All Together Now - Brunch

 

If you look around Chicago, you will find many ethnic groceries with an attached cafe.  There are also many bottle shops where you can buy beer and wine that also have an attached bar, locally known as a slashie.  To a lesser extent, you can also find restaurants that also sell packaged foods (normally gourmet).  Last year, a place opened up in Ukrainian Village that was both a bottle shop/bar and a cafe/gourmet packaged goods store.  Called All Together Now (and originally Brothers & Sisters), it aims to fulfill many of your quick food and drink desires.  The front is a glass fronted storefront and walking in, the first thing that you will encounter is the Cheese and Cured Meat display counter.  There is a counter behind the cheese and meat display with a cash register on the left, where you place your order, and seating to the right for drinking and dining.  There is a beer refrigerator opposite the counter with a lot of local beers and wine shelves on either side of the beer refrigerator and around a pillar in the center of the room.  Aside from the counter seating, there are tables in the back, next to the beer and wine and a large communal table in the front, where we sat, that was made from a large log.

 

As I mentioned, you place your order at the cash register and pay up front.  You then find a seat with your beverage and your food is brought to you.  It was a warm day when we went, so I went with an iced coffee from Ruby Coffee Roasters.  It was a Central American blend with a medium roast and flavors of chocolate and citrus and a little inherent sweetness (I don't add cream or sugar to my coffee).  It was very good and I think I ended up having a couple of cups.  While I was waiting for my food, I decided to take a look at the cheese and saw something that excited me a lot.  When I was at a fine dining restaurant earlier this year, on their tasting menu one of the courses included a grilled cheese sandwich made with Tomme Cheese which was the best grilled cheese sandwich that I have ever had.  When I saw that All Together Now had Tomme Cheese in their display case, I had to try it again, so they cut me a small sample.  Tomme Cheese is a hard French Swiss-style Cheese made from Skim Milk.  It is light, but despite the lack of fat found in other cheeses, it does have a lot of flavor.  While this wasn't as good as the Grilled Cheese Sandwich (and Fermented Tomato Soup), it was good and brought my memory back to the sandwich.

 

Normally for brunches I will tend to order a sweet course and a savory course.  In this case, I actually ordered two savory courses, though admittedly the first did have some sweetness to it.  I had what was essentially an Open Faced Beet and Goat Cheese Sandwich that was a special.  It had Golden Beets, Heirloom Tomatoes, Chervil, Chevre, and Blue Cheese, on a thick slice of some very good Country Bread.  One of my friends dining with me had another Open Faced Sandwich.  This was Creamed Eggs over Toast with Pork Fat Collards, Pickled Pearl Onions, Lemon, and Aleppo Pepper.  It looked and tasted good, but I liked mine better.  Beets and Goat Cheese seems to be a natural pairing and this worked very well.  I liked the bitterness that the blue cheese added as well.  While I did try to eat this by hand, I quickly saw that that would not happen because everything would fall off the bread, so I enjoyed it with knife and fork.

My main course was a Breakfast Sandwich.  As with most breakfast sandwiches, it was built with an egg, meat, and cheese on an English Muffin.  For this one, the meat was Underground Meats Sorpressata, the cheese was Aged Cheddar, and it was finished with Fresno Chile Aioli on a Housemade English Muffin.  While fairly standard, the ingredients used were very good and resulted in a very good sandwich.  While All Together Now is very casual, the service and the food and drink that they both sell and serve are very good and it is a good option for a stop when I am in Ukrainian Village.