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"I find I enjoy even mediocre Cuban food," writes Rob Gardner at The Local Beet. "I do, however, find three flaws about always with Cuban restaurants." We put Rob's list of gripes to Carolina Bolado, who is MenuPages's South Florida editor and — more importantly — grew up part of a big, food-happy Cuban family. We hope her opinions settle the matter.

"The margarine thing – I guess I’m just a snob, but I really dislike the taste of margarine. Bread always comes with margarine, usually pre-slathered."
We don't love margarine, but really, you don't like the pre-slathered, pressed and toasted slices of bread that come with dinner? They're totally addictive. If we don't place the bread at the opposite end of the table, we could end up eating the whole basketful. Is it preferable to some warm rolls with delicious butter? Of course not, but this isn't high-end cuisine. None of the upscale Cuban restaurants we've visited serve the pre-slathered bread. Your solution is to find a place that's a bit nicer. The downside is that you might end up paying $8 for black beans and rice. Once you've made black beans and seen the ingredients that go into it, you realize how much you're being ripped off.

Continue reading "Cuban Food Concerns? You Gripe, We Resolve" »

Last week, we aggregated a litany of complaints against Esquire's "food and travel correspondent" John Mariani. Commenters (mostly anonymous) criticized and supported Mariani, his editor spoke up, and now the writer himself gets a turn.

Below, a point-by-point rejoinder from John Mariani.

Continue reading "John Mariani, In His Own Words" »

When Alinea opens tonight for rare Monday night service (thanks, NRA show) there will be a 13-year-old in the kitchen. Greg Grossman, of East Hampton, N.Y., joins a growing line of kid foodies, from the 12-year-old kid who helps the chefs at Peasant to the kid critic with a movie deal. Lest we forget, the 2006 James Beard Award for multimedia journalism went to Spatulatta, an online cooking show hosted by preteens from Evanston.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that Grant Achatz would open Alinea up to Grossman, who has also attended the James Beard Awards, StarChefs conventions, and now the NRA (with a publicist, natch). "I've run into Greg a few times," Achatz told us. "He's this really genuine, earnest kid who just came up to me and said 'Hey Chef, it's an honor to meet you.' I could tell from the moment I started talking to him that he actually knew what he was talking about -- he knew about how we ran the restaurant, about how we cooked. We were talking about other chefs, gastronomy — it was real, it wasn't just name-dropping. It's impressive!"

Continue reading "Greg Grossman, Alinea's 13-Year-Old Sous Chef" »

As Radhika Desai leaves Chicago for a (maybe, maybe not) job at New York's Tabla, taking over the helm at Between Boutique Cafe & Lounge is the restaurant's former sous chef, Noah Sandoval.

Since taking over the kitchen, Sandoval has been busy revamping Between's menu, ditching Radhika's Indian-fusion in favor of his own Southern-inflected culinary style. While it's been available for a few weeks, Sandoval's cooking — including his signature venison carpaccio with peach, rosemary, arugula, and juniper — makes its official debut tonight, at Radhika's going-away party at the restaurant. (Free drinks!)

We caught up with the new toque in town to find out a little bit about what makes him tick.

You're not from around here — how did you wind up running a restaurant in Chicago?
I was an executive chef before, in Richmond, Virginia, at a place called Verbena. It was kind of the same type of food I'm doing now at Between, but it was my first time running a kitchen. I'm from Virginia, but I've lived a lot of different places — military family and all that. I cooked in New Orleans for a few years, went to culinary school down there. It was fun - too much fun!

Continue reading "Meet Noah Sandoval, Between Boutique Cafe & Lounge's New Executive Chef" »

Responses to our compilation of complaints against Esquire restaurant guy (don't call him a critic!) John Mariani have been extraordinarily varied — from chefs corroborating the story of Mariani’s list of demands to restaurant publicists coming to his defense.

But the opinion we're most interested in is that of his employer. Esquire articles editor Ryan D'Agostino got in touch with us yesterday, and here we reprint his defense of Mr. Mariani in full:

Continue reading "Esquire Editor Defends John Mariani" »

Yesterday we reported that Esquire restaurant critic John Mariani was in town for dinner at Graham Elliot, and it was like a bomb went off. "I can't believe that asshole has the audacity to even call himself a restaurant critic," one disgruntled chef emailed to us. A publicist told us "I hate letting him in the door, even though of course we can't say no. We all feel dirty after he leaves." Sky Full of Bacon blogger Mike Gebert ran a post calling Mariani his "arch-nemesis," railing against his "coastal snobbery" and "jawdropping pretension."

Mariani is the gatekeeper to and primary author of Esquire's influential Best New Restaurants list, so you'd think folks would be going out of their way to be nice to him. Thing is, that seems to be exactly what Mariani expects: Mariani fully eschews anonymity, and goes so far as to announce his presence to restaurateurs by distributing business cards. (At least, that's what he reportedly did while dining at The Bristol the other night.) "He's given me his card before," our chef contact told us. "And so of course I gave him one of the best meals my kitchen has ever made. It made me question my integrity as a chef."

Continue reading "Why Does Everyone Hate John Mariani?" »

We've always thought that the major thing lacking from Mother's Day was some sort of government- or Hallmark-sponsored open bar. Whether it's to numb your pain, numb Mom's pain, or just give the two of you the liquid courage to really open up and have a heart-to-heart, getting silly on bubbly is our own surefire ticket to a successful momday.

• The granddaddy of the all-you-can-drink brunch is at Lakeview's Angelina Ristorante, where the menu options are run-of-the-mill, the room is packed, and your liver is the star of the show. $20 prix fixe, unlimited mimosas.

• It's a similar deal at Deleece: on top of the a la carte brunch options (frittatas, a killer BLT, grilled salmon caesar salad), $15 buys you all the mimosas you can throw down the hatch.

• The brunch drinks at Between Boutique Cafe & Lounge aren't unlimited, but they are cheap: $4 for a specialty Mother's Day cocktails made with P.I.N.K, a caffeine-infused vodka, and it's $8 for a trip to the bloody mary bar.

• Eat at Kinzie Chophouse this Sunday, and your table gets a complimentary bottle of champagne. Yes, bottle. Barter the last drink against mom's free dessert, which she scores by virtue of having given birth to you.

• $10 at David Burke's Primehouse lands you unlimited mimosas and bloody marys, which you can use to wash down the family-style servings of lobster scrambled eggs, french toast muffins, dry-aged beef brisket, and more.

• You can get it as boozy as you want it to be at Orange, where the brunch menu is pleasantly off-kilter (pancake flights are can't-miss) and the drink list — well, it's BYO. No reservations, so (especially on Mother's Day) show up early to avoid the line.

[Photo: quinn.anya/Flickr]

The James Beard Awards, the putative Oscars of the food world, are being held next Monday in New York City. We rounded up some of the Chicago nominees and asked them to share with us their thoughts on the awards, their work, and how they'll celebrate if they win. We'll be running their answers throughout the week.

We close our Beard Week with a chat with Mindy Segal, an Outstanding Pastry Chef nominee who's best known to Chicagoans as the owner of Hot Chocolate. She's also recently signed on with the not-yet-opened Elysian Hotel to oversee all their pastry services.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about your nomination?
It’s a 5. You know, I’m honored to be part of a select few. It’s my third year being nominated, which is awesome, but I take it with a grain of salt that I throw on my back. I do a job every day, go to work every day, crack eggs, mix flour, butter, and sugar, and hopefully – hopefully – it comes out good. I’m got a business to run, so I’m a little jaded. You know what? Never mind, I’m so excited. It’s actually a 10 – I love going to the awards and I’ve met great people there. I'm excited!

