WELCOME, EATOCRACY READERS! First thing you want to do is check out my latest video, Big Chef Small Farmer, just watch it above (if you’re at the main page) or click here. Then check out recent posts below.  If you’re a regular reader wondering what Eatocracy is, it’s this and I’m here.

Well, the Usinger elves are coming with their big plate of sausages, and so it must be Sky Full of Bacon’s second anniversary, that is, the second anniversary of the first video (a few posts predate that).  Actually tomorrow, but I’m sure you have better things to do on a Saturday, so we’ll celebrate today.

I’m less inclined to ramble extensively than last year but that’s because I’m busier in ways that were part of the point of doing all this.  I’m coming off a bunch of food freelance work, some in last week’s Reader, some in next week’s Time Out, preparing the next video, and continuing to try to keep up with the city’s heedless-of-recession expanding restaurant scene.

There are a few milestones to note.  Total views of my videos are approaching 40,000— and it’s remarkable that even the ones that are close to two years old continue to draw viewers steadily, only a couple each day admittedly, but still, it’s great to see that the foraging one has passed 7000 views, the Texas barbecue one is over 4000, and others have passed 3000 and 2000 months or even years after they were first made.  (The one for which I risked my life on a whitefish fishing boat, alas, is taking a long time to reach 1000, though.)

Another milestone is that the new version of the site, a long cherished project, is up, if still in the process of refinement.  But its main goals— highlighting the videos, adding a proper blogroll, keeping me from having to manually turn all the type from dark gray to black, etc.— are already accomplished, big thanks to my friend and collaborator Wyatt Mitchell.

And one of Sky Full of Bacon’s goals, to help establish my name as a food guy around town, has certainly worked.  That doesn’t mean everything I pitch gets bought (or even acknowledged) but it certainly helps, and it also means that editors come to me with things they need done that they know to be up my alley, which is the freelancer’s dream, surely.  I thank all those who have taken me seriously since I went from defiant, sometimes obnoxious citizen media at LTHForum to trying to be a pro, and have included me in many different kinds of projects and events.

Above all, I thank you, viewer-reader-commenter dear.  I’d do this if no one read it— the hypothetical there may be self-delusion at times— because to no small extent, this is where I keep my notes, but I wouldn’t do the videos if no one watched them.  I might do them for a lot fewer people than actually do watch them, though, so to know that something like the population of Naperville has watched them, that I could have filled the Chicago Theater 10 times over with all the viewers of my videos, is pretty cool.  Thank you for your visits, your support, your comments and retweets and Facebook and Vimeo Likes, and please, help yourself to the sausages.  The elves worked on them all morning.

Meanwhile, since it’s almost the end of the quarter, here are the best things I’ve eaten in the past few months, following up on the list at the end of this post:

• Burnt ends at L.C.’s in Kansas City (post to come)
• Bionic Burger, fries and cherry limeade, Wichita (post to come)
• Strawberry rhubarb pie made by me with Green City strawberries and rhubarb
• Hoosier Mama asparagus/lemon/ricotta handpie
• Rib tips at Mary’s BBQ, 606 S. Pulaski
• Collard greens at Fat Willy’s, which was way better than I remembered from, uh, 5 or 6 years ago
• Wild boar naan’wich, Gaztro-Wagon
• Thai-lime-cilantro ice cream at Jeni’s in Columbus
• Oil-poached halibut at Everest
• Pea soup at LM Restaurant
• Sturgeon and spongecake dessert at Blackbird (that’s two separate dishes, by the way)
• Cranberry-orange teacake at Bleeding Heart Bakery, first thing I’ve really loved there
• Scallops served on braised oxtail at Longman & Eagle
• Gin, Great Lakes Distillery, and Maria’s Pizza, Milwaukee
• Jared Wentworth/Longman & Eagle’s waffle with dehydrated bacon and ice cream, Baconfest

Within every first-person food essay is a deeply buried lede, and that lede is, “God I love talking about myself.”

