My Clandestino Valentine

Mark and I were planning a low-key, special dinner at home to celebrate Valentine's Day this year when a few weeks ago I got Clandestino Chicago's email about February underground dinners.  These dinners are not cheap, but seemed like an interesting way to celebrate Valentine's Day, so we bought our tickets to the Pilsen Clandestino dinner.

We had no idea what to expect -- location, size, food?  The day before our dinner we got the details on the location -- the New Arts Club Building just off 18th in Pilsen.  Turns out the building was one of the treats of the night.  It was built in 1906, as it current owner and resident shared before dinner.  It was unusual, according to him, because of its beaux-arts exterior and arts and crafts style interior.  I don't know much about that, but we were immediately impressed with the old woodwork and other preserved details throughout the house.

The building had numerous iterations, including a social club (from what I could gather) for Slovenian immigrants around the turn of the century.  The room we had our cocktail hour in was the old billiards room, an exposed-brick room towards the back of the house was the old gym, and the room where we ate was a small ballroom.  More recently, the building was a book store and the old stock of books is now stored in the former gym.

Here is a pretty poor picture of the second-floor ballroom where we ate:

The menu of the night combined flavors from the history of Pilsen and called itself Bohemian-Mexican fusion, although I found it leaned more heavily on the Mexican.  You can find more details of our menu on the Clandestino site (and I don't feel like repeating that word-for-word here), but I will share our favorite course: lobster dumplings, lobster mushroom consomme and brown butter:

All the ingredients were extremely fresh -- I believe the chef mentioned the mushrooms in the picture above were picked the day before we ate them.  Overall, I'd have to the food a solid "B" -- very good, but not great.  The entire experience, however, gets an "A."  Sign up for their emails if you want to check out a future event.  We might.