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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I’ve been asked this more than a little, and back when I was mainly in advertising, I was asked the same thing about that field, too, and really, the advice isn’t all that different, though the economic conditions are. On the minus side, it’s not a great time in history to make a living at writing about food and drink, but on the plus side, at least it’s never been easier to break into the field. That’s because it’s never been easier to get people to see your work without already having been published.

The first thing is that you simply must write. Writing is not just about being smart and clever, it’s about having the energy and focus to do a lot of it, and quickly. So go get yourself a free blog at Blogspot or Tumblr, and start writing. A lot. Write about what you eat, but also start doing the kind of thing that someone would like to publish—interviews, lists, think pieces, whatever. Blogging about your personal experiences is good practice, but you need to show you can do more than talk about yourself.

Yes, it’s true you’re working without getting paid. You and everybody else. Every mathematician started by doing geometry in high school. Every baseball player played it in the street with other kids before signing with the Yankees. You need to do a bunch of writing for free first, to 1) get better at it 2) prove you can do it, day in and day out. That’s the way the world works. (Believe me, a year from now you’ll be glad some of what you wrote wasn’t paid for, or seen, by anybody!) Don’t think of it in terms of a living yet, because that’s too depressing— the only way you’ll make a living at it right now is with the rare staff job at a paper or magazine.

In fact, I’m all for having a different job entirely when you’re young; I think you’ll be a better writer for being out in the world, working and interacting and gaining a wide range of skills, than if you spend 12 hours a day typing inside the cramped confines of your own head. Go work in a cannery like Steinbeck or sail on a whaling ship like Melville or whatever it takes to have some experiences and observe other people. (Tending bar is good too, especially for food writers.)

Two more things: learn how to promote your stuff in a non-obnoxious way on social media, and use it to make new contacts online. And if you can take pictures with a decent camera, do. Being able to supply photos with an idea always makes it easier to sell. One more thing to start getting practice at now.

A few months pass, you’ve got some pretty good pieces, and you want to actually get published. There are a lot of places that will give you a shot… for free. Well, eventually you’ll want a firm policy against doing that, but for now, the exposure is worth more than the tiny fee you’d make anyway. So look for publications, see what they actually publish—don’t pitch Best River North Bars For Hooking Up to a publication that focuses on recipes for moms—and pitch them ideas that are like what they do, but not exactly what they’ve already done.

Here’s the secret of pitching (indeed, any job search). The person who hires is not looking for someone who is fabulous to be their new best friend. The person who hires has too much work and is looking for someone who can take a chunk of it out of their hair and come back with a finished piece. That’s it. Be their no-fuss solution, show them you can solve that problem for them with no drama and minimal help from them and return with a perfectly good piece, and you’ll soon get more assignments than you ever expected.

Respect the parameters of the assignment. If they say 500 words, turn in 475 to 510, not 1200.

You’ll get edited at this point, and one important thing is learning how to respond to editing. Some of it will be very good advice about sharpening your points and making your writing more compelling. That’s the best thing that can happen to you, even if it stings a little; that kind of editing is your grad school. Some of it, alas, will be somebody who knows less than you about your subject, screwing your well-thought-out piece up. Learn the difference and how to take it in stride. If someone is really hard to work for, simply fade out of their pool of pitching writers without a fuss, getting a reputation for being a pain to work with will get around.

Now you’ve got half a dozen pieces published. It’s time to professionalize your online image. This could be your blog, or it could be on a new site, but you need to find a way to look like a pro, not just a blogger, and to highlight your published work and direct people to it. The game here is, you pitch an editor who never heard of you, the first thing she’ll do is go to your site and see who you are. You want her to see your published pieces and instantly know you’re a pro who can get assignments done (see previous point about “solving that problem”).

And from there, it’s just a matter of getting better at writing and at networking over time— and pitching places that pay better. The things writers have always done, but you happen to live in the time that offers more online tools for doing it without having to have gone to the right school and made the right friends than ever before. Good luck.

Finally, the world is full of more advice about actually writing than I could ever repeat, but when it comes to food writing, an especially sensual subgenre, you can’t do better and pithier than Mr. Samuel Clemens:

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream. —Mark Twain

The 2004 Chowhound Westernathon, some long-gone Indian restaurant where the last diehards assembled after 14 hours. How ancient is this history? We were taking food pictures on actual film, that’s how ancient.

