Order that Martini in the afternoon, and it’ll be you and a handful of grizzled regulars minding their own business in the dim light. At night, the crowd sharpens, and you’ll be drinking alongside serious jazz-heads who will shush you for talking during the sets. Imbibe on a Sunday, and poets will be your companions. The Green Mill is the birthplace of the poetry slam, still held each Sunday evening, which explains why much of the bathroom graffiti is written in verse.

As for sitting where Capone sat, you really can do that, too. His booth is the one at the end of the bar, on the north side—the only seat in the house that has a view of both doors. Chicago has given the world many great creations: brownies, the zipper, skyscrapers, deep-dish pizza. Yet people forget about the jibarito. Local restaurant owner Juan “Pete” Figueroa invented the sandwich in the mid-1990s. His big idea? Take two flattened, crisp-fried plantains and use them as “bread” for a Puerto Rican steak, cheese, and garlic-mayo sandwich. The concept spread fast, and soon chicken jibaritos, shrimp jibaritos, curry-mayo jibaritos, and more riffs on the original emerged from neighborhood kitchens.

You’ve heard of Chicago deep-dish pizza: loved by some, mocked by others. (Jon Stewart famously referred to it as “tomato soup in a bread bowl.”) What you might not know is that there’s something deeper than deep-dish—a bigger, doughier version known as stuffed pizza.

These pizzas thud onto tables around the city; Giordano’s has 50 or so restaurants in the metro area, plus several beyond Illinois. But my favorite location is downtown, on Rush Street—the one where all the tourists go. I love to look around the clamorous room and watch everything, from families with fidgety toddlers to spiky-haired Japanese couples to Urdu-speaking university students. You can almost see panic in their eyes when the pizza arrives, and a waterfall of mozzarella spills down from each wedge as the server spatulas it up from the platter and hefts it onto the plate. Then they have to decide whether to eat the enormous, gooey slice with a fork or by hand. It’s a lot to observe, but since it takes 45 minutes to cook a Giordano’s stuffed pie, I’ve got the time while I wait.

Want to get a glimpse of where Al Capone once hid his bootlegged booze? The Green Mill was Capone’s favorite hangout back in the day, when he’d swirl a cocktail and listen to live jazz. His pal, Machine Gun McGurn, part-owned the club, which was central to their bootlegging operation. If it’s not too busy, ask the bartender to show you the trapdoor behind the bar that leads down to tunnels where they hid the hooch.

The art deco décor hasn’t changed much since the 1920s. Velvet-cushioned booths curve under paintings in florid scrolled frames. Green candles flicker on white-clothed tables, while scalloped ceiling lights add a low yellow glow.

A couple of seasoned bartenders patrol the glossy wood bar that swoops halfway through the room. They’ll shake up a Sidecar or Manhattan or pop open a Pabst for you. But they’re best known for their Martini: a crystal-clear, up-with-two-olives, non-fancy-pants gin bracer.

After peeling the cloves, I always split them in half lengthwise and remove the germ, as the little sprout in the center can leave a noticeable sharpness in raw applications. (Read my article on removing the garlic germ for a more in-depth explanation.)

I process the cloves in a food processor, along with kosher salt for some added friction. Initially, the chopped garlic will want to spray along the sides of the bowl, so you have to frequently stop to scrape down the sides, pulsing until the garlic is completely puréed. The garlic needs to be fully broken down in order for the proteins and stabilizers to be released from within its cell walls.

Once the garlic is smooth, I blend in only some of the fresh lemon juice. With mayo, all of the liquid can be added at the start because the egg is such a strong emulsifier. But because garlic is a weaker emulsifier, we need all the help we can get, and keeping the paste thick creates more drag on the oil droplets, helping to keep them apart.

An emulsion always involves two incompatible liquids that are brought together by dispersing one into tiny droplets suspended throughout the other. This can be done with vigorous shaking and agitation—as when you’re whisking oil into a vinaigrette—but without an emulsifier, the coupling is only temporary. Emulsifiers and stabilizers help these droplets stay dispersed by coating each one and reducing the surface tension, preventing them from coalescing.

Mayo is such a stable emulsion because the lecithin and proteins in an egg are some of the most powerful emulsifiers around. One egg is capable of emulsifying one gallon of oil, resulting in a stiff and spreadable sauce. A properly made toum will be just as thick and densely packed with billions of oil droplets, but it’s all held together with the far less stable proteins and pulverized plant tissues of garlic. This makes bringing toum together a more delicate process than making mayo, but with some patience, you can easily avoid pitfalls.

How to Make Toum
This first step is to make a smooth and fluffy garlic paste. Start with the freshest garlic for the most flavorful toum: Pre-peeled cloves sold in bulk lose much of their pungency, while old, sprouting heads of garlic can be bitter and harsh. Look for firm, tight heads with no signs of bruising or sprouting.

If using yogurt and milk, start at least 3 hours and up to a day in advance by

placing both in a bowl. Whisk well and leave in a cool place or in the fridge

until bubbles form on the surface. What you get is a kind of homemade buttermilk, but less sour.

Tear the bread into bite-size pieces and place in a large mixing bowl. Add

your fermented yogurt mixture or commercial buttermilk, followed by the rest

of the ingredients, mix well, and leave for 10 minutes for all the flavors to

combine.

