Restaurants Hit a Home Run with Baseball-friendly Fare

Baseball season is upon us, a true forebear of warmer spring days to come and incessant appetites for caramel corn, encased meats, and chewy pretzels. Regardless of your team loyalty or your feelings towards baseball in general, everyone’s a winner when decadent stadium-style foods are served in restaurants, sans the stadium pricing. Here are a few places in Chicago where you can hit a home run with your taste buds.

Caramel Corn

Cracker Jacks have monopolized stadiums as the de facto baseball snack, and understandably so with its perfect medley of salty, sweet, and crunchy. But you can do better than boxed Cracker Jacks. You can eat at Popcorn Asylum. The Lakeview newcomer peddles a dazzling array of whimsical popcorn creations, from poblano cheddar popcorn to kalamata olive popcorn and a whole slew of sweets. The maple popcorn is their riff on caramel corn, subbing all-natural flavors and sweeteners in place of the more chemical-y stuff found in boxed snacks. The shop even sports a Chicago mix, which contains maple popcorn alongside cheddar popcorn, everything you need in one convenient package.

Really the only way to improve upon the housemade caramel corn template is by using caramel corn as a garnish to adorn brownie and doughnut bread pudding. Obviously. Lockwood does just that, opting to maximize saccharine flavors with the dessert to end all desserts, studded with a miscellany of textures, salty and sweet flavors, and colors. Dubbed Bertha’s pudding in honor of Bertha Palmer, credited with dreaming up the original brownie at the Palmer House Hilton, the dessert uses doughnuts and brownies as the base for the custard-laced pudding, heaped with vanilla gelato and caramel-strewn popcorn. As far as desserts go, this one’s a grand slam.

Hot Dogs

Hot dogs have always been big business in Chicago, but lately more and more restaurants have been dutifully crafting their own housemade versions of Chicago-style hot dogs, a rarity in the past when all the ingredients and neon-hued components were outsourced from local standbys. Allium broke ground when it opened a few years ago as one of the progenitors of the housemade Chicago-style hot dog trend, and it continues to stand strong today. Absolutely everything is made in-house for this hulking hot dog, from the pillowy poppy seed-sprinkled bun to the succulent hot dog, relish, mustard, and pickles.

Before Tete Charcuterie’s grand opening on April 7, here’s something to salivate over: their very own Chicago-style hot dog. This tubular all-beef sensation comprises the American-inspired portion of the sausage section of the menu at this meaty Restaurant Row entrant. Other sausages derive inspiration from France (boudin blanc), the Philippines (longanisa), and Germany (rostbratwurst), but it’s the Chicago-style dog that has us hankering for baseball season and spring eats.

Pretzels

All the pretzel buzz in Chicago lately has been directed at The Radler, and rightfully so. Logan Square’s sprawling German beer bar and restaurant peddles one of the most superlative pretzels in the city, a hefty masterpiece that lives up to chewy, buttery dreams and then surpasses them with the addition of barley malt butter, blackberry jam, and housemade mustards.

It’s difficult to decide which menu item to highlight at Bangers & Lace, because this place is basically a baseball-lovers’ dream come true in terms of food and beer. From crispy corn nuts and cheese curds to housemade chips and pretty much every sausage imaginable, this place has it all. But one of the sleeper hits on the menu is the incomparable Bavarian-style pretzel. Absolutely glistening with warm butter, this dense treat comes with housemade chocolate stout mustard for dipping, which has got to be one of the most genius condiment creations ever.

Popcorn Asylum
2823 N. Lincoln Avenue, Chicago
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Lockwood
17 E. Monroe Street, Chicago
(312) 917-3404
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Allium
120 E. Delaware Place, Chicago
(312) 799-4900
Website

Tete Charcuterie
1114 W. Randolph Street, Chicago
(312) 733-1178
Website

The Radler
2375 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago
(773) 276-0270
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Bangers & Lace
1670 W. Division Street, Chicago
(773) 252-6499
Website