A suburb on Lake Michigan up where you can tell the north shore was basically rural small towns until five minutes ago, Lake Bluff has a cute little downtown plaza, much less busy than Highland Park’s, say, where they put up Christmas banners saying “It’s a Wonderful Life in Lake Bluff” without irony. (It’s plainly Bedford Falls, not Pottersville.) And right on the corner of one of those cute buildings is the rare suburban restaurant that could actually lure me out for dinner an hour away, Inovasi.

I’m not being snobbish about the suburbs, I’m sure there are many fine dining places that are quite good, scattered throughout them. But I have a certain feeling that fine dining places everywhere don’t so much belong to any place as to their own country, Culinerica. So until I run out of fine dining places to try in Chicago, I just don’t feel a need to go try ones an hour or more away and have their take on food influenced by the same chefs of the moment and same dining trends as are influencing chefs closer to me. I’d rather try the Coney Dog place that’s been around since the 1910s, or the old pizza place, or whatever than the “best” restaurant in Cincinatti or Orlando… or Lake County.

Paul Virant and Vie overcame that, and now I’m an evangelist for taking the train or I-55 to Western Springs. But he’s been pretty much the only one. I got more interested in John Des Rosiers when his outspoken views about molecular gastronomy being a crock got him into trouble about a year ago, and then when I got to try a dab of his food at Green City Market. When not-a-publicist-anymore Ellen Malloy mentioned that he’d been trying to get her to come up there (but she doesn’t have a car), I offered to go with her and check it out. And then six months passed, but after shooting him for Key Ingredient, we finally made plans and went. (You will have noticed that that was my disclosure, that this was about as far from an anonymous meal as one could get, not least in that we were his guests.)

I thought it was weird at the time that Des Rosiers was so philosophically opposed to the molecular gastronomy thing because his outlook and menu— even the name of his restaurant— didn’t seem conservative or classical. At the same time, though he uses lots of the same kind of sustainable/artisanal stuff as the nose-to-tail chefs like Virant and will rattle off suppliers like any of them, his food isn’t like all those trendy porky places in the city. As he says in the video I shot, his cooking is very improvisational— and maybe that’s where he runs into trouble with chefs who devise elaborate conceptual formulas for dining experiences. So far as I can boil it down into a single thought, I think his feeling is you can’t improvise with great ingredients if you’re altering them so much that they’re not themselves any more. He needs the solidity of things being themselves in order to riff on them:

if you take a perfect piece of buffalo mozzarella from Italy and drop it into liquid nitrogen, you ruin the intrinsic value of each ounce of effort and passion that went into producing it. You in fact lose the very value it held.

Though he did some time at Charlie Trotter’s, overwhelmingly he’s worked on the north shore— for Gabriel Viti of Gabriel’s, and at Bank Lane Bistro in Lake Forest. And I think that that has made him kind of an evolutionary island of his own, a bit cut off from the omnipresent Blackbirdization of dining in the city— it’s almost surprising at this point to eat fine food that doesn’t ramp up the acidity, say. Maybe some would find that a flaw— at times it maybe made the food seem a little behind the times, or at least the trends— but it also meant it didn’t taste just like the last 10 upscale meals I’ve eaten out, and that was a good thing. There was more novelty and more genuine surprise at this meal than I can remember having since, I don’t know, maybe the first time I ate vegetables at Mado or something.

Our table was slightly dim, pleasant for dining, not as good for picture taking, so my photos are not going to be the best. But here’s what we had:

• Speck (made from Becker Lane pork from some producer I hadn’t heard of, not La Quercia) with a tossed salad and walnut “sawdust,” served on the board that starred in the Key Ingredient video. Obviously more about the quality of the speck (which is terrific) than anything else, but I thought the slightly tart salad was pretty much perfectly calibrated to the pork.

• Tempura cheese curds. We told him later he needed to serve big bowls of these at the bar during football games. I liked these better in their cheesy-junk foody way than the chickpea/feta fritters at Girl & The Goat a couple of weeks back.

• A Mexican (Tarascan) soup traditionally made with beans, but here with kabocha squash. Nice enough but definitely Anglo Mexican, not a lot of heat or funk.

• Housemade pasta with chunks of guanciale braised in sake to the point that they tasted like pastrami or something. Do other people braise guanciale? I don’t know, but they should, this was a great dish, everything in it perfectly made and full of big flavor.

• Snails in a bourbon-mascarpone cream with toasted ciabatta croutons and black garlic. The black garlic was maybe extraneous, but the sauce was terrific and to me, a good sign of how adept Des Rosiers is flying by his technique; the same sauce made with butter would have been too rich and heavy, but mascarpone was just light enough in flavor for it, and it was paired beautifully with an acidic red wine which cut the richness.

• Lobster and wild mushrooms in a red wine sauce. After those two hits, this was a miss; lobster and red wine could go together, I guess, but they didn’t, it needed more of the silkiness of the traditional cream sauce, or something, and the mushrooms were diced to a size that seemed like scraps, while raw brussels sprout on top was too coarse for the dish.

