Chicago Trip

Jeff and I headed to Chicago to meet up with a few of our college friends to see Lord of the Rings in concert at Ravinia last weekend.  While we were there, we also did a food tour of Wicker Park and Bucktown and headed up to Milwaukee for Irishfest.  It was an amazing weekend with little sleep had by all, but totally worth it.  I thought I'd share a recap of our food tour by Chicago Food Planet.

Stop 1:  George's Hot Dogs

Hot dogs are a big deal in Chicago.  This is a Chicago dog, but it wasn't exactly how I expected it to be.  There's no neon green relish!  As a non-hot dog-eater, this was a decent dog.

Stop 2:  Hot Chocolate

This place was wonderful.  We had iced hot chocolate with house made marshmallows.  I'm not a huge fan of marshmallows in the first place, but these were excellent.  The drink was super chocolately and a great refreshment on a warm day.

Stop 3:  The Goddess and Grocer

This stop had more delicious looking food in the case than my brain could handle.  Our dish was kale salad which was surprisingly tasty.  I would definitely like to go back and check out some of the other foods in the case!

Stop 4:  Piece Pizzeria

This place is a pizzeria and a brewery!  I was delighted when the server brought us tiny glasses of beer to sample and really wowed when they brought out our giant white pizza.  Unfortunately, I'm not very open minded about my pizza toppings and very rarely stray from my beloved pepperoni and cheese.  I wasn't fond of this pizza because I'm not a fan of tomatoes and strongly dislike basil so I picked them both off.  I will say I enjoyed the thin crust and the white sauce that remained, though.  I bet it would've been awesome with just pepperoni and cheese!

Stop 5:  Sultan's Market

We were served a pretty cool falafel sandwich here.  It was stuffed into a neat pita, lined with hummus, and stuffed full of falafel.  The pita itself tasted fresh, but I still haven't gotten into liking hummus or falafel after trying it several different times.  Jeff and our friends thought it was tasty, however.

Stop 6:  icream

This is probably my favorite stop of all the food tours we've taken so far.  It's an ice cream shop where they custom make your ice cream in Kitchenaid mixers outfitted with liquid nitrogen.  It was so neat to watch!  The flavor we sampled was "that guy from Florida" which uses white chocolate, cream soda, and Nutella and was simply amazing.  This was the last stop of our tour, so we decided to get full sized ice creams after the group went separate ways.  That may or may not have been a poor decision since our eyes were bigger than the small amount of space left in our tummies.

Overall, we'd highly recommend this tour.  We had more restaurant stops and bigger portions than we expected (though that could be bad if you're getting too full towards the end of the tour).  If you don't feel like going on a whole food tour, we suggest just visiting icream.  It's totally worth it.