Porky Publican

The Publican. Chicago.

One of the places the husband and I have been itching to visit. We had been given several chances to go in the past and when they fell through we sadly cried ourselves through dinner in front of our plates at home.

Not this time. This time we went. Post Schubert concertings, it was the obvious choice to go. We were on a budget but the choice of eatery tipped us into it. None of us had been and all of us had it on our lists. And this is what happened.

We waited in the bar for our table of 6 - though it might have well been 8 or 12. This joint has communal long table seating that extends around the room in front of their pen-like booths (complete with swinging doors). Ordering our beers, we chose frites with garlic a., a sliced ham sampling, and house made pork rinds. You heard right. And they were, as one diner put it, "lovely fat popcorns," sprinkled with cayenne or some other spicy red spice combo.

Here's where we should have seen the soon to come challenge. Pork rinds, ham, fatty fried frites. Getting the picture??

Once seated at the table, we get a heads up that one in our dining party, let's call him OC, had a connection with members of the restaurant's team and we might get a few perks. Briefly after fanny met chair, what arrived at our table? Why, more pork rinds and frites. A lot more. So we're already porked up and we get more. Awesome, we think, this is going to be awesome.

Note: this is the kind of place you share everything, so we ordered for the table and shared like good little first graders.

OC ordered wisely some apps.: Grilled octopus, beet salad and yellow fin tuna. These were great. The tuna was a little tough for my tastes, especially for how thin it was cut, but it had good flavor with diced kohlrabi on top - though I thought something like a granny smith apple would have been a more interesting flavor with the same texture element.

Grilled octopus was pretty standard, everyone seems to be doing the same thing with some kind of white bean variant, pretty standard. Yet really, really great. I wonder if there's any other way to have octopus other than grilled that would be just as interesting...

The beet salad. Okay. This was amazing. The chef used golden beets, grapefruit, avocado, red onion, red watercress, and something else I cant remember because the beets were too good, and they have blocked out my memory. Those of you who were there, please remember and tell me. Soon. So I can recreate it at home.

OC expertly ordered a couple of bottles of wine to follow our beers (I had drunk a Matilda, as it is so tasty). Then things got crazy.

Pork. Hmmm. This place has giant pictures on the wall of the fattest pigs you've ever seen. Looking at the menu you see a lot of non-vegetarian choices. In fact, there are no. vegetarian. choices. I think even the beet salad uses pork fat in the dressing.

We ordered the lamb curry, pork belly, sardines (actually an app), and the country ribs for the table.

This was THE fattiest meal I've had eaten.

The pork belly was really well cooked, except the crust was a bit to sweet for me. It was kind of like candied bacon. Still very tender, and had a really nice accomp of roasted cauliflower. The sardines were very good, looked like they were roasted whole...mmmmm. The ribs were HUGE. and very good, though with a thematically large amount of fat present with the meat.

The lamb curry was also made with belly. Lamb belly. And only lamb belly. These lambs were the fattiest little buggers ever created by the maker. At one point, with still three pieces of lamb in the bowl, no actual lamb meat was present. It was all fat. I mean, this was delicious fat, if you could get past the point of it being fat and actually put it in your mouth. And the curry was fine, I guess. Not really a curry, kind of a curry-like infused broth. It did have Jerusalem artichokes in it, which were great and totally complimented the lamb-fattiness.

Now, we had all been waiting to come to this place since its inception. And what did we think? Well. It was good. It was alright. Okay, as one of our fellow diners Lance Manyon said, "It's...it's not worth it." I think Lance was referring to the fact that not only was he gypped on his portion of the octopus being served last, but also that after only a few bites of the lamb, there was no actual lamb meat on the plate. I have to concur on the lamb bit. Though my piece of octopus was great.

So, what did we have for finishings? What else, a waffle. And what was on top? A big, luscious scoop of butter.

Are your arteries hard yet?