I think this mail-it-to-yourself service would be a lot more useful on the ENTRANCE side of the security gate here at O’Hare….

photo courtesy of Gene and Georgetti’s

None of us set out to eat our weight in cheese, pasta, olives, and an ark’s worth of barnyard animals, but that’s what happens when Sal calls the shots. You don’t need to know who he is, only that he’s fond of Gene and Georgetti’s, loves to order things for others, and was our generous host on Friday evening. Which is how we ended up tasting what seemed like everything on the menu and begging Joe to limit the number of meat dishes he brought us to two. When we ended up with three rather than the five Sal would have wanted us to have we considered it a victory of sorts.

The evening started out with shrimp, assorted antipasto, and italian sausage and peppers. While my darling girlfriend might knife you in a dark alley for some good peel and eat shrimp, I can personally take or leave them. The sausage slices and cheese in the antipasto was my favorite, though the sausage was certainly nothing to sneeze at. Sadly I like peppers better than they like me, so I can’t tell you much about the rainbow of them that accompanied the sausage.

Our biggest victory in the name of moderation – though I may be struck dead for the offense of using that worth in describing anything about the evening – was getting our server to bring us only one pasta dish. Grod bless him, we ended up with the Tortellini with tomato cream sauce, which might be one of the twenty best things I have ever tasted. If I hadn’t known what was coming next I’d have eaten four times what I did.

Our ‘scaled-back’ meat course included the lamb, chicken (alla Joe, unless I miss my guess – we never saw a menu), and the steak. Oh, the steak. The steak! This was a piece of meat prepared into such majesty that if you could successfully describe it to the cow it would butcher itself just to know it would be giving its life for such a cause. The accompanying sauteed spinach, mushrooms, cottage potato slices were all good, thought the potatoes were the clear standout there, being cooked to the perfect consistency for their thickness.

Once that was as consumed as we could manage, Joe continued his trend and brought us more desert than we could handle, though we could hardly insult our benefactor by refusing it entirely, could we? Spumoni is not my favorite ice cream concoction in the world, though the pistachio layer was delicious. The tiramisu, however, was one of the better I have tried, and the flourless chocolate cake? Almost enough to make me wish I’d eaten less tortellini.

Seriously – these are some butt-ugly icons. It took me a few looks to discern that the other one was supposed to represent a swimming person. Apparently you Chicagoans – or at least the ones looking to swim in very cold lake water – have ape-length arms.

I’m Don from DC and I’ll be guest-blogging from here for a few days. I’m here tagging along with my darling girlfriend as she does a little work here in the second city, and thought I’d take this opportunity to expand my collection of unread Chicago Trib Magazines. If you can’t tell, the ones pictured are from 2004 and 2005 – I didn’t come along last year, so there’s a hole in my “collection.”

It’s not that I meant to hold and treasure the things, I just haven’t gotten around to reading them yet. A sane person would have thrown these out long ago, but I’ve got a soft spot for Sunday supplement magazines going back to my youth in Miami with Tropic magazine, which launched the career of an obscure fellow named Dave Barry. Plus, an article about pubs? You wouldn’t expect an Irishman to throw out a story about the emerald isle, would ya?

Anyway, I’m here for a few days and my darling will likely be busy for much of that, so I’m deciding how to entertain myself. We’ve all got our lists of places we send our first-time visitors, but where would you send a third-time Chicago visitor? What’s on your list that’s far down, past the Pier and the bean and the Aquarium (though I may go back to see your new baby beluga…) but still worth seeing? Or what’s too weird for you to suggest to the neophyte visitor?

Or what, perhaps, would you like to see a naive Chicago metroblogger do and write up?