neenah getting ready for some comfort food.

In an attempt to hone my enthusiasm in to something solid I took an account of all of the things that make me tick.  Friends (often in a the more-the-merrier context), hosting events, sharing and consuming ridiculous amounts of food. Those ingredients combined to form the foundation of the very first family dinner. On January 6th, 2014, my wife and I hosted some of our closest friends for an enormous Middle Eastern feast.  We opted to start with Middle Eastern cuisine because it's accessible, absolutely delicious and has the feeling of food that is meant to be shared.  Since then we've hosted 25 other dinners, meaning literally hundreds of dishes have graced our rickety old dining room table. Sometimes we pick a region or city like Sicily or Bangkok, sometimes we pick something less structured, like "summer" or "family recipes".  Either way, the end product is always meaningful time spent with people who you love.

One the many victims of family dinner food coma

Marketing and consumerism have turned "tradition" in to a four letter word in our cynical generation. Everything is either shoddy in it's cheapness or gaudy in it's luxuriousness.  On top of that, we have become so connected by way of electronic device that personal face-to-face interaction has found itself in to expendability.  For me, family dinners break that mold.  Every few Sundays I have the extreme pleasure of drinking wine and sharing food with some of my close friends, in person, and that is a tradition worth cherishing. Moreover, it's one I suggest incorporating in to your own lives. Find yourself living wedged in the doldrums? Did five tons of snow fall on to your house, striking you with cabin fever? I recommend trying to cook yourself out of it.  Make something cozy, indulgent, and don't be afraid of simplicity. After you do that, tell your friends to pick up a bottle of cheap wine and invite them over. It may be a cliche, but I think you will find it true that true richness can be found anywhere, and can never be purchased.

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.

Last Night's Dinner-Sean Brock's Roasted Chicken

Just a mini-update with a little bit of food porn so I can brag about what I ate last night.  We wanted something simple and cozy so we pulled Sean Brock's roasted chicken recipe out of his beautiful and engaging new cookbook, Heritage.  I'm not going to post the recipe because that would essentially be plagiarism, but I will say that if you have a young or beginner cook who's looking to move beyond the novice level, this would be a great gift idea.  The one caveat is that a lot of the recipes include ingredients that you aren't going to find in every standard grocery store, but there is a handy resource guide in the back of the book.  

Memories In Gustation: Primo's Pizza (Rockford, IL)

Rockford Illinois... The birthplace and hometown of my father, the third largest city in Illinois, and also ranked by Forbes as the third most miserable city to inhabit in America in 2013.  As evidenced by the photograph below, Rockford struggles when it comes to finding pride in itself.  The culinary landscape has improved vastly in the past half a decade, but still exists amorphously and without that certain defined feeling of confidence or permanence.  

This is real.

This story isn't about the restaurants who are accountable for shouldering the weight of changing the game anyway.  It's not about a young restauranteur who is eager to bring light to the bleakness of Rockford's decaying landscape.  This isn't about the intimate beer bar that has a selection which rivals that of any place in Milwaukee or Chicago that I've ever walked in to.  This isn't about the ambitious and ever changing farm-to-table restaurant that's always packed to the gills on the weekend. Rockford has all of those things, and by no means is this post meant to diminish all of the awesome things they are doing, but Rockford also has Primo's Pizza.

My parents split up when I was very young and every other weekend my brother, my sister and I would head down to Rockford.  Initially my mom and dad would meet half way in Delavan, Wisconsin for the exchange. After about a decade of that my brother turned sixteen and took on the responsibility of driving us, blasting ska the whole way down.  It was about that time in my life that my first memories of Primo's are from.  In fact, I have a particularly fond memory of a 15 year old me waking up from a nap at my dad's house to an empty home and a note with a ten dollar bill and instructions to go get a pizza for my self.  I called my order in, popped Goldfinger's Hang Ups album in to my Walkman, and picked up my pizza.  Then I watched All In The Family for hours, nursing a large cheese pizza all by myself.  I was a very, very cool 15 year old boy.

Alright so what's the big fuss?  It's a modest, maybe even generic looking, Italian restaurant.  It can't possibly possess anything so astonishingly special or different that it warrants this much attention, right? No, not right, and stop being snotty.  But Primo's magic doesn't lie in technique or presentation, it's hewn from decades of consistency and precision.  It comes from not trying to do anything riveting or innovative, just making the same thing really good, and making that thing good every single time. What's especially noteworthy about this restaurant is that it's able to sustain itself in a veritable hornet's nest of cheaper, faster competition.  

Wife+Pizza=Truest love

It's hard to say what the key to Primo's persistence is, but the fruits one yields from the labor of love probably have something to do with it.  Ann and Dominic Loria are transplants from Sicily (since 1969 and 1953, respectively) and have owned the unassuming pizza restaurant for 24 years.  Day in and day out for over two decades Primo's has been producing the same brilliant, delicious pizza. That type of steadfast dedication and pride is a scarce and priceless thing in a world increasingly looking to make every part of there day as efficient, small and cheap as possible. Primo's Pizza in Rockford, Illinois stands as one of those rare testaments to a good product actualizing a sustainable business, a sentiment that feels more and more like a bygone era as time goes on.

A scene from literally every time I've visited Rockford in the past 15 years

This post isn't to suggest that you should immediately get in to your car and drive to Rockford and pick up a Primo's pizza, though honestly it wouldn't be the most insane thing you've ever done.  This post is meant to pay tribute to those restaurants that exist everywhere that aren't trying to change the landscape of food, but want to make one thing great, because they absolutely love it. If you don't have your version of that place, find it and patronize unconditionally.  For me, that place is on 1710 N. Rural Street in Rockford Illinois. 