A well-known local food writer retweeted that yesterday (I’d say who it originally came from, but Twitter Is Over Capacity and so I can’t find out who the original author is). We would never wish to disappoint those looking for evidence of solipsism in blogging, so here is my fascinating life in food over the last few days…

That was last week’s Green City Market summed up in a photo. I made, it will come as no surprise, asparagus soup and strawberry-rhubarb pie that night.

One thing they’ve been working on at Green City is having more meat vendors, so it was exciting to see Dietzler Beef and Becker Lane Pork available there. Dietzler Beef is widely used in local restaurants (you’ll hear about it in the next Sky Full of Bacon video) and Jude Becker’s pork, of course, becomes La Quercia Acorn Edition pork, among other things. That said… the Dietzler prices were not insane ($7/lb. for beef… well, it’s really good beef) but Becker was charging $12/lb. for pork belly and into the $20s for some cuts. Sure, if you’re going to roast a little piece of belly, Blackbird style, it would be worth it for meat of this quality, but that’s way out of my range for making bacon, say. (I pay about $5— with shipping— from another Iowa producer, and am very happy with it.) I don’t fault them for this, and I’m happy to see more suppliers, but that’s just the reality of what I, for one, will spend.

Those were purple radishes from Kinnikinnick (which I’m finally spelling right). The next day I went to visit these radishes at their home— yes! I finally shot the last footage for the next video at Kinnikinnick Farm! Actually I took the boys along, and Dave Cleverdon’s granddaughter was visiting, so what started as a 15-minute stop to get some establishing shots and B-roll, turned into an afternoon of farm fun for the boys, including a picnic lunch on the farm. (There’s no such thing as visiting a farmer for 15 minutes and not eating anything, I’ve found.) So anyway, a really pleasant day on the farm, the rain held off until just as we were leaving, and you should see some of that footage very soon, I think.

Now then, here’s a test of how much of a Chicago foodie you are: how many of these backs of heads can you identify? You should be able to get at least three between the two photos:

I was invited, courtesy of Mr. Steve Dolinsky, to an event honoring Grant Achatz for Alinea placing #7 in the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants thing. (#7 makes it the highest-ranking restaurant in North America.) It was accompanied by a lunch at Everest. Given that the list tends to favor Old World places and virtues (though Dolinsky talked about working to change that), there was something oddly fitting about our most avant-garde four-star restaurant being feted at perhaps the most classical.

I’d only eaten at Everest once before, more than a decade ago. I think Chef Joho is one of our local heroes— pun intended; he was buying locally before local was cool— and I like Brasserie Jo a lot, where he gets down with the tarte a l’oignon and other Alsatian everyday food, but I have to admit that whenever I was going to drop an Everest-sized wad in the years since then, I was always more inclined to spend it on avant-garde novelty than classical French, however accomplished. Nothing against it, just not my sweet spot for where I’d spend my own money, I thought.

In my La Quercia video, Joho talks about the first time he tasted their prosciutto, and says, “It was the closest to perfection that you can do, even though perfection is nonexistent.” (I like that comment because the second part of it shows that he’s thinking seriously and discriminatingly in the first part, and not just handing out compliments casually.)

So you see that piece of halibut, poached in oil, with morels and asparagus and a butter sauce? I mean, morels and asparagus and butter, what could be more traditional, expected, breaking-no-paradigms French food, right?

Well, what Joho said.

So there, that wasn’t even me talking, let alone about me.

(By the way, the backs of heads you should have been able to ID were Tony Mantuano, Jean Joho, Steve Dolinsky, and Grant Achatz. And if you’d like to taste Joho’s food for free, he’ll be at Paulina Meat Market this Saturday.)

There’s a new smackdown on the underground dining thing, by Steve Dolinsky. He attended a Rabbit Hole dinner and was unimpressed:

Our third course, a homemade pappardelle with fresh ricotta was just plain boring. It needed lemon juice to brighten it up, as well as salt and pepper; there was allegedly some marrow in the sauce, but we couldn’t detect any; the pasta – while clearly hand-formed – was gummy and not exceptionally pleasing.