• Seared foie with cherries, raw celery and a cream sauce. A nice take on the sweetness-with-foie thing that was big in the 90s, though a whole cherry with a slice of foie was too much; I cut mine in half.

• A little bit of a grilled cheese sandwich with chorizo. Just what it says.

• Bison with a creamy polenta and pickled artichokes (seen in the Key Ingredient video). I avoided eating the goo with the bison, as it overwhelmed its mild flavor; the tartness of the artichoke, on the other hand, brought it out. Des Rosiers said up front that his intention is for everything to be eaten together, but in this case, I have to disagree.

• A sheep’s cheese (I think) drizzled with honey and tomato relish.

• Desserts: a very good espresso chocolate cake (with our friends the cherries again), an even better pannetone bread pudding, and some take on PB&J which I don’t even remember trying.

Nothing wildly bizarre or trendy, but even if we hadn’t been talking to Des Rosiers throughout, I think we would have picked up on the care with which he selects ingredients and the pretty high batting average at combining them in novel, but not in your face strange, ways.

Saying that Inovasi must be the most interesting restaurant for many miles in these suburbs wouldn’t be all that much in terms of praise; as with Vie, he’s bringing city-level cooking to a land of stuffy steakhouses and the like. But the most interesting thing about Des Rosiers is that he’s not only making it happen in fine dining— where there’s room for one of anything, really, wherever there’s money— but across the street he’s opened Wisma, the first of a chain of little shops offering prepared foods and high quality ingredients, trying to make sustainable/artisanal food available to his people. It doesn’t take long to pick up on the fact that Des Rosiers sometimes resents the city for not noticing what he’s doing up there— and I’d say his complaint is justified, on the quality of this meal— but however well that serves as a personal spur to ambition, it shouldn’t get in the way of the fact that he’s leading his own community to better ways of eating, better ingredients and better practices, more or less singlehandedly. And that’s a pretty admirable and interesting thing regardless of whether the trendy hordes, or even the city’s food media, notice him or not.

I will have more to say about 2010 and the food world shortly (if you recall this time last year, I won’t be alone), but the year’s end calls for a ten best list. (I don’t know who these people are who publish them in mid-December; I was still checking out new restaurants last week, hoping for one last glimpse of transcendence.) If you look at other people’s lists, whether of 10 or 100, there’s one obvious point made which is that this was a great year for casual yet culinarily serious joints, big on pork, beer and ampersands. But where some seemed content to make up lists entirely of these mid-upscale joints (understandably, they’re easy to leave contented), I still have my populist LTH/Chowhound side, too, and I want to make sure to take note of our city’s (and nation’s) richness of ethnic dining and other kinds of small joints, that can’t afford a PR firm… or an ampersand. If that means some much more acclaimed spot gets bumped to the second ten, well, what a great city we’re in that the second ten can have places on it like The Purple Pig or Old Town Social or The Southern or Kith & Kin.

Anyway, here, in reverse order, are my ten best, which as always must be things that were new to me in 2010:

10. Beef shawerma at Taza Bakery. Middle-eastern food had grown increasingly boring. And it seemed boring for the folks making it, too. Then I had the beef shawerma at this place on Devon just east of Kedzie, in a big fluffy blanket of freshly-baked bread called tannur, and it was full of flavorful meat and tart sauce and crisp vegetables, and it reinvented and reinvigorated a staple lunch. And the people aren’t bored, they’re standing there making bread all day long, you can watch them at it.

9. Wild boar or Stromboli at Gaztro-Wagon. Speaking of meat rolled up in bread… much as I like the guys involved in the whole food truck thing and wish them well, I have to admit that not being a barfly, food trucks are not personally critical to my lifestyle. But take Gaztro-Wagon merely as a sandwich startup in a storefront on the way to my kids’ school, and it was one of the best pieces of news of my food year— always interesting combinations served gooey hot in delectable soft and chewy sort-of-naan, for nearly always less than $10 a throw. As with Phillip Foss’s Meatyballs, Franks N Dawgs, or Hot Doug’s, granddaddy of them all, it’s the kind of high-low innovation that makes this city such a great place to eat… too often despite the best efforts of city bureaucracy.

8. Charcoal chicken at Taqueria Ricardo. I actually found Taqueria Ricardo late in 2009, but held off posting about it until I could compose a comprehensive guide to the semi-hidden world of supermercado taquerias, the taquerias inside Mexican grocery stores around Chicago.  Several are quite good but by far the most elaborate and interesting and varied in town is this one on Diversey near Kostner, where they make genuinely, no-charcoal-or-gas-involved wood-grilled chicken and even rabbit, along with excellent seafood soups, taco al pastor, and a wide variety of other Mexican dishes.

