Most of our food consumption this week took place in Evanston, which is actually kind of rare these days as we venture into the city more and more now that summer is here… kind of. We did take a break from our tour of Evanston to check out the Wendella Fireworks Boat Cruise on Saturday night, which was a lot of fun, but there was no real food to speak of so no reason to dwell on it. I will say though, if you’re thinking about doing the architectural boat cruise in Chicago, I would recommend doing the fireworks cruise because it was basically the architectural tour, but at night… and with fireworks. The only thing that we didn’t enjoy was the rain and Iman getting screwed on his drinks, but other than that it was a blast. We also checked out Howells & Hood afterwards, but by the time we got there the kitchen was closed and the drinks took forever (even though it was pretty empty). It’s a cool place and I think we’ll probably go back once they get the kinks worked out.
Chicago aside, let’s travel back up the lake shore to Evanston where we channeled our inner mexicans on Friday night at Taco Diablo… yet again. This is the 3rd time Nick and I have been here and I think the 4th time Celeste has, based on her FourSquare history, and even though I continue to get the same things, it’s still amazing. Actually scratch that, I did get a different taco in addition to my two “go to” tacos, so I did venture out of my comfort zone slightly, but not by much. I ordered a carne asada taco, which consists of carne asada steak, fresh tomato salsa, arugula, corn, and poblano rajas (I get it without the poblanos). My other “safe” taco is the pork carnitas which just has tomatillo salsa in addition to the onion and cilantro that all of the tacos come with. My third taco is the one that took me out of my element a little bit, but it still sounds pretty safe; Potato. Basically it consists of potato, chipotle salsa, rajas, arugula, and queso (plus onion and cilantro). Again, I got it with no peppers, but I wasn’t really aware of what the chipotle salsa was going to be. It was more of a yellowish sauce that was a little unnerving at first glance. I’m not a big lover of weird sauces so I was a bit apprehensive of it at first. But after taking that first bit, as well as downing 2 margaritas at this point, it was delicious and has now given me a bit more confidence in trying some of the other tacos on the menu.
Celeste kept it pretty simple and, I believe, went with a crunchy chicken taco, a shrimp taco and a catfish taco, all of which she obviously loved. Nick switched it up a bit on one of his tacos and went with the duck and pork chorizo and egg taco, which I’m not sure he’s had before. He seemed to enjoy it and was even quoted as saying that Taco Diablo might rival Big Star in Chicago, which is apparently saying a lot since Big Star seems to be everyone’s favorite taco joint. I have yet to go there because I refuse to wait multiple hours to eat food that probably won’t live up to the hype, especially after our experience at Tango Sur. I’m sure I’ll eventually make it down there and be able to provide a better comparison, but for now, Taco Diablo wins only because there is no other competition in my head.
Saturday during the day was pretty low key, I ate a rousing lunch of bagel dogs at home while Celeste ran errands before we had to head downtown for the fireworks boat cruise. The boat cruise wasn’t until 9:15PM and while Iman invited us down to Big & Little’s for dinner beforehand, we were kind of lazy and decided to just rock peanut butter and jelly sandwiches… Of course Celeste accidentally bought crunchy peanut butter, so that sucked… but we made due. So needless to say we were pretty hungry after the boat cruise. We tried to get food at Howells & Hood, but by the time we got there the kitchen was closed, we couldn’t even get an order of fries, so we had one drink and jumped on the train to head towards home… and food.
The “L” ride from downtown is about an hour, give or take depending on how long it takes to transfer, so by the time we made it back in the door of our condo building it was 2am. Neither of us were drunk and neither of us were that tired, which is surprising, so in lieu of keeping the puppy awake and cooking something at home, we decided to jump in the car and head into downtown Evanston to hit up Cheesies Pub & Grub, which, according to their website, is open until 5am on Saturdays! I won’t bore you with the details of Cheesies since we pretty much got the same thing as last time, which you can read about here, the only difference was, we were there until like 3am… and we were sober.
Sunday turned into arts and crafts day at our house as Celeste was getting things ready for her sister’s baby shower, but we still had to eat. We decided to take Peter Parker [the puppy] (yes we named our dog after Spider-man) and walk just down the street to Mustard’s Last Stand to grab some food. Mustard’s is this little shack of a hot dog place that sits in the parking lot of the Northwestern Football Stadium and is probably one of the dingiest dives I’ve ever seen, but their food is delicious. It’s just your typical hot dogs, burgers, and fries kind of joint, but sometimes that’s all you need. And since it was nice outside, we got to bring the puppy and sit at the picnic tables while we ate. It was a nice way to round out the weekend of dining in Evanston… although that wasn’t really the end of it because then we ordered Giordano’s for dinner… How in the world do I not gain weight eating all this garbage?!?
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