For the second year in a row (see last year here, here, here, here and here), I’ve invited Michael Nagrant, food writer-bon vivant who hangs his hat at New City and Chicago Social among others, to kick around the past year in the Chicago food scene.  We start this year’s discussion with a roundup of the year, but check back every day this week for whatever farflung topic we’ll have gotten to by then. And note a special feature this year: pose your questions for the rasslin’ reviewers in the comments, and one or both of us will have a crack at them on Friday.

MICHAEL GEBERT: Welcome back, sir, you’re looking tanned, rested and ready.  So what do you think about the year in restaurants? On the one hand, it seemed like the bad economy finally started to take its toll. On the other hand, at the present rate of increase, by the year 2028 every single person in Chicago will be opening a new restaurant using Slagel pork and Dietzler beef. How do you think 2010 was as a food year?

MICHAEL NAGRANT: Well, the Chinese Zodiac says the year of the Goat ain’t till 2015, but it sure felt that way. There was Izard and her drunken goats – great on her flat bread with kale by the way, great goat empanadas last night at Branch 27 from John Manion, the continued rise of Prairie Fruit Farms goat cheese.

Though I suppose goat is also like the “next Bob Dylan” phenomenon. Every year there’s some singer/songwriter who’s supposed to be the next Bob Dylan and they’re great and what not, but they’re never really going to displace the real Bob Dylan. Every year for the past five or something goat has been lauded as the next pork or whatever. Look at Bayless and his tireless promotion of the Kilgus Farm boys. In the end bacon is still king – and besides, Sky Full of Goat just doesn’t sound as sexy.

Still, this is of course just a long way of saying 2010 was the tipping point year for eating weird shit. I mean Lincoln Park trixies have always been into balls, but now they’re like, ohh, sweetbreads, yum-oh. I mean Fergus Henderson could now pull mad Keith Richard’s numbers of birds if he were to hang out at John Barleycorn on a Friday night.

I think that’s good – it means more places like City Provisions, Butcher and Larder, and Paul Kahan’s butcher concept will likely thrive because they can make a living beyond selling the filet.

And indeed if everyone is able to offer Slagel or Dietzler, then bravo, maybe we can just eat good food and not have to read about it on every inch of the menu. But of course what we know is that the small scale of such farms means not every restaurant can offer this stuff. A great aha moment for me (not to be confused with that other A-Ha moment of the Speed Racer clone “Take on Me” video) was talking to Bayless about the opening of Xoco and hearing about his desire to offer free-range pork, but having to settle for semi-free range, but sustainably raised pigs, from Maple Creek Farm because Gunthorp would have to ramp up production to meet demand and it would take a few years. Still, just as the demand creates more good restaurants, it may also create more local family farms, a bigger Green City Market etc and that’s cool by me.

The problem if there’s any this year which you do get at with your wry aside about all restaurants serving the same thing in 2028 is that indeed it does feel like the same restaurant opened up ten times this year. I mean what was the real outlier or the exciting genre breaker – Ruxbin? And if it was Ruxbin – is that just Schwa with a working phone?

I mean I can forgive Bon Appetit for naming Next or Aviary best new blah blah blah, because the fact is it probably will be. I applaud all the great craft cocktails, but all the cocktail talent we have still has its head stuck up the arse of 1919 while Grant Achatz is about to bend them over with what we should be drinking in 2015.

I think part of the blame is the blog war (and this includes old school pub blogs too – not just the new guys) we got going on. Everyone’s fighting for the last scrap and as a result they feel compelled to cover every two-bit line cook and his or her dream as if they were the next Thomas Keller. Mediocre falafel shacks in the suburbs are given the same pre-opening treatment/gossip as Grahamwich.

If you’re getting coverage by just aping everyone else, why would you ever have to be creative? The creativity once reserved for the plate is now showing up in the dining room instead. Chefs are spending as much or more time deciding which The Clash poster to put on the walls. Folks need to get back to the menu.

As for the economy taking its toll, I’d turn that back on you for more clarity. Who closed that shouldn’t have? I mean Pasticceria Natalina would be a big blow, but it didn’t close yet. I think maybe May Street Market and Aldino’s didn’t deserve to close. I don’t know if Aldino’s was the economy as much as it was an owner who didn’t give it a fighting chance.

