Well, she could be; she’ll be on it when the new season begins next week. Her name is Beverly Kim, she’s chef de cuisine, I think, some no. 2 position anyway, at Aria in the Fairmont Hotel, and she made a cool Halloween dessert with black cardamom. The story’s here.

And kudos to anyone who gets that obscure movie reference. Key Ingredient returns after a two-week vacation with Kevin Hickey of the posh Four Seasons restaurant Seasons. The ingredient is Mountain Ash Berries, but the revelation for me was the squab you’ll see in the video, which was easily the best I’ve ever tasted. The article is here.

I’m doing so many little video clips at Grub Street now, many of them short one-take interviews, that I’m not going to link and embed all of them, but I will call attention to ones that are a little more artful and here’s one: Mark and Liz Mendez, shortly before the opening of Vera. Mark, of course, was in Sky Full of Bacon #15 as well as this Key Ingredient (back when Vera was going to be called Uva).

Library, The Public Hotel.

So Monday morning there will be an announcement which many have guessed, or simply assumed, to judge by the congratulations I’ve been getting since before it was official. I am taking the post of Chicago editor (which is to say, writer and editor of myself) for Grub Street Chicago. Which, if you don’t know, is a site which aggregates and creates foodie world news in several major foodie cities.

In doing so I’m going straight against what one of the best-known people on the Chicago food scene has just done:

A couple of weeks ago I went to an announcement party at Union Sushi & Barbeque Bar for Steve Dolinsky’s new site, SteveDolinsky.com. Dolinsky, who is mainly known for his food segments for ABC 7 in Chicago, had (among his other gigs) been the food blogger at Vocalo, the bloggy offshoot of WBEZ which has now simply become WBEZ.org. He gave that up, and my friend Louisa Chu took it up:

One of the reasons Dolinsky told me he had left WBEZ and spiffed up his own site (for which he plans to create an impressive amount of weekly content) was that frankly, he felt he should be building his own brand on the web, not somebody else’s. I agreed completely at the time, and still do in general— and the value of my own efforts at personal brandbuilding were quickly affirmed by the owner of the restaurant introducing himself and turning out to be a Twitter follower of mine. (Okay, he follows 2000 people, but he’d responded to me on occasion, and I recognized his Twitter name.)

Afterwards, Louisa and I checked out the renovated Pump Room…

and the Library, which is a very nice, quiet bar, not at all overrun as I assumed this highly-hyped opening would be.

So why am I doing the opposite? Well, one, they’re paying me, and I really want to be able to afford to do things like go cool foreign places with my kids while they’re still young enough to tolerate me. (Happy 13th birthday, Myles.) As Mr. Mom/advertising freelancer/food writer person, I don’t exactly have the cares of someone depending wholly on their food freelance income, but I could certainly use an income. Two, although I have good access to the food scene and its notable figures, I’m sure just the needs of covering the scene will expose me to many more things much more rapidly. Three, I like the idea of being compelled to produce on a regular basis. To be forced to think up story ideas, day after day, to follow up leads right then. This is my training for the marathon, my fighting middle age contentment by taking on something new and demanding. Better to burn out than to fade away, and all that. So, I’ll be doing the grunt work of aggregating news from all over every day, but I’ll also be trying to produce original content just about every day, interviews and videos and slideshows and commentary. Bookmark it, if you haven’t already!

Marcus Jernmark and Chandra Ram at Plate Cooks.

Not that Dolinsky’s event is the only thing I’ve been to lately, but most of the others quickly got repurposed into material for Grub Street’s insatiable appetite. One was the industry how-to conference Plate Cooks, put on by Plate, a trade magazine based in Chicago whose editor Chandra Ram I’ve met on several occasions. Two different publicists invited me to events, one with Marcus Jernmark, of New York’s Aquavit, which used to be Marcus Samuelsson’s place. To be honest, I had never heard of him and barely of Aquavit, and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with that here, but I had nothing else that morning and I figured, hey, I can attend a chef’s demo at Kendall, why not? Little did I know how grateful I’d be for this material the next week when I started filling in at Grub Street; you can see what I made of that here.