What are you looking forward to about this year's awards?
I’m excited to be with my friends who are nominated, to see my friends who live in New York. I’m excited to see Pichet [Ong, another Outstanding Pastry nominee], he’s one of my closest friends, I adore him. I’m excited to eat in New York, to be a part of the whole scene. Plus, the owner and food & beverage director for the Elysian Hotel are coming with me, my chef [Mark Steuer] from Hot Chocolate is coming with me – it's all my favorite men! How lucky am I to go to New York with all my favorite men?!

Oh the other thing that's so exciting about this is that the guy who does my hair lives in New York, and he's coming to my hotel room and doing my hair. This year he’s bringing a makeup artist and I’m going to wear false eyelashes! That’s how you’ll know me – I’ll have eyelashes for days.

What Mindy's planning on wearing, and the bar whose decor she's modeled her apartment on — after the jump!

Continue reading "Meet Your Beard Nominees: Mindy Segal" »

The James Beard Awards, the putative Oscars of the food world, are being held next Monday in New York City. We rounded up some of the Chicago nominees and asked them to share with us their thoughts on the awards, their work, and how they'll celebrate if they win. We'll be running their answers throughout the week.

Up now: Brian Duncan, wine director at Bin 36, which has been nominated for Outstanding Wine Service. Duncan has been overseeing Bin 36's wine program (and blending some of the wines himself) since the restaurant's opening in 1999, and has risen to national prominence for his joyful, inclusive take on the often-intimidating oenophiliac world.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about your nomination?
35. No wait, 36. It may sound corny, but it is such an honor to get the nomination. And it means so much for our staff- they’re the ones who are out there every day making wine user-friendly and fun for our guests.

What are you looking forward to about this year's awards ceremony?
This is my third nomination in a row, and my date is my aunt Elsa. It’s a thrill to have her there to be part of it, she accompanied me last year. It means the world to have your family there. Besides that, a lot of my friends and colleagues have been nominated and I’m really excited for them. It’s almost surreal to be in the company of the other nominees and participants, past winners – for somebody like me, who has been a big fan of food and wine and the people who have really created interest and energy in the industry, I think the Beard Awards makes the Oscars look like a TV commercial. Who better to throw a party than the food and wine people?

Duncan tells us why Paul Kahan is his hero, and the importance of keeping an inclusive mindset — after the jump!

Continue reading "Meet Your Beard Nominees: Brian Duncan of Bin 36" »

The James Beard Awards, the putative Oscars of the food world, are being held next Monday in New York City. We rounded up some of the Chicago nominees and asked them to share with us their thoughts on the awards, their work, and how they'll celebrate if they win. We'll be running their answers throughout the week.

Now it's time to hear from Koren Greiveson, chef de cuisine at Avec. Grieveson has been helming Avec's kitchen since the restaurant's open in 2003, and is being honored this year with her nomination as a Best Chef: Great Lakes region.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about your nomination?
I guess it’d be a 10. It’s nice to be in with all the other great chefs. The whole thing should be a lot of fun!

What are you looking forward to about the whole experience?
This is my first time going to the awards – I’m excited to see what all the hoopla’s about, and to be around some really great chefs. There'll be good conversations, good networking. It'll be good to see Michael Symon and all those good folks from last weekend [The San Francisco Taste of the Nation benefit], like Traci Desjardins.

Who do you think is your biggest competition in your Beard category?
They all are! Are you kidding me? Michael [Symon] says he’ll be mad, he says that if it’s not him – it’d better be me. But they’re all great chefs, and it’s just fun to be a part of it.

Who Grieveson thinks is the best unsung chef in Chicago, and more — after the jump!

Continue reading "Meet Your Beard Nominees: Koren Grieveson" »

The James Beard Awards, the putative Oscars of the food world, are being held next Monday in New York City. We rounded up some of the Chicago nominees and asked them to share with us their thoughts on the awards, their work, and how they'll celebrate if they win. We'll be running their answers throughout the week.

Up now: Mike Sula, food columnist at The Reader, who was nominated for Best Multimedia Food Journalism for his epic undertaking The Whole Hog Project, aided and abetted with intriguing and moving video documentary by Mike Gebert of Sky Full of Bacon. We got in touch with Sula via email to get his take on the whole shebang.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about your nomination?
This one goes up to eleven. The attention it brings to the mulefoots [the breed of pig highlighted in the Whole Hog Project] is gratifying, especially since the primary breeder in South Dakota suffered a bad barn fire last winter that significantly handicapped her work. Their numbers are coming back—particularly in Wisconsin—but they need all the help they can get. Besides that, my name is going to be uttered over a PA system in the same breath as Ruth Reichl's which I find utterly surreal and terrifying

What are you looking forward to about this year's awards ceremony?
This is my maiden voyage to the Beards. I don't much know what to expect, beyond what I've been told by vets, some of it conflicting. I might just follow Steve Dolinsky around and do exactly what he does, since he's been nominated just about every year since he was 13. It has been a ridiculously long time since I've been back to NYC so I'm excited and daunted by all the eating I need to cram into a 48 hour period. My pal Rob is helping me map out a minute-to-minute itinerary.

Continue reading "Meet Your Beard Nominees: Mike Sula" »

The James Beard Awards, the putative Oscars of the food world, are being held next Monday in New York City. We rounded up some of the Chicago nominees and asked them to share with us their thoughts on the awards, their work, and how they'll celebrate if they win. We'll be running their answers throughout the week.

On the docket: Sarah Grueneberg, who's currently helming the kitchen at Spiaggia, which has been nominated for the Best Picture-esque award of Outstanding Service. Grueneberg has been with the restaurant since 2005, and took over as chef di cucina this past summer after the departure of Missy Robbins for New York.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about your nomination?
Oh god, like 25. I'm super, super excited. It’s my first Beard Awards, since I only got promoted to this level in August of last year. It’s really exciting to be starting off and having all this fun new stuff. I think it’s great that the things chef do on a daily basis are acknowledge, that they get noticed. So it’s a definite pleasure.

What are you excited about for this year's ceremony?
We’re only going to be in New York for a day, but I’m excited to see all the big-deal chefs. Also I worked for the Brennan family [who own famed restaurant Commander's Palace] for 4 years in New Orleans, so to see Ella Brennan get the lifetime achievement award is really touching. It's all really exciting for me.

Why being nominated is just like winning, and more — after the jump!

Continue reading "Meet Your Beard Nominees: Sarah Grueneberg of Spiaggia" »

The James Beard Awards, the putative Oscars of the food world, are being held next Monday in New York City. We rounded up some of the Chicago nominees and asked them to share with us their thoughts on the awards, their work, and how they'll celebrate if they win. We'll be running their answers throughout the week.

Right now, it's time for some words from Paul Kahan. Chef Kahan is the force behind Blackbird, Avec, and The Publican, and has his fingers in the pies of four awards: two design-related nods for The Publican, a Best Chef - Great Lakes nod for Avec's chef Koren Grieveson, and for himself, a prestigious nomination for Outstanding Chef.

Congratulations on your nomination! On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about this?
I'd say 6. It’s a great honor, but I don’t put a whole lot of stake in it. I’m not really into pumping myself up as a brand — I’m much more excited about Koren being nominated for the regional award, which I also won a few years ago. I’m much more excited for her recognition than my own. But still, it’s exciting, it’s cool, it’ll be fun to go to New York.