Read it all, but that pretty much sets the tone.

What floored me about this was the price: he spent about $200 for himself and his wife. As Dolinsky rightly observes, “after you drop $170 plus $30 tip… you then realize that for $200 you could have had a killer meal at one of any number of great places – Naha, Topolo, Avec, Blackbird, North Pond, etc.”

Price, of course, isn’t the only consideration here. But to me it’s a pretty good indicator that the underground restaurant movement isn’t underground in any way that really matters. In theater, say, something like this might be young people starting out, putting on work that’s too daring or experimental to make it with a downtown audience, performing in a dilapidated space in an edgy neighborhood, and charging low prices because it’s not about money and charging low prices gives you a certain freedom that higher prices would constrict.

But these underground dinners are like somebody finding the dilapidated space in the edgy neighborhood– and then charging $85 per seat for an illegal performance of The Lion King. They use an underground atmosphere to cover the fact that they’re trying to serve a Blackbird-level meal at a Blackbird-level price without the costly support system of Blackbird. If you could pull it off, it would probably be pretty lucrative. But they often seem not to pull it off, and so you wind up with a sub-Blackbird experience at the full Blackbird price, The Lion King in cheap Halloween costumes.

To me, the underground dining experience can only be justified one of two ways. One, is at a price that absorbs some of the diner’s risk. At $50, I’m game for adventure, at $100, it almost seems an insult to a city full of fine, hardworking restaurants to spend my money instead on some amateur who gets to evade many of their fixed costs, yet presumes herself in their company. Some of the caterers who’ve gone on to open restaurants have done this, such as Bonsoiree, at such modest prices, and it’s a reasonable path for getting feedback, practice, etc. in anticipation of opening a place or simply being a better caterer. That’s cool.

Two, is by being underground in some manner more meaningful than simply not paying the city a license fee. People put on Beckett or Dario Fo or, in their early days, Mamet or Letts in some ratty storefront, because it represented an alternative to big commercial theater. But what’s underground dining being alternative to— rigid bourgeois notions of how rickety your table should be? The dinner I attended was all full of talk about stuff coming straight from the farmer (who was present) to the table. Great, I’m all for it and more of it, but every week I eat at some place that’s touting its Gunthorp chickens and its Dietzler beef and so on. Not exactly new ground or a challenge to The Man that’s going to flip our dining paradigms. Likewise the kid who was going to introduce people to molecular gastronomy— in the city of Alinea. Our restaurants are already Steppenwolf, you’re not going to wow us by putting on yet another production of American Buffalo.

I could imagine underground dining experiences that would really wow me, but they wouldn’t just be second-tier versions of dinners I can already have. They might be something you can’t get here commercially, like a deeply authentic Southern meal or a Portuguese one or an exotically authentic Asian one, that challenged you to eat things you’d never touch normally. Or they might be more like performance pieces that make us experience food in a manner as much theatrical as culinary, eating and interacting with food in entirely new, provocative ways. I’d love to believe that there’s a space outside the commercial realm for different ways of dining and experiencing food, but I’m largely unsold on the idea that there’s a need outside the commercial realm for a second commercial realm that gets to do the exact same thing but avoid a lot of the entirely reasonable hassles involved, like health inspection and insurance. At the very least, I expect it to try harder than that to justify its positioning as something truly alternative— and that an alternative is needed at this historical moment.

First, some trivial news, then some deeper thinking.

When Howard Hawks set out to make his first western, Red River, he took his cast and crew to the location, and they rented a herd of cattle for the picture. A big herd, not some make 20 steers look like 200 herd, but thousands.

And then it rained. And rained, and rained. For five weeks straight. And by the first day they could finally shoot anything, they were over budget by millions. No wonder that the next time he made a western, Rio Bravo, he shot most of it on a soundstage.

