With Ina Pinkney at the Union League Club

Several live events in the last month—Ina Pinkney led a Q&A at the Union League Club to a very appreciative audience of food fans…

I also appeared at Boswell Book Company in Milwaukee with Kyle Cherek, host of the NPR podcast Classic Eats, which I was on this month—listen to it here.

By the way, do you need an autographed copy? I just delivered a bunch to J.P. Graziano Grocery—as seen here with Jim Graziano, who paints a very vivid picture of Randolph Street before Jerry Kleiner, Girl & the Goat and so on in Chapter 10.

Another media appearance—this one was published in the Northwest (Indiana) Times earlier in May, but I just saw it.

But the biggest event was at Carrie Nahabedian’s Brindille, to an audience of around 60 who filled the place. Carrie is a key figure in the early chapters, having worked at the Dining Room at the Ritz Carlton, Le Francais, and Gordon Sinclair’s Sinclair’s in Lake Forest, with a kid named Chuck Trotter in his first real restaurant job. She put on a great spread (with an assist by Sarah Stegner) and invited a bunch of chefs. So it was a big crowd of people who are in the book, from chefs like Kevin Hickey, Michael Foley and Jason Hammel to guests including Maggie Trboyevic, Anne (Trotter) Hinkamp and Carol Mighton Haddix, with a Q&A led by another person in the book—Monica Eng. A really warm, sweet event. Here’s a few more folks who came out for it:

Penny Pollack, Phil Vettel and Ina Pinkney.

Barnes & Noble on Diversey

Lots of appearances on Substack, podcasts, and even old school media, as well as in person:

I talked food with Bob Sirott on WGN Radio here. I also did a bit with Dane Neal, but he was subbing for someone else, which I’d guess is why it’s not online.

I talked with Andrew Davis at his Substack SAVOR. Go here to read it.

Ina Pinkney, who’s in the book, included me in her newsletter here.

I talked restaurants with Carrie Nahabedian at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago.

Carrie also sent me this review, from the newsletter of a NYC food bookstore, Kitchen Arts & Letters:

Finally, I also did an event at the Old Town Triangle Association, a Q&A hosted by fellow writer Chris LaMorte. Good-sized audience (about 60, I’d guess) which included three interviewees from the book, followed by a healthy number of book sales, plus signing some that people already had. Thanks to them and Chris for a great event.

Chapter 1 of my book in Chicago magazine

If you want to read an actual physical magazine article about my book, Chicago mag’s issue with the first chapter (about Louis Szathmary) is on newsstands now. Go here to read it online.

I was guiltily on Car Con Carne with James Van Osdol. I say “guiltily” because I got to know James appearing on WGN Radio when he’d sub for whoever late at night to talk about my latest Thrillist list of Italian beef or whatever. Now I’m Mister Fancy Pants Fine Dining! We talked a bit about that parked outside Sun Wah; go here, or check your podcast app.

Then I was on WGN Radio’s morning show with Bob Sirott during their weekly food segment. Go here to hear it. I also had an appearance with Dane Neal, but it’s apparently not online.

I was on WGN TV—watch it here.

Monica Eng, who’s in the book, did a piece at Axios here.

I gave a talk on Zoom for Culinary Historians of Chicago/Greater Midwest Foodways, hosted by Scott Warner and Cathy Lambrecht, both of whom are in the book. Watch it on YouTube here, or audio-only in your podcast app.

Finally (for now), I appeared on my own vintage movie podcast, talking with David Hammond about my book. Which is not about old movies, obviously, but I did manage to connect the two subjects a couple of times.

Books on display at a private event at the Chicago Club.

My book is here! Tuesday was the official release date, and also the date of the launch party, held at LouLou by Lula. Big thanks to Jason Hammel and everyone from Lula/LouLou who helped make it happen; to Steve Dolinsky, who did a terrific job running a 30-40 minute Q&A, both his own questions and a few from the audience; to Kevin Hickey, who sent along some Duck Dogs to augment the canapes from Lula; and to about 60 people who showed up, from old friends to a couple of restaurant folks to a bunch of readers of my newsletter.

