Sausage City: Acre's Wood-Grilled House Made Sausages

[Photograph: Blake Royer]

It's an old trope, but a true one: sausages go well with beer.

And as drinking halls go, Acre in Andersonville is the kind of place you might picture in your dreams: dark, lacquered woods, a hefty bar, an overall feel that the place has been there forever (it opened a couple years ago), and an excellent craft beer list.

So it's with pleasure that I report their plate of house-made wood-grilled sausages is fine indeed. Each is sliced and grilled fast and hot, imparting a surprising amount of woodsmoke and caramelization. The selection changes—they were sadly out of blood sausage during my visit—but at least three varieties come on every plate, along with a scatter of incredibly tiny new potatoes.

The sausages themselves are as rustic as the "farm to table" cooking that Acre serves; they're especially coarse ground and crumbly, yet still juicy—not an easy combination to achieve in sausage making. Surprisingly, the chicken sausage was the most flavorful and juicy of them all, beating out the pork and smoked beef (the latter of which was just a touch dry). The chicken sausage was among the best poultry sausage I've ever had: aggressively seasoned with plenty of herbs, with plenty of fat. It paired best with the dollop of house-made mustard on the plate that likely had some kind of chile paste or harissa mixed in, but the server wasn't sharing the secret.

Acre

5308 North Clark Street, Chicago, IL 60640 (map)
773-334-7600
acrerestaurant.com‎

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