Foodie Adventures: The Protein Bar and Wicker Park

Day 4 is a travel day, which means I’m lucky if I’m able to eat a good meal. Travel days also tend to go really fast so the day was really a blur.

Breakfast. The Protein Bar.

This is more my kind of breakfast: Organic steel-cut oats with organic quinoa, flaxseed, millet, and amaranth mixed with organic peanut butter, acaí pureé, organic agave nectar, almond milk, banana. I’ll be honest, it was the peanut butter that got me… peanut butter and oatmeal.

The Protein Bar I went to is a food lab; I’m not sure what that means in the restaurant world because they’re not very forthcoming about their objective… but I’ll tell you what I expect this to mean in my world.

A “lab” in my world is about doing customer experiments and generating feedback. So, I’d expect the restaurant to continually create new food options and use the lab to get customer feedback on these new options. I saw none of that; perhaps it’s more low key than I’m expecting.

Still, it’s a great place to have a healthy breakfast.

It’s Like Uber but for Massage

Lunch. Oops. I totally forgot to eat lunch. It’s a travel day, and travel days go by really fast. But… I did discover something a few days ago that I’d like to share.

While complaining to a co-worker that my shoulders were killing me, she said, why don’t you use Soothe? It’s like Uber but for massage.

And, low and behold, you can book a massage through an app. You open it, you pick a time, you put in your location, and a therapist comes to you. It was possibly one of the easiest and best massages I have ever booked.

For a while, I wondered what it’d be like to see the same people over and over again but in different hotels around the city.

Dinner. Sushi. Wicker Park.

I worried about missing dinner because of traffic. Normally, I don’t care and will fly without food. But, because I missed lunch I was worried that I’d be really hangry on the flight. Traffic didn’t disappoint and even at 3pm was a complete mess. There’s something about the set-up of Chicago that makes both directions of traffic constantly gnarly.

I arrived with just enough time to have a meal. I’m not sure if I’ve talked about travel rituals before. With many travellers there needs to be an on/off switch for the week. Many use food as the trigger to tell themselves that it’s time to switch to their home life so they can arrive without the stress of the week.

Wicker Park has become my “off switch” for Chicago. And, for everyone that sat around me, I could tell it was their off switch too. Not one of them looked at the menu; they all knew exactly what they wanted and how much time they’d have to reach their flight.

There you have it… meat sushi… and the week is over.