The Player’s Club, a sports bar and restaurant most notable for having been voted "Best bar food" by Chicago Bar Fly magazine, is probably the last place you’d expect to find a health food menu. But oddly enough, that’s exactly what you’ll find at this pub-like hangout for diehard racing fans. To this end, diners can fill themselves with brown rice and veggies, all the while watching games flickering away on a nearby cinema-sized TV. (Don’t worry — the sound is turned off.)
Mary Jurczyk, who, along with her husband, bought the bar four years ago, seems to have made it her personal mission in life to rid her customers of their unhealthy eating habits. She’s already had some luck in converting Diet Coke addicts into spring water aficionados, and delights herself with small everyday victories, such as sneaking healthy meals onto customers’ plates without their fully realizing it.
"When we took over this bar, we hired a cook to take care of the menu, but after two years I’d had enough," says Mary. "I threw out all the cans and processed foods from the shelves and replaced them with natural, wholesome ingredients. Where I grew up, on a farm in Poland, all the food came from the land. Here everything is artificial, and filled with salt and sugar our bodies can’t digest. I mean, if you put tenderizer on the meat, it tenderizes your stomach too," she proclaimed.
Mary has refurbished the menu from top to bottom. Many recipes come from the wisdom of her grandmother, who grew her own food and lived to be 102 years old. "I make everything from scratch," Mary says. "All the sauces, the salad dressings, the soups...we make everything, and we only use natural ingredients, such as sea salt and sucanat [raw sugar]."
The menu, at first glance, looks like one typical of any other all-American bar and restaurant, replete with pastas, meats, soups, salads, sandwiches and bar food appetizers scattered across six pages. But if you look a little closer, you’ll see subtle differences, such as daily soups made from scratch, organic breaded mushrooms, and fish served with roasted brown rice and steamed vegetables. One healthy menu feature you can’t miss is the "Sugar Friendly" section, described on the front page of the menu as a program for keeping your blood sugar levels stable by eliminating refined sugars from your diet.
Like high-protein diets, the sugar-friendly program doesn’t require you to give up butter, cream, or fat, as long as you don’t eat them in combination with refined sugars. To this end, diners are offered the choice of replacing white bread with sprouted, white pasta with spelt, and white rice with brown. Even desserts are made sugar-friendly through preparation with whole-grain flours and sucanat in place of white flour and sugar.
All menu items designated as sugar friendly are marked by a red heart, indicating their status as low-carbohydrate dishes. This sometimes results in an odd situation in which items such as Baked Brie and Buffalo Wings are noted as sugar friendly, while seemingly healthier dishes such as Hummus and Smoked Salmon are not (presumably because they are served with French Bread).
If the menu alone doesn’t guide you to the proper healthy dining choice, servers and Mary (especially Mary) are only too happy to recommend a meal that falls within vegan, high-protein, low-fat, macrobiotic, or any other healthy food dietary guidelines. Of course, you may not always want to dine healthy, especially when you gaze across two full pages of tantalizing appetizer choices. Hard as we tried, we couldn’t resist at least trying out the breaded mushrooms, especially since we knew the rest of the meal was going to be within respectable health-conscious limits.
As it turns out, the breaded mushrooms were more mushroom than bread, so probably not as naughty as we had imagined. Not at all greasy, mushrooms bulging from their breading were coated in a thin layer of batter so crispy it nearly crackled. The homemade buttermilk dressing that came with it made a surprisingly nice dip for them. We also scored well with our choice of starter, a homemade tomato soup that was one of the evening’s two soup specials. A kind of tomato-basil soup without the basil, the barest hint of scallions enlivened the flavors. Brown rice and a blush of cream gave the soup a slightly creamy texture that nicely balanced the chunkiness of the tomatoes.
