Restaurant 8 – Bread & Wine

Friday, May 24, 2013 - Happy Memorial Day!!!

Restaurant 8 – Bread & Wine, Heather, Wigs & Julie

This one has been on the list as we always drive by it on the way out of town.  It’s 3732 W. Irving Park Road, between Hamlin and Ridgeway.  For those drivers, it even has a parking lot! No Kevin tonight as he was at his Stinger (hockey team) golf outing. 

When I got there, Heather was drinking fancy champagne and Wigs had a fancy tequila drink, so I had a fancy whiskey drink.  Yum.  Kevin was a little afraid when I later told him that I think I need start to drinking more whiskey…  They also have a wine shop so you can buy wine and go, or drink it at the table ($10 corkage fee). 

We started with a charcuterie plate, which included 3 kinds of cheese, (and baby gherkins – love those!!) some ham and pigface pancetta and an order of duck balls, which were fried and served on a wooden cutting board smeared with buttermilk.  The waiter recommended a special amber beer to go with the duck balls (don’t remember the name, but it was “Coq” something – pronounced “cock” by the waiter.  Ok, got it – cock and balls…  you don’t need to keep hitting us over the head with it).  Wigs got the beer and Heather and I moved on to red wine (cotes du rhone, I think..). 

After the charcuterie, we decided to do three small plates and one large plate and share everything.  We ordered sunchokes, octopus, corned beef tongue for the small plates and pappardelle as the large.  The sunchokes were served with pickled egg, mixed greens, and potato in a brown mustard dressing.  The octopus came with a ramen dumpling and tasso ham in a smoky shellfish broth.  The corned beef tongue was not what I expected.  It was like a hard-shell mini pot-pie stuffed with the corned beef, and served with brown mustard.  Not that it was bad, just the shell threw me off.  The pappardelle was my favorite – it came with config lamb neck, asparagus, queso fresco and served in natural au jus.  It was really yummy.   All was very good, and we weren’t over-stuffed (probably could’ve had one more plate), but I’d rather be comfy full vs. over-full! 

After dinner, we wanted to have another cocktail, but you’re kind of in no-mans land out there.  We ended up at C Manny’s, one of our favorite Mexican restaurants at Irving and Elston.  They were clearly closing down, but since we were just drinking it was OK.  So we had a quick beer and that was it.