Nutella and the Power of Youthful Enthusiasm

Breakfast of champions

My 12 year-old daughter is a huge Nutella fan. She eats it on toast for breakfast every single day. (We make her eat fruit, too - we're mediocre parents, not terrible ones.) If it were up to her, she'd eat it for lunch and dinner, as well. Other than her iPhone, Nutella is probably her favorite thing in the world.

So you can imagine how excited she was when she learned that there's a restaurant in Chicago that exclusively features the hazelnut spread, and nothing else. It's all Nutella, all the time, at least in her telling. And because such a place exists, she requested - nay, insisted - that we visit this magical place.

As it turns out, she's not exactly wrong. The Windy City outpost of Mario Batali's Eataly Italian food emporium does, in fact, feature a Nutella Bar. So does the one in New York, as it turns out, but my kid found the Chicago location first.

Because I love my kid, and because I've never been to Chicago, her Nutella obsession has turned into a family summer road trip. Air trip, I guess. We booked an AirBnB reservation in Logan Square and we're winging our way to the Midwest in a few short weeks to gorge on Nutella.

I'm telling you all this because a) none of you can be bothered to put up a post and I'm on a train to New York with time to kill, and b) as mentioned above, I've never been to Chicago, so I'm wide open to your ideas about what to do with a family of four. I'm sure we'll do a few of the cliche tourist things (my wife wants to go up in the Sears Tower, for example), but I'd love to find a few other things to do, places to see, and restaurants to hit. You're a bunch of worldly lads and ladies, so I know I can count on you for advice.

The floor is yours, Gheorghies. Watch out for the Nutella mess.