The ghee that chef Marisa Paolillo uses at her five-month-old restaurant Mango Pickle comes from a cow sanctuary in Gujarat where the residents feast on organic sugarcane and retire peacefully to the fields when they stop giving milk.
That vision involves almost crystallized spheres of crunchy pani puri filled with cool English-pea puree from which sweet pepper-and-garlic grilled shrimp poke out like the tail of a comma. It’s conjured the smoky charcoal-fired eggplant-tomato dip baingan bharta, here garnished with roasted carrot halves and beet wedges, an arresting adjustment in texture for a typically homogenous dish. Something similar happens with her saag paneer, a finely rendered, incrementally spicy puree whose thickness is mitigated by pillows of fresh grilled cheese, bits of chopped almonds and cashews, and nuggets of roasted cauliflower and mushroom. It’s a version that doesn’t so much complicate an elemental dish familiar to anyone who’s ever stepped into an all-you-can-eat northern-Indian buffet line as open it to the possibility of evolution.
Vegetables take the lead in the daily dal plate—rice, that buttery dal, and a mixture of whatever’s at the market, according to Paolillo, on one occasion fresh green chickpeas, turmeric-stained potatoes, and snappy, sweet long beans. It’s a dish so simple, pure, and affirming that you get to live an extra year just for eating it. Conversely, the chickpea-battered and deep-fried vegetable pakoras—clusters of crunchy onions, okra, potato-stuffed green chiles, and thin chiplike taro leaves—will having you swigging beer all the way to hell.
Mango Pickle
It’s rare that a dish’s seasoning fails to strike a beautiful balance of bright, clear spice profiles, and this success extends to an array of cocktails that leans toward the restorative, like a bitterly refreshing negroni made with black-cardamom-infused gin, a sweetly mellow chai spice old-fashioned, or an exuberantly assertive gin and tonic. There are also a couple of cocktails mixed with feni, the cashew distillate that’s India’s answer to a nationally identified spirit like mezcal, vodka, or bourbon. A resolutely domestic beer and wine list flouts the convention that Indian restaurants are spiritually bound to pour Kingfisher and Sula Vineyards (no relation). But what’s really compelling is the coffee and tea menu, which does feature imports: cardamom coffee from south India, herbal infusions made from rhododendron and tulsi (aka holy basil), black and green regional teas, and chai-bourbon collisions that I’d lean toward as a postprandial option over the stiff rosewater panna cotta or the balls of gulab jamun split, seared, and served with a too-sweet mango sauce.
5842 N. Broadway
773-944-5555 mangopicklechicago.com