7. Blackbird. I wanted to finally check out Mike Sheerin’s food at what is, to my mind, the most influential Chicago restaurant locally (even if others have more of a national profile), little suspecting that his era at Blackbird would come to an end fairly quickly.  But whatever it becomes under David Posey (seen in this week’s Key Ingredient, incidentally), I’ll remember the unexpected refinement and delicacy of dishes like his marvelous sturgeon and escargot or peanut gazpacho, not to mention the mindbending desserts of Patrick Fahy. And I’ll eagerly await Sheerin’s own venture The Trencherman.

6. Tôm yam lûuk chín néua pèuay and other dishes at Aroy Thai. After falling into a rut with much-beloved Thai places like Spoon and TAC, dishes like the fiery, pungent soup tôm yam lûuk chín néua pèuay brought back those heady days when we LTHers were first discovering the world of Thai secret menus and non-Americanized Thai in all its spicy glory.  I’ve been back almost half a dozen times since.

5. Doro wat at Queen Makeda. It took going to Washington, D.C., but I finally had a genuinely great African meal at this invitingly homey (despite the big TV playing C-Span) Ethiopian restaurant a few steps from Ben’s Chili Bowl and other tourist magnets.

4. Tete de cochon, and many others, at Longman & Eagle. Lots of places shoot onto national lists and win Michelin stars in their first year, but for a neighborhood tavern to have done it really says something about how the cutting edge of our dining scene is shifting away from traditional fine dining. A lot of people expressed surprise when Michelin honored them, but not me, from a slightly shaky start this gastropub or whatever it is had gotten rapidly and impressively better every time I visited (at least four times this year), climaxing (almost literally) with the tete de cochon, which made Girl & The Goat’s pig face a pale reflection. But it’s no mere porkateria, other favorite dishes have run the gamut from scallops to charry grilled anchovies, all pulled off as if they were the house’s specialty.

3. Willi Lehner’s bandaged aged cheddar. I had lots of great cheese on my cheese jaunt (see here and here), but the one that summed it up for me was this one of Willi Lehner’s, as atmospheric and dense with history as a 12th century monastery.  I’m sure tasting it in his actual cave was a big part of that, but it’s just as marvelous at home.

2. Ruxbin. As I wrote: “Ruxbin is not another Schwa— it’s a more down-to-earth neighborhood restaurant, with dishes that sound like fairly plain American bistro food, with a touch of Asian fusion. With its thrift-shop look (like some Korean-American cross between Avec and Chicago Kalbi, with a little Amtrak sleeper coach thrown in), it looks more like the kind of place you’d find in a college town than in money-flashing 2010 Chicago. But besides the similarities to Schwa of being tiny, hard to get into and BYO on Ashland, you get the sense of a comparable degree of intensity, focus, and something like perfectionism in the food.”

1. L.C.’s BBQ/A&M Grill. We had a bunch of barbecue places open this year, and I even like one of them (Lillie’s Q) a lot, but if there’s one thing no restaurateur can do, no matter how savvy and skilled, it’s make a barbecue joint with real history behind it. I tried two places like that this year in which the food came with a side of deep culture and heritage; in Kansas City, it was my new favorite Kansas City barbecue joint, L.C.’s:

While in North Carolina, it was A&M Grill:

There’s so much more than food going on at these places… but there’s also the food, which is wonderful.

I won’t go into a long list of runners-up because I’ve posted quarterly lists here, here and here, but here are some other things I liked enough to jot down in the most recent quarter:

• Galley Boy burger at Swenson’s Drive-in (various locations around Akron)
• Goat-pork-veal sugo and a couple of other things from Girl and The Goat
• Eggplant salad, trout and dessert at Ruxbin
• Many many cheeses on my cheese tour (see links above)
• Butternut squash soup, a taste of trout, and goat cheesecake at L’Etoile in Madison
• Shortrib agnolotti at Ceres’ Table
• Some of the new menu at The Violet Hour (we had them as canapes, so I’ve kind of forgotten what they were already, but… they’re good!)
• Beef shawerma at Taza
• Blue cheese-frizzled onion burger at DMK Burger Bar, which is expensive, but easily my favorite of this year’s nouveau burger joints (besides Edzo’s of course)
• Butternut squash-sage thing at The Purple Pig
• BBQ Meatyballs sandwich
• Stromboli from Gaztro-Wagon
• Pizza from Armand’s, old Elmwood Park place now on Western
• The sauerkraut pie I made out of Pig
• Lemongrass tofu banh mi from Nhu Lan by way of Michael Nagrant’s place
• Sonoran hot dog, Big Star
• Corn and pork cake, Ming Hin

Finally, let me note what a great year this has been for Sky Full of Bacon, full of interesting opportunities from the Reader’s Key Ingredient series to doing Grub Street for a week to things like Baconfest or my cheese junket or being the only Chicagoan represented at the Chicago Food Film Festival. I’ve met lots of interesting people in the food world, eaten lots of terrific things and enjoyed the modest amount of acclaim that my modest work merits. It’s a wonderful life that seems to get better and more interesting with every year, and thanks to everyone who stops by to check it out… like you.