Another was a butchering demo with Rob Levitt and Michael Paley of Louisville’s Proof on Main; I’ve never made it to one of Rob’s butchering demos so it was a great chance to see one and share it, finishing the demo off with Paley’s coppa and fried pig tails:

After that one I stuck around for the next, a panel about sustainability, which included Randy Zweiban and Ari Weinzweig, the co-founder of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which I had visited for the first time a few months back. I especially wanted to meet him… because I was already planning to have dinner with him that night. Anyway, Plate Cooks was a great industry event, strong on the technical side which I found fascinating, light on the showbizy-commercialized side even though it did have sponsored interludes (but even those, like Tony Priolo demoing risotto with potatoes in it, were perfectly respectable and worth attending). I’m definitely going to try to get invited again next year.

But wait, you were about to ask, how was I planning on having dinner with the co-founder of Zingerman’s again? Well, some months back the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board, who invited Hammond and me on this, invited me to a bacon dinner at L’Etoile in Madison, part of the push around Weinzweig’s new book, Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon.

And I’m not just repaying their hospitality when I say this was a fantastic dinner, worth the 3 hours each way. I was a little apprehensive about having salt/baconfat overload, but I should have know that L’Etoile’s Troy Miller would have a delicate touch with bacon, bringing out the flavor of numerous different bacons in delicate, surprising ways:

But the other great part of it was that I had the chance to talk with Weinzweig about the prospect of doing a Sky Full of Bacon video at some future date. As I said to him, “Think of some part of your business that you’re fascinated by but no one else seems to be interested in. I’ll be interested in it.” And he was receptive. (In the meantime, this short clip ran on Grub Street.)

So wait, you say, does that mean Sky Full of Bacon is still going? Hell yeh, it’s still going and Key Ingredient comes back this week, too. SFOB is certainly going to be quieter, I’ve tried to do a post a week no matter what, and that won’t happen now. But I’m going to make the next two promised videos on schedule, and there will be something here from time to time.

In the meantime I had a couple of suggestions to check out in Madison before I headed home the next day. One was suggested by one of the Milk Board folks, a very tidy and friendly German sausage place, Bavaria Sausage, where I picked up a bunch of really well-made sausages that went happily into a choucroute garnie that very night when I got home. The other was an old-school Italian deli, Fraboni’s, suggested by Matthew, who comments here from time to time. It’s not as impressive as Tenuta’s in Kenosha or Glorioso’s in Milwaukee, but you certainly wouldn’t be sorry you had it nearby, either, and I grabbed a nice sub (could have had better bread, but what was inside was just fine) for the road home.

Check me out at my new home, Grub Street Chicago, from now on, and my personal home here, too, at least once in a while when I have something to say or show here.

If you came from me being the blogger of the week at Gourmet Live, welcome! The main thing to see is my latest Sky Full of Bacon podcast in the viewer above.

I’m subbing at Grub Street Chicago this week, so anything new I write will be there. Key Ingredient is off for two weeks, but you can see lots of old ones by clicking on it under categories at right.

So next week I will again be subbing on Grub Street Chicago, so watch for me there. In the meantime, though, I am finally back at my desk after various midwestern journeys, here to report on things strange and marvelous:

Yah’s Cuisine

The very last thing I shot for my barbecue video was the standup with Peter Engler in front of the original Leon’s Bar-B-Q location on 79th. Afterwards I asked him to suggest somewhere to eat in the area and he smiled mischievously and said, you may not want this after talking barbecue, but… how about vegan soul food? I know there has been a little discussion of such places on LTHForum but I must admit I hadn’t really paid much attention to the vegan scene on the other side of town, unaccountably…

Would it be too much to say that I’m itching for an excuse to get back? No, it would not, and this was even with Peter apologizing that it wasn’t nearly as good as the first time he went (the proprietress Yah herself was absent that day, and anyway, it’s probably all fresher and hotter on weekends). Even so, I loved the nutty corn cakes, the greens with a surprising depth of pot likker for being untouched by pork, the fresh watermelon-ade. Seriously, a contender for my top ten list this year even on an off day, and that much more of a reproach to the wan home-cooked vegan plates of blah mostly served on the north side. There’s meatless magic happening here.

