Big Heart, Heartier Food At Little Bucharest Bistro
By Melissa Wiley in Food on Sep 18, 2013 7:10PM
No one leaves Little Bucharest Bistro without a blessing on the house. With your eyes closed and head tipped back, owner Branko Podrumedic pours a stream of clear Romanian liquor down your throat while holding a napkin softly to your chin. Yes, you’re sitting across from the Firestone parking lot on Elston, but you’ve just been baptized in the Paris of the East, causing you to forget for the moment anywhere as alien as Restaurant Row.
The bigger blessings, of course, arrive on plates large as miniature moons, because there’s nothing little about the portions here and the generosity begins well before the sacerdotal digestif at meal’s end. We started with the saganaki oppa, i.e. the obligatory flaming cheese ($8), and a bowl of meatball soup ($6), which tasted, granted, a little short on flavor, but then this was in comparison to the homemade bread we were dipping greedily in its broth and devoured three pieces of in quick, happy succession knowing how much more was to come.
There’s something, we have to say, to being overfed, especially when most restaurants worth their stars implicitly ask you to watch your waistline and try to live to 100. And however unfair, it’s hard for us not to equate small portions with small hearts at times, especially when the food is good and we’d rather have more of it. Overburdening your guests with an extra mound of mashed potatoes can be an act of humanity, forcing free alcohol down an unwitting esophagus altruism in action. And so it was at Little Bucharest, the closest to Big Bucharest we’re likely to come for quite a while.
Fully sated from the sarmale stuffed cabbage with pork, ground beef, and sautéed rice stewed in tomato jus while topped with polenta and crème fraiche ($16), we soldiered on to our favorite dish of the evening, the braised veal paprikash with green beans and pearl onions in paprika sour cream sauce over polenta ($21), as well as the Romanian steak, served with roasted potatoes, broccoli, onions, peppers, and mushroom demi-glaze ($21), and house signature braised short rib goulash with tomato stew, green beans, pearl onions, and homemade gnocchi ($20). A vegetarian, it’s worth mentioning, could dine well at LBB, particularly with the meatless goulash on offer. But carnivores, those beasts, really have the best of it here, as most of the sauces are designed to pair with beef and the veal really was outstanding.
All told, three of us shared four main courses with some fried cheese and soup, and we like to think our hearty Midwestern appetites would have made any Romanian mother proud, especially when we ordered the warm clatite warm chocolate crepes with vanilla ice cream ($6) for dessert. We admittedly had to reheat most of our goulash for lunch the next day, making a minor agony of returning to cold cuts 24 hours later, but then all pleasures have their price.
We ate on the patio, incidentally, flanked by flower boxes flush with pink and yellow begonias, when it occurred to us that such an ample, hot meal may be even more in order once we have to sit inside the dining room wearing our wool socks. But patio life is short in Chicago, and there are few where we’ve felt more at home in recent memory. So drink your blessing and eat your fill outdoors before autumn descends in earnest.
Little Bucharest Bistro is located at 3661 N. Elston.