Ten best for: 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003

I liked Scylla fine, I ate there twice (here and here), but didn’t necessarily think Stephanie Izard was obviously more talented than half a dozen other very talented people working at the time, and it was Top Chef more than Scylla that suddenly propelled her into name brand chef stardom.

On the other hand, I think Kevin Boehm (Boka, Perennial) is pretty brilliant as a restaurant impresario, and the two-year-long opening of Girl & The Goat was the restaurant equivalent of the PR campaign David O. Selznick managed for Gone With the Wind, a textbook example of how to create and sustain buzz. So I could easily have believed that the food at G&TG (like GWTW, it calls for initialization) would wind up seeming the lesser partner in a superbly orchestrated glittering restaurant experience bringing together all of 2010’s most desired features (celebrity chef, downtown energy, pork).

Instead, I was genuinely impressed for the first time by Izard’s cooking. She’s come into her own as a Blackbird-esque master of bold, acidic flavors that pop like Pop Rocks in your mouth; many of her dishes seemed well conceived, complex, novel and balanced. (Well, she did have two years to work on them.)

But note the “seemed” rather than “were.” I say that because the way Girl & The Goat prefers you construct your meal— and by “prefer” I mean pretty much stands there and demands it, bulldozing over any desire you display to the contrary— I never felt like I had a chance to really taste and appreciate the best of what Izard had to offer. Instead I had fleeting tastes of almost half the menu, usually only a bite apiece, which ultimately blurred together and seemed far too similar— so that I not only didn’t get to really appreciate the best of what she made, but its novelty was nearly always lost in the arrival of something 75% like it right before or after. It’s one thing to be a small plates restaurant, but divided by four, this was almost a dinner of canapes— as one of my dining companions said later, “only if you were born to a family of Smurfs would these plates be suitable for ‘family-style dining.'”

I had deliberately chosen Sunday night in order to have a more relaxed evening, relatively, but it might as well have been Saturday at 7 to judge by the firm hand with which our waitress moved things along according to her script. We were informed that there were three sections of the menu marked for vegetable, fish and meat, although there was meat on everything and fish in the vegetables (so what, exactly, was the ontological nature of the distinctions? No time to ask such things). We would be ordering two to three dishes which we would be sharing and we would order them all at once and when we hit the slightest snag at about 6 or 7 items, and needed a moment to consult over the last couple, she announced “Would you like me to read you back what you have so far?” which in fact was probably the least helpful thing she could have done at that moment, and then made us sit through an unbidden recitation of everything we’d said thirty seconds earlier. Finally, somehow, we managed to come up with a couple of additional items, and like a cartoon character, in a cloud of dust and squiggly lines she was gone.

Goat, pork and veal sugo: primi for one, not four

Normally I don’t mock service in a review but in this case, it’s important to know what you’re up against. The scenario outlined, and all but mandated, will work fine if there are two of you dining together. You’ll get 4 or 5 things, a few bites of each, and probably be very happy. But if there are four of you, as there were four of us, in the name of all that is holy you must resist. Your goal, now, is not to try half the menu in tiny portions as they would have you do, making the best less memorable by mixing them with obvious second and third choices, like the Greatest Hits album of a band that really only had three good songs. It is to find what you think are the two or three things that you would like to eat, and make sure you get them.

If that means all four of you wind up ordering the sugo, say (which would be a perfectly sane choice), then by all means, everyone have the sugo. It’s not that big a plate for one, but it’s a cruel taunt divided by four. You will earn your waitress’s disapproval, but you will have had the meal I wish I had had— an actual chance to eat Izard’s hearty, dig-in-happily food, not to have been served a big savory pasta as an amuse-bouche.

And it is worth risking getting The Goat’s goat, because Izard at her best is very good indeed, in the same porky-big-flavors vein as The Purple Pig et al. but, I think, a bit more sophisticated and accomplished. The goat/pork/veal sugo is an excellent example: a number of very good places could have made the silky pasta, the deep and soothing ragu, but very few would have put tomato-sharp gooseberries in the middle of it, so that a dish that’s comfy enough to take a nap in comes with its own wake-up call. Same for a salad of green beans and beets combined with little crunchy something-or-others and bits of mild, probably oil-cured white anchovy, so that the vegetables’ freshness and crunch is beautifully complimented with the bracing freshness of the sea:

Or a tartly spicy, yet not stereotypically Mexican, braised beef tongue with “beef vinaigrette” (not exactly sure what that is, but I like the thinking) and salsa verde; any meat could have gone in that, but the accompaniments were complex and fascinating, like a mysterious beauty you see once across the floor of a cantina, and then she is gone. All these things, and probably others that night, had big bold flavors that were nonetheless accessible and totally pleasing.

