Saturday 14 February 2015

Purple Pig - Chicago

We booked a weekend getaway to Chicago through Expedia.ca for about $500 flying Porter Airlines and staying on Mag Mile. It was our first time in the city - so we had a lot to look forward to!

Yay! Chicago

Originally, we planned to start off our trip with Deep Dish Pizza at Gino's East, but unfortunately, by the time we got to our hotel and checked in it was 11:30pm CST (meaning no pizza since the restaurant's closed).
Instead, we did a quick search on Yelp and discovered Purple Pig was still open and it was a 7 minute walk from our hotel. Perfect! A few people gave me recommendations to try the Purple Pig - so it's really a win-win foodie situation. 

 
It's surprisingly still busy for midnight eats, but we got seated very quickly and the waiter came by after 15 minutes to take our order and to tell us that the kitchen would be closing soon.
  
Since everything here is tapas style, we decided to order two dishes since we didn't really want to eat a super filling meal this late at night.

Milk Braised Pork Shoulder with Mashed Potatoes
Super tender and just melt in your mouth delicious! It was a tad on the salty side (which may be because we literally just landed in Chicago an hour ago and might have been a little dehydrated - interestingly, I just read this article recently about how in-flight your tastebuds change).


Pig's Ear with kale, pickled peppers and a fried egg

All mixed together
Again, this was another really salty dish. However, I think it was supposed to be on the saltier side with the salted pig's ear, salted kale chips and sour pickled peppers. The jiggly fried egg, crispy kale and crunchy pig's ears made an interesting texture combination and it was fun and playful, but I probably wouldn't order it again (too much salt).

After our two courses, we decided to grab another one since we weren't really full.
So we ordered the porchetta panini

There was a lot of pesto on the panini: pesto inside the sandwich and outside the sandwich.
Unfortunately, the pesto sauce was really salty. The porchetta was nice and flavourful, but the pesto may have overwhelmed us. Decent sized portion for $11.

Overall: They have some really interesting and innovative pig items on the menu, but we found everything really salty (either because it was really salty or because we just got off the plane and our taste buds were dehydrated or something). Of the three dishes, I'd recommend the milk braised pork shoulder.


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