Western Avenue Series

Mile 20: Addison-Montrose  
This painting is a part of my Western Avenue Series, through which I'll be making 24 watercolor paintings, one to document each mile of Western Avenue, in Chicago.  I started this project because while it is not considered to be among the most “beautiful” of Chicago’s streets, Western Avenue is a perfect place to document the humanness of Chicago, the positive and the negative. In the words of Stuart Dybek, "Western, with apologies to State Street, is a great street,  Unlike State, it is a street that goes to the interior, the heart of the city, as it glides and glows through a United Nations of neighborhoods."  Check back next Monday to see a post about the next mile of Western.

I've eaten at Sticky Rice a number times, as I lived very near to this portion of Western when I first moved to Chicago.  It was a favorite place to have a dinner, when a dependable neighborhood eatery was in demand.  I generally ordered dishes typical of Thai Restaurants in the US, but Sticky Rice offers some more authentic dishes, including  fried worms.  According to an article in the Chicago Tribune written by Louis R Carlozo about this portion of Western, the version of fried worms served at Sticky Rice consists of a pile of inchlong bamboo caterpillar husks on a square porcelain plate, garnished with neat sprigs of cilantro.  He reports that the tan crawlers taste and crunch like peppered potato sticks.

In addition to fried worms, this restaurant features other dishes native to Northern Thailand.  In fact, the restaurant's name comes from the type of glutinous rice used as a substitute for jasmine rice in Northern Thailand.  Northerners eat sticky rice with their hands, in a manner akin to dipping bread in soup.  Sticky Rice offers authentic Northern dishes such as Northern Thai Sausage, made from a mix of ground pork, red curry paste, and Thai spicy herbs, as well as Kow Soy, made with egg noodles, chicken or beef, and a curry coconut milk soup. 


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Have you eaten fried worms?