Dinner at SoNo Wood Fired...This time it's open!

After last weekend's misfire with lunch at SoNo, I decided to try again for dinner.  I found their hours posted on Yelp, not sure why they can't do something with their website but that is another issue.  Betty and I had decided on the day to go, and naturally I got stuck at work that day and was running late.  When I finally made it home, we started the walk to the intersection of North and Clybourn aves.

We were greeted at the door by the hostess, who promptly sat us at a table near the front.  The space is nicely designed, with lots of glass and wood.  There are glass doors at the front that can be opened when the weather cooperates, and last night was beautiful.  After several minutes our waitress came by to take our drink and appetizer orders.  SoNo has a fairly extensive wine list and had 21 bottled beers available.  It would be nice to have the beers on tap that their burger bar next door offers available, but the beers offered were well chosen micros.  We ordered the pomodoro and London Fog bruschettas as appetizers, which arrived soon after our drinks.  The pomodoro was good, lots of fresh, ripe tomatoes, shaved parmesan cheese and good olive oil on top of the toasted bread.  The better of the two was the London Fog, it had a nice portion of the bleu cheese, caramelized cipollini onions and lavender honey.  Both were good, but the portion size is a little small for the $3 price per bruschetta.

For pizzas, I chose the Soppressata Diavola (spicy soppressata, bufala, tomatoes, charred onions & basil) and Betty ordered a Funghi (wild mushrooms, fontina, crispy sage & toasted garlic).  The pizzas arrived in about 15 minutes.

The Soppressata lived up to the spicy description, other than that I found this to be a little bland.  Like my experience at Urban Burger Bar, the chef seems to under season his food in my opinion.  The tomatoes were nice but there were too many of them on the pie which resulted in a pool of liquid on the plate.  The bufala mozzarella was pretty good as were the charred onions.  The crust had a very nice char on it, but didn't have much taste other than that.  When I make this style of pizza at home I use a retarded dough formulation which allows for a long, slow, cold fermentation that produces a nice flavor in the finished product.  This crust didn't have that flavor.  Perhaps we were there on a night when their dough hadn't had a chance to age enough, I'll withhold judgement until I've eaten there at least once more.

I liked the funghi pizza better than the Soppressata one.  This is a white pizza, so none of the tomato juice pooling on the bottom of the plate.  The pie had a nice taste of roasted garlic to it and the mushrooms had some good caramelization to them.  The flavor combination of mushrooms, fontina, roasted garlic and sage really worked well.  Like the first pie I didn't think the crust had much flavor, it seemed to be acting as more of a platform than a component of the dish contributing flavor.  As you can tell, I rally find crust to be an important part of a pizza.  The cheese seemed almost creamy, which was very nice.  Even with the crust issues, this is a pie I'd order again.

We didn't order any dessert, but the menu had about six flavors of gelato, chocolate cake, pana cotta and the like.  All in all, I liked this place.  I'm sure we'll go back at some point since there really isn't anything else like it within walking distance for us.  Hopefully they will be able to improve their crust and get a little more aggressive in the seasoning as they mature.

Key Lime Pie

Years ago I was given a recipe for key lime pie by a person in Miami and promptly lost it.  A good ten years later while going through a drawer of papers, there it was!  I made a pie last weekend and it turned out pretty good so I thought I'd post the recipe and never lose it again!

This is a very simple recipe.  I used a store-bought graham cracker crust and bottled key lime juice.  About a month or two ago I did see fresh key limes for sale at Dominick's, but I hadn't found the recipe at that point and didn't grab them.  Next year for sure!  You will want to have a pie crust ready before you mix the filling.  Graham cracker crusts are traditional and easy to make, but I was being lazy.

The filling has just four ingredients...

