Eating Food for Homework: The Best Assignment I've Ever Recieved Part IV

For the second part of my Chinese eating out activity points, I chose not to go to Chinatown, since I had already been there once. I went to a place called Furama, where I eat very often for dim sum but never go for anything but that. I always go with a large group, most often for the Chinese New Year parade they have on Argyle. When you arrive with a big group, you get a large table with a rotating circle in the middle that the food just gets put on so you can rotate whatever you want to you. The reason why I love this place for dim sum so much is because they actually have people walking around with carts full of food that you can just ask for and get. There will always be at least one person by your table with a cart asking you if you want whatever they have. There are some people here who are very aggressive as well and, when they ask you if you want anything and you say no, will then go on to offer ten other things they have and how good they are and how you should just try them. The carts are great! You can just pick and choose what you want, but this always ends up leaving us with a huge surplus of food and about three things untouched at the end of the meal. The people are always willing to find something for you as well, so if they don't have what you want on their cart, they just call someone else who they know has it. Dim sum is just really easy and a great alternative to Sunday brunch!

We came late as usual, around one in the afternoon, but it was still full to the brim with people and carts alike. We order mostly shrimp things on account of my sister and mother's pescetarianism, but we got so much I couldn't come even close to telling you what we ordered. My father and I got some duck that was extremely full of bones but otherwise good, and we picked these people's carts bare of several kinds of dumplings, buns and noodles, all filled with assorted things most of which we had to ask to make sure had no meat in them. It is truly amazing how many different kinds of buns there are. There are barbecue pork buns, chicken buns, vegetable buns, custard buns... I could go on all day. There are ten thousand different kinds of dumplings, each one just slightly different form the next. And the menu doesn't even cover half of what they have in those carts. Each person has a different cart with different things in it, and when you take into consideration how many people there are with carts, that is a lot of food. 

I was asked to answer this question in my review: Are the characters on the menu in Chinese or English? That is the awesome thing about dim sum - there is a menu, but you of course don't use it and it gets buried underneath your pork siu mai or whatever other thing you are eating and deems more important than a piece of paper with some pictures on it. The characters are Chinese and English, but this is required for much of the people visiting to understand the names of the dishes. However, when the people come around with the carts I do suppose you just point to what you want and say "oh, yeah, one of those", and that is that. The people in the restaurant are a majority Chinese, but there are quite a few non-Chinese people like my family who discovered this concept, just marveled at it and now goes there all the time. I honestly have no idea about the ownership of this place and don't frankly care, so long as they keep the chef.
This place is to me a pretty good example of solid Chinese food served in an interesting way that doesn't cost a lot, and it seems to be part of the clump of places that have been slightly modified to fit American tastes but overall just a good place in total.

Eating Food for Homework: The Best Assignment I've Ever Received Part III

Since we are currently doing a unit on China in my social studies class, I was once again able to go to a Chinese restaurant for some points! I went to Chinatown and, since I don't really come down there at all often, first just looked around at some shops they had there. There was a sort of bulk items/candy store sort of thing that a guy was just closing up so we went in there. We started looking at the tea so he came over and suggested some stuff for us and told us how amazing of a company Ten Ren is.(We actually did end up buying some Ten Ren tea, and it was pretty good!)
To end the debate between different restaurants in Chinatown we've gone to and already enjoyed, we decided to go to a place called Triple Crown that is right on Wentworth with a view of the big sign there. It seemed like it had been there for a really long time and was just one of those old-school Chinese restaurants that everyone likes. It had dim sum all day so we ordered some random dumplings and such, which were pretty average and not particularly fantastic. Later I ordered the beef and mixed mushrooms, which I somewhat regret because I wish I had gotten something slightly more interesting and not as straightforward. This restaurant in total seemed pretty straightforward and not as authentic as some others I have been to in the past, so that was unfortunate.
The people in the restaurant were a combination of Chinese and non-Chinese with the latter definitely being the majority. The menu had dish names in both Chinese and English, but the English was more prominent, which leads me to believe there were on average more English-speaking customers coming here whether they were of Chinese descent or not. The menu said the food was "Hong Kong cuisine", so this would lead me to believe that there would be some Western food influences in this food on account of the British colonization of Hong Kong for some time. The menu did have a section with Szechuan food so Hong Kong style food could also be influenced by this as well.
My fortune cookie ended up saying, "This is the year when ingenuity stands high on the list." I don't know if this review is ingenious but can you really trust fortune cookies?