Well, that’s not a perfect analogy for the delays before the next Sky Full of Bacon, but it will do. I shot the second of the two main interviews in early April, when the farm where I was shooting was still too cool to plant, and planned to come back at the beginning of May to get some more vibrant shots of planting in spring. Only, as you may have noticed, we had a seriously rainy May. And you need at least a couple of dry days before you can go out there and plant. And it took pretty much the whole month to get that. I was ready to shoot one day and then the farmer had a cold and had to cancel. And so the two month gap between episodes quickly stretched to three. I can only chuckle mordantly at the thought— hey, Mr. City Dilettante Videomaker, you wanted to find out what it’s like for farmers to have your whole work and life dependent on the weather? Well, this is what it’s like!

* * *

But it’s not wasted time— as I mentioned in passing, a redesign of this site is in the works, and will debut soon. Also, I’ve been lining up shoots for the summer, so I’ll have an interesting assortment of footage banked to keep the videos rolling out more regularly.

One guy I talked to, I honestly don’t know if it will ever happen or not. He’s a genuine prophet of a different kind of agriculture, there’s a page or two on him in The Omnivore’s Dilemma though he’s not otherwise media-overexposed, I didn’t think. What’s more, what he talks about is all through that book, and I’m betting he, with 30+ years experience living it, didn’t get it from Pollan.

So I sent him a packet, letter and a selection of the videos, and gave him a call. He started out by flatly saying no, too busy during the time frame, too many people who want to interview him and turn it into 90 vacuous seconds. I assured him what was different was, I try to go in depth for 20 minutes, not cut it down to soundbites.

Then it got interesting. He was more open to the idea at some future point, but at the same time, even 20 minutes is hardly anything, he’s working on a book and has been talking (to whom if anyone, I have no idea) about a Carl Sagan-like series on the subject, 10 hour-long episodes, that kind of thing. And then his point of view exploded in multiple dimensions and he went off on how organic farming for overpriced restaurants for foodies in big cities (in other words, exactly what most of my videos have been about) isn’t the solution, it’s a distraction from the real problem which is soil erosion, which is the result of 10,000 years of the wrong kind of farming and the scientific method which reduces nature to problems to be solved (that, by the way, is all over Pollan too) and it’s no good to tell people a little bit of it, they need to get the whole thing, because they need to see that we need to change everything from growing annuals to growing perennials, change the whole basis of agriculture or we’re doomed.

So this is one of those guys with a Big Idea. And guys with Big Ideas sometimes are cranks and sometimes change the world, and it’s not necessarily clear which is which at first.  Or maybe it’s a distinction without a difference.  And, well, I can see how people like him lose patience with the media turning their Big Idea into soundbites, even as there’s probably no way to win people over without first trivializing your Big Idea enough to get its foot in the door.  A contradiction which, it was clear, he was acutely aware of and didn’t need me to drive home the irony of.

In the end he gave me a little room for hope.  I could write up a proposal of what I was up to, and show how well I understood the topic, and he’d grade it and I had to get at least a B+ (yes, he really said that, with a chuckle— but not joking).  And then maybe, at a less busy time of year, it could happen.

You know, I may do it.  I don’t mind being put through hoops for this guy, because hey, how much would you go through to get a chance to hang for a day with Wendell Berry?  Or Thomas Jefferson?  Or John Brown?  I have no problem swallowing my ego and doing some extra homework to make that happen and be in the presence of somebody who might just change the world.  What does give me pause is… how far do I have to become an acolyte to win the chance?  Do I have to become a convert— or, contemptibly, fake it— to convince him I’m worth his time?  It’s a dicey thing for me because I do tend to make videos about subjects I’m highly sympathetic to, so the temptation to go from sympathetic observer to salesman is there.  And as much as I think his research and work is important, I can’t say I really expect the whole world to switch to what he’s working on any time soon, on his terms precisely.  I could see it making a big difference.  But I don’t think he would see his work being 20% adopted, even, as being any better than ignoring it completely.

