Since our flight was not until 7pm Sunday night we had pretty much the entire day for exploring. We decided to go to the famed Field Museum of Chicago, but first we stopped for breakfast at a bagel place called NYC Bagel Deli (found courtesy of Yelp, again, yay for social media), New York-style bagels in Chicago, I 
know but they were really good (I got an everything bagel with garden veggie cream cheese, that’s my control case for bagel places, if they do that well, then they’re golden). After breakfast (and coffee for me) we made our way to the 
nearest El stop and hopped on, riding “the Loop” around downtown Chicago to the Field Museum. As we were walking to the museum we went past an interesting, and slightly creepy art installation called “Agora” that had the backdrop of the Chicago skyline, a very cool locale to be sure. Then we were off (after taking some panoramic shots of Chicago from the steps of the museum) to explore the Field Museum.
When you first enter the large atrium/lobby of the museum you are greeted by its most famous resident, Sue, the largest, most complete and best preserved T-Rex. We started on the top floor of the museum with the gemstones, and worked our way around the floor looking at the ancient Asian artifacts, meteorites and more, and realized we’d spent over 2 hours just on that floor…there was no way we were going to be able to get to any other museums that day. So we took our time strolling through the other areas of the museum, past the “Gold” exhibition, the menagerie of stuffed animal specimens from around the world and of course, the dinosaur fossils.
After we finished at the museum we went to a restaurant called Mercat a la Planxa, a restaurant owned by Iron Chef Jose Garces. We were there just in time to catch the brunch tasting menu, we had the option of picking four tapas courses and unlimited bloody marys, mimosas or 3 different flavored sangrias or five tapas courses, all for $25. Not being able to pass up such a good deal for food and drink we opted for the four course menu and I had the rosemary and grape sangria and Jeremy had the pomegranate peach sangria. The entire menu is (not surprisingly) Spanish-influenced and was very tasty, Jeremy and I made sure to order different items so that we were essentially getting an 8 course tasting menu.
Brandade (this was very good)
Bacon-wrapped dates
Andouille potato hash
Shrimp and grits
Grilled chicken sandwich
Crab salad (yum)
Ham sandwich
Steak and scallop (one of my favorites of the meal)
Cream puff with berries
Rice pudding (and Jeremy trying to get into it before I was done taking photos)
Chocolate pudding
Once the meal was over they were done serving brunch (it was 3pm) and they were gearing up for dinner, so when we asked to see a dessert menu they just brought us the three “demonstration” desserts for the day for free, a very nice gesture and they were quite tasty as well. I had my DSLR with me this time for photos (and my 50mm prime lens) and since the restaurant was pretty quiet it was much easier for me to take pictures (although the server did catch me doing it one time, saying “We see a lot of people doing that”, so I didn’t feel quite so guilty).
After lunch we checked out of the W, and hopped on the El back to O’Hare. Our flight left on time and we were back in the ‘burg by 10:30pm. Overall it was a great trip (and a lovely surprise), I was expecting Chicago to have more of that “big scary city” feel but it didn’t. There is some really cool architecture there, nice parks and walkways along the water and great restaurants, I’m definitely looking forward to the next time I can return.
All of my photos of the trip are up as a Flickr set.