Ten years ago, something beautiful was released to the world when, through careful planning and calm consensus, LTHForum…

no, that’s not how it happened. It was crazier and more haphazard than that. Let’s go back. To Chowhound. Chowhound c. 2002 was where a bunch of us, though we weren’t an “us” yet, first started talking about food and, more importantly, meeting about it with strangers. We would meet for lunch, at Spoon or La Quebrada or Kang Nam or “Little” Three Happiness or Los Mogotes or Vito & Nick’s or whatever the enthusiasm of the moment was, and order the weird things with no concern— as we would have had with normal people— that something might gross somebody out. I learned so much and experienced so much in such an intense short time. But more than that, I came to feel that the city was mine at last. A decade after moving here, I no longer felt like a Kansan temporarily working here but that I belonged to the city, I understood the city, it wasn’t something too big and alien to ever comprehend. You want to know where to get great tacos? Here. I read a post about it. I made a movie about Maxwell Street. I’m the guy that knows Chicago.

But Chowhound was an imperfect vessel for our aspirations. The management didn’t like us planning events on the board, they didn’t like us seeming like a clique (even though we tried to be as welcoming as possible). I didn’t think they were necessarily wrong by their lights— we were taking something public and impartial and making it our clubhouse, even if we’d welcome anyone into it. But at the same time, I didn’t feel obligated to spend the rest of my days answering the same questions from tourists over and over, either, as remains Chowhound’s primary purpose. We outgrew it, plain and simple.

Me and the late Will Philpot, for whom the Will Special sandwich at Riviera was named, at TAC Quick, 2004. No idea who the mom and kid are, or who took this picture with my camera.

For a while we planned events on an email list, open to whoever wanted to be on it, but that was cumbersome, too; and there was an incident when Jim Leff (“Big Dog” of Chowhound) read some minor bitching about Chowhound on it and came unglued about its real purpose being ragging on him. It was time to declare independence from New York, and twelve of us became the core group behind it. I suggested that we launch our own discussion board and researched open source software we could use; Gary Wiviott got his hosting company, a bunch of Turkish guys, to install PhpBB (the fact that they also installed a Turkish character set would prove to be a problem years later), Seth Zurer put up the first logo which led me to design one that would be more distinctive (and easier to do on things like T-shirts), and through April and May of 2004 we slowly fiddled around with it, debating board organization, getting our feet wet with a few practice posts (here’s mine, a thread that was still active as of last August).

We were getting closer to going public when Rob Gardner mentioned it to somebody (Monica Eng, probably) in the press. Suddenly we were public before we meant to be. Hastily, we had to tell the email list what we were up to— and within about 24 hours, we suddenly had a board that had 125 or so members. In retrospect not at all a bad thing, to be off to a running start; and a very good thing to instantly not just be one homogenous group of friends but a large group with many varied interests, who from the start engaged in multiple conversations and revealed new sides of themselves that Chowhound’s more limited focus had not made room for.

We declared the date of that announcement, May 27, 2004, the official public launch date of LTHForum. Was this LTH’s golden age? You could argue it wasn’t, since unbeknownst to 97% of users, it kicked off with a big fight over who “owned” it, who would be the Big Dog, loudly argued on the sidewalk right in front of Little Three Happiness itself, as a legless beggar in a wheelchair, clueless about the argument but happy to join in the shouting, yelled something like “You tell it to The Man! The Man always be tryin’ to rob you!” (I kid you not— or at least so I was told, I was out of town that weekend.) The issue of ownership (of what was supposed to be a communal hobby), and egos more generally as we started to get media attention, would simmer for years behind the scenes and eventually split us apart three or so years later. When the issue became public I had people tell me we should have nailed ownership stuff down right at the beginning, to prevent the embarrassing situation that finally ended the old LTHForum. In which case, I said, none of it would have ever happened at all. It was never about (phantom, to this day) internet riches; there’s nothing ownership would have given any of us that was worth more than a few good years of collective creative ferment and shared enthusiasm and adventure. Certainly none of the things I’ve done since— Sky Full of Bacon, Beard award, writing for Grub Street and the Reader, whatever— would have happened without it. (You can get a sense of what we were like in this podcast I asked Michael Nagrant to do with us.)

Road trip to Milwaukee: Jake’s Deli, 2004.

It had its few years, and life moved on (remarkably, this blog has been around almost twice as long as I helped manage the many unique personalities of LTHForum in their interactions; only one of those seems like an eternity). A version of LTHForum exists, and some people still use that in that generous, open-spirited way and discuss things in detail that nobody else is talking about, and bless them for it, while others use it in, well, ways that end in screaming in Thai restaurants. Which is pretty much 180 from the spirit in which it was founded, I’ll just say that. But some friendships from those early days have lasted the decade and more; and in any case it’s a very good thing that the comrades of those days have spread out across the world and infiltrated all kinds of things from media to local organizations and farmer’s markets.

