We honestly thought Michael Nagrant had the week off last week, not seeing any review by him at the Sun-Times site. Turns out we shouldn’t have been looking in “Food” under “Lifestyles” on the home page, but… in “Entertainment,” which the home page gives absolutely no indication contains a section called “Dining.” More proof that newspaper home pages could teach the Albanian secret service how to hide things, but in any case, we have now bookmarked this secret Dining home page and can report on last Friday’s review of Al Dente, the Mexican-Italian spot opened in Old Irving Park by Spiaggia vet Javier Perez.
As if suffering from pop cultural reference deprivation, Nagrant loads up the first paragraph to note that the Mexi-Italian mix is not only fruitful but that Perez is the James Brown of the kitchen, which means not that he shot up his ex-wife’s Lincoln Town Car but that he’s in there, sweating every course like a man possessed, every night. “Maybe that is why in this lazy celebrity chef culture, where big Chicago chefs open in Vegas and bigger New York chefs carpetbag with mediocre afterthought restaurants in Chicago, every protein at Al Dente is cooked perfectly… Lamb chops, perched on a hill of mineral-kissed wilted spinach, are medium-rare lollipops of succulent-to-the-bone, rich flesh dripping with nutty, rusty-orange romesco sauce… A nest of wild boar meat, tender as the lamb, is coddled by a circular wall of cloud-like potato gnocchi glazed in truffle sauce and dusted with wisps of sarvecchio Parmesan.” Where David Tamarkin saw only a road company Spiaggia here, Nagrant finds the Mexican as well as the Italian influence and declares it “glorious.”
Al Dente serves up Mexican-Italian Mix With Great Flair [Sun-Times]
