07/27/16 Portillo's Crystal Lake, IL

Off to Crystal Lake, Illinois for a baseball tournament. This place is close to Chicago, and so the food is appropriately influenced. All the same stuff that you can find in Chi-town, you can find here. So where do you go to find Italian beef and a good Chicago style dog?

Portillo's of course. My baseball playing son Joey and the majority of the rest of his team frequented Portillos while in the area. Mostly we hung out with Austin. Joey and Austin split time at catcher, and both had a pretty good showing in International-level play. Austin's dad is Corey Schwab, Stanley Cup winner in 2003 with the New Jersey Devils. Pretty cool guy too. But hey, this isn't a sports blog, so back to the food!

Joey had the Italian beef, Austin had Chicken Alfredo and the rest of us did the dogs (above. Yes, there's a hot dog in there)

As you can see from the above picture, the Italian beef sandwich was hot, drippy, stuffed with an above average amount of beef, and...well...gone. I'm lucky to get this picture, since everyone elses food was likewise gone.and we just sat there being fatter than normal.

We got a trip to Wrigley Field, and while there, I tried a Chicago style dog. It wasn't as good as Portillo's and I could have gotten 3 Portillo's dogs for the price of one stadium dog. A quick word about the "hot dogs" in Chicago. They are more like a sausage, and less like the Ball Park franks That the rest of you amateurs are used to. They have a very different taste and you don't feel like you're eating the worlds supply of phosphates in one sitting. Add all that other stuff (Tomatos, pickle, relish, onion, and sport peppers) and you have a Chicago style hot dog. Trust me when I say that you can not do this with a regular hot dog.

This is (L to R)Kelly, Joey, and Austin, after we found Kelly wandering the mean streets of Chicago. Totally another story, for a different time.

Portillos is 4 out of 5 stars.

3/10/2016 Bucharest Grill, Detroit, MI

No pics on this one. Went from the Crain Building where I was working to RenCen to pick up my brother Mike and he says "Lets go to Bucharest Grill".

So we got there (a the Jefferson location), and the place was nearly empty, save a bunch of Detroit's Finest. I thought this was a bit strange, but it was only 1130, so whatever. We ordered, and while we were doing that, the cops finished up, cleaned up and left. We sat down and waited for our number to be called.

2 minutes later, you couldn't move in this place. Once the cops left, the "Oh yeah, I'm in Detroit" moment hit me. There was nobody in there because the cops were in there. After they left, it was as packed as a bar on nymphomaniac night. On payday.

In any case, the food was cheap and awesome! And the garlic! There was too much garlic in everything, which as everyone knows, is just the right amount of garlic. You can never have too much garlic. Even the salad had a lot of garlic.

Anyways, you can get a good seat if you eat with the cops. Everyone else, apparently, is a felon or wanted.

4 out of 5 stars

Photo courtesy: Bucharest Grill

3/8/2016 Texas De Brazil, Detroit, MI

In retrospect, we probably should have finished here rather than started, but you cant pass up a TDB, no matter where you are. This is the ultimate steakhouse. You don't have to choose what steak you want, because you get them all. I cant even begin to tell you. If you can dream it, and it is meat and it tastes good when cooked over an open flame, it is here. Pretty much whatever you want.

There is also a salad bar that puts other salad bars to shame. Olive Gardens never ending salad bowl is a pile of wilted lettuce in comparison. In fact, speaking of lettuce, you are going to see 20 different things, like olives, cheese, peppers, mushrooms and other garnishments before you even see any lettuce. You will be like "Oh yeah, there's actually lettuce". In any case, you can come back, but you're not going to want to. You probably wont be able to anyway, because the parade of meat has not yet begun. You should, however, so you don't have to double up on your Lipitor when you get home.

Waiters start coming past your table, carrying skewers of meat. Filet, Sirloin, Lamb, Chicken, Pork, Sausage, Ribs...like I said, whatever you can dream. All you have to do is wave them down and grab your personal tongs (provided) and they will come to your seat and start cutting until you say stop. For me and my brothers (plus Drew, who is like a brother, just not as good looking), the word "stop" wasn't going to be heard for about an hour.

Its fantastic. So fantastic in fact that we didn't take a lot of pictures because A. we were too busy eating, and B. we didn't want to get grease, blood, and other assorted debris on our cameras/phones. However, Mom took pics so at least you can see who was there. Can always count on Mom for pics. I was glad to have all of the brothers and sisters there, because I hadn't seen them is a while. What better way to reunite than stuffing yourself with 40 pounds of meat?

Texas de Brazil is a perennial 4-5 star pick no matter who reviews it and no different here. Due to being too full to think and suffering from a good case of the meat sweats, I didn't get the name of any of our servers but it is unimportant. The food is fantastic. Its a bit pricey, but its a flat rate plus whatever you drink.

4.8 stars

Back on the Road, Eastbound and Down, etc etc...

Soooo Im back. I am back on the road, and visited Detroit for a week. Luckily the food there is fairly well priced no matter where you go, and we went a LOT of places. I was solo for work, but my siblings Mike, Chris, Nathan, Emilie and sometimes Drew were with me pretty much at all times. Add Dad, Mom and Sue (stepmom) to the mix and there was quite a crowd at each place we went.

About Detroit: Its not the town that I left in 1987 anymore. There seems to be no people. The upside to this is no traffic in the city. I managed to miss all the Red Wings games too...

In any case, it will be good to get back to the food thing! Remember I don't blog when I am not travelling, so there could be big gaps. Since there are no regular followers anyway, nobody should notice!

So I hopped a Delta 757 to Detroit....