Last week I was in Chicago. This week? Well who knows what has happened to this week; it has been busy enough although I’m not sure I could actually tell you why. Not that the why is ever really important. Time flies. Life Happens.
My trip was not as ambitious as I might have preferred, but I was happy to be able to go at all. That first day, what with airports and travel and getting settled in the hotel, I overdid it a bit and my right ankle was swollen. Ice and elevation was my plan of action for Thursday morning.
Still, the first day was low-key but fun. Liana and I found a new to us restaurant near our hotel, The Gage, where we had a lovely midday-cocktail and lunch.
I had a sensational cauliflower cream soup made with coconut milk. The coconut flavor was not very prevalent, but the soup itself was subtly complex and satisfying, lovey intense and rich with the essence of cauliflower . I followed that with a salad of some sort, I recall it included sliced steak, but I took no further photographic evidence. Afterward, we took a meandering walk back to our hotel and I followed up with a mid-afternoon nap. We had both been on early morning flights, so I felt it was well deserved.
I was not ambitious that evening, so we had cocktails and shrimp in the hotel bar and called it a day. I had a simple Amaro spritz; the lovely pink cocktail was Liana’s.
We went our separate ways Thursday morning and met at Eataly for lunch. As mentioned previously, I had a hot date with a bag of ice.
I had a simple plate of carbonara on gluten-free pasta and a glass of Nebbiolo. I had arrived a little ahead of Liana, and had a lovely time wandering around the store perusing charcuterie and cheeses and foods I cannot get easily in Knoxville. I also sat and had an espresso and a piece of chocolate while I waited. I cannot think of a much happier way to while away a leisurely morning.
Suitably fortified for the rigors of shopping, we headed out to Salma’s fabrics, a place that was new to both of us. There was a wonderful collection of silks and cottons and trims.
We each purchased a couple of pieces and will happily return. I’m already thinking about my next trip to Salma’s. The initial visit was a little overwhelming and I had not known quite what to expect. I am very happy I went. Now I think there were things that deserved a more detailed perusal.
We ended the day with a burger. The burger looked and tasted delicious. Unfortunately we were both up in the middle of the night with a bit of food poisoning. It must have been the burger, because that was the only thing we both ate. Well, we both had an Amaro Spritz as well, but that seems an unlikely source of our distress, unless there was problem with the ice.
The burger was lovely, and deceptively delicious. When I saved this photo the next morning, I named it “death trap”. Perhaps a little extreme. Our third day in Chicago was perhaps a little more low key than it might have been.
We had made lunch reservations at Le Colonial (photo from Le Colonial’s website) so we gamely kept our reservation. We had a fabulous lunch, and I was thrilled to notice that Nicole Routhier created the menus and is the food coordinator for the restaurants. Nicole Routhier wrote the first Vietnamese cookbook I ever purchased; it still resides on my shelves and I was fondly thinking of my introduction to, and history of, eating Vietnamese food, as we enjoyed our time there,
We both had the green cocktail, which I had also enjoyed the last time I visited Chicago and dined and Le Colonial. Then we spent the afternoon wandering through boutiques and snoop shopping.
The evening ended with a trip to the symphony, the original impetus for our trip. We heard Vivaldi’s Four Seasons led by the symphony’s concertmaster, Robert Chen (photo from the CSO website). The musicians played beautifully, with elegant harmony and a quality that was both musically entrancing and conversational. This was the best chamber orchestra performance I have heard in a long long time.
The Vivaldi was also refreshingly luminous. I tend to think I know The Four Seasons, and I do; it is almost ubiquitous, but this performance brought new light to the piece. From the brightly chirping notes of “Spring” through the languor of summer and Chen’s brilliant playing in “Winter”, this was a fabulous concert, not soon to be forgotten.
We also heard Mahler’s orchestration of Beethoven’s String Quartet in F minor, Op 95, “Serioso” which I thought was fabulous and enlightening in many ways. I don’t believe I’d ever heard this version of the quartet before and I found it fascinating, thrilling both my heart and my head. It struck me how timely this was as merely a few weeks previously I had heard another Beethoven quartet in Knoxville, the performance of which also had me thinking about chamber music with new understandings. Here, in Chicago, I was once again revising long held presumptions and biases, coming to new a new appreciation of both Beethoven and Mahler, and the way that not only I, but we, in this historical and cultural moment, listen to music.
All in all a fabulous evening, and a grand finale to a fabulous adventure.