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Doing the Wine Bar Crawl

Zinny ditches her BYOB mantra at not one, but two wine bars.

Monday Sep 18, 2006.     By Zinny Fandel

Food Feed

After a long summer of three-hour train rides to Michigan and weekends spent scrounging for a bottle of wine that tops Yellowtail at the local grocery, Steamer is home.

I'm excited to have him back for a multitude of reasons, one being that there's someone else to lug the garbage out, another being that I don't have to exhaust my address book looking for a BYOB partner.

I decided that a celebration was in order, and what better way to feel special then to bypass the BYO for a wine bar? I grabbed my credit card, mentally forbid myself from feeling bad about the damage we were about to do (at least for the remainder of the evening) and set off to Frasca Pizzeria & Wine Bar, 3358 N. Paulina Ave., with Steamer in tow.

Considering the bucketfuls of praise I've heard about Frasca, I was slightly worried about showing up well into dinnertime on a Friday evening, and pretty much every seat was filled. We immediately nixed the idea of dining inside (so loud and crazy—the food may be good, but if it sounds like TGI Fridays...) and were pleasantly ushered to a table on the patio pretty much immediately.

We quickly ran down the wine list; though the flights seemed a pretty good bargain at $12, there were only four to choose from, and none of them really screamed "come to mamma." With the credit card halfway in mind (I don't throw caution to the wind very well) we ordered a $28 bottle of Fassati Selciaia Rosso di Montepulciano.

I don't know much about Italian vino, so I tend to stick with this Tuscan wine since it's done me well in the past. Made mostly from Sangiovese—the principle grape of Chianti—it's pretty much impossible to not like a Montepulciano with anything tomato-based. And though Frasca had shelved it under the "light to medium" category, it had a nice body, with a pleasant hint of tartness and acidity.

With that as our backbone, we narrowed down our choices. I lost out on my bid for oven-roasted calamari—the return-to-Chicago bliss hasn't worn off, and it's left me surprisingly agreeable. Plus, it was hard to argue with any of the dishes on the menu, especially since most of them list cheese as a prominent ingredient. Give me a wegde of anything made from cow/goat/sheep milk and I'm a happy girl.

We started with $7 proscuitto-wrapped fontina. I'm not sure if it's possible to mess up cheese wrapped in bacon, but our three skewers, which took the shape of a corndog, were oozy bliss. Having paved the way for a healthier dish, we requested the $12 Frasca Chop Salad next. Either our waitress was a timing goddess or if the busyness naturally kept the pace slow, as our dishes were brought out in a leisurely manner that was right on. We sipped some more, then dug into the massive salad, which was studded with amazing fatboy croutons.

Though there are a few entrees on the menu, we had clearly come for the pizza, and spent a while debating between the Haven, with clams, oregano and garlic; and the eventual winner, the Capone. The pie was plenty big considering its $12 price tag, and cut into Zinny-size pieces—four whoppers. We couldn't find anything bad to say, and with ingredients like caramelized onions and fennel sausage, how could we? We polished off the bottle, polished off the pizza and gave a sweet sigh.

I was stuffed, but the night called for dessert. Generally of fan of just about anything sugary, I was remarkably unswayed by Frasca's chi-chi carrot cake tiramisu. I wanted something American, a drippy cone of chocolate ice cream, an unimpressive but belly-satisfying slice of apple pie. And I wanted more wine.

So we sped over to 404 Wine Bar, 2856 N. Southport Ave., to cap the evening off with something Grenache based (we've been into how in-your-face robust it can be), paired pretty poorly with an in-your-face dessert: a hot turtle brownie with a big scoop of ice cream. We did our darndest to drain our bottle of Cotes du Rhone, scraped the plate clean and soaked in the wine bar charm. Or at least that's what I encouraged Steamer to do. It's back to lugging bottles to $20 dinners after this one.

Zinny Fandel's tales of living the (mostly) BYOB life are intended to be attempted at home and in the community, preferably at BYOB restaurants. If you know of a BYOB spot she simply must tipple at, let her know.