Restaurantdar

Dear Diary,

Being as how it’s my birthday, and how Chicagoland is full of incredibly fabulous restaurants that are profusely Yelped about and blogged about and ranked enthusiastically by our most esteemed professional restaurant reviewers, I want to tell you about how it is we ended up having my birthday dinner in one of the many wonderful, off-the-radar, often-parking-lot or strip-mall-situated restaurants of the Chicago suburbs.

Diary, I know there are diners who swear by Zagat and TripAdvisor and TimeOut Wherever, but I just personally don’t believe in reviews as necessarily the best way to go choosing a restaurant. I do read them and I factor them into my general vague sense of places I might want to try if I’m ever organized enough to make a reservation three months in advance, or patient enough to wait an hour and a half for a table, or lucky enough to score an empty seat at the bar. But can I also say there’s only so much Brilliant Young Chef-Driven Cuisine I’m really interested in, and that generally speaking (see my Manifesto) I’d almost always rather have a delicious, honestly prepared ethnic meal in a restaurant that feels less like a Savvy Business Venture and more like someone’s home?

This kind of restaurant rarely makes it onto anybody’s What’sHot List, so to find them, you have to develop a certain confidence in your own dining radar, or what Mr. Darcy and I have come to call Restaurantdar. We’ve successfully employed Restaurantdar all across Europe and all over the U.S. and it has led to most of our most memorable dining experiences. Just a couple of weekends ago, we followed our Restaurantdar to downtown Palatine, Illinois–a suburb so exotic that neither of us had ever been there–where we wound up seated in a parking lot sipping the most magical sangria and dining on a beautifully grilled Argentinian-style steak with chimichurri sauce and truffled french fries (picturedhere).We discovered it on the way home from a bike trip, simply by wondering aloud what downtown Palantine looked like, cruising around for about five minutes till this place called Artistic Cuisine Restaurant–Modern Argentinean Cuisine appeared like a mirage in a parking lot, and saying to each other: Really? Artistic Argentinian Cuisine in the the middle of a Palatine parking lot?

That’s not really all, of course. But it is the first stage of employing Restaurantdar: The restaurant has to catch your eye. It has to give you some kind of sultry, come-hither look, like the not-necessarily-totally-hot yet somehow-intriguing-looking person across the room at a crowded party who just strikes you as someone it’s going to be interesting to talk to. For instance, a few years ago, strolling through the little tourist town of Lindos on the island of Rhodes, Mr. Darcy and I were trying to avoid the bullying come-ons of the maitre-d’s who routinely stand outside tourist restaurants in Greece trying to get you to come in for dinner even if you only ate lunch an hour ago, when we walked past one who was simply standing outside his restaurant saying “Good evening” to passersby without any sales pitch at all. He looked friendly and intelligent and was definitely smart enough to not pester us as we began to examine the menu. The menus of Greek tourist restaurants, even in Greece, are usually not all that different from the menu of a tourist restaurant in Greektown, by the way: you got your moussaka, your souvlaki, your gyros, your pastichio, and of course, your Greek Village Salad–and most of the time that’s pretty much it. On this menu, though, there were a bunch of unfamiliar dishes, one of which was listed as being ”Greek Spring Rolls” filled with cabbage, carrot, feta cheese and mint. That alone was enough to draw me and Mr. Darcy inside the ancient sea captain’s home housing the restaurant Kalypso–where we not only had one of the most extraordinary meals I’ve ever had in Greece, but where we ended up befriending the owners Evripides and Angelika, and, several dinners later, I ended up taping a WBEZ story on Evripedes’ baby goat kleftiko.

We’ve used Restaurantdar to guide us in the Black Forest, where we feasted on Swabian ravioli or Schwäbische Maultaschen at the Gasthaus Sonne Neuhäusle; in the Italian Alps north of Trent in a tiny town called Fondo where I had the best homemade manicotti I’ve ever eaten at the Lady Maria Hotel; and in mid-town Manhattan, where the Apulian restaurant i Trulli serves a pasta made of the burnt semolina crumbs left on the baking sheet after the daily bread has been baked. (Actually, the recipe is based on a practice from the Old Country, they told us, but since they themselves don’t bake their daily bread they spent a long time figuring out just exactly how much to burn semolina by itself so that they could use it to replicate the original recipe.)

Since I’m a sucker for homey-looking Greek restaurants pretty much anywhere on earth, it wasn’t necessarily Restaurantdar that caused us to pull off Milwaukee Avenue Friday night to investigate Periyali Taverna in Glenview. But we had already pulled off Milwaukee Avenue to investigate several other places that, once we poked our heads into them, did not pass the Restaurantdar test. One place had advertised an all-you-can-eat lobster special which Mr. Darcy had imagined would be a perfect birthday treat for me, which tells you what kind of a guy he is right there because I grew up trained to disassemble and consume a just-recently living lobster with military precision and the first time he ever watched me do it I swear he turned green. But the special turned out to be part of a seafood buffet, which of course meant it was previously frozen lobster, which of course completely offended my New England sensibilities, and thus we were forced to move on. Place Two, though it had an extremely dazzling pastry display, failed to pass the something-unusual-on-the-menu test. Periyali was Place Three, and we could see from the parking lot that there was a big outdoor seating area which, though basically situated on top of the parking lot, was screened by a fairly substantial fence. It had been raining for much of the afternoon, but now the sun was out, and the patio was cool and shaded by an arbor covered with grapevines. The tables were covered with those blue-and-white checked tablecloths you see at tavernas throughout Greece, and the combined aroma of grilling meat mixed with the perfume of honeysuckle blooming all along the fence created an elixir that just sent my Restaurantdar into overdrive. So we sat down, ordered a bottle of retsina, and pretended we’d left the country (which wasn’t hard, since most of the conversations at the tables around us were actually taking place in Greek).

The meal we had was simple and good–nothing fancy, nothing complicated, just very fresh and very well prepared. I think it was because we looked so relaxed and happy a couple of hours later that, even after we’d refused dessert and paid the bill, the waiter brought us dessert anyway. (No one had said anything about birthdays, so no candles or singing were involved). I don’t know if they do that for just anyone, of course. I’m pretty sure you can’t actually ask. I think you have to have just wandered in, like a random traveler in need of nourishment, and looked like you were glad when you recognized your good fortune in discovering it yourself.