I am a big fan of the website Atlas Obscura, which has weird and interesting things that you can do in a range of cities. For example, I learned about the Tiffany Dome and the Garfield Park Conservatory from this website. The Tiffany Dome is inside the Chicago Cultural Center, which I would say is even cooler than the dome itself.
The green marble is from Connemara, Ireland, and is extremely rare. I wouldn’t have known that without our handy retinologist-turned-tour-guide.
Clicking around on the internet is no substitute for good old-fashioned walking around and exploring. And even then, walking around is not bulletproof. For example, I tried walking around Old Town, and I found a store that sold spices. This store turned out to be completely uninteresting to me, and instead of a merchant selling high-quality single spices, they instead sold spice blends for all sorts of foods and I had no way to vet the quality. I tried walking around Lincoln Square, which was decent, except several of the things we “found” were places that were thoroughly discussed online, like Merz Apothecary, or Vaca’s. Merz is actually quite cool, and sells a very wide variety of imported goods, which was not emphasized online. I also “found” another disappointing spice shop, which once again sold blends of an unknown component quality. I need to stop getting duped by this over and over.
If you go to any grocery store in Chicago, including big chain brands, you will probably find El Milagro tortillas. They’re made in Chicago, and have a tortilla storefront that doubles as a taqueria (and starred in a recent immigration raid). I also discovered another tortilleria, Atotonilco, which also makes great tortillas, and I would not have discovered these if not for simply poking around the grocery store.
In Little Italy, we found Living Water Tea House. To be fair, this was through careful prodding on Google Maps, and it is mentioned online. If you never went there, however, you would probably not find out that they are probably the only shop in Chicago that sources extremely high-quality single-estate (or even single tree) teas, and maybe even the Midwest. You might get recommended to Chicago Teahouse, which is good, or Chicago Coffee & Tea Exchange1, but if you want something truly off-the-wall, Living Water is your best bet.
The aftermath of tasting six different teas
The shopkeeper was not the owner, but he was still very knowledgeable about tea, and we watched him remake a random customer’s matcha two or three times to make sure it was acceptable. He sampled us six teas, when the “Tea at the bar” reservation only said it would have three. For one of the teas, he tasted it, appeared clearly disappointed, said something in Chinese to the other worker, and proceeded to pull out an even higher quality tea to brew for us.
The pot where they boil the white tea with lotus flowers, which comes as a puck
I would definitely return, and I want to try the pu-erh with mandarin rind that he initially offered us, which quite literally is pu-erh made inside little mandarins.
Chicago is a young city that has had a lot of residential turnover, so finding a store with “heritage” is very difficult. Scafuri Bakery, also in Little Italy, completely failed in this regard. 120-something years in business and mid pastries. Conte Di Savoia, on the other hand, had an old Italian man working the register and a fascinating selection of imported Italian goods I had never seen before, like a tomato sauce in a juice bottle. They had a half dozen different Italian pasta brands, and cheap fresh pasta when compared to offerings at fancy stores or the farmers market.
My next goal is to explore Chinatown on foot. Chicago’s Chinatown is still very much a working, breathing Chinatown, with astonishingly little English to be found. One time, my wife could find no one to serve her in English, since everything was in Chinese. Thankfully, one worker spoke (only) Spanish, so she could get her order finished. She also found another store which sold unique tea, but she does not recall which one it was, and nothing is written about most of those stores in English anyways. I’ll write back when I find it.
1 I admit to never having been to this store. But I heard they keep their coffee in open barrels, exposed to light and air, so I cannot trust anything they sell.