- Michael Gebert
- Jamon de Iberico bellota
Several of my friends had spoken highly on social media of their experiences at Bom Bolla, a new cava bar—that is, a wine bar focused on sparkling wine from Spain—from the owners of Pops for Champagne. As food gets more ornate in Chicago, there’s a counter movement of places that focus on simple but high-quality foods from other cultures; chefs in particular seem to like to eat at these sorts of places, maybe because there’s no other chef’s hand in between them and the ingredients. A plate of hand-sliced jamon de Iberico bellota, funky Spanish ham, is as simple and straight from the source as it gets. So the first thing that happened to me at Bom Bolla was that a chef came over to tell me how much he liked it—not Bom Bolla’s chef but John Manion of La Sirena Clandestina, who said he’d been there half a dozen times already in the month it had been open.
- Michael Gebert
As one of my friends said later, “That’s all the good stuff!” In a hundred years of eating out, I had never overlooked the major part of a menu like this, and God knows I’d eaten at plenty of places whose categories were as opaque to me (“Nibbles,” “Mountain,” “Platforms,” that sort of thing) as these Catalan ones. We were full enough to be done already—except for that hollow feeling that we’d missed the point of coming here—but we went ahead and ordered a pair of bocadillos (little sandwiches), one with delicately fried squid and one a savory hot mess with pork belly and cheese, as well as a plate of Manila clams with bright salsa verde. These dishes finally made us feel like we were eating at the restaurant my friends (and John Manion) had been raving about. The three things we ordered off the menu’s second side were all the most flavorful things we ate there, and they were still true to the restaurant’s simple and un-messed-with aesthetic.