GEBERT: Goat as Steve Forbert, I have to admit I hadn’t thought of it quite that way.  Goat certainly seems trendy— though I hardly tasted it in the flurry of tiny bites that constituted dinner at Girl & The Goat recently, which was one of the disappointments looking back on that meal— but I always laugh when I see those “is pork over?” pieces, because to me it’s like saying “is tap water over?”  Pork is one of the elements, it’ll be over when eating is over and the Matrix feeds us through a tube.  I wish goat luck making some inroads as the next Dylan, I’m as interested as anybody to see what can be done with it, but pork is The Beatles.  Which means you can now get it on iTunes, or something.

Anyway, I like your distillation of 2010 into “the tipping point year for weird shit,” and I think that’s very much true on the menu level— nobody seems to be afraid of anything any more.  Pig face is flying off the racks at Girl & The Goat, and pork neck gravy is selling like hotcakes at The Purple Pig, and duck balls are moving at The Bristol, and bull testicles are a hot item on Phillip Foss’s truck.  I was reading something somewhere (I honestly can’t remember where) about some dish that had veal heart in it, and one commenter said sorry, that’s where I draw the line, and I was like— really?  You won’t eat a mere veal heart?  The mere palpitating life-muscle of a tiny, innocent, doe-eyed veal?  You draw the line at that? What’s wrong with you?

And maybe people have even absorbed the reality of food production enough now that they realize that they’ve actually been eating that stuff all along, only then it was called Oscar Mayer Luncheon Loaf or a Taco Bell Beef Gordita.  But I also think there’s kind of a bigger shift that really became apparent in 2010, in the types of restaurants that made it in a big way, and the types of restaurants that bit the dust.

Last year, I thought the economy hadn’t really hurt the restaurant biz much— the places that closed seemed mostly to be the kinds of places that were ready to retire, like Healthy Foods in my video about it.  But this year we’ve started to have some closings that surprised people, like May Street Market or Eve or Cafe Matou.  Cafe Matou, to me, is the sort of place that you expected to just be around forever— not a great restaurant but a perfectly good neighborhood one, solid and grownup.  Never had a bad meal there, you could take the ‘rents there and feel all sophisticated.  Except it turns out being everybody’s old reliable fallback when they can’t get into hot new places isn’t enough to sustain a restaurant this year, or to sustain an older chef in working on his feet night after night for a much less full room.  You don’t make any money being the second choice that doesn’t get used, funnily enough.  And so we lose one of the last old school French restaurants on the north side.

Meanwhile, and I’m as guilty as the next north side hipster, they’re packing them in at Longman & Eagle.  Which has an English name and a funky meats focus and a Belgian beer list and Charlie Poole or The 1900s on the playlist, and you can go eat some of 2010’s most exciting food in your jeans and your flannel shirt.  And they get a Michelin star for it.  Which was smart of the Michelin folks, not being as stodgy as they were assumed to be and getting out in the neighborhoods and finding where the real action is.  Good for them.

But if the shift is big enough that even the French have to pay attention to it, it must mean something, which to me is that if the most exciting cuisine is moving not merely to kind of casually hip restaurants but outright bars, then what is the future for the middle of the road nice restaurant?  If people today can get the level of cuisine with the atmosphere of a honky tonk and the beverages of a pub in Brussels, are they going to kiss off dressing up and sitting proper at a white tablecloth entirely?  That certainly seems to have been the case with Aldino’s, which got its plug pulled as a standard Italian restaurant very quickly when U of I students didn’t come out for it, apparently, and was replaced by… I don’t know, Scott Harris opens Italian concepts too fast for me to remember.  Something less like Spiaggia and more like a meatball bar or a shots-and-clams joint, anyway.

The high high end will survive, because that’s Disneyland, total escape and fantasy.  But it’s going to get harder to be merely pretty good and merely kind of fancy and make it, if people are just a lot more comfortable in a bar where the dress, the music and the food are all funkier.  That’s part of a big cultural shift away from behaving like grownups that if anything, the world of fine dining has been one of the last holdouts from (see David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise for more), but it seems to have finally landed there, too.

NAGRANT: Cultural shift away from being grown-ups, huh? Well, it’s true Johnny Knoxville, smutty Peter Pan that he is, is the patron saint of a new generation. However, when it comes to dining, I don’t know that I agree or buy that the trend toward restaurants where you can dress how you want and eat what you want is a shift away from being grown-up.