In addition to two pages of appetizers and three soups, there’s also a good selection of salads on the menu. Some, like the Grilled Tuna Steak or Grilled Veggies seem more like full meals, but there are a few lighter choices such as Caesar Salad, Garden Salad, and something called the Chopped Salad. According to our server, both the Garden and the Chopped Salad contain the same ingredients, but in the latter, the cucumbers, tomatoes, romaine, carrots, and red peppers are shredded up like confetti instead of being tossed whole. Intrigued, we opted for the chopped variety, which turned out to be somewhat like a coleslaw of salad ingredients, melded together by the buttermilk dressing Mary seems to favor.
After two years of evangelizing the health benefits of a more wholesome diet, Mary has recruited a fair number of regulars into her fold. But even the extensive menu isn’t enough for some of those regulars, apparently. For that reason, a chalkboard menu displays from seven to nine specials each day, many featuring excellent, extremely fresh cuts of meat. Mary’s health philosophy, while not meatless, emphasizes eating only the freshest cuts of meat and fish (never frozen!), which are delivered to the restaurant every other day. She also ages her own beef, rather than subject customers’ bodies to the perils of tenderizers.
Pasta entrées, which come in eight different varieties, can all be prepared with spelt pasta. Not quite knowing what to expect, we took the plunge, and, boy, were we glad we did. Spelt, a whole-grain pasta, is chewier than regular pasta. It lent the dish we tried an almost risotto-like consistency. The thick noodles seemed to absorb all the flavors, similar to the way a fresh sheet of pasta might.
Laden with just the right proportion of sauce to pasta, a large serving of Penne Arrabbiato came in an almost family-sized bowl. Less a tomato sauce than a broth, big chunks of tomatoes and moist slivers of mushrooms clung to the folds of the rotelli noodles. Garlic, some spices, and something indescribably reassuring transported us into a kind of pasta nirvana until the last morsel was gone.
The pasta was a hard act to follow, but we also wanted to test the restaurant’s prowess with traditional entrées. You’ll never feel hungry after leaving the Player’s Club, especially if you order one of the meat or fish dinners, which tower high and fill the plate. Most come with roasted brown rice and veggies, but check with the server to be sure what accompanies your meal. Without warning, our Golden Tilapia came with fried rice and chopped salad instead, which was a bit annoying since we’d already ordered the chopped salad as a starter. However, they did bring the steamed veggies described on the menu within a few minutes of our pointing out the inconsistency.
The kitchen displayed the same kind of talent with the fish that it had with the pasta. An ample portion of notably fresh tilapia was lightly dressed in a creamy reduction of white wine, lemon, and capers that beautifully accented the flavors of the fish. The fried rice that unexpectedly arrived with the fish was a meal in itself and surprisingly did balance well with the fish. The simple toss of broccoli, cauliflower, and green beans that comprised the side dish arrived still glistening from a brief sauté in oil, and could not have been crisper.
Dessert at The Player’s Club includes several sugar-friendly options that take away the sting of guilt. By the time we ordered dessert, that little red heart had become so reassuring that I almost felt like I was doing my body good by having something sweet, like one might feel after taking a vitamin. We couldn’t resist the temptation to try out the medley of ice-creams promised in the Homemade Ice Cream sampling platter.
On one day, the platter included a few scoops of kiwi and French vanilla ice-cream, wedged between decorative carvings of several varieties of fruit spread across a large platter. A spoonful of the French vanilla, topped by a few sliced strawberries and a smudge of homemade whipped cream proved to be a fatally delicious combination. Mary threw in a few homemade spelt cookies for good measure. I had no idea whole flours could be so good.
Most diners never realize the healthy aspects of the Player’s Club’s menu. In fact, the original tip about the restaurant came from a friend who just thought the food was awful darn good. But if one really does one want a healthy meal, there’s plenty to choose from, including organic wines that Mary claims, "never make you feel bad the next day." Sounds like reason enough to try a new dining experience.
The Player’s Club, 2500 N. Ashland, Chicago, Illinois 773-477-7769.