If I were the sort of food writer who thought about page views as much as I’m supposed to, I’d write a blog post with a headline like “Squid ink is the new bacon,” and then send the unpaid interns out to kitchens across the north side to take pictures of all the black food chefs are cooking these days.
I loved and wrote about all of those dishes in recent times, but by now you’d think everybody—especially chefs—would be bored with their ilk. It’s with that preconception that I approached Chris Pandel’s tagliolini nero with crab, sea urchin, and, yes, chiles, at Balena, the Italian alliance between the Bristol and the Boka Group (Boka, Perennial Virant, GT Fish & Oyster, Girl & the Goat). I was happy to be surprised. Mounded on a pool of uni compound butter, interspersed with shreds of crustacean, and topped with a briny, foamy lobe of sea urchin gonad, it’s the most delicious, spicy tangle of fish netting to wash up on the beach yet.
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Pandel’s pasta program is just as interesting as Van Camp’s, with some unusual shapes that could simply use a little more executional tweaking. Take the Piedmontese tajarin, an uncommon chitarra-shaped pasta traditionally cooked in upper-class kitchens because it was made with only flour and precious egg yolks (no water). But whatever distinction that lends is lost in a dousing of sweet pork ragu. Similarly the gigli, or “lilies”—trumpetlike curls tossed with guanciale and clams—were a bit oversalted and overcooked. Switching the sauces on these two might have made all the difference.
1633 N. Halsted 312-867-3888
balenachicago.com