What are you looking forward to about the awards ceremony?
I've been to the awards several times. I was nominated three times [for Best Chef - Midwest] and won the third time, and I was nominated for Outstanding Chef once before. Am I exited? Yeah. It’s a great chance to check up with friends and visit with them — it’s a full social calendar. I don’t get to check in with my chef friends from Los Angeles and places like that very often, so it’ll be great to see them. It’s always a good time.

Who Kahan's up against, and what he and Mario Batali do every time he's in New York — after the jump!

Continue reading "Meet Your Beard Nominees: Paul Kahan" »

The James Beard Awards, the putative Oscars of the food world, are being held next Monday in New York City. We rounded up some of the Chicago nominees and asked them to share with us their thoughts on the awards, their work, and how they'll celebrate if they win. We're running their answers throughout the week.

Up first: Monica Eng and Phil Vettel, both from the Tribune. Eng is nominated for her article “Morality Bites: Mustering Some Sympathy for the Bedeviled Ham and Beef”, and is also nominated together with Vettel for their article “Big Night. Big Mystery: Why Did Michael Carlson Vanish the Day After Serving Dinner to the Greatest Chefs in the World?".

Congratulations on your nomination! On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you?
Monica: I am really excited and honored by my nominations. Not sure I can put a number on it but it’s a nice feeling, especially in these journalistic times that don’t bring a lot of joy.
Phil: It was probably a 7, 7.5 when I found out that Monica and I had our story nominated. That was very cool.

On running into your heroes in the bathroom, and more — after the jump!

Continue reading "Meet Your Beard Nominees: Monica Eng and Phil Vettel" »

Oh goodness, this is the best kind of flashback: reviews of Chicago restaurants from the 1931 book Dining in Chicago by John Drury (the volume is available in its entirety as a free download here).

Every morsel of the book is a delight, from the exhortations to try birds' nest soup ("that queer but tasty concoction made from the substance that certain Oriental birds use for cementing their nests") to the dining room at the Congress Hotel ("the foods are of the best quality").

The introduction is written by none other than Carl Sandburg, and of Chicago as a city populated by those who love to eat and drink, he says:

'On reading over the text of John Drury's book one is not merely persuaded that Chicago is a place to stop for more than a sandwich and a cuppa coffee. From page to page he hammers home the evidence that cooking skill and kitchen science has drifted to Chicago from the continents of Asia, Europe, Africa and the archipelagoes of the seven seas."

Drury on then-restaurant Kristensen, on the site that is now the bar Nick's Uptown:

Continue reading "Awesome Chicago Restaurant Reviews from the 1930s" »

News of the dead goat strung up on the arm of the Harry Caray statue at Wrigley Field is more of a stomach-churner than an appetite whetter. But from this gory lemon, we intend to make lemonade: if you really are dedicated to overturning the Curse of the Billy Goat, may we suggest you go for something delicious rather than destructive?

Here are some of our picks for the best goat-based dishes to be found — but you're on your own if you want to smuggle them into the park.

Continue reading "Get Your Goat: Curse-Busting Options for Every Palate" »

Blogger Nibble Me This picked up some of Weber Grill's steak seasoning from Costco, and this got us thinking. We freely admit that the steaks at Weber Grill are among our favorite in the city, touristy appeal be damned, so is the solution to pulling that off at home to be found in the aisles of our local super big-box store? We checked in with the folks at Weber Grill to find out about the supermarket version stacks up against what they use in the restaurnat.

"It's similar," our contact told us. "But the spices aren't identical. They're both produced by Weber, of course, but the supermarket versions are for more general consumption. What we use in the restaurant is only available in the restaurant or the restaurant's online store." The seasoning used on their (insanely delicious) in-house steak? That'd be the seasoned salt.

In contrast, the Lawry's Seasoned Salt that you can buy at basically any grocery store in the nation (and which is, also, a staple in our kitchen) is the exact kind used at Lawry's The Prime Rib. One big vat of seasoning spices parceled out into a million little plastic jars.

Steak Taters [Nibble Me This]
[Photo: christina.hope/Flickr]

Last night, a standing-room only crowd packed into the culinary showroom at Evanston's Now We're Cookin' to watch Grant Achatz demo some of the more magical dishes in his Alinea repertoire. The white wine was free-flowing as he demo'd tempura-fried sweet potato pie (similar to the pumpkin pie recipe he and Nick Kokonas filmed for An Alinea Thanksgiving), made exploding yogurt balls (served in Crate & Barrel shot glasses — star chefs, they're just like us!), and used a volcano vaporizer to make a lavender pillow that was passed around the room. Afterwards, in the Q&A, Achatz weighed in on all sorts of important matters.

On the culinary turf war between Slow Food and Molecular Gastronomy: "I think it's a false division. We have a co-op, we use farm-raised Amish vegetables, we have our lamber in Pennsylvania who does his lambs in certain ways and for certain reasons. However, that's not our ... identity, shall we say? In today's modern times it's almost a given that you're focused on sustainability, that you're focused on artisan products. So incorporating that philosophy with the avant garde, with progressive American - that's where we stand. I feel for a long, long time — going back to '97, '96 — for a long time, there was a very clear division. A rivalry if you will. The Alice Waters camp, and the Ferran Adrià camp. If you were practicing modern gastronomy, you were a hater, you were growing everything in a petri dish and test tube, you were putting all those funnky chemicals in there. But that's not it at all. We love produce too."

After the jump, Achatz weighs in on why he became a chef, his favorite Chicago restaurants, and how Twitter played him good:

Continue reading "Even Grant Achatz Gets Suckered By April Fool's Day" »

We've been sitting on a few samples of Starbucks' much-buzzed-about instant coffee, VIA, for a couple days now, nervous to actually pour the little packets of coffee powder into a mug of hot water. What if we hate it? What if, maybe even worse, we like it?

Today Starbucks is ready to foist VIA on you — they're sending out "VIA Vehicles" to hand out samples at various Chicago locations (full list after the jump) — so we figured it would be a public service to finally put this stuff in our mouth and taste it. Spoiler alert: It's pretty darn good.

In the interest of true experimentation, we made two cups of each of the two varieties (Italian and Colombian roasts), one cup of each roast made with the recommended 8 ounces of water, and one made with a "no, seriously, we like strong coffee" 6 ounces.

There was a clear difference between the Colombian roast (our favorite) and the Italian roast (not worth sneezing at either) — Colombian was richer, smoother, and reminded one taster of Cuban coffee. The Italian had a thin, clean flavor and a sweeter smell, and was the one that most benefitted from just a 6-ounce water pour.

The Verdict: Our motley crew of taste testers responded, to a man, with "It's not bad!" This possibly says more about expectations than it does about flavor, but let's just say we didn't leave any of the extra samples out in the kitchen for anyone else, choosing instead to hoard them for the day we find ourself without coffee.

(For an in-depth, gut-bustingly hilarious take on this coffee product, please to be checking out Michael Nagrant's On Coffee over at Hungry Mag.)

VIA is available as of today at most Chicago Starbucks (Starbuckses?). If you'd rather not pay for it, the full list of locations for today's VIA Vehicle samples is after the jump:

Continue reading "The MenuPages Taste Test: Starbucks VIA Instant Coffee" »

It's not a new thing — we have blurry childhood memories of scarfing down Thai in a former McDonald's space — but it seems that more and more media-friendly restaurants are opening up in spaces that were originally occupied by (and designed for) fast-food restaurants. We can't help but ask, Carrie-style: Is launching an authentic, delicious kitchen out of the bones of an old quick-serve place a bona fide trend?

