For the past few months, the Husband and I and our friends Will, Laura, and Matt have been talking about taking a possible trip to Chicago.  I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, but I lived in the Chicago burbs when I was a kid – from 3 to 10 years old – and I have lots of great memories of the place.  After my family moved east, we continued to go back each summer for a few weeks, well into my high school years.  My frequency of visits dropped off through college and post-college, but the city always held a special place in my heart.  The Husband had never been to Chicago, other than for an overnight layover we had when returning from our Christmas in Italy and Germany in 2008, so I had wanted to get him there for a while!  When we began planning with our friends this trip, it couldn’t get here fast enough! We decided to plan it around the Taste of Chicago, a fond childhood even of mine as well as a good blogworthy event (at least in our type of blog!).  We booked our travel and had been counting down the weeks since our move.

We arrived in Chicago on Thursday night and planned on checking out the Taste on Friday, hoping that the crowds would be less than the weekend’s normal crowdedness.  Our friends were staying with their friend Rachel a bit north of the city and since we were staying only a few blocks away from Grant Park, we headed over shortly after the event opened.  We enjoyed the scenic walk (the Husband will post about the gorgeous architecture I grew up loving) and found our way to one of the many entrances.

While the event is free itself to attend, in order to eat or drink anything, attendees (6 million or so per year, now in its 30th year) must buy food and drink tickets.  Ticket booths could be found at the entrances as well as throughout the park and accepted cash, credit and debit.  This year they were 12 tickets for $8.00, a bit steep but a portion of that money goes to the maintenance of the event.

The Husband asked the cashier for a recommendation on how many tickets to get so we started out with 3 sets of 12.  We also got a helpful booklet which included the names of all participating restaurants, concerts over the entire event (all free!), and a map of the park.

We weren’t expecting our friends to meet up with us for a while so we started out with just walking through the Taste to see what was available.  Dominick’s, one of the local grocery stores, was offering fresh produce – fruit as well as grilled corn.

There was a wine tent…

And Chiquita Banana

We quickly found ourselves in front of my mom’s favorite location downtown – Buckingham Fountain!

The Husband caught a picture of me sending a photo message to my mom and sister of the fountain and the beautiful background

At this point, we decided we were getting hungry so we needed to start our tasting! Each booth offered regular sized items as well as “taste portions.”  Our first stop was the Timothy O’Toole’s Pub.

We went with the 2 Mini Angus Burgers w/ tater tots – the perfect size for sharing.  We weren’t impressed with the burgers (they looked like breakfast sausage), but you can’t go wrong with tater tots!

Next we found a booth with mac n cheese – Manny’s!

It was a “taste portion” which was tinier than we expected.  One of the Husband’s pet peeves with mac n cheese is when it’s not actually macaroni and the menu doesn’t note that properly (note – we love other pastas and cheese, we just want to know what pasta we’re getting).  This was likely a homemade pasta (plus!) as it was kinda like spaghetti but in short spurts.  It was not bad.

We enjoyed the mac n cheese in our first shade escape of the afternoon.  One of my strongest memories of the Taste of Chicago is the heat and the sunburns I got as a kid.  I prepared with adequate sunblock and we enjoyed the many, many trees and tents available throughout the park.

Up next, we definitely needed some water.  In general, beverages were expensive in the park – 6 tickets or so for soda (or pop as it’s called there), and 6-11 tickets for alcoholic beverages.  We were happy to see that they were offering liters of water and thought 6 tickets was reasonable (relatively speaking) for it. 

We ordered one and the awesome cashier gave us two! Yay!

Back to the shade we went to wait some more for our friends.  In the background was one line of the many port-a-potties. 

In general, I don’t like public bathrooms.  Port-a-potties are even worse and I don’t recall using one since I was a kid.  I’m generally not a good self-hydrator (I’m working on it now that we live in the desert!) which works out well that I never have to really use public bathrooms.  At the Taste though, I needed to go and assumed only port-a-potties were available.  Well, I’ll share with you that I was incredibly traumatized by what I saw! I walked into one and immediately walked back out.  Entered a second one and walked out with a look of horror on my face.  I refused to walk into another (and this is only a few days in to the 10 day event!).  I headed back to the Husband and proclaimed that I would hold it.  He laughed quite a bit at me and insisted we look to see if permanent bathrooms were available.  Luckily, they were (closer to the fountain) and they were MUCH better than the port-a-potties

Okay, enough about bathrooms! The Taste of Chicago has a handful of small stages throughout the event and one large stage and field for the big events of the week.  Friday night, if we had stayed for the concert, we would have seen Salt-N-Peppa and Bel Biv Devoe! Saturday night featured Gavin Rossdale! Later in the week, we could have seen Rob Thomas! All for free! I can imagine how crowded those shows might have been…

One last snack before our friends arrived… at the Polka Sausage & Deli.

Here we went with the “taste portion” of two perogies to share.  I heart perogies! We had three flavors to choose from (potato, cheese, and sauerkraut) so I got one cheese and one potato for us each to take a bite out of.  The potato one was delish and the cheese one was sweet (which we weren’t expecting)… but it was good.

At this point, we decided that we needed to hold off on eating till our friends arrived.  We found the Cooking Corner tent and took a nice long seat.  We had just missed Mario Batali’s cooking demonstration, but I enjoyed perusing the mini cookbook with recipes from various restaurants throughout Chicago.

On our way out of the tent, we saw fans lined up to get Mario’s autograph

Our friends had arrived and it was time to get Chicago-esque food! First up – the Chicago-style hot dog!

I actually have to admit, out of all the years I’ve spent in Chicago, I’ve never had one and have no interest in trying them.  I prefer mine plain, in a poppy seed bun (Chicago does the all-beef hot dog and poppy seed bun so well) with a bit of ketchup.  The Husband tried the Chicago style though (we each got a half) and thought it was pretty good.

Around the corner, our friend Matt decided he needed a hat.  Luckily, there were Taste of Chicago souvenir stands throughout so he didn’t have to go hatless for long!

The next required Chicago food we needed to try was a deep dish pizza (a love).  There were a handful of options, but we headed to Lou Malnatti’s Pizzeria.

My pizza was plain cheese while the Husband got sausage.  This was his first experience with deep dish pizza and he loved it (wait till we went to Giardanno’s for dinner! He’s now in love!).  If you haven’t had deep dish before, one thing that’s unique is that the toppings are below the cheese which is below the sauce.  This version had a large sausage patty instead of little clumps.  We both really enjoyed this.

At this point, the event was getting more crowded and hot and the group decided we were going to prep to head out for more fun Chicago activities.  We had a few tickets left and I suggested ice cream One place in particular had been standing out to me as people walked by with huge, colorful waffle cones: The Original Rainbow Cone.

While I was set on trying the rainbow cone, I did see some with the sundae cone which was vanilla yogurt, strawberries, and blueberries.  That looked quite refreshing! I did stick with my rainbow cone choice though and was very happy! It had orange sherbet, pistachio ice cream (with pistachios in it), Palmer House (vanilla ice cream with cherries and walnuts, according to their website), strawberry and chocolate.  Yum!

Overall, we had a good time at the Taste of Chicago! We did miss out on some Chicago classics like the Italian Beef but it leaves something else for the Husband to try the next time we visit While I would have liked to see a concert or two, I’m glad we got to go at all and we had a blast the rest of our weekend.  Stay tuned for all the fun places we went!