Yah’s Cuisine
2347 E 75th St
Chicago, IL 60649
(773) 759-8517
www.yahscuisine.com

Village Inn, Middlebury IN

No, not that Village Inn, but an unrelated actual small town restaurant. Heading to a film festival in Ohio, I finally had a chance to use a book I got last Christmas called Cafe Indiana. The woman who wrote it, Joanne Raetz Stuttgen, has two of them, one for Indiana and one for Wisconsin, both identifying small town cafes and diners where the food is made the old way and the people are especially nice. I mapped out several spots along 80/90 and lunchtime struck near Middlebury, not too far from the Ohio border.

Lunch was freshly made, no industrial shortcuts, but it was pleasant, not dazzlingly good. But then we ordered pie…

I ordered blueberry sour cream, my friend Irv ordered rhubarb cream. They were wonderful. The crust wasn’t as perfectly flaky as Hoosier Mama’s, say, but the combination of bright in-season fruit and a slight tartness in both cases was homey, yet with a touch of sophistication, an almost musical counterpoint. One of the best ten-mile detours I’ve ever taken, and while there I learned about something else I’d never heard of— Bob Andy Pie. I asked what it was, and neither of the waitresses seemed to know— they said it was kind of like pumpkin pie. I wondered, persimmon? Paw paw?

Of course, the internet knew— Bob Andy is a simple custard pie with cinnamon that rises to the top making an attractive layered look, common in the Amish country of Indiana (which is exactly where we were). Like Hoosier Mama’s sugar cream pie, it’s a “desperation pie,” one you make when you’re out of fruit or anything else that might make a better pie.

Guess what I’m about to make.

Village Inn
107 S Main St
Middlebury, IN 46540
(574) 825-2043

Further Adventures in Massillon and Wooster, OH

For some unknown reason, there are two different old movie festivals in Ohio, and I’ve been to both some years. The one in Columbus has always also been an interesting food trip, the one in Massillon, on the outskirts of Akron, has been more an exercise in defensive eating, Massillon home mainly to fairly generic burger-and-salad-bar family restaurants. But slowly I’ve found things in Massillon worth eating, like the Swenson’s Galley Boy, an old-school double-decker drive-in burger native to the Akron area with mayo and bbq sauce on it— but more than the sum of its parts. I also found an Akron BBQ chain that has opened just down the street, Old Carolina Barbecue, and if not the greatest barbecue I ever had, is certainly real enough to be satisfying, its Southern Pride smoker (the same used at places like Smoque) visible from the dining room.

But the most interesting find was one some friends of mine, who seem to have been bitten by the food bug after being exposed to me (and Swenson’s) last year, turned up. Taggart’s Ice Cream wasn’t a secret to me, since it’s one of the few places in the Massillon area (actually Canton) listed at Road Food. The ice cream is all well and good, but my friends discovered the real gem on the menu, the total retro surprise tucked away in the sandwiches column: a genuine “ladies who lunch”-style cream cheese-olive-walnut spread sandwich on rye bread:

I had a grandmother— not this one, the other one— who used to make cream cheese and black olive spread. I kind of loved it but it was also one-dimensional, tasting as much of building materials or adhesives as food. With more pungent green olives in this one, and who knows what other culinary tricks, this brought one of grandma’s Depression-era staples to life. It couldn’t have fit the old movies we were seeing better. Another olive spread sandwich, Countess?