We first started paying attention to the phenomenon when Sky Full of Bacon puzzled over the former incarnation of Al Bawadi Grill in Bridgeview — turns out the stellar Turkish food is served out of what was formerly an Arby's.

Then there was another SFoB Bridgeview find, one of the many Chicagoland Arturo’s (not necessarily related to one another) located in a former Pizza Hut at 7260 W. 79th St. And then there's Italian newcomer Tocco, the latest venture from the team behind Follia, which makes its home in a former McDonalds — despite its deep-fryer past, owner Bruno Abate told Chicago Mag that "the space is too much sexy!"

And again, a few weeks ago, Chicago Mag lets us know that a former Taco Bell in Naperville has been reborn as the casual Israeli restaurant Naf Naf (1095 E. Ogden Ave., Naperville; 630 904 7200), a casual Israeli restaurant. They've repurposed the fast-food setup to work for their selection of falafel, shawarma, hummus, and baba ghannouj — “'You can order at the counter,' says Altman. 'You can sit down and have a waitress. You can do anything you want.'"

And then last week at the Tribune, Renee Enna said of Arlington Heights's Penang, "The Jetsons-like retro exterior betrays a fast-food history (the site used to house an Italian beef joint named Zippy's, which might explain the fried calamari ...)"

We suppose something has to happen to the shells of economy-eaten counter-service lineups — and we'll admit to kind of loving the prevailingly 60s-kitsch architecture that tends to accompany them. We're always happy to see a schawarma-purveyor or a source for "too much sexy" Italian replace a Drive-Thru than another iteration on the tired old chicken nugget.

[Photo: nnecapa/Flickr]

If you're that guy (or, to be fair, that girl) who hasn't yet made plans for THE MOST IMPORTANT DAY OF THE YEAR vis-a-vis your significant other and the Hallmark Greeting Card Corporation, we've done the legwork for you. All of these restaurants have tables for two available for tomorrow night — at least, they do as of 11am today. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call.

A handy dozen options, after the jump.

Continue reading "Valentine's Day for Slackers" »

To kick off the limited-edition candy bar Butterfinger Buzz ("with as much caffeine as the leading energy drink"!), the folks at Nestle are hosting a free event TONIGHT at Chicago Buzz barbershop (124 S. Franklin Street) from 7-10pm. Barbers will be giving "Butterfinger Buzz Cuts" complete with a (wash-out-able) orange spray-on Butterfinger logo. If you're one of the first 25 people to buzz your hair in the name of caffeinated candy, you'll get a $100 gift card. Also we will be really impressed by your cojones for, like, forever.

Earlier this week we found ourselves in possession of a handful of Butterfinger Buzzes, which we decided to consume in the name of science. We live-Twittered our eating experience — we forewent our coffee that day in exchange for half of one of the king-size bars, which packed a walloping 40mg of caffeine. We also handed out bars to anyone who came near us, on the condition that they report back after consumption.

Maybe it's that we're not used to taking our morning stimulant in solid form, maybe it was the double-whammy of all that sugar (our half-bar had 24 grams, which is half a day's FDA allotment), but oh my god we were flat-out tweaking. Fluttery blinking, difficulty typing, a complete inability to focus on whatever was in front of us. We weren't the only ones — Elsa of MP:Philly, who ate only half of a half, reported "I did not feel as alert as I do from a cup of coffee, but I did feel like a moth was trapped in the chambers of my heart."

Interestingly, the results of our informal experiment were clearly divided along gender lines. While we and Elsa were jittering around MPHQ, MP:SF editor Adam and IT Guy Sean were almost frustratingly blasé. IT Guy Sean consumed an entire bar and experienced absolutely no ill effects, but noted that he drinks 8 cups of coffee a day, so it was entirely possible that "this would give normal people a stroke."

Flavor-wise, it tastes like a Butterfinger — plus a little metallic aftertaste that we might, admittedly, have hallucinated. On the whole, while we never ever want to eat one again, the experience was not an unpleasant one.

Regular readers of Chicago food media are familiar with Pat Bruno, the Sun-Times's head restaurant critic. We've spent a lot of time on this blog tearing into the guy, for better or for worse, but if there's one thing with which we can credit him, it's this: He knows his old-Chicago Italian food . If you wake up one day and think to yourself, "Self, there is nothing I want more in this world than meatballs buried in redsauce and a nice deep-dish pie," Bruno is your man. Heck, the dude has been contributing to Pizza Today magazine since 1975.

A recent comment on the PizzaMaking.com message board wonders whether it's not Pat Bruno himself who started the (incorrect) trend of the inclusion of cornmeal in deep-dish pizza recipes. The poster also acknowledges, though, that it could have been another guy — one Pasquale Bruno , who appeared as a judge on the December 21 episode of "Throwdown! With Bobby Flay," when the show visits Lou Malnati's Pizzeria. When Pasquale Bruno is introducing himself, he says "I write a monthly column for Pizza Today , and I've traveled halfway around the world showing people how to make pizza."

Pat Bruno ... Pasquale Bruno... there's something here, but I'm not quite putting my finger on it. Could it be that the head restaurant reviewer for a major metropolitan newspaper decided to blow his anonymity out of the water by appearing on a highly-rated nationally-aired television show featuring the signature dish of his hometown, with his cover being only the inversion of his highly recognizable name? [Update: Holy crap, y'all, I'm not sure why I heard this as an inverted name, but he just flat-out uses his real one! Pasquale Bruno, a.k.a. Pat. Not even trying!]

No. That can't be possible. It can't be the case that there is someone that completely and utterly dismissive of his role as a nominal arbiter of restaurant quality, and the trust of his readership. That cannot possibly be the case.

At the end of the show, Bobby Flay turns to the judges — this Mr. Pasquale and charismatic former Chicago Bear Glen Kozlowski — and says "you guys are the best judges we've ever had... you guys should do this for a living."

Video (the only video you'll find, as far as I can tell) after the jump.

Continue reading "The Sun-Times's Pat Bruno Could Care Less About Anonymity, Appears on 'Throwdown With Bobby Flay'" »

Basically the minute we heard it would be coming out, we started pestering the folks at Destineer about Iron Chef America: Supreme Cuisine for the Nintendo Wii. Our copy finally showed up last week, and after a weekend of carpal-tunnel-baiting with the wiimote, we can issue our official verdict: Meh.

We were fully prepared to like this game. We really wanted to like it. We love the TV show 'Iron Chef America'; we love the Wii; we love the game Cooking Mama, which ICA was rumored to closely resemble. That rumor is half true: Iron Chef America does resemble 'Cooking Mama,' mimicking the step-by-step gameplay. But saying it "closely" resembles it is taking it a little far, since 'Cooking Mama' has given us many rollicking hours in cutthroat omelet competitions with friends and loved ones, whereas with Iron Chef America, we had to bribe an unfortunate acquaintance with homemade toffee for him to sit through a single round. The game is Just. That. Boring.

To be fair, the developers did try to mimic the format of the TV show. Like the television version, a challenge is introduced with a secret ingredient, you pick your dishes, and then you've got a set amount of time in which to prepare and plate. All the while, Alton Brown is providing running commentary, and ultimately a set of judges (alternately snide, clueless, deranged, and pretentious — just like on TV!) render an apparently arbitrary verdict and declare a winner. Sadly, though, this makes for way better television than it does interactive gameplay. And while we were psyched about smacking down a virtual Cat Cora (anyone else out there so deeply annoyed by her?), it turns out you've got to mow down a couple dozen stock chef characters before you can unlock the actual Iron Chefs themselves.