I mean I subscribe to the theory that being grown-up means doing what you think is right or living how you believe you should live even if it’s against public opinion, which is not to say I believe R. Kelly should cavort with 14 year old girls.

But, as they say in Office Space, “The Nazis made the Jews wear flair.” Formal wear, especially say “black tie” is a construct of Saville Row tailors and a class-based differentiator promoted by aristocrats. People often dress up more as an expectation of others than as a choice. The fact that we’re now reclaiming that is pretty exciting to me.

In some ways this adherence to formality almost smacks of American insecurity, our only way to combat the vestigial guilt of having been the dirty rabble that escaped colonial rule. I mean go to Michel Bras or many Michelin 3 Stars in Europe and you’ll see people in jeans in a t-shirt. Does this make the experience any less valid?

Though I hate to side with Charlie Trotter on much, I do appreciate his Libertarian stance on stuff, i.e. I don’t like my actions to infringe on others and so maybe I’d draw the line at personal hygiene, i.e. if your body stink invades my adjoining table atmosphere and competes with the waft from my Epoisses, well then maybe I have an issue. However, if you are wearing a Chanel #5 spritzed burlap sack, it’s not gonna have any bearing on my enjoyment of dining out.

I think one of the most interesting things about Alinea is that they challenge most of what a restaurant should be, but they still prefer that their guests wear jackets. I don’t think they turn them away if they don’t, but why is it that one of the most innovative restaurants in America is so 1897 in their dress code policy? They’re smart enough to know that if they don’t enforce a basic standard, many of the patrons will be appalled or not return. It’s a business decision. Then again, they’re cool having a sommelier with a bedhead afro, so who knows what the line is. Then again, as I say, who cares?

GEBERT: Well, God knows I have many archaic tastes which will doubtless die with me, but one of them certainly is that it’s fun to dude up once in a while and be around other people who are dressed to the nines as well.  Alinea wouldn’t be Alinea if everyone was in jeans, though personally I’d love it if one of Next’s concepts was futuristic and we all had to wear turtlenecks with capes like Raymond Massey in Things To Come or Ming the Merciless or somebody.  That said, it does depress me a little when I’m surrounded by people who so obviously work on LaSalle (no offense to my wife, who’s just around the corner), charcoal gray with power ties and master of the universe self-seriousness, there is a distinct lack of a vibe when you’re in a room with people who have more money than God and seem joyless at spending it. All the same, what I’m spending there clearly hurts me a lot more than it hurts them, so they damn well better look nice while I’m eating there.  They kind of owe it to me, really.

But dress is, really, just a minor part of what I’m talking about.  There’s really a whole host of changes being made to the way we dine out— Belgian beer is the new wine, small plates have replaced the entree (on the whole, a big improvement in creativity, given how boring your protein and side dish shaped into a pyramid often proved to be compared to your apps), and everything from Harry Smith-style old-timey folk music to indie rock has replaced the video game soundtrack that seemed to be the only sound you heard while dining for most of the 90s and 2000s.  That, at least, is my big story for 2010, that trend as validated by Michelin and every one else, it seems, and I don’t think it’s going to go away.  I think anyone who follows the market would really have to think hard before opening a traditional restaurant, as opposed to a gastropub, a woodburning pizza oven place, a Bakersfield taco bar, or something else that offers comfier food with higher margins and a crowd that’s planning to knock back a few $9 brews at every meal.

NAGRANT: Don’t get me wrong, pocket watches, fedoras and vinyl records still have a place in my world (ok, well, not pocket watches).  I mean I like to dress up too.  I just don’t like it to be compulsory.

TOMORROW: Chefs to fame like moths to flame?

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.

David Posey, the new chef de cuisine of Blackbird, was given balls as his ingredient by Phillip Foss. Big, squishy balls. Read about ’em here.

And check out Eater Chicago’s year-end wrap ups with various local Chicago food pundits, including myself.

1944.

Today.

(First image snapped at the way-better-than-I-expected Cantigny Museum in Wheaton.)

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

Happy Holidays to all.

You’ll see what I mean, along with his more immediate interest in showing you how to make something with freeze-dried saffron. Watch it here, get the whole story here. Next week: balls!

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.