Other friends turned up another culinary attraction nearby— the university town of Wooster about 20 minutes to the west. It’s funny, I had gotten so used to Massillon being stuck culinarily in the 70s that it almost bothered me to see the world I normally live in, the foodie world, encroaching on my annual escape from obsessive foodieism. But Spoon Market was a very nice deli that would do any neighborhood in Chicago proud, full of things like La Quercia prosciutto and Jeni’s ice cream and serving fried kale chips alongside deli sandwiches.

But the real must-stop in Wooster is Tulipan, a Hungarian cafe and pastry shop. Reports on the goulash and paprikash for lunch were good, but the thing to go out of your way for— besides the note-perfect mittel-European setting, again, most appropriate for all these old movies made, so often, by refugees from central Europe— was the pastries, like this classic, and really splendid, walnut torte, not too sweet or gooey, a reproach to all the overdone yuppie cakes and cupcake trucks of our time:

Oh, to have a shop around the corner like this one… One of the mysteries of Chicago is why there isn’t much Hungarian food here; but it’s all over the area near Cleveland, and in my experience, always worth checking out, for dessert if nothing else.

Taggarts Ice Cream Parlor
1401 Fulton Rd NW
Canton, OH 44703
(330) 452-6844
http://taggartsicecream.com/

Spoon Market
147 South Market Street
Wooster, OH 44691
(330) 262-0880
http://www.spoon-market.com/

Tulipan
122 South Market Street
Wooster, OH 44691-4839
(330) 264-8092

* * *

And on to the best things I ate in the last quarter (for previous lists, click the category “Best Things I’ve Eaten Lately” at right). As always, Key Ingredient dishes are not included because they’re one-offs and you can’t go eat them; and I probably could include a couple of things from the Green City Market BBQ or the LTHForum picnic, but those too are kind of one-shots and anyway, I was concentrating on enjoying myself, not memorizing the profile of everything I tasted. Hey, it happens.

• Corn cakes and greens at Yah’s Cuisine (see above)
• Corn cakes of a different sort at bacon dinner at L’Etoile, Madison WI (report to come)
• Olive nut sandwich, Taggart’s Ice Cream Parlor, Canton OH
• Sour cream blueberry pie, Village Inn, Middlebury IN
• Octopus salad and grilled mackerel at Izakaya Yume
• Cold soba noodles, Ruxbin
• Grilled quail stuffed with garlic sausage, Nostrano, Madison WI
• My homemade strawberry-mint-basil jam (inspired by a Dale DeGroff cocktail)
• Burger and fries at Walt’s in Wichita
• Ham spread and cracker at Brobeck’s, Kansas City area (I forget which burb)
• Baozi buns at ING
• Short ribs and other stuff at Perennial Virant
• $6 chorizo tamale, Green City Market
• $1.50 tamale, Garibay Tamales
• World’s simplest lobster roll, New England Seafood Market
• Biryani-like something or other at Chaihanna, Buffalo Grove
• Sausages from Bavarian Sausage, Fitchburg, WI, as cooked by me in speedy choucroute garnie

Sugarcane! Dirk Flanigan of Henri and The Gage really goes to town on sugarcane, trying to use it a bunch of different ways. Not all of them worked but we were pretty dazzled by all the thinking he put into it. The piece is here. Note that Key Ingredient will be taking a two-week hiatus after this episode.

Too bad I wasn’t out of town and couldn’t pass this one to Hammond… he eats bugs all the time. The Seth Rogenesque Luke Creagan, of Pops For Champagne, makes short and funny work of a can of bamboo worms, marked “Not For Human Consumption.” The whole piece is here.

There’s more than food in Chicago’s South Side barbecue joints— there’s the whole history of African-Americans in Chicago.

Though not as famous as barbecue styles in other parts of the country, Chicago’s South Side barbecue culture is distinctive and shaped by the African-American experience in the 20th century— from the great migration from the South to the civil rights movement and racial turmoil of the 1960s. This in-depth tour talks to half a dozen pitmasters, a sauce maker, a pit manufacturer and barbecue historians to show how barbecue was shaped by life in Chicago and in turn served as a vehicle for the aspirations of the black community from the Depression to the present day. Oh, and there’s lots of juicy BBQ food porn in it, too.

