I was beginning to turn against the Midwest, so returning to my hotel I perused the room service menu. I was hoping to find a snack that might not be double-chunked, supa-sweet whipped or Hi-Lowed
Perhaps I’m beginning to sound like an internet porn-cruiser but I find something faintly perverse about a store that encourages small and not so small children to ‘Dress Like Your Doll’. This one’s got five levels and is in Downtown Chicago, just off the ‘Magnificent Mile’ shopathon of Michigan Avenue.

On the sad day I found this weird, dolly corner I was confronted by small and not so small girls, and boys, wandering up and down the five floors clutching their doppelganger dolls. There was one floor of all matching camping gear so dolly and you could hit the hay in cloned sleep sacks and pyjamas, and then get up, all cosy and co-ordinated, in farm yardy dungarees and cute knobbly lumberjack shirts. This was pretty bad, but for some reason the thing that seemed to offend me most of all was the cafe at the top. The tables, chairs, plates, cutlery, servers (people, not big spoons – you can’t write, let alone say, ‘waitress’ in Downtown US- not pc), curtains (would say hangings but then that’s only pc in certain states), and food were all polka-dotted. That was fine. Then I saw the little high chairs at each table and thought ‘ how nice’ Mom, kids and baby can all bond over junk snax’—but no, the wee high chairs were for dollyganger.

Now that is sick. Is there not something a little bit worrying about a fourteen year old, especially if she is your daughter or niece, or even wife, wandering around the streets carrying her dolly clone? It just reminds me too much of ‘Pretty Baby’ and the danger of a whole generation of little girls thinking it would be cool to be Brooke Shields in modern teen lipstick Lolita-mode.

I was beginning to turn against the Midwest, so returning to my hotel I perused the room service menu. I was hoping to find a snack that might not be double-chunked, supa-sweet whipped or Hi-Lowed (cancer in a small packet for those of us not versed with the carcinogenic sweetener lexicon of the States). No healthy snacks, but I did find the pet menu—‘And for you fancy felines the Claw Cleaner. Albacore Tuna with chopped egg and sour cream at $6’. Good, just what I had in mind.

I ran, a mute scream in my throat, to the concierge’s desk. I wanted to find a place beside the lake to sit and eat, breathe real air and see real people cutting each other up on roller blades.

‘No ma’am, Lake Michigan does not have waterside cafes’, the young man at the desk shook his head and commiserated with me.

I could try any of the 101 cafes along Rush Street and watch the perambulation of the mighty-hipped Chicagoans en route from size humiliation at Prada to the reassuringly large clothes in Bloomingdales. Lovely young Dhav at the concierge desk was from Serbia, and he wistfully reminisced about evenings on the Lim River lakes near Novi Pozar. He went away to try and seek help and returned with a big smile and a name, The North Pond Cafe – not very inspiring.

How wrong can a girl be? North Pond Cafe has it all in spades. It is beside North Pond in Lincoln Park and cars cannot drive up to it. You have to walk there and this is the only explanation I can find as to why the place is not the top foodie name on everyone’s lips. It was busy but not packed. So it must be the walk that does it in for the mighty-hipped ones; that tough trek of an evening walk on kitten heels, through the park with the fireflies over the pond and butterflies all aflutter in the new preservation area.

We sat outside, almost on the pond, which is more of an ornamental lake. The tables were lit with hurricane lamps and we all had a merry time tipping the menus towards their small pools of light. I thought about the seared Hudson Valley fois gras with a balsamic vinegar compote but I get jumpy about the thought of French geese with swollen organs, so I chose braised rabbit, English peas, sun gold tomatoes and Rinnickinnick chive cream, mainly for the chive cream.

And I got the whole story, elegantly told by our man of the organic farm knowledge, about Rinnickinnick organic farm. There ain’t a goose with a pumped up vital organ in sight, and all the produce is watered and tended at night because that’s when they like it best at Rinnickinnick. A lot of the vegetables on the menu were from this happy place, and happy organic vegetables from Up State are worth every double ‘n’ they’ve got. All that was just $9 and my boneless, all natural Gunthorp chicken, chanterelles, fava bean ragout with bitter greens from, of course Rinnickinnick — go on, say it out loud, it’s going to become the battle cry of every sad carrot ‘Oh…..won’t you pleeeeeese take me to Rinnnnniccccckkkinnick’ — was $25 and perfect, plump, soft and fused taste-wise like the smell of a Nantucket garden on a summer evening.

On the wine front we were given lovely literary descriptions from our organic farm man and so picked a young Californian Diamond Creek Cabernet Sauvignon. The fireflies flipped and flopped upon the pond while we drank the Diamond Creek dry.

So there I was, all enamoured of Chicago again until I sat cruising the internet the following morning in search of some totally dull and un-sexually related information. I chanced upon a locally set up site – well, its mailing address was in Chicago. It listed the top 50 songs to listen to when you break-up (this search was nothing to do with a mild altercation over the Rinnickinnick bittergreens beside the pond). The home page had a poem set against a background of dying roses—Oh God, the poet, if that she be, described how wonderful her lover was, but the punchline was that he was her imaginary lover that she just sat at home and wrote poems about—not quite a killer left hook that one. This was all bearable, just, until at the end of the site there was an ad for ‘Jason Jones – love detective – Let me find out if your love is cheating on you’.

No, enough.

Originally published on Travel Intelligence