Dozens of cookbooks come out each year, but NBC 5's Food Guy Steve Dolinsky is excited about one in particular, from one of his favorite restaurants.
After 24 years, Lula Café finally has a cookbook out, documenting their own story, of how their menus have evolved and changed right alongside Logan Square over the years.
Daytime brunch is always busy at Lula Café, which transformed a long time ago from the old Logan Beach coffeeshop into one of the city’s best places to eat. Expertly made sweet corn and ricotta omelets are as commonplace as the bowls of chilled spicy peanut noodles. And The Lula Café Cookbook not only features the dishes from their humble beginnings, but also their more ambitious dishes, dictated by the Midwestern farms and farmers they’ve come to know personally over the years.
“So to me that makes the experience of cooking and then the experience of eating, a deeper, more emotional experience, and I think that really matters, especially now,” said Jason Hammel, the chef-owner of Lula Café, who also wrote the cookbook.
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Hammel shows off one day’s delivery highlights: peppers and root vegetables; heirloom tomatoes, stone fruit and lettuces. They dictate what shows up on the menu, but there’s always room for the classics.
“Pasta Yia Yia is a recipe from my wife’s family. It’s bucatini, feta cheese, brown butter cinnamon and garlic,” he said.
The Tineka is one of the few dishes that pre-dated Lula, but it’s never left the menu.
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“The sandwich has a peanut butter and soy sauce spread – kind of a version of a satay – on the bread. And then a lot of crunchy, juicy vegetables,” he said.
Much of the menu – and as a result, the book – is defined by seasonal ingredients, like this radicchio salad.
“We just happen to get radicchio from a farm here in the city; we happen to get Asian pears from one of our favorite producers that is actually on the West Coast. And then we try to find a way to marry that together. We created this vegan dressing with white poppyseed,” he said.
Hammel adds fried parsnips for crunch, then showers it with Pecorino Romano.
“So like a lot of products that we’re really deeply connected to that just kind of come together at the same time,” he said.
Three Sisters Farm is another longtime supplier. He turns their baby corn into a delicious vegetarian side dish.
“And we grill that over Japanese charcoal and finish it with a sunflower salsa verde,” said Hammel.
There are desserts in the book of course, but hard to beat their carrot cake - another menu regular. Hammel says he wants the book to be a starting point for inspiration at home.
“Go to the market, find something exciting, it’ll give you an idea of how we think about food and then hopefully inspire you to get in your kitchen and start cooking,” he said.
Here's where you can go:
2537 N. Kedzie Blvd.
773-489-9554
