Taste Chicago

I play in a Friday night modified-fast pitch (fast pitch underhand with a no-windmill delivery) softball league in Burbank with a great group of men and women . . . we have a good time playing and post-game pizza and beer is a staple.

But there was always a restaurant I passed on the way to the park that I wanted to try - Taste Chicago. It's been a few years (eight, actually) since I last spent time in the Windy City, but since my longtime friends Margie and Dave moved there, I've wanted to go back and see them, and revisit the three food items I remembered from my last trip: Chicago-style hot dogs, Italian beef sandwiches, and Chicago deep-dish pizza. So those are the three things I ordered before last Friday's game.

Mercifully, I was accompanied by Beeper, (or Bumper, as I tend to call her) who shared in the taste test, or my acid reflux would have gone into overload. We got a Chicago dog with everything, a hot Italian beef sandwich with peppers, and a slice of deep dish pizza with sausage.

In theory, the Chicago dog contained all the right ingredients, but they didn't use enough celery salt and they used plain old pickle relish instead of the bright green "Nuclear Relish." There also weren't enough poppy seeds on the roll. The taste was so-so, and not really that impressive, at least not what I remembered from my last one in Chicago. Grade: C-

The Italian beef was just middling too; perhaps I've been spoiled by the French dip sandwiches at Philippe's in downtown L.A. The beef and peppers were all right, but there wasn't the juicy beef flavor I expected in a dipped sandwich. Grade: C

I've never been a huge fan of Chicago deep-dish pizza. To me, it tastes more like a quiche than a pizza, it's been very heavy to the point of almost being soggy, and I never liked the fact you almost always have to eat it with a knife and fork. I've always been more a New York-style pizza guy. The pizza here wasn't a true Chicago style; maybe if we had ordered a whole one it would have come out differently. But surprisingly enough, the slice of sausage we got wasn't all that heavy, and the crust stayed remarkably flaky. Bonus points for the sliced sausage rather than crumbled. Grade: B

Overall, it wasn't a horrible experience, just mildly disappointing. Beeper was a good sport, and we got to see the end of the Stanley Cup finals before our softball game (she OWNS left field). At least now I've tried Taste Chicago, but it just can't compare with the real thing.