In the end I asked him, if he feels that he already gets all the mainstream publicity he can stomach, is there somebody else in the area who’s doing something that he thinks is worthwhile?  The reply was withering— they’re all doing industrial monoculture agriculture, they’re all the problem. So apart from the people working at his place, he has no followers in his own country.  A video could, one supposes, help with that, help interest others in his vision of farming.  But for a prophet, accepting the diminution of your message even into 20 minutes may be too much of the world for you to bear— even to gain the world.

YOUR UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA

presents

“Blogging and You, The Chef”

Educational Film No. 261

(A sunny, tree-lined street.)

NARRATOR: This is Pleasantville.  A happy little town with a butcher… a baker… and a fine French restaurant for anniversaries and business dinners.  But today, things are not so happy in the kitchen of Pierre, Pleasantville’s best-known chef.

(A French chef, boiling mad in his kitchen.)

PIERRE: Sacre bleu! Zees bloggers! Zey make me so angry! Who told zem zey could write about my food! I am Pierre! Who are zey!

NARRATOR: Pierre has a common problem today— let’s call it “blogger-bitis.”

PIERRE: Demanding zees, taking pictures of zat, zese bloggers, they drive me crazy!  And now some leetle crazy man living in a basement has made fun of my lobster thermidor! By Escoffier’s beard, I will never allow bloggers in my restaurant again!

NARRATOR: Now, hold on a second there, Frenchy! So you think bloggers are crazy men living in basements like beatniks or Communists?

PIERRE: But of course! Who else would write about food? It ees madness, no?

NARRATOR: Maybe you need to come on a little journey with me to meet a blogger or two.

(Pierre is whisked magically from his kitchen to… a doctor’s office.)

PIERRE: Doc Wilson?  He ees a blogger!

NARRATOR: You betcha! Check out his food photos— quite the amateur photographer, isn’t he.

(And then to a classroom.)

PIERRE: Miss Carpenter, ze schoolteacher?

NARRATOR: She has the Chocolate and Tetrazzini blog.  You see, Pierre, having opinions about food isn’t a sign of craziness any more— it’s like any other interest.  Like betting on horses, or collecting guns.

(Stock footage of scientists at work, studying bloggers.)

NARRATOR: Government scientists in your department of social media have been studying bloggers for years, and they’ve found three key points.

One, bloggers are normal, well-adjusted Americans who simply enjoy talking about and comparing the food they’ve enjoyed.

Two, they come in all colors and sizes.  Some may be sleazy ignorant vermin trying to cadge a free meal, but most are decent, law-abiding Americans who know a lot about food, pay their own way and actually have fewer ethical entanglements than professional writers and editors, with their complex relationships with powerful restaurant owners and publicists and need to curry favor with celebrity chefs to sell magazines.

Three, though I know the occasional bad review stings—

PIERRE: You are telling ze me!

NARRATOR: —Bloggers and other online food media are actually the best thing that’s happened to your business in years.

PIERRE: Bah! How can zis be?

NARRATOR: You see, Pierre, as a famous English sissy said, “The only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.” Bloggers, Tweeters, even Yelpers all spread the news about your restaurant and help make it an exciting place for the people of Pleasantville to go. More voices means more chances for you to be discovered. And it means if someone says something stupid, there are plenty of other places for you to counter that opinion with a smarter, better one.

PIERRE: So… ze blogger, he is not my enemy?

NARRATOR: No, Pierre, he’s not your enemy.  He’s your customer— and he can be your friend, for just a fraction of the ass-kissing and ego-stroking that a professional food writer would require.

PIERRE: I’ll do it! I’ll be nice to ze bloggers from now on!

(Pierre is whisked back to his kitchen— and joined by Doc Wilson and Miss Carpenter, who are eager to document his cooking with camera and steno pad.)