4 egg yolks
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1/4 cup key lime juice
pinch of salt

Whisk the yolks together, then whisk in the condensed milk and salt.  When everything is smooth and uniform whisk in the key lime juice until well combined and pour immediately in to the waiting crust.  The acidity of the key lime juice will start to set the curd pretty quickly, the filling does not have to be cooked at all but will "cook" in the mixing bowl if you don't get it in to the crust within a few minutes.  I just make a quick whipped cream to go with the pie but the original recipe called for a meringue topping make with the four egg whites you should have left over and three tablespoons of sugar, whipped to stiff peaks.  Once this is placed on the filling the pie is baked in a 350 degree oven for about 10 minutes to brown the meringue.  Using the store bought crust and whipped cream instead of meringue, this dessert took about 5 minutes to make and was liked by all who partook!  Next time I make it I might add a little fresh lime and lemon juice to freshen up the bottled key lime juice, I'll likely try that this weekend.

Lunch at SoNo Wood Fired, uh....make that Urban Burger Bar.

Last week there was an blog in the Chicago Tribune talking about a new wood fired pizza place called SoNo Wood Fired.  At the time I'm writing this the web site basically says very little, no menu, no contact info, just a logo and a place to sign up for twitter and facebook feeds.  This was the weekend of the Chicago Air and Water Show and the Midwest Buddhist Temple's Ginza Festival.  Every year during these events (which normally happen on two consecutive weekends instead of on the same weekend) the only thing to do is find a parking spot on Friday and leave your car there for the entire weekend.  Move your car and you're not likely to find another space within a mile of home until Monday.  Until I saw the blog about this new restaurant my plan was to visit Old Town Social for lunch on Saturday, I've enjoyed most of what I've tried there.  With this new information in hand, I ventured out on a very how Saturday just before noon and trekked my way to SoNo Wood Fired...and found it closed.  No hours posted on the door, just a menu and a locked door.  I guess opening a restaurant with no information on the web page and no information on the door is one way to go...

Anyway, next door to SoNo is Urban Burger Bar.  The two restaurants are owned by the same people so I figured they might know if the pizza place would be opening for lunch.  The answer was no, it wouldn't open until 4:30pm.  Oh well, I decided to have my lunch at the also new Urban Burger Bar.

UBB is a pretty nice bar, they have a wide selection of beers with about 15 or so on tap.  And the stuff on tap is GOOD beer, mostly from micro breweries.  Plus, on the Saturday I was there ALL draft beers were only $3!  The main food attraction is (coincidentally) burgers.  There is a long list of topping to choose from, with a few premium ones that cost extra.  For some unknown reason the menu on their website starts with their "Urban Stackers" and leaves out the "burger bar" entirely.  Someone really needs to talk to their webmaster to get things straightened out!  After I enjoyed my Crooked Tree IPA from Dark Horse Brewery I ordered my burger.  I chose a grass fed burger (all burgers are 1/2 pound) made with beef from the Tallgrass Beef Company, an organic beef producer partially owned by local media personality Bill Kurtis.  For toppings I chose mushrooms, crispy onions, white cheddar cheese and bacon.  The burgers come with a side, I chose regular fries but there are other options like sweet potato fries.  They also offer a selection of dipping sauces for the fries instead of just ketchup, I chose the chipotle aioli.

The burger arrived in about 10-15 minutes.  Not bad considering that the place was pretty busy.  The burger itself was cooked to a nice medium rare as requested.  It was juicy and tasty, but could have used a little more seasoning in my opinion.  I have to admit that I'm kind of a bun man, and this one was nice.  A bad bun can ruin the burger experience for me.  This one was fresh, sturdy and gave just the right amount when you squeezed it to take a bite.  They were pretty generous with the toppings.  The crispy onions where sliced thin, breaded and cooked until crispy.  I would have no problem having just these as a side.  The mushrooms could have been sauteed a little more, I like some caramelization on my sauteed shrooms and these seemed a little on the bland side.  The cheese and bacon seemed top quality.  All in all, there wasn't much to complain about with this burger that couldn't be addressed with a salt shaker at the able.  The fries were good as well, and since I'm not a big fan of ketchup I appreciated all the dipping sauce options available.  The chipotle aioli was really good on its own, and I used a bit of it on the burger as well.  I'm looking forward to trying my original plan, pizza at SoNo, at some later date (and time).