Anyway, it was a really nice event (Friend of Fooditor Rebecca Fyffe posted some nice pics from it here), and I sold and signed a bunch of books.  But we had some left over which I signed for the bookstore to have inventory, so if you want one, head over to City Lit Books, just a few doors south of Lula, and you’ll find them there. Or you can order from them to have a signed copy shipped. I just popped over there and signed some more on Friday.

Q&A at the LouLou launch party.

On to more publicity! Another nice print piece, by Daniel Hautzinger at WTTW, talks about the long span of continuity between restaurant people in Chicago:

Charlie Trotter’s eponymous Lincoln Park restaurant was one of the most famous and influential in America. But when we first meet Trotter in The Chicago Way: An Oral History of Chicago Dining, a new book by longtime food reporter Michael Gebert, he’s a high schooler dining at The Bakery before his prom. Kevin Boehm is one of the most successful restaurateurs in Chicago, with The Girl & the Goat, Boka, and Momotaro among the many spots he has opened with his partner Rob Katz under the name Boka – but his first appearance in the book is as a young man who has the wine list from Gordon faxed to him in order to precisely plan out a tight budget; he and his girlfriend go to Chicago just to have this one meal.

“I wanted to introduce everybody at their early point and follow them through,” says Gebert.

So far it’s mostly been print pieces plus my morning show appearances last week, but the podcast attention is beginning—exciting for me to get a chance to talk at greater length. First up was with David Manilow (who’s interviewed in the book about Check, Please!), a really good half hour conversation that includes him talking about reacting to reading himself quoted by someone else. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to link directly to it, but look for The Dining Table in your podcast app and then scroll to episode 151, “The Tastemakers Who Define Chicago Dining.”

And I returned to a favorite program I’ve been on several times before—Outside the Loop with Mike Stephen. Our ten-minute chat ran early Saturday morning on WGN Radio; now you can go here to catch up with it.

That’s all for this week, but more to come!

Signing books!

Me in the green room at NBC Chicago

So that was me slightly before 6:00 am (yikes!) at NBC Chicago, in their green room/staff lounge area, which doubled as the set where we shot me in conversation with Matt Rodrigues for Matt in the Morning, part of their local morning line up with the Today show. Very snazzy new studio there, which looks like it’s not just making TV shows, it looks like it’s on one.

A bunch of things in the process of becoming publicity as we approach the book’s official release next Tuesday—I did NBC Chicago’s morning show, and then I did Fox’s Good Day Chicago. The latter has a clip up which you can watch here.

But the main thing to click on to check out is my old friend Lisa Shames’ excellent piece at the Sun-Times, which really is everything I could hope for in a profile of the book, including vintage photos from the Sun-Times’ own archives. Go here to read it, or if that requires logging in, it’s also at WBEZ here.

Lisa’s piece also got called out in Ray Pride’s column at NewCity. More to come next week!

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Well, I saw Andy’s soup at a museum in Wilmington, Delaware, but can’t say I actually had soup with him. Or any other Andrew, like Wyeth, whose work I also saw there. Anyway, needless to say a big year mainly for getting my book over the finish line of publication, but I did manage to be more adventurous on the food scene than in the past few years, since COVID. Here’s my top ten for this year:

10. Calamansi dish, sturgeon with Thai flavors, Atsumeru
All three of the omakases I ate in a fairly short time were good, but I think I was most charmed by Atsumeru in the former Temporis space, because they’re young and it had a very pleasant laidback feel; I came out rooting for them.

9. Pork belly, crab lion’s head soup, Nine Garden
If my choices at this Shanghainese restaurant in Chinatown sound familiar, it’s because on my first visit I ordered straight off of John Kessler’s advice at Chicago mag.