MISS CARPENTER: Blogging. It’s as normal as baking apple pie!

DOC WILSON: Blogging. It’s democracy in action! (Except in my office. I didn’t go through medical school to argue with what you read on flippin’ Wikipedia, bub.)

PIERRE: Blogging! Eet’s… money in ze bank for me!

MISS CARPENTER: Can you make this low-fat? My readers like low-fat recipes.

(Pierre picks up a cleaver and contemplates the sharp edge for a moment.)

THE END

In this week’s Reader, I have a story on a Korean vegan buffet located in a dive bar.  How did such an improbable thing come to be?  Read it here or pick up a copy at your nearest sandwich shop or coffeehouse.  And savor the picture which somehow manages to make this dingy tavern look like an attractive brunch spot.

Chicago magazine has folks a-flutter (you can’t say a-twitter anymore) with a list of the 40 Greatest Chicago Restaurants of All Time.  Okay, I’ll play, I’m always happy to see the past get some attention alongside the trendy.  Chicago’s list is pretty much what you’d expect: three parts hot restaurants of today (Alinea, Avec) or the very recent past (Le Francais, Gordon), one part names of the more distant past whose luster still lasts (The Bakery, Henrici’s), one part nostalgia for North Shore folk who grew up on the likes of Fanny’s in Evanston or Don Roth’s.

Of course, some of this is pure hypothesizing about things we’ll never have direct experience of, like a debate over whether John Barrymore or Richard Burbage was a better Hamlet; even though a snippet of Barrymore’s Hamlet is preserved in a screen test, we can never see it with the eyes that found it revelatory in the 1920s, and we couldn’t eat at The Bakery and find it new now, either.  Really, this is more like a list of the most memorable or influential restaurants, and in that sense I’ll throw out five of my own that I would replace something on Chicago’s list with.

Rosded.

Chicago’s pick: Arun’s
My pick: Thai Town
Enough already about Arun’s, a temple of overpriced Thai dining which Chicago magazine has been bowing down to for two decades.  Erik M., whose knowledge of Thai food in Chicago is light years beyond anyone’s (even though he doesn’t live here any more), credits Thai Town at Belmont and Clark, in its original incarnation in the early 1970s, as the first Thai restaurant that Thais took seriously, or that took its own cuisine seriously.  The owner later opened Thai Villa at Western and Winnemac, helping launch the little Thai restaurant and shopping enclave near Lincoln Square that still includes many of the most authentic and venerable Thai restaurants.  Neither of his restaurants exists today in anything resembling its original form, but I suspect Lincoln Square’s Rosded, which dates to around the same vintage (and is pictured above), conveys much of the atmosphere of these prototypes of one of Chicago’s great glories of ethnic dining.

Chicago’s pick: Spiaggia
My pick: Colosimo’s
Nothing against Spiaggia, hey, I had my wedding reception there, but before anybody needed to revitalize Italian food in Chicago and return it to its authentic roots, first they had to bastardize it and give it its colorful reputation in America.  And Big Jim Colosimo’s joint did just that, introducing Chicagoans to both the pleasures of hearty red sauce Italian and to the illicit delights of dining amidst mobsters, not least on the day in 1920 that Big Jim himself was gunned down in it, turning control of the nascent Outfit to Johnny Torrio, who in turn would retire and hand the keys to his young lieutenant, Alphonse Capone.  (That quintessential Chicago dish, Chicken Vesuvio, is often attributed to Colosimo’s, though Rene G says there’s no documentation to support that and my bet is the dish originated at a restaurant actually called Vesuvio which was in existence at roughly the same time.)  Postcards and matchbooks are worth many thousands of words here, so check out this page full of Colosimo’s memorabilia, and savor a reputation we still haven’t escaped.

