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I just got back from a five day “business trip” to The Windy City and had a great time. I was tied up at a conference for three of those days but was able to use the other two for a little exploring — which was great, but not nearly enough. I wasn’t able to get up to Wrigleyville, or explore many of the neighborhoods outside of the downtown area. Maybe next time. I was, however, able to cover downtown well.

Saturday:
I arrive at the hotel and get checked in around 4pm. I desperately flip channels trying to catch the Cal vs. Oregon game but am forced to watch it via ticker. After the game, I explore the area a bit. McCormick Place is huge. I hike up a small hill that gives a great view of the entire convention center on one side, and Soldier Field on the other. I make my way back to the room to hop online for some quick dinner and drinks research before meeting up with some fellow Yahoos. We end up at Clark Street Ale House, which had a great tap selection, but no food, so based on a recommendation from the bartender we head to an Irish pub/restaurant a few doors down. My bangers and mash were ok, not great, but enough to hold me over for a trip back to the ale house for some drinking. Trying to stick with regional beers I had a Three Floyd’s Gumballhead (a hopped up wheat ale), a Three Floyd’s Alpha King, a Sand Creek Wild Ride IPA and a Great Lakes Edmund Fitzgerald (an excellent American porter). Next we wander through downtown a bit and make one final pit-stop at a sports bar for some wings and another beer before calling it a night.

Sunday:
I took a nice stroll from my hotel at McCormick Place loosely following the Lake Michigan shoreline all the way to the river. Sites included Soldier Field, lots of sail boats in the harbor, a nice strip of lake-side park with cool environmental awareness art, Buckingham Fountain (think Married With Children), and a great view of the downtown skyline. At the river I cut in a few blocks so I could head back through Millennium Park checking out the Pavilion, the Bean, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the rest of Grant Park. At this point I was ready for some food and begun my search for a true Chicago Dog — which turned out to be much harder than I anticipated. In fact, as beautiful as the parks and lake views were on this part of my walk, I really wasn’t impressed with this part of downtown. It was filled with national chain restaurants and tourist traps, and not the good, local spots I was searching for. Just as I was about to give up I stumbled upon Hackneys, which I vaguely remembered from some Food Network show for having great burgers. I ordered the Bluecheeseburger (an original Hackney Burger generously topped with blue cheese). It was fantastic. What made things even better was being able to order it in from a neighboring pub while enjoying a few pints of Three Floyd’s Alpha King and watching the Cardinals beat the Steelers with a couple of very nice kids from Pittsburgh. Full and tired I took a cab the last few miles back to the hotel. Some pre-conference activities filled up the rest of my night which was capped with a late-night room service Italian Beef.

Monday-Wednesday:
Conference, conference and more conference. Very long days of sessions, and meetings, and parties. I will make a special note on the official event party Tuesday evening which while filled with corporate party clichés was actually a lot of fun. It was in a huge open room at the convention center and included tons of free food, beer, wine, and soda, a skate park (two quarter pipes with a table-top ramp in the middle) with four bikers and two skaters doing tricks for our entertainment, a lounge rock band, a Segway obstacle course, an oxygen bar, a dozen or so Wii and Xbox consoles, an interactive art wall, breakdancers, poker tables (complete with dealers), and the Deloreon.

Wednesday Night:
Determined to have a great hot dog before I leave I make my way to where the internets told me was best dog in town, Portillos. It did not disappoint, I had a great Chicago style dog with everything, and a Maxwell Street polish sausage with onions just for good measure. The after dinner plan was to catch a cab to The Map Room (Chicago’s highest rated beer bar) for a couple drinks then to the Goose Island Brewery in Wrigleyville to have a snack and watch the Cubs/D’Backs playoff opener. I meet up with my buddy Henry and we head to our first stop. The place is great — a solid draft line accompanied by an awesome bottle selection and great people on both sides of the bar. We end up chatting (and drinking) clear through the game never making it to Wrigleyville. After many, many new (to me) and great beers I catch a cab back to the hotel to crash.

