Open Market: Friday, December 6

If you’ve ever wanted to take a little bit of La Sirena Clandestina home with you, we’ll be giving you the opportunity on Friday, December 6 when we vend our wares at a new food-focused pop-up market. From the mastermind that is Tasting Table’s Heather Sperling, Open Market will feature only the finest (hey, they invited us) food purveyors this city has to offer.

Chicago Magazine called Friday’s portion of the market — featuring food stalls from yours truly, Mott Street, The Bristol, Yusho, Travelle, Parson’s Chicken & Fish, Smalls, Pecking Order, Blackbird, Big Jones, Floriole Cafe & Bakery, and Acadia — “what foodies have always wished Taste of Chicago would be like.”

We’ll be hawking hot sauces or alfajores or something equally delicious and ‘take-home-able,’ so you can skip that Black Friday doorbuster, because the last thing we’d want is for you to get trampled when you can scoop unique and awesome holiday gifts in a much more civilized atmosphere.

Open Market

Block 37

108 N. State Street

Friday, December 6, 2013

6*-9pm

*get in a whole hour early when you purchase a VIP ticket!

Get Your Party On

We’re here to tell you that you don’t have to put up with tired buffet lines and tepid chafing dishes at your holiday party this year. Instead, you could be enjoying the cornucopia of Mermaid Shack favorites above. 

This mermaid shack stays cozy all winter, thanks in part to Alice’s arrangements, and you can roll right through that initial awkwardness of co-worker socialization pretty quickly once you’ve got one of Justin Anderson’s daiquiris in hand. Play the big shot and impress your coworkers with the story behind the Mermaid on our Morgan Street facade.

We’ve packaged together some of our most popular dishes into perfect party fare, so you can leave the details to us if you’d like. In our opinion, no menu would be complete without our signature empanadas or Feijoada Black Beans and Rice, but we’re into customization, so we encourage you to pick the dishes that truly float your boat, like our Whole Fried Fish.

It’s the kind of latin/local party that will make your boss look the other way when you sneak in around lunchtime the next day.

Our Three Cheese Panini

Humans weren’t born yesterday. In fact, we’ve been on this planet cooking cheese and bread for a long time. We’re pretty sure the moment fire was invented, a line formed immediately for everyone’s cheese to be toasted. But it wasn’t until the 20th century when the U.S. really got down to business in the cooked bread and cheese game, and the ubiquitous Grilled Cheese as we know it was born.

Like many of our greatest inventions, the Grilled Cheese arose out of necessity. In the 1920s, sliced bread and American cheese were relatively inexpensive and some genius decided to slap some butter on the bottom of the bread, layer the top with cheese, and cook the daylights out of it.

When the Great Depression hit the country in the 1930s, the Grilled Cheese was renamed the Cheese Dream — PR appears to have been a thriving business, even then — probably because giving something a fancy name makes it more than acceptable to serve to guests, without doing too much damage to one’s wallet. And moreover, given the choice between the American Dream and the Cheese Dream, which would you choose? We rest our case.

We’ve got a modern, Latin-local Cheese Dream on our lunch menu. You may know it by a slightly less aspirational moniker: the Three Cheese Panini. It’s comfort food at its finest, with chihuahua, cotija and cheddar melted and perfectly gooey, plus a little avocado (almost everything is better with a little avocado). Pickled fresnos and salsa verde add the La Sirena Clandestina bite that you’ve come to expect from this Mermaid Shack.