8. Lamb carpaccio sandwich, Cellar Door Provisions
I’ve been to Cellar Door Provisions several times, though not since COVID, I’m pretty sure. From a coffee shop that dabbled in farm-to-table dishes, it has a new chef de cuisine, Alex Cochran, and dinner there basically seemed like Feld Light—a similar approach to treating farm to table ingredients simply. Not all of it worked—I remain unconvinced that there’s anything to do with green strawberries but let them ripen—but one dish—some lamb carpaccio on their crusty black bread, with greens and something like farmer’s cheese—was an absolute wow, and other things were very good as well.

7. Musubi, skewers, Kanin
I went to Hawaii last year and while Hawaiian food was interesting, I’m not convinced it was great—mostly pleasant enough as blue collar comfort food. I went to this Hawaiian-Filipino spot in Chicago and pretty much thought it beat everything I had there (except Leonard’s malasadas and this one banana lumpia I had at a night market). There’s something to be said for elevating your game to compete in Chicago.

6. Prosciutto Friulano Il Gigante, Fratelli Martin, Pordenone
I go to this silent film festival in Pordenone, near Venice, every year, and by now I mostly eat at the same restaurants every year. This was one I knew existed but had not been to before, and wound up going there twice in one week. Very good pastas and risotto, but the bigger draw is the assortment of prosciutto they will make you a plate of. I asked the waiter to bring us two different ones to compare, and he brought us a fairly standard (very good) San Daniele prosciutto—and then this one, which took us to a whole different level of meaty, funky complexity.

5. Petite Vie
No picture of my food because I was there to have dinner with Meathead (resulting in this interview). But the new, smaller (and packed to the gills on a weeknight) version of Paul Virant’s Western Springs restaurant wowed me with classic French flavors and techniques. The burbs are lucky to have him.

4. Saltimbocca, Prosciutto with cheese and balsamic, Il Carciofo
I went to Joe Flamm’s newish Roman restaurant early in the year, and found it just okay—but it seems like Flamm’s restaurants need a little time to grow into themselves. The one thing I considered an unalloyed hit was the mortadella sandwich on fresh-baked bread. I returned in the fall with some friends—hence the grabbed-quickly-and-possibly-after-someone-had-already-dug-into-it photos—and frankly, it wowed throughout. The saltimbocca showed above was the best hunk of pork I’ve eaten in some time. But honestly, everything was pretty great—pastas, the namesake fried artichokes, that sandwich again—I will find an excuse to go back soon.

2-3. Roast chicken, tarte flambée, Creepies

2-3. Cod in beurre blanc, labneh with chives, Cafe Yaya
I pretty much planned on Cafe Yaya, the new restaurant from the Galit duo of Zach Engel and Andreas Clavero, being #2 ever since I had their roast chicken and the labneh dip with chives, which inspired me to make labneh dip every time I had people over since. A more recent dinner that included this piece of cod in a beurre blanc (a phrase I typed many times in my book, without quite knowing what it was or when I’d had it before), and a duck confit with lentils which my wife had, confirmed how much I liked it.

But then I went to Creepies, from Anna and David Posey. And it’s not just that it was plenty good—as my son said after tasting their roast chicken, “Why isn’t every chicken like this?”—but it was good in very similar ways: high class comfort food, dishes you recognize easily but have rarely had so well executed. Except I had them twice this year in two different places. Anyway, I debated which was #2 and which was #3 on my list for a couple of days, and finally decided it wasn’t something where I had to make a choice. They’re both great in very similar ways, and I would be happy going back to either one (and undoubtedly will).

1. September menu, Feld
Is there any recent restaurant story to compare with Feld’s first year and a half? Chef Jake Potashnick worked up farm-to-table hype on social media before opening in the summer of 2024. But the deliberately artless plating and aggressive minimalism got it skewered in its first few weeks by at least one reviewer and on one of the same social media platforms (Reddit) that it had lived by. It seemed like it was heading toward being one of those legendary ambitious-pretentious flops, like TMIP or The Black Sheep. But then I started hearing the same thing from other writers—”Actually, I kind of liked it.” By the time I did my piece on them at Fooditor, Feld had figured things out and reached a steady model for warm and friendly service; but the winter menu I had, which I recall as being a lot of turnips, was still just promising. I decided I wanted to try it at the height of the summer season—when it would be tomatoes and corn and so on.