Chicago’s pick: Avec
My pick: The Dill Pickle Club
Today it’s radical when guys who own a fancy restaurant go downscale and put in community seating so people might actually talk to each other, gingerly. Back when the Dill Pickle Club opened in 1916, radical genuinely meant radical, in dress, behavior and ideas, and could get you and your whole community of Wobblies, hobos, poets, slumming trust fund types and dope fiends arrested. Mainly a “little theater,” the place also had a tearoom, readings and lectures by anybody willing to stand up and take a chance, and in general was the crossroads of intellectual ferment across class lines in this rude place by the lake during the pre-Depression era. Everything Wicker Park or any other center of hipsterism wants to be, the Dill Pickle Club was.  Here’s a good overview.

Rib tips, Clarksdale, MS

Chicago’s pick: Carson’s
My pick: the first guy from Mississippi to start selling rib tips and hot links on the South Side
Not having grown up here, I don’t have nostalgia for any old white people’s barbecue joint— Carson’s, Russell’s, Twin Anchors— and so I’m much more interested in Chicago’s indigenous black style, the rib tip and hot links joints that would eventually be associated with aquarium smokers.  Before the aquarium smoker came to be, though, somebody was making this stuff over a 30-gallon drum cut in half in a vacant lot somewhere, for his fellow transplants from Mississippi come to seek work in the North.  While he filled the air with smoke, maybe a neighbor named Chester Burnett started filling the air with blues at the same time.  We remember Howlin’ Wolf; the guy who fed him, not so much, but here’s to his memory, whoever he was.

Chicago’s Pick: Ambria
My pick: Hot Doug’s
It kind of says it all that the only place actually busted under our short-lived foie gras ban wasn’t a French restaurant but a hot dog stand.  Chicago honors Ambria, the place that represented Rich Melman and Lettuce’s graduation to the big leagues of fine dining in their view, when a better choice would be Fritz That’s It, R.J. Grunt’s, the beginning of the Melman empire and the jokey cartoonization of dining out that dominated our scene through so much of the 70s and 80s.  But to me Melman’s conscious climb from low to high over the years is trumped by Doug Sohn, who simply saw no contradiction in putting foie gras, artisanal cheese and truffle honey on a sausage, and then naming it for someone on American Idol.  He’s the godfather of all the high-low combinations that are currently one of the liveliest aspects of our dining scene— or at least the Solozzo to Bayless’ Don Vito.

[note: I thought I had read somewhere that Fritz That’s It actually predated Grunt’s, but that the Melman corporate history had been rewritten to accommodate the one that still existed and make it the official beginning of the empire.  But David Hammond disputed this, and when I checked with Peter Engler/Rene G, he was quite certain that Grunt’s really was first and that Fritz actually came third, after Jonathan Livingston Seafood.  Also, thanks to Gaper’s Block for the link!]

For the last few days I’ve hinted at a big announcement… here it is. Under this new deal, Sky Full of Bacon podcasts will be dubbed for Spanish-language online viewing in Mexico and Latin America, bringing me exposure to a huge new market. Grupo Intermundo, the Yahoo of Mexico, is a great partner and I’m really excited about this opportunity to showcase my work for a new audience.

They prepared this minute-long promo to explain what Sky Full of Bacon is to their advertisers and promotional partners in Latin America, and I think my English-speaking viewers will also enjoy seeing how Sky Full of Bacon translates to another culture.

Sky Full of Bacon: Latin American Promo Reel from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Grupo Intermundo, Mexico’s leading online content provider, is pleased to announce that it has acquired Western hemisphere Spanish-language rights to Chicago’s leading food video podcast, Sky Full of Bacon.

“Michael Gebert’s Sky Full of Bacon has built a substantial brand for multiplatform online food content in North America,” says Grupo Intermundo director of content acquisition Estella Ruiz-Leibowitz. “By extending its reach to over 100 million Mexican and Central and South American online users, we will increase exposure to the Sky Full of Bacon brand in one of the fastest-growing markets in the world, while adding an acclaimed and unique voice to Grupo Intermundo’s portfolio of food-related content.”

