14
Sep
Taxim: Greek Gods in Wicker Park
I’ve recently been a champion of authentic, regional cuisine prepared and served more like it would be at home than in a fancy restaurant. In short, I’ve been down on white linens and expensive wine lists. New Orleans was perfect for me: some of the best food I ate was street food, bought at 1 a.m. outside a music hall. I mean, it usually doesn’t get any better than that—New Orleans, street food, music.
But I was treated to a meal in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago that reminded me, as is so often necessary, that there is more than one way to skin a cat, or, as the case is here, apply fat, spices, and fire to raw fish, meat, and vegetables.
Taxim is a restaurant that prepares and serves Greek food. But it wasn’t like the Greek food I’ve had in the past (admittedly, I haven’t had much and it’s been pretty mediocre). The place is owned by a family friend of Adam and Emily Schwartz. His name is David Schneider. His mother is Greek, and the story I heard is that he designed the menu around the dishes his mother made when he was growing up.
I’ll let you check out the menu, if you’re so inclined, but I have to say a few things about eating at Taxim.
We ordered several appetizers to start, and probably only because Adam is a vegetarian who also eats fish, they were all vegetable dishes. I was a vegetarian for most of my 20s, and I’ll tell you, I’ve never had better vegetable appetizers. These were simply beautiful dishes of perfectly cooked vegetables prepared in ways that illuminated how satisfying and flavorful the main ingredients can be.
Let’s just start with the okra, shall we? Yes, okra. Hey, don’t get all up in my face or start skimming forward, just because you either A) hate the stuff, or B) have only had it fried or in jambalaya or some sort of stew. There’s more to it. Isn’t there always?
This dish was called bamies laderes (with accents I can’t add right now), and it was listed on the menu as baby okra, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh coriander, olive oil, and semolina bread. The okra were tiny, dark green pods about as big as a cannelini bean, maybe a kidney bean. There were only flecks of sun-dried tomatoes, maybe a grind or two of coriander seeds.
The okra tasted like they were poached in the olive oil, which was dark and floral and delicious. I ate the little pods one at a time. (Well, maybe more than one at a time.) They were soft, and silky with the oil, and the dark skin had a hint of bitterness, which was offset by the oil’s savory, floral notes. Then came a little microburst of that smooth texture that is okra’s calling card. In this case, instead of the being the focus of the dish, it was one quick element in a complex arrangement of olive oil, coriander, and a touch of salty dried tomatoes. A sip of very dry white wine cleansed the palate each time, right before I dove in for more.
That whole description aside, the okra was clearly a revelation. I actually had trouble stopping with these, and Adam’s mother ended up insisting I finish them when there were a dozen or so left over before the entrees.
Next was the melitzanes tiganites, or sauteed baby eggplant with house-made yogurt, garlic, and dried mint. This one is simple: the eggplant was about as thick as a broom handle and sliced on the diagonal, sauteed in oil until crisp, and arranged on a plate with a bed of light yogurt underneath. The yogurt was spiced very slightly with garlic and dried mint, and the crispy, slightly salted eggplant, with its soft center, was addictive when spread with a little of the cool, smooth yogurt.
And it went on like this. We had a phyllo dish with leeks, oven roasted fingerling potatoes, and fried padron and banana peppers—the peppers were another favorite, but I’ll spare you the details.
I was positively vibrating during this whole appetizer course, and I’ll tell you why. This wasn’t just good food, this was the best example I’ve seen recently of perfectly cooked food. So many line cooks get it wrong. So many restaurant kitches are more like production lines than the kitchens we have at home. But this was truly a place that felt like a tribute to the way someone’s mother cooked; it wasn’t just a concept. There was not one piece of food I placed in my mouth that wasn’t flawless. The scorched skin on the peppers and the soft flesh underneath; breaking through the crisp skin of the baby eggplant and savoring it with the yogurt; the cool bite of the feta with the flaky phyllo and leeks. There was no need for a flashy meat app, no need for indulgent fats. The vegetables had as much flavor and style—and history—as anyone could want. These were dishes cooked with simple ingredients. No truffles, no foie gras, no exotic or rare spices.
As for entrees, there was a rack of lamb that looked beautiful, a half chicken with potatoes that I tried a bit of, and a whole sea bass that I shared with Adam and his mother.
David was also the consumate host. Smiling and gracious, with a Mediterranean complexion and closely shaven head, he was comfortably dressed in black. He brought out our entrees and asked if we’d like him to bone the fish. As he gracefully used a serving fork and knife to take the fish apart, he told us how his mother was in Greece taking care of his grandmother. Then he and Adam’s mother shared a few stories about his mother’s driving record in Greece. As he placed the utensils on the platter and juiced a lemon over the clean, white fillets, he insisted that she should take the bus, and shook his head with light-hearted worry.
After we all ate as much as we could (only the chicken came home with us), David reappared with three flutes half-filled with dark-red wine, and two baby snifters with a caramel-colored wine in them.
He explained the regions each dessert wine came from (I forget, of course), and that they were all made from dried grapes. The flavor of my wine was sweet and dark, and tasted, with no surprise, of dried fruit. Paired with the bitterness of my black Ethiopian coffee, it was a sublime and comforting end to a meal that seemed to come out of nowhere.
I thank David, and his mother, for helping us all experience a cuisine that is rooted firmly in a land and its culture. I have to say I’ll never look at Greek food, or a Greek menu, the same way again.