So I went back the first week of September. And it wasn’t just promising—by now, a year and a few weeks old, it was magical, like walking through a farm or an orchard and being told “Here, taste this!,” over and over. (Since one of their suppliers is Oriana’s Orchard, I actually have done exactly that.) Tomatoes were used so many different ways that I can’t reconstruct what the dishes were, but the one pictured above—peaches in a poblano cream—was a perfect example of Feld at its best, a combination you have not had before, simply but attractively plated, and zinging and singing in your mouth. After a year and a half, Feld has a Michelin star, a Banchet nomination for Best New Restaurant, and I can’t wait to get back at different seasons to see what else they can do.

I’ve been making ten best lists forever at different places; here’s the whole list of them:
2024 2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003

Monkey King Jianbing in Skokie

My first review, from the trade publication for booksellers. They enjoyed it! Go here to read the full review.

Announcements about events, reviews and interviews, etc. relating to my book will be posted here. In the meantime save 15% by going to the book’s page at Indiepubs (ignore the text saying to click the picture above; click the link in this paragraph); enter the code FOODITOR15.

A curious year in which I didn’t feel like I found much of interest outside of the mid-to-high end; partly I was really trying to wrap up my book, so little time for driving around far-flung corners of the city hunting for new Mexican or Chinese delicacies. I ate many good things, but it was not exactly a rare discovery on my part that, say, Johns Food and Wine was good. Still, I hope this list offers some ideas worth checking out.

Two places I left off the list: yes, like everyone I ate at Cariño, and especially liked the huitlacoche version of Alinea/Schwa’s Black Truffle Explosion. But we all know it, and I ranked a very similar dish from chef Norman Fenton’s previous incarnation at Brass Heart #1 on my list in 2020, so let’s give somebody else a chance. And there’s a hot new place that I went to, but I’m writing a piece about it and I won’t know exactly what I thought until I finish it. So if the chef is reading this, its absence is not a criticism, just a bit of stage management.

Travel this year was mostly for my wife’s legal organization, and to places I’d either been before (scouting out dinners in Toronto last year was fun, actually having the dinners this year was anticlimactic) or took an instant dislike to (Phoenix leapt to my least-loved city in America slot). But there’s a little eating-the-world here, so with no further ado:

10. Squash and white chocolate galette, Bungalow by Middle Brow
Bungalow by Middle Brow has a hot dish at the moment—tavern style pizza on Tuesday nights—but I have to admit I can’t get excited enough about tavern cut, served on every street corner in Chicago, that I want to drive to the burbs for it (Kim’s Uncle Pizza) or get there precisely on Tuesday and wait in line. (I thought about ordering from Pizza Amici, a new place from some of the people involved with Kim’s, on Friday, but it was showing a 2-1/3 hour wait for delivery. For tavern cut!) Instead, I go there in the mornings and have the place nearly to myself, but the inventive savory-sweet baked goods deserve more notice.

9. “Salad balls,” smoked pork, etc., Stumara
Any time I see an interesting cuisine on Instagram, I follow the restaurant. Not sure I would have raced to Pirosmani in Wheeling, a place selling premade Georgian foods, but when I got a PR announcement about them opening a sit-down restaurant next door, Stumara, I expressed interest and was invited to check it out. It was a fascinating mix, meaty dishes (as you might expect from that part of the world) but also touches of modernism, Moto in Georgia; and a lot of fresh stuff, like the balls of salad (that look like falafel). I don’t usually expect anything resembling haute cuisine from such parts of the world but between a lot of hearty fresh food, very welcoming service, and curious touches of sophistication alongside peasant pleasures, this was well worth the trek up to Wheeling.