“Grupo Intermundo is the most dynamic partner in lifestyle-oriented content in Latin America,” said Sky Full of Bacon creator-producer Michael Gebert, “and this is an exciting opportunity to monetize the Sky Full of Bacon brand across a wide range of Latino demographic niches.”

The first translated Sky Full of Bacon video, “Los Últimos Días de Kugelis,” will premiere on April 24th, with the back catalog of existing videos premiering approximately one each month after that. Upcoming titles will include “El Pastel: Entre la Vida y la Muerte” and “El Desierto Acuoso de los Pescados Blancos.”

Fanesca is just one of the Easter treats you’ll find in this Time Out piece by me.

And speaking of Easter, check out FOSFOB (friend of Sky Full of Bacon) Cathy Lambrecht here.

Got a really cool comment (not that they all aren’t!) on the Healthy Food video which would otherwise go overlooked:

What a wonderful film. The only thing negative I have to say is that in all the years I grated potatoes with my Grandma, Great Aunt, Aunt, Mother, Sisters, Cousins etc. to make Kugelis, I never had one of those fantastic power potato grinders, just one of those little skillet like grids that took a lot of skin off my knuckles too! My Gran said it adds to the flavor.

You really captured the spirit, and time and place. You caught the trials of Jurgis from the Jungle, the enclaves of the huddled masses, the growth of pride when Lithuania became a country after the First World War right as the Lugenhoppers were starting to make it in America, the difficult and complex motives, stories and choices made by the displaced persons and post Second World War immigrants, the struggles in Chicago inthe 1960s, the fear, the racism, the justified concern of loss. Geeze. You caught it all for me, a 1/2 Lugen, 4th generation, suburban raised (but Bridgeport, Cicero, Marquette Park descended), non-Lithuanian speaking Chicago-loving Brazilian Resident Kugelis maker. Damn. I wanna’ shake your hand.

Consider it shaken, virtually. Thanks.

And watch for a big announcement soon…

Like the pizza at the auto show, today’s post is just a whole bunch of stuff thrown together:

• First off, thanks to my post on Tuesday about when a review is a review, I was a last-minute invitee to WBEZ’s Lunchbox series of online media guy chat thingies, along with a real Ocean’s Twelve of local food media folks— Kevin Pang (who dropped the only major news of the thing, that the Trib food section is about to get all reinvented, including him being Mr. Cheap Eats, which was always the best part of it anyway), Steve Dolinsky, Sula of the Reader and Sudo of Chicagoist, Julia Kramer of Time Out, Mike Nagrant, David Hammond, and Audarshia Townsend of 312 Dining Diva.  It lasted an hour, but you can read the transcript in ten or fifteen minutes, it was a lively discussion not unlike Nagrant’s and my five-part year end chat a few months back.  (Well, not unlike if you don’t count A LOT SHORTER.)

• No Beard nomination for me this year, but there are very good things in the video category (which is what I entered), including one I’ve linked to many times, Liza de Guia’s Food, Curated.  I asked her which she entered and she couldn’t remember exactly, but here are a couple of them:

Notes from a Lone Acre: 1 Dude. 1 Acre. Many Little Anecdotes. from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Brooklyn’s Urban Beekeepers: Breaking The Law For The Planet (Part I) from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Also nominated were my supporters-linkers the terrific site Serious Eats, for this portrait of a farmer who sells at the Union Square Greenmarket in New York:

Last is a site called Alwayshungryny (yes, it was all New York this time), who don’t let you embed and also didn’t tell me which specific videos they entered, so go here and just watch whatever you please.

• But I do have some other exciting announcements coming up.  It will perhaps be no surprise that one of them is strongly bacon-oriented… and is taking place April 10. It’s sold out, so you either know what it is and have tickets… or it kinda doesn’t matter.

• Another announcement with international flavor will be coming later in the week…

• Finally, watch for next week’s Time Out Chicago— I’ll be talking ethnic Easter traditions around Chicago.