(Yes, it’s by far the longest one I’ve ever done. But it won’t feel like it— barbecue is fun food and this is a jumpin’, jivin’ history. I thought about cutting it into two parts, but it’s the internet, if you want to pause it, there are plenty of logical places to take a break.)

LINKS

Here are some pieces that I did for Time Out Chicago, based on some of the interviews conducted here: this one interviews some pitmasters, this one is about the “aquarium” smoker. By the way, you know how you can tell an Avenue Metal aquarium smoker from one made by somebody else? Look for the octagonally-rounded corners, a distinctive design element. There’s one non-Avenue pit in the video. (Here’s some interesting history about the term.)

Here’s Meathead Goldwyn’s site, Amazing Ribs.

Here’s an ancient piece by Mike Sula that is more or less an account of the discovery of Honey 1, featuring Peter Engler who is in my video (and representing sort of the high point of the aquarium-smoker-no-sauce orthodoxy that dominated BBQ discussion at Chowhound and LTHForum for years).

Although this video pays high tribute to that style, I’m all for good barbecue however you make it, and you can see a master of the gas-cooker Southern Pride, Barry Sorkin of Smoque, in this Key Ingredient video by me. And of course, here’s my first video about barbecue, Texas barbecue to be specific.

One thing that didn’t make the final cut was Argia B. Collins’ career as a music producer (really, kind of a sponsor of up and coming talent) in the late 60s and 70s. Here’s the hit record he made with the soul singer Garland Green, and an interview with Green which mentions Collins as his mentor.

Here are links to sites of the businesses in the video, where any exists:

Lem’s Bar-B-Q
Honey 1 BBQ (incidentally, I made up the tagline you see on the homepage)
Cole’s Family BBQ
Avenue Metal
Argia B.’s Mumbo Sauce
Pizza-Ribs-N-Things seems to be down at the moment, but I left it in the video assuming it will come back…

This week at Key Ingredient: Shin Thompson of Bonsoiree cooks with burdock root. Read the piece here.

Longtime SFOB watchers will recall that burdock root was seen in the wild in this classic SFOB video.

This being episode #40, time to recap the last ten as dishes, as I last did here:

• Shawn McClain/Blood: although seeing it in its brownie-batter state was pretty appalling, by the time it had all that savory stuff around it, it was just like a pate, and quite tasty.
• Nick Lacasse/Whelk: much the same is true of this one, though I can’t see why anyone much wants to eat the decidedly rubbery, not very flavorful whelk.
• Justin White/Ostrich egg: in the end, it’s an egg. A lot of egg. It was good, if overabundant.
• Jeffrey Hedin/Rabbit Lungs: just another thing in a pate. Good country pate, I liked the balance of sweet and tart things around it, which made it more sophisticated.
• David Dworshak/Milkweed: I loved the cocktail, the cured beef bacon, and the ice cream. Anything that had a higher concentration of the green pods was harder to take; they really don’t have much flavor.
• Mark Mendez/Tomato leaves: super-simple (like the video) and clean. Probably my favorite in this series, although it was so plain it was hardly more than drinking after a squeezed tomato. But just enough more.
• Rob Levitt/Abalone: as Rob said, he kind of overwhelmed the subtle abalone with the (certainly tasty) other things going on. Abalone at least more rewarding than whelk.
• Jason Vincent/Duck tongues: the duck tongues themselves were fine, just crispy fatty friedness. The sandwich was ridiculously overstuffed, but enjoyable. I wanted one the next day.
• B.K. Park/Chufa: I loved the idea of replacing the sushi rice with something else; I thought chufa was kind of dry and chewy for the role, though. Don’t quit your day job, chufa.
• Shin Thompson/Burdock root: I really liked this soup a lot, although I think it’s too rich and savory-sweet for a whole bowl. But for a small shooter or whatever, a really interesting and complex flavor.