Work Road Tripping

Detroit’s food scene is pretty much exploding. Although for a city of it’s size everything is still spread out. Attending a pop-up this past weekend, I had a conversation with someone comparing Chicago’s food scene with Detroit. Traveling to Chicago frequently enough we agreed that there really is no comparison – by every stretch of the imagination, numbers, density. of course Chicago’s population is only 4x the size of Detroit’s.  However, I did say that the quality of places opening at a frequency of what seems like a new place every week, is really good.

Yesterday started another road trip, this time traversing across the Midwest crossing quickly over to the cowboy country.

[Chi-City

We ended up staying close to the John Hancock building again at the North end of the Mag Mile.  After driving for a couple of hours, we and found a place to eat one block over – not The Cheesecacke Factory, rather Di Sotto Enoteca, serving Italian tapas.  I’m sure certain people would have called the decor stereotypical, but I kinda like the way they sloppily filled in the gaps with cement. It even looked as though they just put newspapers on the floor to catch the falling cement once gravity took over and the end result was left alone.

For a Monday night it seemed slow, although it was only 5:30 we were still the first people to put the kitchen staff to work. Since it was tapas style we ordered a bunch of plates, with no intervention from the waitress that we had ordered too much food for two people. Although later she admitted that if we had swayed toward that seventh plate she would have piped up. We had a hard time selecting because every single entree looked amazing so we went with some of their recommended dishes. The line-up from top to bottom and left to right:

Porchetta e Pepe – in which I ate the largest piece of pork belly I have ever had in my life. And even though it was the definite star on the plate the crispy basil gnocchi wasn’t far behind.

Prosciutto e Caprese – classic caprese with made in house mozz with their own cured proscuitto.

Tostato con Uova – probably the best thing we ordered. I’m use to making the easy version of this we extra thick sliced bread but this was another level using the entire loaf which, mind you, was covered in truffle oil and and asparagus.

Lunch: instead of heading to Big Star this time around, even though I crave that mushroom taco in my sleep, we looked for a place closer to where we were testing. Nini’s Cafe was a top hit on Yelp and since I watch The Chef pretty much one a week, we decided to try out this place serving a spin on Cubano sammies.