8. Assorted seafood, Ocean Grill
This bustling Vietnamese-run spot on the fringes of Chinatown was one of the year’s big surprises—a place packing them in for lots of Asian seafood, nearly all of it made better by a splash of the funky condiments on the table bursting with fish sauce, garlic and other strong, pungent flavors. (h/t John Kessler)

7. Malasadas at Leonard’s, Honolulu
I enjoyed trying a lot of food in Hawaii but it was mostly kind of blue collar eats, which were fine but did not leave me pining for loco moco and a side of macaroni salad when I got home. (Maybe for banana lumpia, though—the best I had was from a church group’s stand at a night market on Kauai.) The things that seemed well-nigh perfect, world-class, were the malasadas—doughnut balls with tropical fruit fillings. It’s packed every morning, deservedly so, and you will not regret the wait.

6. Pastries at Panaderia Rosetta; Pastor and steak tacos at “Orinoco,” Mexico City
I couldn’t quite pick one for our Mexico City trip, not because there weren’t candidates but because I was overloaded with them. The moment you feel hungry you can walk to the closest taco stand and have one of the best tacos of your life. EVERY time. Anyway, had some great pastries at Panaderia Rosetta, a spinoff of one of Condesa’s best-loved restaurants, and it’s a good sign if my wife wants to return to a place, so I’ll praise Taqueria “Orinoco” for that—though I will say that when Rick Bayless commented on my choices, that was the only one he wasn’t wild about. (I think it might be a bit Americanized in its flavors, compared to ten million others in CDMX. But as the old saying goes, Happy wife, happy tacos.)

5. Pappardelle with corn and blueberries, Bar Parisette
I liked the Parisian classics from chef Madalyn Durant a lot, but the standout was the most American-flavored dish on the menu. So if you go and you spot something that doesn’t seem quite Parisian… order it!

4. Chestnut coffee cake, Daisies
Daisies as an Italian restaurant for dinner has been a favorite for a while, but this year Daisies as where I go for coffee, a work space and Leigh Omilinsky’s pastries has been one of my standard morning stops when I want to get out of the house. I picked this chestnut coffee cake because 1) I liked it a lot, 2) I just had it so I know it was from 2024, and 3) I happened to snap a photo of it because my son’s girlfriend was going to meet me there for lunch and I saved a bite of that and the orange olive oil cake for her and sent a photo to encourage her to get over here, but it could be any number of things. But I will say that afterwards, she picked up exactly those two things to share with my son the next morning (if they lasted that long).

3. Grana arso pasta with lobster and crab meat, Johns Food and Wine
Johns does pretty much everything I’ve tried well, but the standout seems to be pasta—on my first visit I was wowed by some perfect gnocchi with Italian sausage, and the second time—well, it says something when you order a pasta with lobster and come away saying that it was “the cheap stuff, mainly flour in different forms, that impressed—the pasta had just the right toothsome-rubber texture, and the sparing use of toasted bread crumbs, demonstrate what makes good pasta so good.”

2. Roast duck with sugar shack beans, Dear Margaret
Lots of heartily good midwestern produce-y things at the French-Canadian neighborhood gem, including Gunthorp pork, Three Sisters spinach tossed with wild rice and ricotta (a dish I imitated at Christmas dinner), and a slice of parsnip cake for my birthday. Read more about it here.

1. Moqueca, Brasero
I just picked a dish more or less at random—a Brazilian rice dish full of seafood—but really, both of my meals at John Manion’s latest restaurant were just orgies of robust seafood, accompanied by things like pao de queijo, a salmon ceviche full of South American spices and brightly fresh vegetable-based sides. Not the only new place that I went to more than once this year, but the one I wanted to get back to fastest and try more. So I did.

I’ve been making ten best lists forever at different places; here’s the whole list of them:
2023 2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003

Meeting ex-Chicagoan Henry Adaniya at his (now-closed) hot dog stand, Hank’s Haute Dogs, Honolulu.

