Delicious Chicago

I went to lovely Chicago this weekend for the National Conference of Physician Scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Actually, Chicago was not lovely for most of the weekend, as it rained and generally was cold and wet, but the places I went in Chicago were still delightful. My hotel was right on the river downtown, which is nice for conference going (as the conference was in the same area), but not all that nice for eating or much anything else (other than maybe picture-taking.

I headed directly to Wicker Park to take in the yarn fumes at Nina, my favorite Chicago knit shop. I found some lovely souvenir yarn, as well as a project bag that reminded me of this video:

Put a bird on it!

I was starving by this point, and knew that I wouldn’t make it to dinner without eating something soon. I stopped at the Milk and Honey Cafe, which served a surprisingly spicy corn soup, and was located next to yet another trendy bird sign, causing the hipster index of this neighborhood to spike off the charts.

After a brief stop at the Verizon store to get a new phone charger, I headed back to the hotel to drop off my purchases and headed back west to try out Green Zebra, a fancy-pants vegetarian restaurant I’d been meaning to try for a while now. It proved to mostly live up to the hype!

The salad was mediocre at best. The menu promised roasted squash, but there was none to be found. Toward the end it was even a little grainy, making me wonder whether the lettuce and scallions had been properly washed. The fig dressing was delicious though…

Dinner was amazing. I ordered the Farm Egg, which was a perfectly poached egg on top of smoked creamed potatoes, with little toasts forming a house around the egg. The potatoes were some of the best I've ever had.

Dessert was also incredible, making me wonder whether it is, in fact, only vegetables that cause problems at this vegetarian restaurant… The crème fraiche ice cream was 100% a reason to continue eating dairy…

The rest of the weekend was consumed with the conference, which was, as it was two years ago, a great source for thought-provoking talks as well as some of the best career information I’ve ever received. I think Adam, one of the conference organizers, put it best when he said “this is the conference of my people.” I thoroughly enjoyed getting to meet and reconnect with the other MD/PhD students in the social sciences and humanities!