But under their system, I had just a glimpse of each of them (which tells you what impression they made even in a tiny quantity) before leaving them behind in order to devote palate attention and stomach space to chickpea fritters with romesco and feta, which would be fine as bar food but were too gooey-junk foody for the start of a meal, or two modest, unmemorable scallops in pumpkin plop, or the much-lauded pig face which just seemed like rather average breakfast food to me:

or the absurd, disastrous stone crab claw and pork belly special, $21 for a tiny amount of very good stone crab claw ill-matched with sodden pork belly swimming in a vanilla-grease sauce, which has reminded me of my vow never to eat anything savory which advertises vanilla, it just doesn’t work, you might as well make cream soda gravy.

In other words, it’s a restaurant of hits and misses, like (almost) every other. But because of the system forcing me to fill so many slots with second and third tier choices (my instincts about which would be the best dishes were fairly on-target), I just had a lot more acquaintance with the misses than I needed to. If I’d ordered just a few things for myself, I’d have had a success rate of at least 67%, rather than one struggling to break 50%. And though G&TG was certainly effective at getting us to spend freely this way, I wound up the evening having tried so much of the menu that I had little curiosity about the remainder to motivate me to return.

What would get me back isn’t the chance to try ten more things, but to retry things I wish I had gotten more of the first time. So far as I could tell in my brief acquaintance with them, some of them are really quite good— and worth butting heads with The Goat a little to have your way.

Another I liked a lot: grilled seppia (aka cuttlefish) with smoked tomatoes and sea beans.

We tried three of four desserts and all of them were in the tradition of Jessie Oloroso’s work at Scylla, surehandedly integrating oddball ingredients like crispy parsnips or a marshmallow made with Ommegang’s Three Philosophers ale. This part of the meal had the highest batting average, if not the highest highpoints.

The latest Key Ingredient stars Chef John Des Rosiers of Inovasi in Lake Bluff, and a houseplant. Read the piece here.

46 minutes, the counter on my viewfinder said.

That’s how much footage I shot at Alinea one Sunday afternoon, watching Grant Achatz and Craig Schoettler (soon to be the head guy of Aviary) make a cocktail using a weird Indonesian nut for the Reader’s new series of chef challenges (which if you haven’t seen yet, you can see here).

46 minutes and I was exhausted. Keeping up, mentally and physically, with Achatz’s kitchen wears you down quickly.

The first thing I saw was the kitchen. Square and, it felt, neatly divided by a group of exactly equidistant counter spaces running the length of the room. It’s the most perfectly geometric place I’ve seen since a visit to the Air Force Academy a decade or so ago.

And every few feet along the invisible grid of the room, there was someone in chef whites cleaning furiously— perhaps 20 of them in all. It was like a shot in an old Disney cartoon of elves working, where the whole frame is filled with evenly paced, purposeful motion. Here’s a short, inartful assembly of outtakes from the Reader video which convey this initial impression:

A few moments later Achatz greeted us and took us on a tour of the restaurant— or rather, a tour of the Alinea experience as orchestrated by him. You enter through a hallway of bordello-red lighting with forced perspective that makes it hard to know exactly where you go— a kind of mental palate cleanser from the street outside, Achatz told us. Just as you’re feeling lost, the doors open— there’s a motion detector on your side to time this moment exactly— and you face the stairway which ascends between the three dining rooms.

“It’s kind of a parallel to the cuisine,” Achatz said, cryptically. Leaving us to ponder the Carollian question, how is a staircase like a plate of roast pheasant?

One way, apparently, is that it’s meant to break with the formality of the traditional fine dining experience and to make it more homey. “Like if you guys were coming over to my house, I’d open the door, welcome you, ‘come on in,’ rather than being that barrier between you and I,” he said. “That kind of physical barrier, to me, was always a little bit snooty and formal. So I wanted to eliminate that.”

Another puzzle to contemplate: three-Michelin-star, fabulously expensive Alinea as a break with all that’s too hoity-toity in dining. Alinea as an extension of Achatz’ den, pass the chips and guac please. Yet it starts to make sense to you because it so obviously makes sense to him. I’ve never seen a chef so at home in his restaurant, not in the way that a commanding officer is at home on his battleship, but in a free and playful way.

Achatz explains that he wishes he could repaint the walls a new color every night. Instead, he has LED lights which can change colors to cast a different atmosphere on different visits.

As intense and intent as the work in the kitchen is— and this was several hours before service— there’s a feel there not so much of a laboratory, which is the clichéd comparison based on the technology present, as of a kind of artistic workshop, an atelier (there, I just named Achatz’ next restaurant) where fine objects are being wrought by skilled craftsmen.

Part of the reason for this is that, unlike almost any other working kitchen, Alinea has windows. Very nice windows, actually, which let in not only a cool blue winter light but offered, this day, a spare view of a bare winter tree and the brick two-flat next door. It’s an urbanite’s idea of a view, wouldn’t impress the folks at Courtright’s, but there’s no question that something that simple gives the work in the kitchen an entirely different feel. It honors the work, tells it that it’s valued and deserves to be carried out in a pleasantly natural atmosphere.  

