Ten minutes to write. Less time to read.

I am slowly returning home from a long weekend in Fargo, ND, and am currently waiting for my next connection in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport.

I’ve never particularly liked O’Hare; it’s big and dirty and impersonal. It’s filled with high carb, low nutrition food options and high cost, low number-of-ounces beverage choices.  Perhaps it is what purgatory is like . . .

There is one bright spot, however; and it’s called Wicker Park.  I was introduced to it by my son Kevin on a trip we took together to Rome a couple years ago. He’d discovered it a while before that.

Wicker Park is one of the best seafood and sushi restaurants I’ve ever been to, and if the layover is long enough I always try to eat there.  Today is no exception.  I stow my luggage under the table and sigh.  Even before the server arrives, I text Kevin: “Settled in Wicker Park and thinking of the great weekend.” It’s part of the ritual.

I spend the next forty-five minutes enjoying the Rainbow Roll, a combination “platter” of various types of sushi.  It avoids making a hard decision, because the menu is extensive. Kevin texts back: “Reminiscing as well.” I smile.

I don’t know why it’s called Wicker Park, since it isn’t a park at all and that is one of the names of a Chicago neighborhood that isn’t anywhere near the airport. Perhaps the name helps keep it a secret, so that the ambience is restful and unrushed. So, should you love sushi and have a layover at O’Hare, visit Terminal 2 just before it segues into the corridor that leads to Terminal 1.  You won’t be disappointed.