No, they really don’t have anything to do with each other. Vella Cafe has added a dinner menu, or more accurately, expanded its lunch hours to include dinner. Instead of closing at 3pm on weekdays, it now closes at 7pm. Um, we don’t think closing at 7pm should really count as dinner. 10pm ought to be the earliest, or 9pm if the restaurant is run by a family with small children.
But to qualify, the small children have to bus your table, and also perform musical interludes of some kind in between courses. Ideally, they should be dressed in period costume for this, but that’s not essential.
Right, so now you can pick up one of their salads (spinach with bacon, apple, blue cheese and balsamic vinaigrette for $7.50) or panini (brisket with plum, apple, caramelized onion BBQ sauce and butterkase, served with pickles and slaw for $8) on your way home for work. Also, the Vella ladies entreat you to “Call & ask us ‘what’s for dinner?’ We are now featuring a roatating selection of ala carte meals in our deli case. Stop in & pick up dinner to take home.” That sounds lovely, except “a la carte” is three words, not two.
Okay, and the part about the Chicagoist is an extremely minor technical quibble, but given the hyperniche focus of this blog, we don’t see a problem in voicing it. So if you click on the “food” category, you used to get the nice, normal Ist layout with photos and everything. But recently, it’s only been showing three lines of text, and nothing else! Note that the Gothamist food category at least gives you image thumbnails. Anyway, this may be well beyond anyone’s control, but we wanted to register that we like the old way better.
On a side note (the half), please start/keep voting on the best review or we’ll be sad. Kthxbai.
Vella Cafe [MenuPages]
Vella Cafe [Official Site]
Food Archives [Chicagoist]
[Photo: from Vella’s website for some reason. They want you to vote because they are too young/nonhuman to do so themselves]
