Mama Delia - Chicago
Bonhomme Hospitality has brought to Chicago some of its most dynamic and colorful restaurants – including Porto, Celeste and DISCO – and they’ve just opened Mama Delia in the Wicker Park space that once held their Galician restaurant, Black Bull. It is amazing.
The menu at Mama Delia is going to present you with food items that you may never have tasted before, but which are destined to become favorites. Chefs Marcos and Antonio take their cooking very personally, and dishes are created to reflect their lives in Chicago and Spain, as well as family recipes that you will not find anywhere else in the city.
Some dishes that will knock your socks off include family style favorites like Paella Valenciana (bomba rice, free-range chicken and rabbit, saffron, gigante bean, and, of course, socarrat) and Arroz Negro with bomba rice, squid ink, calamari, baby scallops, head-on prawns, saffron, parsley and aioli; for a small upcharge, chef will add carabineros, beautiful and huge Spanish shrimp: you want to try these.
If you went out to eat to enjoy some delicious meat, Mama Delia serves up some specialties that will make you incredibly happy. Cochinillo is confit suckling pig belly, fried pork ears, apple/morcilla puree, all dressed up in pork jus, Oloroso sherry and quince mostarda. If you came to dinner with beef on the brain, there’s Vaca Vieja, a twenty-four ounce boneless 8-year-old aged Spanish-style grass-fed ribeye with charcoal roasted piquillo peppers and beef fat fries.
There’s wine and beer, and you can have a bottle (or two) of both, of course, but we’d recommend one of the fabulous cocktails and what is perhaps the city’s best selection of sherries, some quite rare and, again, they offer new tastes that are destined to be on your must-have list.