After the woman had finished her lecsó sandwich, cherry turnover, and choco-spice latte, she asked if she could take a nap on the couch.
Lecsó, a paprika-stained Hungarian stew of lard-sauteed peppers and tomatoes, doesn’t typically appear on a sandwich. But it is typically consumed with bread, as it is with Finom’s slightly more traditional expression of it, served in a mini Le Creuset crock, crowned with a sel gris-sprinkled sunny-side up egg. Esparza supplements the erstwhile kick provided by hard-to-find gypsy peppers with a dose of Erős Pista (“Strong Steve”) Hungarian pepper paste.
The deceptively titled marrow toast, on the other hand, is a delicate thing of beauty, a smooth composite, not of bone jelly, but veal brain (or “head marrow” in Hungary), chicken liver, and smoky bacon, spread thin across toasted sourdough, bedazzled with sliced watermelon radish and pickled tomato, and showered with cured egg yolk and assorted microflora.
Eds. note: This story has been updated to correct that Rafael’s last name is Esparza, not Galarza.
4200 W. Irving Park 312-620-5010finomcoffee.com
