The image in my head of what Old Town Serbian would be like was... really, really Serbian. I mean, long wooden tables, guys in cassocks, oxen parked outside, like that. Something like Szalas.
The reality? 70s, maybe even 60s. And I don't mean 70s/60s like Flourchild's, I mean-- stucco walls and a guitar-upright bass-accordion combo hitting every classic of the easy listening repertoire-- That's Amore, Besame Mucho, Ma Vie en Rose, Don't Get Around Much Any More, Never On Sunday, The Godfather theme. How they missed Lara's Theme and The Windmills of Your Mind, I'll never know. In case this paragraph comes off like criticism, I loved that part of the experience. Restaurants are, with movies, the only true time machines.
Basically, Old Town Serbian is like a Greektown place-- including the fact that the food ping-pongs between classically hearty-delicious and we're-so-tired-of-making-this-every-night. (No wonder our hostess, who spoke and coughed like she'd been smoking Khrushchev brand unfiltered cigarettes since she was 6, kept pushing the Veal Wellington special on us. I have to admit, just the way she said it-- "Feel wallingtone"-- would have been worth ordering it.)
Delicious? The tomato and feta salad at the beginning (how are they still getting flavorful tomatoes?) The spinach borek, even though I like the kind that Rob was saying this isn't-- I like the chewy doughy kind and this was the flakey crispy kind. The roasted pig, although there wasn't enough of it to go around (our fault not theirs). The veal cevapcici, which we only ordered a half per person of, but which I was glad to try after a lot of lamb ones (which we also had; here they are, they were just okay):
Less inspiring was a chewy, not-all-that-flavorful roast goose, a rather wan moussaka, some okay cabbage rolls, or maybe I've just never met a cabbage roll that did that much for me. They brought our main dishes out all together on a platter:
See, there's green on the plate. Approximately 5% of it. And we had dessert:
Crepes with apricot jam inside them. The extra helpings of whipped cream seemed to have their fans, certainly.
Anyway, an adventure. A trip backwards in time, to the kind of place that would have died off in Chicago by now (and actually did, I suppose, e.g Miomir's or Little Bucarest). A good time with an interesting bunch of LTHers. Prost!