An Unexpected Culinary Globetrot on Chicago's Far Northwest Side

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A recent Sunday in August on the far northwestern edge of Chicago felt cool and breezy – surprisingly like pho weather, in fact. Fortunately, my husband and I were already headed for the distinctive bright-green building that houses Pho No. 1 Brewing Co. I’d heard the Vietnamese food here was excellent – sticky caramelized fish sauce wings and pho founded upon two-day bone broth – cooked in turns by owner Son Ton and his father-in-law Lai Do. But we’d come first and foremost for Ton’s experimental house-brewed beers, which often take inspiration from Saigon street food and beer pairings. Think barrel-aged coffee and milk stout with a touch of milk sugar to mimic the sweetened condensed milk in a Vietnamese coffee. The draft menu board hadn’t been updated yet when we arrived around lunchtime.

“What’s ‘berry?’” I asked, gesturing to a beer tap labeled the same.

“Berry wheat,” the server replied. “We have a mulberry tree out back so my boss wanted to make something with them.”

The tartness of the berry tamed the brew’s grainy sweetness for a refreshing pairing alongside mild green papaya salad laced with tender shrimp and heaped with savory fried shallots and peanuts in tangy fish sauce dressing. Between sips of his pleasingly mild, crisp pale ale, my husband declared it the best papaya salad he’d ever had in Chicago.

It was a promising start to our second consecutive Sunday spent traipsing among the tidy bungalows and sprawling cemetery parks of Dunning in the name of culinary exploration. Dunning may be unofficially known as Chicago’s other Little Italy and home to the iconic Eli’s Cheesecake Factory, but lately the chatter is growing louder not just about Ton’s gift for pho and clever craft beers, but also the topnotch from-scratch tamales and tacos at Santa Masa Tamalería and the technicolor Turkish sweets, teas, and spices doled out with uncanny hospitality at the first U.S. outpost of Turkish cafe chain Yakup Bey Turkish Delight. The area is a delightful, if perhaps unexpected, one for a bit of culinary globetrotting without leaving city limits.

We weren’t sure we were in the right place when we walked up to Yakup Bey; the shop still sports signage from its sweets-and-nuts predecessor, The Nuts Castle. The interior unfurled as a visual tidal wave of shelves and glass display cases laden with candy-colored powdered teas, spices, nuts, baklava, and Turkish delights of every color and shape. We ogled apple and rose candies coated in pistachios; sugar-dusted mango-, lemon-, and hazelnut-studded plum jellies; slabs of springy marshmallow layered with chopped nuts and chocolate; cigar-shaped sweets rolled in sesame seeds or stuffed with nougat; and soft, sticky baklavas that were stacked, rolled, and folded from sheets and shreds of honey-oozing phyllo.

“Welcome!” said owner and shop namesake Yakup Bey, no doubt noticing our open-mouthed gazes. “We have nice baklava, Turkish delight, also tea, spices, nuts – everything 100 percent Turkish. I’m also Turkish.”

Bey’s grandfather (also named Yakup Bey) started the cafe in Turkey in 1924, and it now has some 20 locations across Turkey, Macedonia, and Albania. This is technically Yakup Bey’s second U.S. location: Bey opened the first in the southwest suburb of Bridgeview, before closing it in 2023 due to landlord issues. He plans to open additional locations in Albany Park, Orland Park, and Bridgeview.

Bey mixed little cups of powdered pomegranate tea while he asked us what we’d like to try before committing to a dozen-odd sweets to fill a small gift box. (Items are priced by weight.)

“Do you like pistachio? Hazelnut? Chocolate?” he asked. “Yes, yes, and yes.” (Oh, no.) An employee sliced off bite-size sections of marshmallow layered with hazelnut-chocolate spread, and cubed pomegranate-and-pistachio sweets. We sank into plush gray seats along the opposite wall, which was covered in images of Turkey as seen through open windows, feeling like we were 5,000 miles from a strip mall on Harlem Avenue.

Yakup Bey sits on a 2-mile stretch of Harlem between Grand Avenue and Irving Park Road that could soon see some upgrades, thanks to a recent beautification study that the city’s Department of Planning and Development drafted alongside local business owners, residents, and elected officials. Longtime business owner Gino Bartucci Sr., who runs Italian gift shop La Bomboniera (a.k.a. Italy’s Gifts and Novelties) less than half a mile from Yakup Bey, has been trying to establish a Little Italy here for more than 40 years – since shortly after the construction of the University of Illinois Chicago in the 1960s displaced many Italian families and businesses from the city’s original Little Italy on Taylor Street.

Bartucci, an immigrant from Calabria, started working at an Italian market on Harlem in the 1960s. In 1979, he and his brother Anthony Bartucci built a two-story strip mall structure called the Piazza Italia and he opened Gino’s Italian Imports (which closed in 2010). Bartucci started the Harlem Avenue Little Italy Business Association to help unite local businesses. In 1989, Bartucci and Anthony opened Pasta Fresh, which still churns out fresh spaghetti, lasagna, and rigatoni from scratch daily using just flour, water and eggs. The charming storefront with its red-checked tablecloths is still one of the most transportive spots to grab a spaghetti and meatball lunch, complete with affable banter from Anthony himself.

On this particular Sunday, however, my mind was on a different kind of dough – namely small-batch non-GMO masa sourced from Northern Mexico – that fuels Danny Espinoza and Jhoana Ruiz, the husband-and-wife duo behind Santa Masa Tamalería. They debuted their brick-and-mortar location a few months ago in Dunning, though they’d already become famous for their tender, savory tamales during the pandemic, when they opened a takeout operation in Avondale. The two now preside over an inviting little slip of a restaurant, which welcomes you with a mural by Christine Delgado of a tamale being beamed up to a spaceship.

Yes, the green chicken tamal was a nostalgic cloud of rich, shredded chicken in tangy, savory green salsa. But my favorite was the rajas, with stretchy cheese, sweet caramelized onion, and saucy ribbons of poblano expertly coaxed to their softest, most concentrated state. You’d be remiss to skip the tacos here, wrapped in blistered housemade tortillas that exhale aromas of fresh corn. The tinga de pollo masterfully balanced tomato-kissed chicken with tart crema and salty crumbled cotija cheese – threatening to upend my husband’s and my well-mannered practice of trading off bites of each taco. Things grew more contentious when we started on the Santo, a meat lover’s dream of surprising nuance: herbaceous green chorizo, tangy-charred adobada, silky barbacoa, and prickly pickled onions nestled in a tortilla with a melty, caramelized cheese crust. Yet again, my husband wondered aloud if this was his favorite taco in Chicago.

Back at Pho No. 1 a well-fed week later, I figured I’d slurped far too much warmly spiced pho ga broth to order a second beer. Ton had already planned for this likelihood, which is why the imperial coffee stout arrives in an especially diminutive tulip glass. I sipped on roasty, bittersweet Vietnamese coffee in beer form, relishing how much of the world we’d just traipsed through without leaving the city’s far Northwest side.

The server asked if I’d like the rest of my pho to go. As if anticipating my next thought, she said, “Want me to top off your broth?”