Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! This weekend my wife Anne and I attended the second edition of Fan Expo Chicago at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in the suburb of Rosemont, Illinois. Last year they arose from the ashes of the late Wizard World Chicago, which we attended eleven times and whose already-shaky financial standings didn’t fare any better during the pandemic. Fan Expo threw such a great inauguration party, and invited such a staggering guest list this time that we agreed an encore was in order…

Much as other convention-goers have their traditions, so do we here at MCC. One such tradition is waiting till our site traffic dies down — and other aspects of our lives are caught up — before we share some of the bonus ephemera that can bore wider audiences. Sometimes that includes food photos, in cases where we’ve found sustenance that left an impression on us within reasonable distance of a given show. We don’t indulge in all the classic blogging tropes here, but on occasion we still brake for food photos. They’re a fun memory, a quick excuse for posting something during busy or preoccupied times, and an even quicker scroll-through for You, The Viewers at Home. If you read all 6300+ words of our Fan Expo Chicago actor-meetup recap, this is the opposite of that.

The booths and carts inside the Stephens Center are sufficient when you’re starving, near death after miles of walking and refuse to take an intermission away from the show floor. For those who can handle one last hike and were planning to spend a lot on dinner after the con anyway, attendees who parked in the official garage can walk west from the Center, through the garage and out the other side into the self-parodically named Parkway Bank Park Entertainment District (formerly MB Financial Park), which offers a fair collection of restaurants and other activities, all of which will validate your parking ticket with purchase. Sometimes we’re lucky and the food is also worth the extra steps. 2023 was one of our luckier years.

Friday night after one last photo op broke my heart, we tried Crust Brewing, a gastropub that opened in February 2022. Their location formerly housed a German eatery we enjoyed back in 2015, when our young waiter cartooned Hawkeye’s head on our receipt. As with a lot of gastropubs, their culinary focus is All The Things Plus Fancy Ingredients. We each ordered a 12-inch pizza that handily surpassed the Stephen Center’s same old faux-Chicago pizza.

A few leftover slices traveled with us to our hotel for the next two nights, a mile-‘n’-a-half north of the con. We almost never stay at official convention hotels because we’re in our 50s, never partied down even we were young, don’t drink, and are perfectly okay with staying somewhere offsite that’s slightly quieter and cheaper. (Two very cool friends actually did extend an invitation to a gathering place at our next con. I’m told they’ll even have non-alcohol. It’s tempting, though I worry about infecting them with buzzkill and oldness.)

For breakfast we considered trying the hotel restaurant, but it wasn’t included gratis with our stay and the elevated prices were aimed at business travelers who don’t have to worry about budgeting because they have the luxury and reckless abandon to expense twelve-dollar toast. While Anne ate one of the granola bars she’d packed, I went down to the convenience nook at the front desk and used their microwave to reheat our pizza. (Our room had a fridge, but no microwave.) Those morsels got us through the first few lines of the day.

Our FCE Saturday ended earlier than most folks’ did, leaving us plenty of time for an elderly-paced stroll to Saltwater Coastal Grill. This elegant seafood spot had just opened in Parkparky Park Park this past June, so very new to the world that Google Maps pinpointed them with an icon smaller and dimmer than their neighbors’, which I nearly overlooked. Their location formerly housed an Irish-esque pub we tried back in 2016, though the food was unremarkable and the service left me disgruntled. The new residents topped that and beyond.

That’s the Salwater Fish Sandwich in our lead photo — fried haddock topped with tartar sauce, cheddar cheese, and a citrus cole slaw. She scraped off that last topping and passed it on to me, our standard procedure whenever cole slaw pops up. We have this unintentional running gag with restaurants that serve me a tiny artisan dish and then hand her a gargantuan platter that could wrestle Adam Richman under the table. Saltwater joined that illustrious roster with their leviathan on a bun. Anne ditched some of the bun but insisted on eating the entire fish because some foods should never be hotel leftovers. We ordered a few other dishes, but her Monstro-Meal left very little room for her cute tiny body to hold anything else. It also came with a large order of chips, which she barely touched.

Sunday morning at the hotel, Anne’s breakfast was her huge side of untouched Saltwater chips, unheated. I ate the other half of my salad, which kept rather nicely in the fridge. By 10:30 we were starving again, so it’s a good thing the Andy Serkis experience went as smoothly as it did and gave us the free time to treat ourselves to early lunch.

The drive home that afternoon was marred by endless miles of road construction delays, more so in Indiana than in Illinois. Nevertheless we were happy to conclude our super awesome comic-con weekend.

In keeping with MCC’s tradition of candor at my own expense, let it be noted we arrived home that evening from our super awesome comic-con weekend only to discover a nation of ants had established a beachhead around our kitchen sink, and our mail included a letter from the neighborhood association giving a snooty thumbs-down to my master plan to replace all our lawn’s unsightly dirt patches with lots and lots of lush, verdant, untamed weeds. The ants have since been defeated, but hopefully the weeds will die just as easily before our next convention [checks calendar] next week.

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…okay, now we’re done with Fan Expo Chicago 2023. Previous chapters in this very special MCC miniseries:

Part 1: Cosplay!
Part 2: More Cosplay!
Part 3: Stars and Strikes
Part 4: Comics, Shopping, and Other Hobbies