As we played through (we chose as our avatar the character our friend dubbed "Slut Chef," whose jacket is strapless and who apparently carries around her own amply bouncing milk supply), we felt a growing sense of déjà vu. From challenge to challenge, the game barely varied. Every ingredient that we played offered a "pita" option (okay, to be fair, sometimes they called the dish a "chapati"), with identical gameplay: Chop the ingredient, grill the pita, plate it with olives and a pickle. And unlike 'Cooking Mama,' where chopping was a serious matter of wiimote dexterity (not to mention aching triceps), Iron Chef America was happy with just vague up-and-down motions.

By the end, we found ourself less interested in the actual playing, and more interested in the increasingly snarky commentary that our friend hurled at the screen, Rocky Horror-style. At a certain point his rage overtook his patience and he wandered into the kitchen, wiimote in tow. His screenshot of an unchopped onion half just sat there, Alton Brown's disembodied virtual head babbling about knife safety, until the clock ran down and we won by default. Unexcited by this pyrrhic victory, we turned off the Wii, flipped over to a tivo'd episode of 30 Rock, and picked up the phone to order something, anything that didn't involve pitas.

A recent thread on Chowhound got us thinking about strategy.

The post in question is from a couple who'll be visiting Chicago from Arizona, and the centerpiece of their trip is a dinner at Alinea. They're wondering where else to eat while they're here, which is a normal sort of Chowhound-esque question, but at first we thought they were asking something far more interesting: What should you eat to prepare for a major dinner?

Surprisingly, we've found that the best methods for dealing with double-digit course counts come to us via the crazy world of competitive eating. From the outside, it might seem that ordering the twelve-course chef's menu at L.2O and participating in Nathan's hot dog eating contest have more differences than similarities. But the goal is, ultimately, the same: Consume a truly massive quantity of food without giving up (or, for that matter, throwing up). For all that high-end chefs insist that the tasting menu is an easily scaled mountain, the multiplex of courses mitigated by tiny portion sizes and multi-hour seatings, it truly is a tremendous amount of food.

While we still occasionally find ourself politely declining desserts and mignardises, unable to swallow so much as another sip of water, we've gotten better at marathon gourmet consumption over the years. Taking into account our own experiences (and polling some friends and acquaintances), here's the official MenuPages Guide to Making It Out Of A Tasting Menu Alive.

After the jump, the six easy steps...

Continue reading "The MenuPages Guide to Making It Out Of A Tasting Menu Alive" »

Two weeks ago, we wrote a post on some findings from a day of processing menus, including Mothers-In-Law (tamales in buns with chili) on the North Side and Mexico City-style tortas at La Baguette on the South Side.

All this piqued the interest of Peter Engler a.k.a. Rene G, one of the superstars of LTHForum, and the MIL expert we quoted about the no-MIL-on-the-North-Side thing. Turns out what he meant was, no one on the North Side calls it as such, but the component ingredients of the Mother-In-Law are on plenty of North Side menus. We stand corrected!

Engler also had insight into the torta chilanga (milanesa, chorizo, ham and queso fresco), one of the Mexico City-style tortas we mentioned in the post. He wrote:

Tortas chilangas are not too uncommon in Chicago. Doña Torta Chilanga (2152 W Cermak) sounds like a good place to begin. A large window sign also advertises tortas guapachosas (I had no idea what those were until today). BomBon Café (38 S Ashland) makes an upscale version with ham, salami, Serrano ham and queso Chihuahua. On the north side you can get them at Cardona's (3537 W Lawrence), filled with milanesa, queso Oaxaca and chiles poblanos. Although there are some common features, the ingredients tend to vary.

The conspiracy theorist in us didn't get very far along in its investigation because neither restaurant has English-speaking staff, but that could be a ruse! Incidentally, Dona Torta Chilanga's menu doesn't resemble Dona Torta's menu in the slightest. Go figure.

Anyway, there's still a mystery surrounding the tortas guapachosasa, which appear on both menus. La Baguette's has milanesa, queso y pierna (i.e. breaded steak, brick cheese & sliced pork shoulder), while Dona Torta Chilanga's contains milanesa, pierna, queso amarillo, jamon y salchicha (i.e. breaded steak, flank steak, cheddar cheese and a hot dog). What makes this all the more strange is that "torta guapachosa" receives virtually no hits on Google, while "torta chilanga" has several thousand (although the top two are Yelp's page for DTC and our previous blog entry on the subject, so take it with a grain of salt).

The way we want to imagine it is, two brothers from Mexico City were up late one night with the munchies and they each constructed a torta that, under the circumstances, they named "groovy." And then they came to Chicago and opened competing torta shops, and one did quite well (La Baguette has a dozen locations, it seems), while the other has had to languish in his brother's shadow. Isn't this narrative more entertaining than the truth?

Because the truth would have to encompass an explanation for why there's a hot dog in DTC's guapachosa, an addition truly beyond the bounds of rational behavior and certainly good taste. We would, nevertheless, eat this sandwich in its entirety.

Dona Torta Chilanga [MenuPages]
La Baguette [MenuPages]
La Baguette [Official Site]

[Photo: Dona Torta Chilanga's guapachosa torta, via Peter Engler]

In Jay Rayner's recently published The Man Who Ate The World, the Observer food critic's diary of a tour through the world's most notable (and particularly, most expensive) restaurants, the author recounts an incident where a Japan-based chef was charged with stealing the dishes of a Washington D.C. restaurant. The accusation surfaced on eGullet, which has subsequently chronicled other instances of culinary plagiarism, usually involving molecular gastronomy.

This issue of menu copying came to the fore in late 2006 into mid 2007 (when Marcel of Top Chef may or may not have appropriated a dish from wd-50), inspiring a whole spate of articles exploring the subject. The basic format went like this:

1) Wow, look at these unprecedented accusations of stealing recipes!
2) Used to be, there was a canon of dishes with the air of historical permanence
3) Now, with advent of molecular gastronomy, there's a new emphasis on innovation
4) And originality is now where the money is, for these chefs at least
5) But, uh, how are you going to copyright food, exactly?

The last point is true enough; copyrighting recipes is relatively uncharted territory, especially when one is dealing with dishes that have been adapted and are not direct copies.

None of this ambiguity is stopping chefs from taking action. Homaro Cantu of Moto in Chicago has filed a patent for his edible menus (specifically, the ability to print text and images on an edible structure), and Missy Chase Lapine of sneaky-vegetable-cookbook-for-kids fame is suing Jessica Seinfeld for publishing a cookbook based on the same concept.

Let's consider a case that's much older than molecular gastronomy or even Jessica Seinfeld: Coca-Cola's secret formula. This well-written examination of intellectual property law through the lens of Coca-Cola gives us some insight into how the rest of this food plagiarism stuff will turn out. Coca-Cola has a copyright on the product's aesthetics, a trademark on the name, a patent on the method it uses to make the bottles and whatnot, but the formula itself, the key to the company's success, has no legal protection whatsoever. It's merely a trade secret — this is not a legal term — and the only protection Coca-Cola has against copiers is its ability to...keep the secret. If the company filed a patent on it, they've have to publish the formula and the game would be over.