Oh, and by the way, that beer bar and farm-to-table restaurant I mentioned up there are The Oasis Micropub and The Social respectively. They are both awesome and worth your money.

First Things First

I'd like to begin our journey together with a touch of elegance.

BEGIN TRANSMISSION

Not too long ago I asked my friend Dan Jacobs, executive chef at Odd Duck here in the beautiful city of Milwaukee, if he knew anywhere that was hiring.  I was desperate. I was desperate enough to, to the complete horror of my own eyes, type the word "dishwasher" in to the text box that contained my maudlin inquiry.  For those of you who are lucky enough to have never worked as a dishwasher in a busy restaurant,  allow me to give you some perspective.  Dishwashing is the sole job that exists in the kitchen that you can't possibly source any inspiration from.  Unlike other cripplingly dull jobs, you can't use your imagination to get out of it because it requires a rigid, mechanical and relatively focused mind. Things happen when you are washing dishes that knock you out of your escapist stupor. A clog, a sudden rush, a broken glass, some clunky cumbersome object that breaks the flow you've developed over the course of your shift.  Trust me, a Hobart claw amidst the homogenized ocean of silverware and plates can fuck your whole day up.

Washing dishes is not dirty, it's completely filthy.  It's not hard, it's agonizing.  It dulls the mind and crushes the body all at once.  This in no way meant to delegitimize dishwashing as good honest work.  If anything, a good dishwasher ranks high on the hard workers list. However, to the overprivileged, lily white, suburban bred porcelain doll that was 17 year old Tommy Ciaccio, it felt utterly Sisyphean.  In short, I think dishwashers shouldn't be employed; I think they should be drafted out of a pool of distracted high school students who are given six months stints in the dish pit, so as to give them some perspective on what life is like when you don't go to college.  But that's not the case.  They are employed, and the requisite years one spends in the dish pit before moving up in the kitchen make peeling potatoes and grinding meat seem like some kind of sweet heaven.

Despite all that, that's where I was.  If I didn't have a wife and mouths to feed (dog mouths, specifically), I probably would have chosen an easier route, like driving my car in one direction until it ran out of gas, and then just living in the woods forever.  But I have shackled myself to responsibility and thusly found myself in a pathetic plea for a dishwashing position.  I was sure somewhere had a vacancy that would allow me to fulfill my manic and admittedly baseless need for a change of scenery.

Dan knew better than to be deceived by my cunning wiles.  For a brief, humiliating period of my life, Dan had been my boss at Wolf Peach.  My arrival at Wolf Peach, appropriately enough, was too a product of desperation.  The restaurant I was working at had to suddenly shut down leaving both me and my then-fiancee-now-wife out of work.  Wolf Peach was close to opening and was hurriedly filling in it's last few opening positions. Determined not to be impoverished, I decided to snap one up. With an illegitimate amount of confidence, and opportunistic deceitfulness raging harmoniously together in my heart, I bluffed my way in to a cooking position at Wolf Peach. Bad move.

Twelve combined hours and five or six threats of physical violence later, Dan quickly and deservedly dispatched me to the dish pit.  It was only by virtue of his true benevolence that my frustrated boss didn't just straight up fire (or murder) me.  It didn't take long for me to break.  I just couldn't do it. Eight to ten hours of sweating through dirty, physically challenging work was just too much for me to handle. I was 26 years old and on the verge of getting married. I was fast approaching (and have since surpassed) one decade in the service industry and I wasn't even treading water, I was flailing and abjectly plummeting headlong back in to the goddamned dish pit.  Crestfallen, I quit, with a personal vow to never return to the service industry.

I decided to take a stab at normalcy, which manifested itself in working in retail at a major electronics chain in the wealthy suburb of Fox Point. After six months I felt it was time to move on.  And by "felt it was time to move on" I mean I could either quit working retail or experience what it's like when your soul bleeds out through your nose and ears and dies in a puddle on the floor in front of your eyes.  And there, as ever, was the service industry, ready to break my fall.  While I have returned to the kitchen, I do so with a forcibly ambition-less shroud cast over me.  Clumsiness and anxiety aside, I never want to be a chef, and while I love the place I work, a sense of permanence feels defeating when my face is already smashed against the ceiling of the potential it has as it pertains to me.

What makes the decision so heartbreaking for me was the fact that I passionately and truly love food.  Generally speaking I'm wildly intrigued by cuisine and spend hours poring over cookbooks and wistfully watching Anthony Bourdain live out every sane human being's fantasy.  I adore the vibe of a bustling restaurant kitchen, even to the point where I love the stereotypically sociopathic behaviors of the chefs I've worked for.  I've also had the privilege of being raised by two parents who cooked home cooked meals for us almost every single night of the week.  Food is as central as anything to my happiness. So what's the problem? Behind all the platitudinous gastronomic fantasizing that lives in my heart lies a clumsy and befuddled guy with comically imprecise motor skills and an anxiety disorder.  These traits are not conducive to a hot, fast and hostile environment that requires you to be fast on your toes and has zero room for error.

Which leads me to here, the birth of Rough Chop.  I felt the name appropriate as these are perspectives written by an unbridled epicurean who also happens to be an inept cook in a restaurant kitchen. Incidentally, this blog's existence should be at least partially credited to the same chef who verbally eviscerated me and sent me to the dish dungeon.  The reply I got in response to my counterintuitive plea for additional kitchen work was not a job, but a push in a more appropriate direction. Disparate from the unfortunate soul that is "Kitchen Tommy" is the (hopefully) more capable and confident "Blogging Tommy".  Frankly I have no idea where this little project will lead or how it will evolve.  At the very least I hope to illustrate to you, the reader, why the world of food and everything it entails is so absolutely important and powerful to me. I mean, if I can't cook food I might as well blather on incessantly about it.