May 18, 2013 NRA Convention and Iberico Restaurant

May 18, 2013 NRA Convention and Iberico Restaurant

Suzette, and Anne Sesler and her daughter, Elizabeth, and I took off for Chicago and arrived at around noon.  I took us a while to work out the ground transportation.  We finally took a CTA train to the center of town and switched to a subway that took us directly to the McCormack Center.  We arrived around 1:30 and checked our bags in the coat check room.  We arrived at the Rick Bayless panel on recycling about ten minutes before it ended and heard him say, “It may seem like a complicated job to recycle but you just start and go from easy to complex sequentially as the opportunities present themselves.”

I then went to a franchising seminar and a lecture by Homaro Cantu on the Miracle Berry diet and bought his book.

 

Then I met Suzette at around 5:00 and went to the first floor where the International Wine and Spirits Association had their sampling booths.  In about an hour we sampled about fifty wines.   Particularly interesting was Picaurd Rose Pineau and several French Fronton grape wines from near Carcassone.

Then we visited the Bulgarian wine booth and the Macadonian wine booth and Valdemar German wines such as Joseph Prüm and ended our visit to the area at the Quady booth were we tried all three of their Vya Vermouths and realized that we had only visited two of six aisles.   I promised myself I would return tomorrow.

After returning to the Felix Hotel the front desk taff recommended the Café Iberico for tapas , so we walked the two blocks to it and found that it was packed with folks.  We were shown to a table upstairs near the open windows so there was a breeze.  We ordered several tapas, including an Iberico ham plate.    As it turned out the ham was not iberico ham, just regular Spanish ham, but still good.

The best tapa was a boiled and grilled octopus and fresh spinach tapa, as was the pitcher of sangria for $17.50. 

We also ordered a tapa of roasted red and yellow bell peppers and eggplant, but the eggplants were the small green kind, not the larger rosa or aubergine ones, as you can see above on the right.  

We ordered a paella but the waiter forgot to place the order so he felt terrible and brought us two desserts to compensate for the wait.  The flan with blood orange caramel sauce  in the foreground was quite nice. 

 

Finally after a lovely evening of eating tapas, we retired for the night.

 

Salud.