A Critic Loves the Carbs at a New Logan Square Brewpub

Bread takes center stage at Logan Square brewpub Middle Brow Bungalow. Mike Sula raves about the products coming out of the blazing 675-degree PizzaMaster oven. Pizza crusts, “activated with a sourdough starter,” are “chewy and toasty with a dark, tangy interior structure that embodies the life-affirming powers of good bread.” They’re topped with ingredient combinations like butternut squash with arugula, mozzarella, orange squash shavings, and an “intensely herbal” sage salsa verde; and cremini mushrooms with fontina, caramelized onions, and oyster mushrooms. Even the margherita has an “assertive herbal aromatic punch” thanks to the “scent of minced basil riding noseward on its ambient heat.”

The menu also offers salads and a “surprisingly colorful take on the normally murky Egyptian fava mash ful,” featuring green legumes, pickled eggs, chioggia beets, and ruby-red carrots. The country bread is another can’t-miss, with a “slightly moist, almost cakey, sour interior that compels you to tear it to pieces and force it into your mouth as if a meaner inmate might snatch it away from you.” In the morning hours, it’s toasted and topped with cinnamon sugar, and grains of paradise, or smeared with ricotta and jelly. As for the beer lineup, it’s a “well-rounded curation of styles” that range from a citrusy saison, Robyn, to a “funky” wild-yeast-fermented spelt beer, Check the Charts. [Reader]

Rockit Bar & Grill is almost 15 years old and has “gone back to what made it successful” according to Graham Meyer. The menu of burgers, sandwiches, and apps are “still one rung above bar-food standard.” Rockit’s “power chord of a signature dish” is its namesake burger made with wagyu beef, brie, fried shallots, and date aioli. And the “Rockit Booster Super Food Salad” is “fine but definitely eating one’s vegetables.” Overall, the restaurant “isn’t going to top any charts like its 2004 self aimed for, but could slot into a rotation.” [Crain’s]