A chef friend who saw the video zeroed in on this immediately: “First thing I noticed is that there are windows in the Alinea kitchen. I feel a little less sorry for those cooks now. Hehehe.”

A few moments later Achatz and Craig Schoettler launched into the dish— and for the next 20 minutes or so I scrambled to keep up with them as they made it. Part of this was that there were two of them; I was constantly having to anticipate which of them would be where my camera should be. But it was also that they moved as fast as their minds, and I had to keep up. We were barely halfway through the shoot for our first chef challenge before Achatz was deconstructing the very idea behind it, breaking it into pieces to see if something more interesting might be made out of the same parts:

And then our time was up; dinner was less than two hours away. After some pleasantries, we were back on the street, out the other end of his forced perspective telescope. The gray world outside seemed dull and clumsy next to the gleaming white vision of cooperative artistry happening on the other side of that nondescript door. Next to my 46 minutes inside the mind of Alinea.

Check out Key Ingredient each week at chicagoreader.com/food.

The new edition of “Key Ingredient” is up here and features Curtis Duffy of Avenues, funky Chinese black beans and an absolutely gorgeous dessert. Watch it here:

The first one, with Grant Achatz, got over 1500 views the first week. We’re shooting two this week, and it’s funny what’s different each time (the chefs and their approaches, very different in personality even when, like Achatz and Duffy, they’re similar in approach) and what’s been the same— they each seem to take right around 45 minutes to shoot, and wind up at right around 4 minutes and 50 seconds when they’re done.

Lots of people are thanking me so it’s time I did some thanking about all this: thanks to outgoing Reader editor Kiki Yablon for thinking of me and calling me up for some info even when she couldn’t tell me why yet, to Julia Thiel my writing partner in crime, and to everybody else at the Reader who helped us in the mad scramble to get the first one done (Paul Kate Geoff Mrs. Paul Mike Whet) and going forward. Oh, and to Chicago’s great chefs who are so game for doing this on short notice and no matter how weird it sounds.

Today I am very excited to announce that one of the founding goals of Sky Full of Bacon has been met. No, this is not another setup for a gag like the Mexican April Fool’s prank video. It’s the real thing, which is: the first in a series of videos for the Chicago Reader (who are launching a redesigned food section this week) called Key Ingredient. In the videos and the attached articles (written by Julia Thiel), we will throw a weird ingredient at a Chicago chef, and he or she will invent a dish from it. The opening cheftestant is one Grant Achatz of Alinea, and his ingredient is the kluwak kupa:

You can read the article and get the recipe here. Though the device of challenging a chef with a mystery ingredient is not a new one, I think the way Key Ingredient does it is distinctly different from, oh, say, a TV show with a bombastic pseudo-samurai chef and cooks running around in a panic. The point here is to let the chefs reveal how they think, how they approach an ingredient (even one as out of left field as the kluwak kupa). It’s high on character study, low on screaming. At the same time, the video side is short and sweet, considerably faster-paced than my usual Sky Full of Bacon videos; it’s a quick sketch, not an in-depth portrait.

So that’s why you should watch and read Key Ingredient (and check out everything else happening in the revised Reader food section… which will be news to me too, I had nothing to do with it otherwise). But for me the deeper significance is that, although it’s not the first time I’ve done video for publications, it’s not even the first time I’ve done video for publications and gotten paid, it does represent the first time that I believe a publication has taken on my kind of video as a sustained strategic effort to serve readers in the new online media environment. My hope from the beginning with Sky Full of Bacon was that by demonstrating a capacity to do good journalism, not just slick video, in video form, full of my own passion and knowledge and inquisitiveness about food, somebody would see an opportunity in it to expand their media brand online as video becomes an inevitable part of every journalistic enterprise— not an add-on to print but simply part of how you tell the story. It’s happened a number of times in one-offs, but this is the first one that’s a regular branded feature. (Yes, this probably means regular Sky Full of Bacon videos will be at least as infrequent as they were in 2010, but I promise they won’t halt entirely, when there’s a genuinely great subject for a longer form piece.)

But hey, I’ve still got several days a week open, so feel free to email or call me. Yeah, the world is full of people who shoot food video, but if you want video that really has the taste of the world of food and speaks to your foodie readers/viewers/whatevers, the name is Bacon. Sky Full of Bacon. Enjoy The Reader’s Key Ingredient, and there will be a new one in the same place, next week.

P.S. Thanks to those who not only linked it all but mentioned my involvement (more prominent in the print version, by the way, which was kind of them), including Nick, Ari, and many Twitterers including Sula and Sudo. I really appreciate the support and admire that there are so many class acts on our side of the Chicago foodie world, too.

Fresh from toasting the winners of Bib Gourmands at The Violet Hour, I dined with one of the one-star anointees. I was invited to Everest for a lunch hosted by Chef Jean Joho and the Spertus Institute in honor of Joan Nathan, author of a couple of previous books on American and Israeli Jewish cooking, who has a new one on French Jewish cooking, Quiches, Kugels and Couscous. (Yes, the irony of Sky Full of Bacon attending such a lunch was noted.)

