Conscious Choice: Bite Café: Quick, Healthy and Creative

October 2007 | Conscious Dining

Bite Café: Quick, Healthy and Creative

By Tanya Fritz

For a quick, healthy nosh, Bite Café offers a creative food menu with a great venue for post-nosh tunes just next door. My dining partner was Conscious Choice staff photographer, Maggie Faircloth, to whom I owe a hearty thanks for this month’s dining suggestion and for introducing me to a great casual dining spot.

Bite Café’s dinner menu runs the gamut of cuisines with items from across the board, such as Skate Wing, in a traditional butter lemon sauce with capers, which was perfectly cooked and seasoned — definitely one of the best Skate Wing dishes I’ve ever tried. On the more eclectic side was the Pomegranate Chicken with vegetable tagine and red rice pilaf with couscous. The traditional guacamole was fine, not excellent, and both of us needed to keep adding salt to all of our dishes (although we both professed we are salt fiends). One dish we ordered, Blackened Catfish Tacos, really sounded fantastic but was unfortunately such a random cacophony of flavors neither of us could work our way through it. In addition, the catfish wasn’t blackened and from both its texture and flavor, it appeared to have been frozen for a bit too long. The Roasted Tomato Soup was incredibly tasty, with fresh ingredients and a very light flavor. The desserts we tried included a Dark Chocolate Strawberry Cake with whipped cream. The twist here was that the strawberries were actually chopped up and added to the cake batter before it was cooked. We were expecting something like dark chocolate cake with fresh strawberries on top and while the actual dish was more creative that our expectations, it was not to our liking. Instead of nicely balancing the bittersweet flavor of the dark chocolate, the sweetness and the flavor of the strawberries conflicted with the chocolate, creating a chocolate strawberry mix, that wasn’t particularly pleasing. We agreed we’d prefer the strawberries remain separate, but I appreciate the clever go at a classic pairing. The other dessert we tried was the Chocolate Chip Bread Pudding … a very appealing concept, no doubt. However, it turned out to be smothered in chocolate, with very little caramel sauce, which would have balanced out the chocolate chips, chocolate sauce and cocoa powder sifted on top. There was just too much going on for us to enjoy the flavors.

Bite doesn’t offer alcohol so diners must either bring their own or walk through a small back hallway to order wine, beer and cocktails from the bar at The Empty Bottle. They have a great wine list and an impressive beer list which would satiate any connoisseur. The hassle of leaving the table to order drinks next door isn’t huge, and it actually adds to the low-key charm of the café. Our server was speedy, attentive and charming. The exposed-brick walls at Bite hold local artist’s work, the music is at a decent level and the general feel of the café is comfortable and unassuming. It’s a great find for exactly that — a quick bite.

Bite Café, 1039 N. Western Ave., Chicago; 773-395-2483

Tanya Fritz is a professionally trained chef, oenophile, slow-food fanatic and yoga enthusiast.

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