Yesterday TBWITWW and I went to the Taste of Chicago. It was a good time. Kind of like a picnic with a couple dozen thousand of your closest friends. At The Taste, we sampled a variety of food, most of which was excellent. Here's the rundown.

• O'Brien's Restaurant & Bar
• Celtic Corn on the Cob A Taste staple. Roasted corn on the cob, doused in butter, and with their special seasoning blend. Yum! Very Good

• Penang Malaysian Cuisne
• Roti Canai Indian style pancake with curry chicken and potato dipping sauce. This was just okay. The flavor was good but the chicken walked through with stilts on. The serving size was quite small for being 8 tickets ($4)
• Coconut Pudding A light, refreshing pudding with a hint of coconut flavor. If was hotter out it would have been too sweet, but the pudding (which had a texture more like jello) was very good, and a generous portion.

• Bella Luna Cafe
• Beer-Battered Artichoke Hearts Pretty much exactly as advertised. Bite-sized peices of artichoke heart, battered and crispy, with an amazing dipping sauce. These are great.

• Vee-Vee's African Cuisne
• Jerk Chicken with Red Beans and Rice This was a dissapointment. The chicken was not very good and very much full of fat and bones, very little meat, and the beans and rices were also not very tasty. Perhaps we would have gotten a meatier piece of chicken with the full sized portion instead of just the taste.
• Sauteed Goat and Fried Plantain This, on the other hand was very good. The goat was cooked well and has that somewhere-between-beef-and-venison flavor that makes goat good, and the plantains were just at the borderline between being potato-ish and banana-ish, which gave them just the hint of sweetness to offset the mildly spicy sauce. Delicious.

• Cousin's Turkish Dining
• Borek Spinach and Feta Cheese Pie. Spinach and feta in a crispy filo dough crust. While tasty, nothing overly exciting or special about this one.
• Tavuk Adana Spicy Ground Chicken, Greens and Cucumber Yougurt Sauce in a Pita. The greens in this consisted of iceberg lettuce and red cabage. But otherwise this was quite good. The chicken was spicy like breakfast sausage... just a hint of heat in the mouth, but no lingering heat, and nicely offset by the sauce.