For most chefs, the money isn't in keeping their recipes secret and their dishes unique: it's in providing high-quality food and service at a good value and maintaining it over time. The molecular gastronomists who invest considerable resources in innovation may be out of luck: anyone can take a picture of a heretofore unique dish at dinner and post it online along with the menu description, and chefs with enough patience and skill can reverse engineer it and serve it for breakfast, or change an ingredient or two and serve it for lunch. Molecular gastronomy dishes may simply be too fluid, malleable and impermanent for the law to touch, but it will probably take a whole bunch of lawsuits to find out for sure.

The Man Who Ate The World [Amazon]
Sincerest Form, Interludes after midnight [eGullet]
Can you copyright a dish? [Guardian]
New Era of the Recipe Burglar [Food&Wine]
Can You Have Your Intellectual Property and Eat It Too? [Wired]
Marcel Vigneron Is Not A Plagiarist [Gurgling Cod]
System and methods for preparing substitute food items [USPTO]
Jerry Seinfeld Lawyer Hits Out At Cook's 'Bogus' Lawsuit [Post-Chronicle]
Understanding Intellectual Property Rights through Coca Cola [Zvulony & Co.]

wd-50 [MenuPages]
wd-50 [Official Site]
Moto [MenuPages]
Moto [Official Site]

[Photo: Moto's edible menu and copyright notice with ramps on the side, via steve renaker/flickr]

It's late Monday afternoon and the Taste Of Chicago is in its fourth day already! We thought we'd take a look at what's been written about it so far, and it seems like the lion's share of ink has been spilled by the Tribune, via the Stew. This is really their area.

• The Chicagoist had a preview piece this past Friday, but the content ended up getting overshadowed by commenters being mean to Chuck Sudo over a spelling error. Jeez!

• The Reader's Food Chain forgot to mention the Taste until this special Heads Up extra post from last Thursday (still in plenty enough time, though). The post reminds us about the 800 people who were sickened by Pars Cove's hummus at last year's Taste. Come to think of it, watch those tomatoes!

• Kelly the Culinarian is an enthusiastic proponent of the Taste, dispensing good advice about bringing cash (credit card lines are long), not stopping at the first ticket booth you see (the interior ones are less crowded), bringing your own water (bottles are expensive), and not buying alcoholic beverages (they're a poor value). We think you should bring two bottles of water, but the second one should actually contain vodka. No one will be the wiser!

• MrsJ2004 had a few other observations that we haven't seen elsewhere: the Budweiser Clydesdales were on display (better catch them now before the Belgians turn them into tartare), and the line for free slices of Eli's one ton cheesecake was two blocks — perhaps a quarter of a mile! — long. People are really bad at making time/money calculations when something free is involved...but on the other hand, this particular cheesecake is a Tradition, which often perverts rational behavior.

But the Tribune's At Play team is really the star of the Taste's media show, with eight blog posts on the festival in the past few days, not to mention last week's entire At Play section. Reactions and retractions abound: the team has running, booth-by-booth commentary about each dish*; Monica Eng apologized for some recommendations she made once she actually tasted the stuff, and then provides some helpful hints on how to conduct oneself (by way of having made these mistakes herself); Chris Borrelli summed up all the reasons why people generally avoid the Taste; intern Michael Pasternak has a nice human interest story about the antacid booths like Tums and Ultra Xcid lining the upset stomach of the Taste (fun fact: we have never once experienced heartburn!).

But nobody tops Phil Vettel, right? For two minutes and thirty-eight glorious seconds, Vettel tours around the Taste wearing a hat cam that gives us a "Phil's-eye view" of his lunch, a perspective we only wish was permanently accessible to us. The truly sparkling moment comes when Phil takes a bite of his mixed berry sorbet at Canady le Chocolatier, the squeals of delight betraying an afternoon of scarfing greasy, heavy, crappy food in the heat and humidity. Enjoyable throughout.

And finally, while it's impossible to say what brilliant, unfettered mind concocted this, we're nevertheless thrilled with the unholy mashup of the Talking Heads' "Once In A Lifetime," a poetic response to the rigors of the Taste, and the specter of Phil Vettel, choir person. It is, by far, the most successful piece of media inspired by Taste '08.

[Photo: crayfish boil from Lagniappe, via corsi photo, who took dozens of great photos of the Taste]

* Like with the Chicagoist post, the real story here is in the comments. Three different people asked what "meh" means, as it's used repeatedly in the reviews. Phil Vettel keeps his head and responded with "Meh? 'It’s a verbal shoulder shrug. It’s not great, it’s not awful, it’s…meh.'" We would have gone on a tirade about three-letter Scrabble-valid words and then executed all the offending commenters. Feh!

A little cheap receipt humor for your Friday afternoon? Sure, why not! Most of these are pretty base, but oh well. Enjoy!

• Sticky Rice w/ Mango, via Aysha Photography:

It gets much worse after the jump...

Continue reading "Receipt Follies: Abbreviated Entertainment" »

Two interesting tidbits we came across while putting some new menus online for you:

1) The mother-in-law is an ostensibly South Side (also, Mississippian) concoction involving tamales, chili and hot dog buns, and often all three. The gut-buster got some coverage recently because of the Southern Foodways Alliance's tour of Chicago in May, which was written about in the Sun-Times and Reader. One of the points made in the Sun-Times article is that mothers-in-law are all but impossible to find on the North Side:

[Chicago food historian Peter] Engler is convinced the mother-in-law is a South Side phenomenon, just like bad bad Leroy Brown.

"I made a concerted effort spending a couple of days going all over the North Side asking about mother-in-laws," said Engler, who worked in mouse genetics at the University of Chicago between 1988 and 2007. "Nobody knew. It's not on any menu."

2) The menu for La Baguette, a Mexican restaurant on 43rd and Ashland, contains several heretofore mysterious epitaphs in the tortas section. Tortas are delicious Mexican sandwiches, of course, but the category is inscruitably subtitled with "Las Guapachosas," and sub-subtitled with "Estilo D.F."

So we consulted with Carolina of MP:South Florida, who translated the latter as "in the style of Mexico City," where D.F. = Distrito Federal. While tortas are served all over Mexico, they're especially popular in Mexico City as street food. The menu lists a specific Mexico City torta called the Chilanga. It has milanesa (breaded steak), chorizo, ham and queso fresco, plus the standard beans, lettuce, tomatoes, avocado, onions and mayo; a classic torta.

The explanation for "Las Guapachosas" comes from another torta on the list, "La Guapachoza," or the Groovy Torta. This differs from the Chilanga in that it has pork shoulder instead of ham or chorizo...clearly a groovier ingredient, right? Lest we have to explain why the Russian Torta includes hot dog and pineapple!

These tortas are all $4.25, so you can't really go wrong in any case.

Clark Street Dog [MenuPages]
La Baguette [MenuPages]

[Photos: a mother-in-law from Fat Johnnie's on the South Side, via Southern Foodways Alliance; torta de chilanga from Seattle, via ascheele100/flickr]

This week, we got three comments worth sharing with you (or so we think).

• On our post about cult-run restaurants, Tyler pointed us to the fishy Unification Church:

Remember the Moonie Sushi joints featured in the Trib 2 years ago?

• Re: an old post about Old Fashioned Donuts's apple fritters, in which we mentioned that Michigan goes down to 150th street, Chicago Guy tries to set us straight:

Did you know Michigan Avenue continues well past 150th street and goes all the way to Detroit?

It's how people got between Chicago & Detroit before I-94 existed.