Spoon the fattoush into serving bowls, drizzle with some olive oil, and garnish generously with sumac.

How to make toum, the powerful Lebanese garlic condiment, at home in your food processor, and what to do if it breaks. Whenever my husband and I order delivery from our favorite Lebanese place, the center of the meal isn’t the chicken shawarma or the mixed grill for two—it’s the potent garlic sauce, toum. Despite my desperate messages for extra toum, they never pack more than three two-ounce containers of the stuff. I carefully ration the precious substance, but my husband mindlessly finishes his tub and a half and descends onto my share, leaving me forced to recalibrate each of my smears and paw hysterically at empty containers.

Suggested tweaks: It’d be easy to swap in different mix-ins here. Shredded carrot would be a nice addition and diced fuyu persimmon would be a great substitute for tomatoes during winter months. Be sure to keep the proportions the same though; the proportion of bread-to-veg is already pretty perfect.

Reprinted with permission from Jerusalem: A Cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, copyright 2012. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Random House. All rights reserved. Available wherever books are sold.
scant 1 cup / 200 g Greek yogurt and 3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp/200 ml whole milk, or 1 2/3 cups/400 ml buttermilk (replacing both yogurt and milk)
2 large stale Turkish flatbread or naan (9 oz/ 250 g in total)
3 large tomatoes (13 oz/ 380 g in total), cut into 2/3-inch/1.5 cm dice
3 oz/100 g radishes, thinly sliced
3 Lebanese or mini cucumbers (9 oz/ 250 g in total), peeled and chopped into 2/3 -inch/1.5cm dice
2 green onions, thinly sliced
1/2 oz/15 g fresh mint
scant 1 oz/25 g flat-leaf parsley, coarsely chopped
1 tablespoon dried mint
2 cloves garlic, crushed
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/4 cup/60 ml olive oil, plus extra to drizzle
2 tablespoons cider or white wine vinegar
3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon sumac or more to taste, to garnish

As Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi write in the introduction to Na’ama’s Fattoush in Jerusalem: A Cookbook, there is no escaping chopped salads in Jerusalem. Some are simple amalgamations of tomato, cucumber, onion, and lemon vinaigrette, while others, like Arab fattoush, contain a cornucopia of vegetables mixed with leftover pita bread.

This version comes from Tamimi’s family and has the tangy addition of homemade buttermilk dressing. Even made with less-than-perfect November tomatoes, Na’ama’s Fattoush is vibrant, crunchy, chewy, herbaceous, and creamy all at once.

Why I picked this recipe: Who could resist such a vibrant salad, especially when there’s copious amounts of chewy bread involved?

What worked: Tangy, crunchy, and just a little sweet, this fattoush is a colorful surprise bite after bite (not to mention a total breeze to make).

What didn’t: I would have liked more fresh mint and a little less buttermilk in the dressing (not all of it soaked into the bread, so I was left with buttermilk soup at the bottom of the bowl).

Kewpie mayo is a Japanese mayo that is sweeter, a little bit acidic and so much more delicious than regular mayo. It’s made with just yolks as opposed to all other mayos which are made with whole eggs, giving Kewpie an extra rich custard like texture. It’s slight sweetness comes from rice vinegar. It comes in an iconic super soft squeeze bottle with topped off with a little red flip cap.

Do I have to put octopus in takoyaki/what can you put in takoyaki?
If you don’t like tako, you’re in luck because you can put literally anything you want in takoyaki. Technically it won’t be called takoyaki anymore, but it’ll still be delicious! In Japan they have lots of takoyaki varieties. Some ideas:

shrimp,chicken cubes,ground beef,ground pork,sausage,bacon,tofu
cheese + anything else because everything is better with cheese
mochi + regular takoyaki ingredients
kimchi + cheese
diced ham + tomato sauce + cheese for a pizza takoyaki
taco meat + diced tomatoes + cheese for a taco takoyaki
vegetables: diced carrots, corn, peas, cabbage, zucchini, mushrooms, etc
What sauces go on takoyaki?
Takoyaki is finished by brushing on super savory takoyaki sauce and squeezing on kewpie mayo.

Kewpie mayo is a Japanese mayo that is sweeter, a little bit acidic and so much more delicious than regular mayo. It’s made with just yolks as opposed to all other mayos which are made with whole eggs, giving Kewpie an extra rich custard like texture. It’s slight sweetness comes from rice vinegar. It comes in an iconic super soft squeeze bottle with topped off with a little red flip cap.

Do I have to put octopus in takoyaki/what can you put in takoyaki?
If you don’t like tako, you’re in luck because you can put literally anything you want in takoyaki. Technically it won’t be called takoyaki anymore, but it’ll still be delicious! In Japan they have lots of takoyaki varieties. Some ideas:

shrimp
chicken cubes
ground beef
ground pork
sausage
bacon
tofu
cheese + anything else because everything is better with cheese
mochi + regular takoyaki ingredients
kimchi + cheese
diced ham + tomato sauce + cheese for a pizza takoyaki
taco meat + diced tomatoes + cheese for a taco takoyaki
vegetables: diced carrots, corn, peas, cabbage, zucchini, mushrooms, etc
What sauces go on takoyaki?
Takoyaki is finished by brushing on super savory takoyaki sauce and squeezing on kewpie mayo.