Pork & Mindy's preview: Peek inside Jeff Mauro's restaurant, opening Friday
From the Trib:
In 2011, on the final episode of Season 7 of "Food Network Star," the judges threw a surprise challenge at the remaining contestants: Make the best dish of your life. No pressure, right? But Chicagoan Jeff Mauro knew what we all, deep-down, want in our lives: a sandwich. His eggplant parm on brioche, oozing with ricotta and mozzarella, got Giada De Laurentiis to utter "One of my all-time favorite sandwiches." (He won, obviously.)
Five years and six seasons of an ensuing Food Network show about sandwiches later, you can finally try a Jeff "Sandwich King" Mauro original for yourself. The Elmwood Park native opens his first restaurant, Pork & Mindy's, on Jan. 8 in Bucktown. Surprise — it's a sandwich shop!
Mauro pinpoints the start of his sandwich fanaticism to age 10, when he had a beef with the grilled cheese his mom packed him for lunch. Basically: No one wants grilled cheese hours after it's been griddled. "My mom said, 'If you don't like it, make your own lunch," he says. "So I started making a turkey sandwich every day. Just turkey, cheese, lettuce and tomato, but I'd segment each ingredient in its own Ziploc bag to retain freshness, and assemble it at school. I wasn't the coolest kid at the lunch table. But I had the best-looking sandwich."
Pork & Mindy's specializes in slow-smoked meats sourced from Midwestern family farms, but it's not a barbecue restaurant. "The sandwiches are so far from your typical barbecue sandwiches, which I think are the worst part of a barbecue place," Mauro says. "If I go to a barbecue place, I'm ordering six meats, three sides and a defibrillator. Not a sandwich."
Here, choose from options like the Pig Candy BLT ($8), made with brown-sugar-coated, slow-smoked bacon on a buttered, griddled brioche bun; the Chuck ($9), featuring meat pulled from a 35-pound hickory-smoked chuck roll, with thick-cut pickled and fried red onions and horseradish cheddar sauce ("like a nacho cheese sauce, but good"); and the Chicken & Waffle ($8) — which is not what you'd expect.
"Being a guy who's made a career out of eating and making sandwiches, I think the worst sandwich in the world is chicken and waffle," Mauro says. "I don't want two dense waffles surrounding three pieces of breaded fried chicken. Our quote unquote 'waffle bun' is a split-top bun brushed in maple-bourbon butter and pressed like a waffle. It's soft and pillowy, and has the same sweet maple flavor without having to motor through 1,200 calories of waffle." The chicken is mulberry-smoked (not fried) and topped with green apple slaw.
You can also get tots loaded with meats and cheeses, concretes, salads (fact: faced with sandwiches and tots, I will never get a salad here) and packs of Pig Candy to go. "This is our version of the fries in the bottom of your takeout bag that you eat on the way home and you never tell your family about it," Mauro says. "By the time you get home, you've destroyed the evidence. Until your wife kisses you, and the jig is up."
he quips come naturally. Two weeks after graduating college, while he was helping his cousin open a deli, Mauro was invited to join the Chicago cast of "Tony n' Tina's Wedding" as one of the servers.
"I cooked and I learned the restaurant business during the day, and six nights a week, I'd drive to the city and perform," He says. "I was in my young 20s. I had the stamina to do that."
Not much has changed: Two days after Pork & Mindy's opens, Mauro is off on a 6 a.m. flight to New York to shoot five episodes of "The Kitchen," his other Food Network show. He'll fly back on Wednesday and be back in the restaurant on Thursday.
This isn't just a place he's slapped his name on, he says. "If I open a restaurant, I want to be there. That's the point of this."
Pork & Mindy's, 1623 N. Milwaukee Ave.,
www.porkandmindys.com. (to view the menu)
http://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/ct ... story.html (with pictuires)
_________________
Frank Coztansa wrote:
I don't waste my time with the Cubs.
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