• Finally, we were party to a dialogue about Chicago's Polish food back in April, covering topics such as 1) are people prepared to pay a lot of money for high-end Polish food 2) does the Polish food in Chicago compare to the Polish food in Poland 3) is Chicago's Polish food even any good? Commenter "Bart," a native Pole, declared that Chicago's Polish food &mdash nay, all Polish food in America — is subpar. Just yesterday, Todd S. Jenkins joined the fray with an ultimately somewhat inappropriate quote from his pastor:

My Chicago-born, Polish-heritaged, former-missionary-to-Krakow pastor thinks Bart is full of beans. He comments, "I imagine the statement “there are no good Polish Restaurants in the Chicago area” ironically came from a Pole. There is a saying in Poland: “If two Polish men meet, there will be three opinions.” I have had the privilege of eating at no less than 10 Polish restaurants in Chicago that are run completely by Polish natives. I also spent many years in Poland and have eaten at their best. This poor guy must have the taste buds of a 13-year-old anorexic girl if he can’t find a good Polish restaurant in the second largest Polish populated city in the world!"

Okay, have a good weekend.

The tone and energy level of the finale was, for us, really encapsulated early on in the episode: when Padma announced that first pick of sous chef and proteins would go to the cheftestant with the most Elimination challenge wins, we figured, given that Richard and Steph were tied at four, there'd be a final, brutal, clarifying Quickfire. Instead, Stephanie drew a knife with the number "1" on it, and even she seemed surprised that that was all it took to get the go.

And, star-struck, she was all over Eric Ripert like...orange on Ripert (hey, that's not very nice!), but Eric seemed more interested in Richard's liquid-nitrogenated hot chili balls than anything else. All the attention gave Richard a freeze-on, and unfortunately, it was the highlight of day for him.

Meanwhile, Lisa adopted a catty zen as she chatted up poor April Bloomfield of The Spotted Pig (which we've been to and recommend), annoying the world with sympathetic details of her child labor line cooking. At first we thought, when she was saying things like "you know what, I'm about to beat you, so...", Lisa was having a Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf moment, but honest to blog, we got scared right before the last commercial that she might get the win.

Because each of the judges was careful to articulate that based on this dinner, with much regret belied in their intonation and facial expressions, a winner was clear. And since we laminated the public's collective hatred of Lisa (although she did go up from 3% to 4% of the audience pick during the final ten minutes of the finale) onto the judges, we could only assume they meant the worst.

Honestly, given the judges' reactions to the various courses, it was plausible. Poor Richard, who deployed his puppy face to much success this episode, failed to execute his dishes to the satisfaction of the judges, and moreso, to his own. His admittance of such during the final cross-examination didn't hurt him as much as it's hurt other reality contestants over the years, but that's because he was already at the bottom. It wasn't just one flimsy piece of flabby pork belly skin that stood between him and victory, but, close enough (also, it might have been his gender).

Lisa and Steph traded top honors on most of the courses. Dare we say it's easier to please the American palate with decent South East Asian food than it is with great New American? Yes we will say it! Because high-end Thai and Vietnamese is still relatively novel enough to garner wows simply for being, while New American has been the focus of many (most?) serious chefs for decades now.

Which means that when Lisa's flavors are too "big bold spicy sweet salty sour" (the adjectives she used to describe her personality), there's less context to judge them against and she gets a pass. And on top of that, girl knows how to make tom kha soup.

Still, none of the twelve dishes garnered praise quite like Stephanie's medallions of lamb with maitake mushrooms, pistachios and olives. Ted Allen almost shat himself over the creativity of the combinations, and it's what put her over the edge. Tom pointed out, during judging, that she almost always cooks delicious food, but what really makes her a Top Chef is the ability to pull out a revolutionary, never-before-seen surprise like the pistachios. Except, well, it's not exactly sui generis. But nevertheless!

Stephanie won because the quality and consistency of her cooking was more and better than any of her competitors. She may not have the attitude of Lisa (which didn't bother the judges much at all, by the way) and the so-called "artistry" of Richard (we don't mind calling it that, actually), but the key to being a great commercial chef (and Bravo reality has a penchant for the commercial, obviously) is the ability to churn out top-notch, accessible product with reliability. Being incredibly nice is merely a bonus.

Meanwhile, we're secretly excited for Top Haircut in two weeks.

[Photo: and that's why she's Top Chef, via Bravo]

p.s. we've seen Stephanie's last name, Izard, spelled a bajillion different ways, i.e., with two z's instead of one. The consensus on Google is Izzard (133k to 45k), but that's W-R-O-N-G. Disagree? Take it up with Bravo.

Disclosure: we spent much of last night in an ill-conceived attempt to fly from New York to Chicago during a summer afternoon; and instead of La Guardia to Midway like reasonable people, we picked Kennedy to O'Hare. Even bracketing the weather-related delays and hour-long wait in the take-off queue, we spent more time on blue-colored subway lines (the A train in New York, the Blue line in Chicago) than airborne. Since we were on JetBlue, we had the distinct displeasure of being subjected to a Top Chef marathon while knowing full well we'd miss a good fraction of even the second airing of last night's episode.

Nevertheless, we still have opinions and observations worth sharing! They mostly revolve around message T's. What would possess both Lisa and Stephanie to don that fashion faux pas of 2003-2006? Stephanie's lack of style (remember the teddy bear backpack from her audition tape?) comes off as charming, because she's a fabulous person and an even better chef. As for Lisa, all her affectations are indelibly coded as sinister.

Steph's "I ♥ Tahoe Boys" is quirky — and perhaps there's a deep camp interpretation that escapes us — but Lisa's "Kosher" is a direct assault on everything we hold near and dear. Because, okay, fine, so Lisa is Jewish and there's no turning back from that, but...how could the Kosher tee not have been a plant? The entire episode revolved around slaughtering and eating pig! Talk about a pat ironic "coincidence." And girl is not kosher on any level, sorry.

You know what we admire about Lisa, though? Obviously not her cooking; she's been second-to-last in every contest far back as we'd care to recall. It's the stone-faced death stare she's able to conjure in the moments before the judges decide her fate. The physiognomological structure is different from the one she deploys to receive/not receive criticism, which is more of a sour, twisting grimace of disgust; what we're talking about is the final few seconds, right before her co-loser is dismissed, where she goes slack and inscrutable like an Easter Island moai. That's how we want to play poker! We bet she's really good at poker.

Otherwise, the episode played out like these episodes play out. Everyone is in it to win it, and the two best remaining cheftestants both scored a victory: Stephanie's one-biteable tostones pucks with seared tuna clinched her first Quickfire victory, and Richard once again slightly outclassed his competition for a win in the elimination challenge. That Price-is-Right-style car he won (or least its mainland cousin) will doubtless be drafted into baby hauling duty.

Antonia got kicked off for...what, her al dente pigeon peas? Kind of ridiculous. Lisa may be a bigger ratings draw, but Antonia is a really clever lady; the funniest Top Chef contestant yet? Discuss.

Anyway, tragedies of injustice and all that. Next week, barring an utter catastrophe, Lisa will be at the bottom of the pile; her best can barely compete with her competitors' worst! And she's never at her best anyway, even though she keeps promising to "bring it this time" at the beginning of every episode.

Between Richard and Stephanie...they are both very good at making very good food, even if Richard's technical abilities surpass Stephanie's. There's the whole lady-must-win conspiracy, but we'll have to just wait and see, won't we.

[Photo: pigs are smarter than dogs, via Bravo]

And so, the final episode of Top Chef in Chicago starts out where Chicago itself starts out: no, not in a muddy onion field, but at the Allen Brothers steak warehouse. But first, Stephanie has to deliver the requisite line about there never being "this many girls" at this stage of the competition. Okay, Bravo, we get it! Lady power!

