A Critic Lauds Wicker Park’s New Filipino Restaurant

Cebu’s “generous, meaty comfort dishes have a transportive quality that takes you somewhere warmer but also familiar,” writes Maggie Hennessy. The Wicker Park restaurant dabbles in Cebuano-style specialties like sisig made with pig face, duck livers, and jalapenos and topped with a poached egg. Lumpia crackles to reveal “juicy-sweet bits of marinated pork and shiitakes,” while roasted lechon belly crunches “like hard candy; the succulent, lightly smoky meat beneath whisper[s] of spicy star anise and sweet lemongrass.” Halo-halo, the classic Filipino dessert, is an “amalgam of textures and temperatures” that gets “more flavorful as it melt[s] and osmose[s].” [Time Out]

Australian meat pies have made their way to Chicago. Mike Sula samples the savory treats from Down Under at Barangaroos in Lakeview. The “uniformly sturdy, pliant, pastry-encased casseroles” come in a number of varieties, such as minced ground beef with melted cheddar that’s “like an Anglo-Saxon Juicy Lucy.” Tikka masala is a “sweet, lightly curried vehicle” while the chicken and mushroom combo “seems to build a sturdy bridge between English sobriety and midwestern blandness.” There are also “deliberately Yank-targeted” pies like buffalo chicken and “Mexican” (steak fajitas, black bean, cheese, sour cream, pico de gallo). [Reader]