Hopleaf (Chicago, IL)

Hopleaf is one of our favorite restaurants in Chicago; we've been going since we first moved to Chicago, but recently we've moved to within walking distance. Lately, with the warmer weather, we've been making it our Friday post-work place to unwind and get some great food and beer.

Located in Andersonville, Hopleaf is a Belgium pub known for a huge selection of beers, and equally impressive food. Any given day, they'll have 40 different beers on draught and countless more bottled selections (they have a 22 page bottled beer menu). 2 of our favorite, easy drinking beers that we have each visit are the Goose Island Green Line and Metropolitan Iron Works Alt. Even better, the Green Line, only available in Chicago and on draught, is the cheapest beer on the menu at $4/pint.

We started the meal by sharing the Herb Salad, which was a mache salad with roasted beets, goat cheese, sunflower seeds, and a laundry list of herbs, all dressed with a lemon-tarragon vinaigrette. The menu lists the herbs as chervil, mint, lovage, parsley, celery leaf, and micro radish greens. It was a refreshing salad, with the herbs (obviously) being the predominant flavor. I would have liked a bit more goat cheese to compete with the herbs.

One of Hopleaf's specialties are the mussels and frites, so to follow up the salad we ordered the mussels in a spicy thai curry. The mussels were perfectly cooked and perhaps the most tender ones I've had. The red curry, filled with sweet potato, jalapeno, lemongrass, and cilantro, was quite spicy and left a warming heat on our palate with each bite. As per any good steamed mussel preparation, crusty bread was provided to soak up the cooking liquid. Served along with the mussels are my favorite fries in the city, made even better with the accompanying garlic aioli. We moved onto a more bitter, hoppier 3 Floyds Pride and Joy to drink with the mussels.

Finally, we each had a CB&J for our main courses. We've had nearly all the sandwiches on the menu, but this is our favorite. This riff on the basic PB&J has cashew butter, fig jam, and raclette cheese on sourdough bread. Its gooey, sweet, nutty, and fantastic. This sandwich also comes with stilton mac and cheese. If you like blue cheese, you'll love this side dish. We had a Goose Island Fleur with the sandwich. You'll also notice we got our second and third portion of fries and aioli. God I love these fries.

We feel spoiled having Hopleaf so close for terrific beers and food. We just need to remember to order less food......