Dining at Alinea has been a dream of mine for a very long time. I remember reading about it and looking at pictures of the dishes with my mom over a decade ago and commenting on the sheer artistry. I am sure we were not the only ones. Alinea is Chicago's only, three-star Michelin restaurant. In addition to earning three Michelin stars, the restaurant and chef have won numerous awards including just about every "James Beard" designation, "Best Restaurant in America," "Best

The Art Institute of Chicago The Art Institute of Chicago is the second largest museum in the United States and was voted "One of the Top Museums in the World." The Institute was opened in 1979 as both a museum and a school of fine arts. Today it has a permanent collection containing nearly 300,000 works of art and is visited by 1.5 million people per year. The ceiling over the entryway at the Art Institute is covered by a skylight. It just so happened that I was lucky eno

As I said in a previous post , "Chicago is a foodie's paradise." You can find award-winning restaurants around every corner. In fact, Chicago is currently home to 22 restaurants that have at least one Michelin star. I was blessed to dine at three of them during my visit. Two are featured in this post (along with a Bib Gourmand restaurant) and one is yet to come. First up is "Kasama" which means "with" or "together" in Tagalog. It refers both to sharing and communing w

With more than 600 parks, and 8,800 acres of green space, Chicago has been called a "city in a garden." There was no way to see everything during my visit. I did, however, get to discover the gems below, and I enjoyed each one. Millennium Park Cloud Gate It is hard to believe that if you visited Chicago before mid-2004, the site where Millennium Park is now located, was a parking lot and railroad station. Today, the park draws an average of 25 million visitors a year. C

As I mentioned in my last post , my primary reason for wanting to visit Chicago for all of these years, was the culinary scene. My expectations about how good the food would be, were met and exceeded. Chicago is a foodie's paradise, in my opinion. It didn't matter whether it was fast food, casual or fine dining restaurants I visited. They were all exceptional. There was so much good food in fact, that rather than sit down for a two- or three-course meal at a single resta

Chicago is a city that has been high on my list of places to visit for a very, very long time. The primary reason Chicago was a top destination of mine was the culinary scene. (There will be plenty on that in posts to come.) What I discovered however, is that the food is just one among many reasons to fall in love with this city. Here are some things that I didn't previously know about Chicago: 1) While visiting, I was told that the moniker, "The Windy City" refers both