For me the legacy of that time is everywhere that LTHers have spread the gospel that Thai and Mexican food matter, that great food is all over the city, that there’s so much that’s interesting out there to taste and do and it all should be talked about in many different ways and places. It’s Cathy at Culinary Historians, and Hammond at the Sun-Times, and Melissa Graham with Purple Asparagus and Rob Gardner with The Local Beet and Seth Zurer with Baconfest and on and on. It’s the next generation of food writers— apparently 10 years is long enough for a next generation— for whom Burt’s and Lao Sze Chuan and Cemitas Puebla and the Will Special (whoever Will was) and mother-in-laws and 30s style burgers (wherever that description comes from) are just part of the fabric of the city, places we all go and things we all eat, naturally, impossible to imagine a time when people didn’t. We all reap the benefits of that intensive, creative, crazily obsessed time, and take what we gained then with us to whatever we do now. That, it turns out, was the only part of LTHForum that anybody ever truly owned.

So I look back in fondness on this tenth anniversary, and thank all who were present at the creation or close enough, we happy few, we band of brothers (of both sexes). Let’s go grab a bite sometime.

LTH kids in the doorway of Podhalanka, 2004.

In the last few years there have been several documentaries which sought to explore the world of food at its very highest level. Such films as Jiro Dreams of Sushi and El Bulli: Cooking in Progress show how working with food and seeking perfection can become a kind of spiritual quest.

After making so many shorter films about food, I wanted to find a similar subject which would allow me to explore food at the highest, most artistic and spiritual level. That’s why I am excited today to debut the trailer for my upcoming release, Edzo Dreams of Cheeseburgers:

So the Reader, where I’ve been foodblogging for the past few weeks, runs a thing in its print issue showing what the most-read blog posts— across all sections, not just Food & Drink— were during the previous week. Here’s how I did:
Week 1: The top two most-read blog posts for the whole site, #1 and #2.
Week 2: #2 and #4.
Week 3: #2 and #5.
Week 4: no ranking, not shown.
Week 5: #1.

Week 6: #1 again, third time in six weeks.
Week 7: #2 and #5.
Week 8: #4.
Week 9: no ranking, not shown.

Grub Street shut down its blogs in cities outside New York today; I learned about it this morning and, not surprisingly, had no more than about 20 minutes before Twitter blabbed it to everybody. I can’t speak for others but I wasn’t shocked that the day came that a New York-based publication shut down operations outside New York; I’ve been in enough ad agencies expanding and then shrinking to be unsurprised by that happening eventually. We’re in an age when things grow fast and die fast, you have to make that work for you, or go work at the Dept. of Motor Vehicles.

I am very gratified by, but also slightly uncomfortable about, the kind words of sympathy that have flowed in because I don’t feel like someone who lost a job, mainly because I have at least two others at any given moment. At most I’m merely underemployed again. (Not to discourage your kind words, keep ’em coming!) But I’ve long been the guy who worked to keep his own brand alive— Sky Full of Bacon came about initially because I figured it was too hard to stand out as a food writer named Mike or Michael in this town, and needed something more memorable— and developing and being known for a set of portable skills that were bigger than any given assignment (and reinforced each other). I am grateful to a year and a half and change at Grub Street and my editor Alan Sytsma for expanding my access to the restaurant scene immensely, giving me countless opportunities to devise my own opportunities without having to pitch them to anybody most of the time (easily the thing I’m worst at in this game, reading the minds of editors to figure out what they’ll want and haven’t assigned yet), and letting me do so many things just because they sounded cool to me, which by the way reminds me that I haven’t posted this video which ran at Grub Street yet:

Anyway, no hard feelings, at the very least the next Key Ingredient will appear in about ten days at the Reader, and I have no idea what I will do next with what I’ve learned and can do, no actually I have about 20 ideas at any given time but I have no idea which of them will pan out. But there is no danger of my disappearing, as long as there is self-promotional breath in my body.

And yes, really, thank you to everyone who emailed or tweeted kind words of support, for being readers then and friends now. For a decade now I have tried to cover food in a way that was personal, funny, thoughtful, and not just about grabbing bucks but about what food means to us on every level, and I will continue to do that, probably in several places at once, as usual.