Quique has been eating his mom’s chicken stew his whole life.
Ale’s been eating it since high school in San Juan, when Quique’s mom always packed him an extra plate for lunch.
Last January, Nnamdïi and Geordie Greep ate it for the first time, when the former opened for the latter at the Bottom Lounge and Empty Bottle.
Greep will eat it again in September when the erstwhile Black Midi front man returns to Chicago. . . .
But that’s not before you’ll eat it this August 11 when Moncho Moncheo makes its long awaited return to the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Frank and Mary’s Tavern.
It’s been more than two years since you’ve had Mama’s Chiki stew—in jibarito form—when the Boricua Jedis Quique Ortiz and Alejandro Gonzalez last played Foodball.
That was followed by a long hiatus, when Ortiz returned to Puerto Rico to mourn his mother, who was diagnosed with cancer not long after he lost a sister from it. Meanwhile, Gonzalez had gotten burned out working at Honey Butter Fried Chicken’s short-lived Glencoe outpost, and when reunited, they spent less time making their own food than they did working on their ongoing documentary about the pop-up life.
That all changed with the Greep–Nnamdïi catering gig. “We started falling in love with food again,” says Gonzalez, who’s now working at HBFC’s TriBecca’s Sandwich Shop. “We got excited to work again.”
And that’s why they’re back at Foodball, stuffing annatto-tinted empanada dough with sofrito-stewed Mama’s Chiki, served with a bracing culantro sauce.
They’re unveiling their Puerto Rican chopped cheese on Borinken Cakes’s soft, chewy pan sobao, with housemade adobo sazóon, potato sticks, shredded lettuce, “mojo mayoketchup,” and a crunchy, vibrant plantain relish that “cuts through the fatty meat like butta,” says Gonzalez.
There’s a veggie-friendly black bean version for the planteaters, along with housemade adobo-seasoned potato chips.
For dessert: a caramel goat cheese flan with guava–gochujang syrup.
“I’m really excited because I feel like this pop-up is a big reintroduction,” says Ortiz, now back working at the HBFC mothership. “We’re falling in love with putting who we are out there and doing it with an added purpose: We have to honor my mom’s food—make sure that we’re living up to what she saw in us.”
Don’t miss the return of Moncho Moncheo to Monday Night Foodball, lest some unscrupulous touring act poaches them and puts them on the road forever. That’s 6 PM till sellout this Monday, August 11, at 2905 N. Elston in Avondale.Meanwhile, only two more Foodballs to go before a fall lineup drops. On August 11, it’s a very special Foodball fourth birthday with a Bad Johnny’s wood-fired pizza three-peat. And on August 25, the debut of Itzel Hernández, aka @hija_de_maria, leads it into the Labor Day break.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)