From the remarks (kept as brief as she could), we got a glimpse of what seems to be an interesting hidden world which made relatively few inroads into restaurant culture in France (beyond some falafel shops) but has a lot of depth to it— France is, she said, the third major Jewish country after Israel and the US and one of the only Holocaust countries where Jews returned in numbers after World War II and reestablished their culture. And most of her research was in homes rather than professional dining settings.

For Joho, who called himself “half Catholic, half Protestant and half Jewish,” and is from Alsace where the Jewish presence was strongest, cooking out of her book made for an interesting experience as his newly Michelin-starred kitchen had to turn out what are basically very homey, humble recipes. So Gemarti soup seemed wonderfully rustic until you noticed how perfectly brunoised the tiny bits of vegetable in it were:

Actually, one interesting thing she said about French Jewish cuisine is that it’s often the last place that older French recipes survive. She said this recipe, with carrots and toasted semolina, was exactly the sort of thing that was replaced otherwise in French dining by potato-leek soup when potatoes arrived from the New World. Similarly, she says this sweet-sour fish dish can be found in Taillevent in the 14th century:

My thought was, she’d found the missing link between Jews and Chinese food. This one may have stirred a little fuss at the end, because Joho said that it’s traditionally made with carp, but he doesn’t like the carp in this country, so he used another white river fish: catfish. I immediately heard people saying that catfish wasn’t kosher, however because it’s a scavenger. So’s carp, I thought, but what do I know about all this.

Anyway, after a couple of homey courses, we finished with a dessert fit for a Rothschild, in fact named for them:

A very interesting meal on a topic new to me; I recommend leafing through Nathan’s book when doing your half-Catholic, half-Protestant, half-Jewish holiday shopping. Being in a food-cultural mind as I left, I noticed an interesting juxtaposition that summed up for me our own mix of food cultures even in the Loop:

So I went to the instantly sold-out pre-Michelin event at the Violet Hour last night. At least, that’s what it was supposed to be. Since there was never a moment that any Michelin person came out and said anything about anything, the only real clue that that was what it was— and not any other reason why I’d be scarfing free food and drink at the Violet Hour, which does seem to happen at least once a year— was that Michelin Guides were sitting around, free for the taking.

No, not the Chicago one.

So I chatted with some LTHers, touched base with Nick at Grub Street, finally met the lovely Patty Erd of The Spice House in person (if you want one piece of advice for Thanksgiving, go to Spice House and buy their pumpkin pie spice mix, which is doubleplusgood), met a bunch of Gaper’s Block people I had never met before, talked with Ari Bendersky of Eater Chicago about the alleged Yelp list of Michelin winners (I think it’s a plausible-looking phony, we’ll know shortly), and I think I saw Jason Lardone but didn’t get a chance to talk to him. (Actually, I thought for a moment of pulling a full Tony Clifton and going as Jason Lardone, but I just got a haircut and didn’t feel like immediately wasting it by shaving it off. I also proposed climbing onto the bar and improvising a welcome speech in half-French, half-English, but would have needed at least $100 to be barred from The Violet Hour for life, and only managed to raise about $60 from my immediate companions.)

Speaking of The Violet Hour, from which I am not barred for life, I say this unequivocally, on my index of visits I’d say this one was a definite uptick, the best since my first. There’s a new chef and the food, if less distinctively bar-like, seemed the most sophisticated and accomplished to date— I really liked the bacalao fritter, and a lamb sausage on a little slice of roasted beet in particular. Although we had a set list of cocktails to make serving en masse easier, it was no trick to walk up to the bar and request something special, and one of the bartenders (who LTHer Ursiform eventually realized had been in a band that recorded at her house— weird small world moment) was more than happy to take my vaguely inebriated desires for something unusual and translate them into, first, an excellent rum-based cocktail with black walnut liqueur, and second, a vermouth cocktail with some half-heard reference to “artichoke juice” in the description. This was better once the ice melted a bit and cut the syrupiness of the vermouth.

I’ve been meaning to get back to Big Star, people like Michael Nagrant keep raving about it, and it looked oddly quiet over there so after our drinks, we went over for some tacos to wash them down (this made sense at the time). Big Star has improved the basement-slash-submarine feel of its cold gray box space with some pink Christmas lights, which work far better than they sound. The tortillas were much improved over my previous visit, when I felt like they were rubbery and bland. But I’m still just not wild about the food there, in fact, I had pretty much the same feeling about the tacos as last time: pork belly quite good and different, chicken not bad (there’s more flavor to chicken here than at most Mexican restaurants, admittedly), the pastor, just not right. Too sweet, no crispy char-ness.