Eating Food for Homework: The Best Assignment I've Ever Recieved Part II

For the second part of my project, I chose Tiffin, an Indian restaurant on Devon. My mom and sister, being vegetarians, were pushing to go to Udupi Palace, which was more Southern Indian, but I decided to come here. The first thing you see when you walk in is this big piece in the middle of the restaurant with two Greek-looking pillars sticking up to the ceiling which has an oval on it with blue sky and clouds. It’s pretty dimly lit which makes the dark orange and yellow walls even more dramatic than they already are. The restaurant is pretty empty at 7 on a Tuesday night so we had a waiter constantly coming over to our table, asking us if we needed anything and filling our water glasses.

We ordered the assorted appetizers which had vegetable samosas, pakoras, kabobs and a spiced chicken of some sort cut into cubes. My father and I were therefore stuck- no complaints- with the kabobs and the chicken because Mary and my mother had to eat the vegetarian things. The kabob was, my dad assumed, lamb sausage which was very rubbery and not my favorite. The chicken looked interesting- it was an uncommon shade of salmon pink- but really was just well-cooked but not super flavorful. Once we were finished with starters, I ordered the chicken makhani. When it came out, I recognized it as a dish I knew better as murgh makhani or butter chicken, something that I had wanted to give up a while ago because I thought it wasn’t very spicy. I had ordered it medium heat but it had only a hint of spice. The buttery taste was still strong in the sauce though which was very good. I mixed in some of my dad’s rogan josh which was much spicier to add heat and that made it better. We also got a garlic naan which is always good to dip in the sauce of your dish, especially because the rice-sauce proportions were way off here and I ate some of my sauce with biryani, which was still very good. When my parents asked the man waiting on us what region of India this food was mainly from, he said it was from Northern India. The cultures are probably different in different parts of India, then, if Northerners are more meat eaters and Southerners are more vegetarian. This could relate to just culture, but it could also be possible resources or location.

In conclusion, Tiffin was good Indian food and while it maybe wasn’t as flavorful as I had hoped it to be, it still tasted good and was a nice weeknight dinner that was worth going a little out of the way of where you live.

First Course, Taste Buds

The arrival of twins seven years ago did nothing to slow our restaurant habit, as we feared it might. Rather, we took them along, finding two sleeping infants to be rather good dinner companions. For several months they slumbered away in their seats as we enjoyed evenings out, albeit at a much earlier time and more rapid pace than before their arrival.

As things happen, eventually those sleeping children woke up, sat up and, as quickly as their tiny fingers could sign, they asked for more. At six months they were trying out restaurant high chairs, eating avocados at El Barco, pancakes at Uncommon Ground and green beans at Bistro Margot. We became experts at menu reading, piecing together kid-friendly meals from ingredients offered in other dishes. Any restaurant that has a Cobb salad on the menu can offer a diced egg, avocado and small pieces of cheese. Mrs. Murphy and Sons fed them mashed potatoes, carrots and bits of roasted chicken; at steak houses we opted for for diced asparagus and baked potatoes; and in Asian restaurants we relied on tofu, edamame and broccoli. Sourcing the menu became a game, a challenge for us to see who could assemble the best non kid’s menu meal in the shortest time. The truth is, despite my being the family cook, it was their father who really mastered the art of reading between the lines and creating masterpieces for our budding gourmands.

Their restaurant skills developed along with their taste buds. Once they started talking, they started ordering. They developed favorite dishes, favorite restaurants, and favorite types of food. When they were unable to agree on something to share, we asked for half portions, and found most places agreeable to that request. More often than not restaurants seemed pleased to see young children interested in trying new food; that we try to eat early helps keep our hosts happy. The girls have eaten everywhere from Topolabampo to the burrito place at the end of the street. They eat close to home, downtown, in Chicago’s diverse ethnic neighborhoods, and occasionally in their own apartment.

Listening to us complain and compliment for seven years has worn off; Mary and Kate freely offer their own opinions on everything from service to food to atmosphere. Their reviews are both hilarious and often dead on, and now here. We're skipping the kids menu and talking real food for real people, just in a smaller size.