I was in Toronto early this year, and I’m heading to Mexico City at the end of the year. So I may yet have better things in 2023… but I’m declaring the year closed once this publishes.

10. Ribeye and cobb salad, Gibsons
I’d say Gibsons is probably the most popular and successful restaurant in town I’d never been to, except it’s also pretty much the most successful restaurant any of us have been to in Chicago, one of the highest-grossing spots in the country. Anyway, I had to interview a couple of the guys in charge for my book, and they very kindly offered me lunch. I’ve had more steaks than I normally go out for this year, I tend to cook steak at home rather than eat it out, but… these guys know what they’re doing with hunks of cow. Classics, done exceptionally well.

9. Shrimp po-boy, Daisy’s Po-Boy and Tavern
As good as the po-boys I’ve had in New Orleans? Probably not. Good enough that you can legitimately ask the question? Yeah.

8. Grouper, Captain Charlie’s Reef Grill, Jupiter, Florida
I had some nice meals (La Goulue in particular) in Palm Beach, first time there, but honestly being around money (especially retirees with money) makes me feel jumpy after a while. (See photo.) The perfect antidote came from a Titus Ruscitti post—-a blue collar-feeling fish diner in Jupiter, busy as hell but also efficient as hell, and delivering totally solid, entirely reasonable fish dishes for regular people.

7. Mantu, Helmand
I’m bummed by two things about this very sincere mom and pop Afghan place on Kedzie, one, that the group of people I took to check it out didn’t love it like I did, and two, that it has “temporarily” closed—-who knows if they will be back. But I really liked the mantu, the dumplings with things like squash in them, and the grilled meats which I (but apparently not my friends) thought were first-rate.

6. Som tum salad, grilled chicken, Lao Lao Bar, Toronto
People have raved about a couple of new Thai spots in town, but the best new southeast Asian meal I had in 2023 was at a chic place in Toronto (recommendation of Renee Suen). It’s amazing how something as simple as cutting the papaya thicker can make such a difference with a familiar classic like papaya salad.

5. Fish sandwich, Omarcito
I liked other things, like the Cuban sandwich, at this stand in a container at some sort of oddball community center. But the fish sandwich, in which expertly-fried fish is topped with a spicy, lively Ecuadoran kind of salsa or relish, leapt to another, higher level and was pretty much the cheap eats of the year, while Omar himself is like the Hot Doug of Latin container stand joints.

4. Borsch, halushki, Anelya
Eastern European food rarely looks like more than a bucket of stuff, so the photos are fairly randomly from the appetizer (zakusky) portion of my meal at Johnny Clark and Beverly Kim’s Ukrainian restaurant, but the borsch (who stole the T?) and the short rib with huckleberries (!) managed to pull off both a grandmotherly rusticness and a cheffy delicacy.

3. Enmolada, Calli
Jonathan Zaragoza’s restaurant in Soho House is already gone, but this dish—-somewhere between an enchilada and a burrito, covered in an amazingly good, surprisingly nut-free mole–was so widely praised I suspect and hope we will hear from it again.

2. Sambusa with gomen wat and berber spice, Atelier
Not sure I’d actually call this the single best thing I had at Atelier, but in my memory it was a good example of what this place does: collard green and African spices in a samosa-like wrapping is not what you expect to find on a tasting menu, but Atelier chef Christian Hunter surprised us with course after course that was not what you expected next in a tasting menu.

1. Lobster with avocado, Kyoten
Kyoten has split into two places—-Kyoten, $400+ a person, and Kyoten Next Door, which is a mere $150ish a person. Which is still expensive, but given the quality, seems a relative bargain, so check it out. That said, I did go to Kyoten Crazy Expensive, and this dish was a good example of what Chef Otto Phan does on his top-of-the-line menu to go beyond standard sushi and take it to new dishes with Japanese influence.

I’ve been making ten best lists forever at different places; here’s the whole list of them:
2022 2021 2020 2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003