The one new thing we tried was the Sonoran hot dog, a massive, and impressively charred, beef frank allegedly wrapped in bacon (I’d say more like there’s a piece at the bottom) and then wildly overdressed with crema, beans, diced jalapenos, I don’t know what all. As Sharon Bautista said of the dressing, “It seems like the right things on it, but it’s way too much when you’re actually eating it,” you wind up basically smearing a couple of tablespoons of gooey stuff onto a napkin with every bite. It’s kind of a weird one-shot for them to be offering but I think it’s the thing I’ve liked best there to date.

Still, after two visits, I have to say that Big Star is just not the bar or the Mexican restaurant for me. Somehow I think they’ll survive, even so.

In a moment, we’ll have the real list of Michelin winners, and then… Michelin mania will be over. For at least a year or two.

BY JASON LARDONE, FooderChicago.com

When injustice besmirched the lobster bib of France in the Dreyfus case, the fearless writer Emile Zola cried out: “J’Accuse!”

Today, when another injustice is done by Frenchmen, I must be no less bold. No less courageous. No less willing to put my opinion right on the front page, with my name in type as large as Zola’s: J’Accuse!

What is it that prompts me to make this j’accusation?  Why do I willingly choose to be such a big j’acc?

It is, simply, the only choice I have when I look at the list of Bib Gourmands, the supposed list of “Chicago good values” issued by the Guide Michelin last week.  Someone has to stand up for the best in value-priced cuisine in Chicago, and as the founder, CEO, chef de content, and Chief Visionary Officer of FooderChicago.com, je suis that someone:

• Melange: Un Creperie. No, no, no, M. Naret and all your anonymous reviewers. As I made clear in my definitive post, “Puckle Density in Chicago Crepes, A Spectrographic Analysis,” Melange’s use of a powdered crepe mix results in an insufficient puckle to plane ratio of 1.6:1-1.83:1, depending on whether it’s Arturo or Manuel in the back doing the mixing. The best creperies in Paris achieve a standard of at least 2.12:1, and the anti-griddle crepes at Jean-Chauve Souris’ experimental crepe atelier Désespoir in Toulon achieve an awe-inspiring 4.67:1 (see Lardone, “The Creperies of France: A Study With My New Nikon DXL650SI” and Lardone, “I Can’t Believe Delta Won’t Let Me Use My Miles To Go To Freakin’ Paris Directly”).

• Go Thai Yourself. Really? Really, France, did your experience in Indochina teach you nothing about Asian food? Go Thai Yourself’s boat noodles are a sad, lumpish mockery of a classic dish, the gristly, wizened nam tok redefines the meaning of “insult to the customer,” and the nam khaa pla vim kra ban tuu fok Chiang Mai style is blatantly inferior to the version available on the upstairs back room secret menu tattooed on the owner’s 100-year-old mother’s inner thigh (may require anti-wrinkle cream to read completely) at Thai You Too Pal— as anyone would know who has read my extensive posts on Thai food. Did you even open your browsers, Team Michelin? Why do you even go out to eat if you aren’t willing to do due diligence? The best you can say for Go Thai Yourself is that the hostess, Gum, is an especially attractive young lady whose pert breasts exhibit all the perfection of form, shapeliness and jiggle sadly lacking in the chive dumplings. Um, now that I think about it, this one was fine, actually.

• Ye Scurvy Dog. I am shocked at the inclusion of this pathetic old school excuse for a Chicago fish and chips house. Yes, it may have been popular with vintage celebrities such as Mitzi Gaynor, Gordon McRae and Cardinal Mindszenty back in the 1950s and 1960s, but we’re not living in Kup’s Chicago any more. What makes this choice such a mockery of everything I have devoted my life to (see Lardone, Dreams From My Waiter, coming Spring 2011 from Harper Collins Perennial) is that it continues to serve the style of fried fish I call “fish kugel,” in which the fish is encoated in a gummy, flavorless batter which quickly turns insipid with exposure to air. True fish and chips devotees such as myself know that only a light cornmeal-based dusting achieves the perfect viscosity-to-aeration ratio which allows the full flavor of the tilapia to shine through.

When you review this sorry list you wonder how anyone could be so far astray from the truth of Chicago dining, which can easily be found via my blog (follow me on Twitter: TheLardone). Far better choices for the visiting European to gain a real sense of our city’s bounty would have been the shrimp dosa at Klang, the pork intestine panini at Uub, or the Lemonhead pot stickers at The Sheepman. How can anyone know Chicago who has not tasted the bacalao testa at Archerman & Trenchfoot, the delicately piney piquancy of the mulattoes y castratos at El Muerte de Castro, the Imploding Plasma-State Margarita at Cassowary, or the crabapple-based giardinera at Sal’s South Pulaski No Loitering? The answer is as stark as the shuttered Mister Freeze of my youth: they can’t. And much as it pains me to have to say it, if they come to Chicago clutching the Michelin Guide instead of FooderChicago.com on their iPhone (get the FooderChicago app at iTunes, $1.99), they won’t.