I was up visiting an account in the far northern Chicago suburb of Libertyville last fall. Before I went there, I was talking with a Chicago area friend who used to live in Libertyville and he was telling me about a place up there called Milwalky Trace. "The guy who owns it, Lee is his name, is a friend of mine," my friend told me. He said that I really needed to stop in and eat there. When I was done with my dealer meeting, I found Milwalky Trace and parked just down the street from the place. I walked up to the building and the place was packed. It was their very popular "Burger and Beer" night at Milwalky Trace and it was going to be quite sometime before I would be able to be seated. The hostess said, "If you want, we have a little taco place next door." The name of the place was Milwalky Taco and there appeared to be room at the bar in there, so I ended up going there instead.
The "Lee" my friend was referring to is Lee Kuebler, native of nearby Gurnee, IL who started to work in restaurants as a teenager. Taking a break from the restaurant business to go to college, Kuebler studied at a botany school in Chicago and became a commercial flower grower. He did that for a few years, but his hobby for cooking became a passion.
Kuebler ended up getting back into the restaurant business working in the kitchen at the Union League Club of Chicago, and while he was there he entered the culinary program at Kendall College in downtown Chicago. After culinary school graduation he worked with noted chef Michael Lachowicz at Restaurant Michael in the tony suburb of Winnetka where Kuebler learned the finer parts of French cooking - something that he embraced and became the foundation of his cooking style.
After a two and a half year stint under Lachowicz, Kuebler went on to work for the DMK Restaurant Group under Michael Kornick and David Morton. Kuebler helped open Ada Street for Kornick and Morton and learned the business side of running a restaurant there. When a childhood friend who admired what Kuebler had accomplished in his culinary career approached him to tell him that his family had a building in downtown Libertyville that had just opened up, Kuebler decided the time was right for him to strike out on his own. He opened Milwalky Trace - named after the trail that connected Chicago and Milwaukee that roughly runs where Milwaukee Ave. is located - in early 2014.
While classic French cooking is still Kuebler's forte, he also studied and dabbled in other cuisines such as Mexican, Vietnamese and Thai. When the space next to Milwalky Trace opened up in the fall of 2015, Kuebler decided to put an eclectic taqueria in the spot. Kuebler opened Milwalky Taco in January of 2016.
Both Milwalky Taco and Milwalky Trace are located along Milwaukee Ave. in downtown Libertyville. (see map) I was lucky enough to be able to find a parking spot just down the block from both places. (There are parking lots behind the businesses, as well.)
After finding out that getting into Milwalky Trace was going to be a problem, I almost found the same problem at Milwalky Taco. The tables with banquette seating along the brick wall were all full. And there was a bar area near the open kitchen that was also filled up.
I sat at the small bar up front - the last seat available in the restaurant that evening. They had a baseball game going on the large flat screen television behind the bar. They had a dozens of varieties of tequila on the shelves, as well as a large selection of whiskies. But I ended up going the beer route that evening as I ordered a Rogue IPA that they had as one of the dozen or so beers on tap.
The kitchen area was a beehive of activity keeping up with all the orders that evening. There were three or four people scurrying about trying to keep up. It's mainly just tacos on the menu at Milwalky Taco, but they also have a seafood cocktail and a handful of appetizers, as well.
Milwalky Taco has a wood-fired grill where they cook their meat directly over a blazing hot fire. Chicken, skirt steak, and crimini mushrooms are some of the items they cook on the grill to give it a great Southwestern flavor.
I ended up getting three tacos - the lamb barbacoa taco, the carne asada taco, and the pastor taco. They had a fish taco on the menu, but it was battered and deep-fried - I'd rather have it grilled with no batter. And I know my wife would have liked the wood-fired chicken taco and the braised cactus taco they had at Milwalky Taco.
The pastor taco featured spit-roasted pork along with grilled pineapple and grilled red onions. It was topped with chopped cilantro and a tomatillo salsa. The pork had a bit of a spicy bite to it, but the pineapple helped counter the spiciness of the pork.
The carne asada taco featured wood-grilled skirt steak along with a fire-roasted tomato/guajillo chile sauce, topped with chopped onions and fresh cilantro. The meat was smoky and tender, and the tomato/guajillo went very well with it giving it a mild taste to each bite.
But the best taco was the wonderful lamb barbacoa taco - braised lamb topped with a somewhat spicy tomatillo/pasilla chile sauce and finished with chopped onions and cilantro. Now, the other two tacos were tasty, but the lamb barbacoa taco was completely off the chart in terms of flavor. As much as I liked the carne asada and the pastor tacos, I could have easily gotten three of the braised lamb tacos and been more than happy.
While I will still try to get into Milwalky Trace at some point, the meal that I had at Milwalky Taco was a nice consolation prize. The atmosphere was hip and fun, the service was a little hurried, but efficient, and the tacos were very good to outstanding. There's a lot of places like Milwalky Taco that have sprung up over the past few years, but the tacos I had here were some of the better street tacos that I've encountered in my travels.
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