Chicago: Calypso Cafe
For my friend's birthday dinner, she selected Cafe Calypso in Hyde Park. I'd never been before, but I'd heard a lot of good things about it so I was quite excited:
Birthdays are best spent over a filling meal with awesome friends. I hope my friend had as much fun as I did. I'm already thinking ahead to my next visit for more plantain nachos.
Calypso Cafe had a very quirky interior designer. Any restaurant that hangs soup cans and kitchen utensils from the ceiling gets bonus points. There was so much to look at, from the walls to the shelves to the ceiling:
The one thing that everyone says about Calypso is how great the plantain nachos are:
And indeed, it was quite fabulous. I think I could just eat a plate of that stuff by myself. The plantain chips come with black bean sauce, pico de gallo, cheese, and, if you add $4, jerk chicken. So good!
Fried fish is always welcome, so I got the catfish po'boy:
Much more impressive than what I had at the Big Easy. The breading on this catfish was very light and the fillet itself was flaky and sweet. I chose sweet plantains as my side and those were pretty darn good too.
The birthday girl got the half jerk chicken:
I tried a bit of the chicken and it was surprisingly tasty. Not as dry as I feared it would be.
No birthday dinner would be complete without dessert. After a quick perusal of the dessert menu, we collectively decided on bread pudding with whiskey sauce:
When I told the server that we had a birthday girl at the table and asked if we could get a candle on the bread pudding, he did us one better by letting my friend choose another dessert...FREE. She picked the coconut banana creme pie. We were delighted when it came with a lit candle:
When I told the server that we had a birthday girl at the table and asked if we could get a candle on the bread pudding, he did us one better by letting my friend choose another dessert...FREE. She picked the coconut banana creme pie. We were delighted when it came with a lit candle:
Birthdays are best spent over a filling meal with awesome friends. I hope my friend had as much fun as I did. I'm already thinking ahead to my next visit for more plantain nachos.
wow...this post hit all my palate sweet spots xD! sweet and salty plantains, coconut and banana creme, nachos, fried catfish, bread pudding... everything looks so, so amazingggg :D :D!
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