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Thorndale (Red)

Diamonds in the rough.

Monday Jul 04, 2005.     By Alan Simmons

Lifestyle Feed

At first glance, the area around the Thorndale stop looks like just another stretch of bleak and nondescript grid between Lakeview and Evanston. If you pay attention, though, you'll be rewarded with glints of obscured treasures and glimmers of exotica. You'll marvel at the ornate French gothic facade and sweeping Mediterranean interior of the Broadway Bank, originally designed in 1925 by Bernard Kurzon to be an auto showroom. You'll ponder shop signs in twisting Ethiopic script and hear people chatting in Amharic and Somali, or visit a shop that rents Nigerian videos. The mostly local restaurants offer a range of cuisines from eggs over easy to Ethiopian, and there are plenty of places where you can knock back a couple after work.

Panhandler rating: Not a regular hangout for panhandlers.
Safety rating: Broadway can get tumbleweedingly deserted south of Thorndale in the evenings; however, the blocks around the station are well lit. Observe the usual urban cautions.

Good for groups
Ethiopian Diamond
If Ethiopian cuisine is foreign territory, the Ethiopian Diamond is an excellent place to embark on a tasting journey. Dining here is an easy and tasty way to be adventurous: the dining room is large and colorful, the servers are friendly and helpful, and the food is simply superb. Ethiopian entrees are served on circular trays that are lined with injera, unleavened, spongy bread made from teff flour. Entrees are usually stews (or watts), arranged in small, fragrant mounds on the injera like paint on a palette. You eat without utensils, using other pieces of injera to pick up morsels from your tray. It's best to bring a friend or two along, because Ethiopian meals are traditionally eaten communally from the same tray. It's a big tray, too, so you'll appreciate the help.

The menu offers something for almost every taste and dietary preference - from the Adkins-friendly kifto (steak tartar) and tibs (meat cubes) to vegan offerings like gomen (chopped collard greens) and yesimir (red lentils and onions). Vegetarians and vegans will be ecstatic to discover the many dishes that are cooked without any animal products.

A variety of exotic beverages is also available. There's tej – an almost cloyingly sweet honey wine. There are a number of African and Brazilian beers. At the end of the meal, you can try a cinnamon, cardamom and clove-spiced tea—or better yet, a pot of coffee from beans that the restaurant roasts and grinds on the premises.

Where to chill
Ole St. Andrew's Inn
If you don't have a local watering hole of your own yet, Ole St. Andrew's Inn might be a good place to adopt. It's a quiet, low-key establishment where people can talk as they tipple and not shout to make themselves heard. Although there are four large televisions, the bartender cringes at the mention of the term "sports bar", or even "sports-ish bar," and the televisions function on mute. The restaurant area surrounds the horseshoe-shaped bar. The menu features the standard burgers-and-fish-and-chips pub fare. There is an interesting selection of beer on tap and, as you might expect, a long line of single malt Scotch on the top shelf.

The walls are lined with golf clubs, and a stuffed pheasant hangs near the register, which you would expect from a place named after a famous golf course. There's karaoke on Wednesday nights, shepherd's pie on the menu and Tracey Chapman in the jukebox. A knot of regulars grumble about the bus system while a couple gets up to dance to the last strains of "I Could Write a Book." In its own quiet way, the bar is almost theatrical, the perfect staging of a neighborhood watering hole.

Arena for the a.m.
Broadway Armory
You might expect a lot of recreational possibilities from a building that looks large enough to house a 747…but classes for the flying trapeze? They're here in Chicago's only indoor park, along with basketball and volleyball games, rock-climbing walls, theater productions and kendo (Japanese fencing). The park offers a slew of activities for all ages. Children can participate in summer day camps or after-school programs that feature wall rock climbing, recreational tumbling and cheerleading. Photography and theater programs accommodate teens, and adults can learn yoga or dancing or play basketball and volleyball in one of the park's five gyms.

The park provides other programs through partnerships with other organizations. The Billy Goat Experimental Theatre Company offers original theater productions; the Choyokan Kendo Dojo holds classes in kendo and the Flying Gaonas (as you might suspect) use the Armory space to instruct students in soaring through the air with the greatest of ease.

Cheap eats
Barry's Spot
There are only five seats in Barry's Spot and a cramped area in front of the counter. You might be surprised to find such a large number of options in so small a space. You can get pizza: entire pies fresh from the oven or phone book-size single slices from the rotating warmer. However, Barry's also offers rib tips, chicken wings, seafood, hot dogs, burgers, grinders, gyros, subs, pasta, salads and desserts. It's mostly a meat-fest, but vegetarians who like spinach can enjoy…well, the spinach pizza.

The already low prices (an enormous slice of the aforementioned spinach pizza costs $2.99) are helped along by daily specials like 50-percent discounts on carryout pizzas on Monday and "buy three slices, get one free" offers.

Dinner-date destination
Indie Cafe
Indie Cafe is one of the latest examples of the Thai/sushi combination restaurants that are popping up on the North Side. Though there are separate sushi and Thai sections of the menu, the division between the dishes themselves is not really that clear, and that's a very good thing. Some of the entrees are deft fusions of two: the special "Bangkok" maki includes lime and cilantro, and arrives in a long, boat-like dish instead of on a bamboo planche. Mussaman beef curry normally comes to the table unceremoniously heaped in a bowl; here, the components of the dish are arranged to form something that looks like a lotus leaf floating in sauce.

The decor is surprisingly hip for a spot so far from the Loop. The walls are dark and metallic. The lamps are clever. Tiny attractive people in black swirl around tables, taking orders. The tables are packed. Is this Thorndale? you ask. It is; and it's going to be difficult going back to curries that aren't artfully arranged.