Thursday:
The day is slow to start after a wild night but the last required stop on my agenda is for deep-dish pizza. I walk down to Giordano’s which always came up near the top of best-of lists. This, for me, was the biggest bust of the trip. Maybe it was the hangover, or that I ordered the lunch special individual size, but it was disappointing. The dough tasted like a hard, bland, biscuit, the sauce, while good, was all I could taste due to the sheer quantity of it, and the cheese sat like a lump at the bottom on top of a very thin bed of spinach. Oh well, they can’t all be great. So if we’re keeping score, Chicago wins on hot dogs (although NY has great dogs too) and NY takes the top spot for pizza.

All in all it was a great trip, but I am glad to be home to Lydia and Tiger and my great Brooklyn neighborhood.

(pictures coming soon) 

The sandwich has always been a rather neutral food item for me — I’ve always liked them just fine, but never craved ’em (with maybe one exception). However, this has all changed. NY makes great sandwiches. And I’m not talking about some fancy place where you have to pay top dollar and make a trip out of, any corner deli (and really, almost every corner has one) makes a good sandwich. Fresh baked bread, packed with meat, cheese, and anything else you want on it, for cheap (4-5 dollars). That’s really all I had to say with this post. I just realized that for about a week straight now I have craved a deli sandwich and have even made the effort to try different corner delis to see if one was better than the next. Conclusion… they’re all good, it’s just a matter of which ones are open 24 hrs, ’cause a hot patrami hero at 2am is hard to beat.

Friday night Curtis and I ventured into Manhattan to check out a few bars he’d seen in Time Out. We disembarked at the West 4th St. station after a young girl puked at her friend’s feet on the last car of the F train, and headed up Bleecker St. until it split off toward the Hudson River. Our first destination was a bar in the Meatpacking District. Going with the dead animal theme, I imagined the area to be like the Tenderloin in San Francisco — kind of shady and gritty, somewhere you wouldn’t venture at night. That’s exactly how it was, but in swaths and splotches, dare I say much like the marbled cuts of the area’s namesake. Below the rows of meat hooks that hung above the sidewalks were lines of young hipsters waiting behind velvet ropes. Dresses, sportcoats, flashy jewelry, impeccable hair and makeup, high heels, sports cars, valets. As meat delivery trucks sat idle in loading bays, stretch limosines wrestled with cabs to maneuver down the narrow streets. For every dark, dirty packing plant there was an open-air wine bar, dimly lit restaurant or tucked-away bar entrance. Bags of old meat sat rotting in front of warehouses, as girls in summer dresses and guys in collared shirts flirted, smoked and chatted on cell phones a block away.

It was the most curious juxtaposition we’d ever seen.

After a whiff of the Hudson and a hand stamp from the bouncer, we were inside. It was packed with twentysomething Abercrombie types. It was as if Ivy League frat boys had taken a wrong turn somewhere. We couldn’t get close enough to the bar to order a drink, much less find a crevice to hover in. On the way back to Bleecker, we passed galleries, specialty stores and more nightlife. There was something unnatural about it — the nexus of trendy anchored among meat carcasses and gutted industry.

As we crossed 8th Avenue back toward the Village, we passed a much more low-key strip of revelers. The perfect bodies of the Meatpacking District gave way to normal-looking folks out for a drink and a stroll. Primped college kids strolled past gay couples and middle-age adults eating gelato.

Then the buzz of Greenwich turned to the lull of midnight in Soho as we turned off Bleecker down Mott. The trendy boutiques were gated, display windows dimmed and stoops bare. We were some of the few folks wandering the street. Chinatown was all but abandoned. A few shopkeepers rolled down their metal doors, a dumpling shop provided the only bright spot on a dark street where Chinese banners hung lifeless amid the putrid smell of fish. We cut over to Mulberry street, which was much more alive as the last diners enjoyed pastries and coffee as restaurants shuttered for the evening. We grabbed a cannoli under a “Welcome to Little Italy” sign and headed up Canal toward the Manhattan Bridge. After trying to enter the East Broadway station where a man was peeing and the gate was closed, we made our way closer to the East River to find a 24-hour entrance. Back on the F train and home with a red-eyed, slouched, rumpled cast, for an evening of Casino Royale and iTunes until the sun rose, and we went to sleep.