…and new second favorite restaurant in Logan Square. Tonight I ventured to Caliente, on Fullerton and Rockwell. There’s a stop light in front of the place, so lots of times in the past I have been in my car, stopped at the light, looking in at it. It only opened relatively recently, though I’m not sure when. It’s the second restaurant in Chicago, the original being in Wrigleyville. I read some pretty positive reviews on yelp, so I thought I would check it out. I wasn’t sure if it was opened today- the website hasn’t been updated since the new location opened, and the other store is not open on Mondays. Yelp and Centerstage and Citysearch all said it was open today though, and its only about a five minute walk, so I figured I would risk it.

When I got there, it was open but only barely. There were about a half a dozen people seated in the front window, but the rest of the restaurant was empty. I went in and waited around a bit- there was literally nobody else there. After a few minutes, a guy came out of the kitchen, apologised for my waiting, and sat me. He informed me it was BYOB, and noticing that I didn’t BMOB, he offered me a Becks of a Heineken, on him. I go the impression that it was from his personal, after work stash, so that was really nice of him. Normally I’m not the sort to say no to free beer, however after the Sweet Cobra show last night I didn’t really need any booze.

The menu only had one vegetarian option, which made ordering easy. I got the zucchini and goat cheese enchiladas. While I was waiting for the meal, the guy brought out the food for the other people, and it all smelled and looked delicious, so I was started to get really exciting. I love well presented food. While I waited, the guy, Gerardo, stopped to chat a bit. He and his wife, who is the chef live about the restaurant with their kids. He told me they were considering not opening that day, just to relax a bit, but that the party of six called in a reservation. That worked out well for me because that party inadvertently also sorta made my reservation.. I never thought that restaurants would just… not open for a day for the heck of it, but I like it. Anyhow, the food came out, it was delicious, looked good, smelled good, and was way too much. That worked out nicely though, because I was in the mood to eat way too much.

I also drank an entire big carafe of water. It must have been a half gallon. So, great, great meal. It was a little pricey though, and like I said, only the one vegetarian option. If that chef decided to cut prices by 25% added a half dozen vegetarian options, changed the menu weekly, and hired some cute, hipster waitresses, she could give Lula a run for its money as for Best Logan Square Restaurant.

Anyhow, the other notable thing is that while i waited the music was awesome. I asked him about it, and Gerardo said that a customer brought him in a mix cd. He offered to make me a copy of the cd, which I accepted. He said to come back in the next week or so and he’d have a copy of it for me. Doubly awesome.  The songs were really good though, and I couldn’t wait, so I downloaded my first songs on iTunes. The first was a Nouvelle Vague cover of the Depeche Mode song “Just Can’t Get Enough”, which I am pretty stoked on. I’d never heard of Nouvelle Vague before, but apparently its French for “new wave”, which means that the English word vague is the French word wave. Weird. That album looks good, I think I will try to find the whole cd somewhere. It’s an album of 80s punk/post-punk covers, including “Too Drunk to Fuck”, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, and “A Forest”. I don’t want to download an entire album in iTunes, it’s too early for that.

The other song that I really dug was called “Porque Te Vas“, by Dutch-French-American-Spanish-Austrian 70s pop singer Jeanette. That song is rad. I don’t have much to say about it, but the quick clip on the iTunes store should be enough to get you to want to download it too. For those of us who weren’t big into European pop scene in the 70s and have no idea who Jeanette is, there’s a nice article about her at Cha Cha Charming. Cha Cha Charming is also a pretty cool magazine that I’d never heard of, so I’d also recommend clicking around it as well.