Back to the steak. The first part of the Quickfire involves Frenching a long-bone dry-aged rib rack, an activity to which Spike is unexpectedly well suited. Both of his grandfathers were butchers, and he adds, "there seems to be a little strain of butchery in me." You, and Pol Pot!

Spike did, in fact, do a great job cutting up and cleaning the ribs, while the girls suffer mightily against the ribs' tough outer layer of agedness. So much for lady power.

The cheftestants took their meat back to the Top Chef kitchen, where Rick Tramonto of TRU and Tramonto's Seafood & Steakhouse asks for the steaks to be cooked medium rare, please. (Tramonto must be pretty please about ultimately getting his way in the foie gras wars. Did you know he's the national spokesperson for the U.S. Duck Council? The ducks can not be happy about this.)

So the Quickfire is all — and only — about appearance: who butchered their meat the best, and then who cooks their steak to LOOK medium rare the best. No one's judging the taste of the steaks, or apparently even eating them at all. Hopefully they gave them to the homeless or something!

Each chef approaches cooking the steak in a different way; some grill, some pan-fry, some pop it in the oven, some do a combination of the three. But all must converge on the correct layering of red, pink, grey and black in order to please Tramonto. Richard and Stephanie fail to do so (they are not "tomahawky" or "lollipoppy" enough), and while Lisa and Antonia's impress, Spike edged out the competition with his superior butchering abilities.

The Challenge is revealed to be a takeover of Tramonto's Seafood & Steakhouse for an evening. Spike's reward for winning this Quickfire, much like when he won the healthy lunch Quickfire, was to have his first choice of proteins for his appetizer and entree. And much like the last time, he completely squandered it! He heard all the chefs talking about scallops, so when he spied some scallops in the kitchen, he nabbed them. But when they turned out to be frozen, instead of dropping them like a sack of frigid bivalves, he stubbornly decided to cut off his nose to spite his face and use them anyway. Right at that second, he was off the show.

Instead, we had to watch him unravel for 35 more minutes anyway. Each of the other chefs picked their proteins, which mostly involved seafood and organs for appetizers (sweetbreads, which both Richard and Stephanie used for their appetizers, are so hot right now we can hardly stand it), and various cuts of steak as the main. It's been a while since the elimination challenge was a solo event; when it's impossible to slough off the blame, you really have to bring it.

To make matters worse, Padma trotted out three VIP guest judges in the form of the winners from seasons past: Harold, Ilan and Hung. Everyone knows Ilan is a hipster douchebag, which is fine, but why did he wear an ill-fitting t-shirt to this relatively fancy restaurant? A fashion faux pas much worse, in our estimation, than Rachael Ray's keffiyeh kerfuffle. But we digress.

Onto the tasting and judgment. Richard's hamachi and sweetbread appetizer overwhelmed the judges with pleasure, to the point of it being their favorite appetizer. Similarly, Antonia's perfectly cooked, very "steakhouse" steak was their favorite entree, and they love how "from the heart" she is. Stephanie was determined (by the judges) to be the most "well-rounded" chef of the evening, and Tom Colicchio is amazed by her unflappable demeanor. All three are off to Puerto Rico (just in time for the primaries!), and Stephanie took the prize this week, which is a Tramonto cookbook (obviously) and a suite of kitchen appliances (kind of awesome, if a little Price is Right).

The bottom is always more interesting than the top. It came down, as everyone expected, to Lisa and Spike: Lisa's shrimp dish was served cold and her steak was cooked unevenly, while Spike's frozen scallop dish was a complete disaster. Lisa's face, while the judges were faulting her for various things, was a thousand different shades of hideous. But the best part of the episode was Spike's exchange with Rick over the scallops, which took around three seconds to devolve into a frat house shouting match.

Tom started it off by rightly criticizing Spike for using frozen scallops, which are mad declassé (and not very tasty). Spike suddenly blurts out, to Rick, something along the lines of "why do you have frozen scallops in your pantry?" And Rick reddens and says "yo, I'll take the shot, bro, that I had frozen scallops, but you gotta take the shot that you used them." (By the way, scallops are not currently on the menu at Tramonto's.)

After the interrogation round, Spike cracked up backstage because he knew that interchange was the death of him, and he was right. So the final four are Richard, Antonia, Stephanie and Lisa, and three out of four ain't bad. Lisa's going to get a hilarious sunburn in Puerto Rico next week, and then go home. Unless she kneecaps Antonia and no one finds out until it's too late, or something.

[Photo: "you're next," via Bravo]

We'd like to start this week out with a sighting: a friend of ours just saw last week's eliminee Andrew air-drumming really hard to music on his headphones (or maybe just in his head?) on the subway in New York. Of course he was. You thought that spazziness was just an act?

To the show. It's pretty easy to imagine that Tom Colicchio, in another life, was an experienced thief; who's ever looked more natural breaking and entering in the pre-dawn hours? Anyway, the cheftestants were woken up early to short-order cook at Lou Mitchell's. Owner Helene watched the six remainders fumble through orders of eggs over hard (who orders that? The same horrible people that like their steak well-done) and split sausage and so forth, eventually naming Antonia the winner for being generally competent and not screwing up anything royally. Also, Helene clearly saw a younger version of herself in Antonia &mdash tough, diligent white-ethnic family girl — and it is impossible to discount the role this emotional resonance played in her decision. Not that she didn't deserve to win, but still.

Toni's egg-flipping skills in the Quickfire allowed her to choose her team for the resurrected Restaurant Wars Elimination challenge, and she adroitly tapped Richard and Stephanie. Not only did she get two of the three best chefs left on the show, but she forced Dale and Lisa back onto a team together, a reliably explosive combination. Antonia's one canny lady!

So, Antonia, Richard and Stephanie decide to do a gastropub called "Warehouse Restaurant" (the challenge was to take place at a giant loft space on Goose Island); Stephanie took the front of the house, easy enough for the former proprietress of Scylla. Meanwhile, Dale, Lisa and Spike concocted an Asian restaurant called "Mai Buddha," since they all specialize in Asian cuisines and many of them have worked at Mai House in New York.

An aside: Antonia, for the second time, rails on Dale for only cooking Asian food. Excuse me, Ms. Italiana? Like "Asian" is such a tiny niche while ITALIAN is a universe unto itself and for all time? The first time she said it, it was a passing thought. The second time, racist! She may have been right about Dale getting kicked off, but for the wrong reason (by the way, what was the right reason? To be explored shortly)

Restaurant Wars was not the only relic making an unexpected return this week! Cue the devoutly adored Anthony Bourdain as guest head judge and several eliminees from episodes past — Antonia picks Nikki to cook her team's linguini and clams dish, while Mai House taps Jen because she's a good chef. Not that we hear from either of them at all for the rest of the show...

Then a lot of things happen very fast — as is often the case on the Restaurant Wars episode — but especially for Mai Buddha. Dale browns up the avocado mixture, Lisa continues her losing streak with some Teflon sticky rice, and Spike slicks himself into a suit at the front of the house and completely disowns his teammates.

Team Buddha's utter failure during dinner can be placed neatly in the realm of the spectacularly inevitable. Bourdain prophesied that the team, with their overconfidence and disproportionately upscale decor, had set themselves up to fail, and that's the one front on which they succeeded. Lisa's laksa shrimp was too smoky for the orthodox Bourdain (although Padma and Ted Allen like it), while her mango sticky rice was likened to "baby vomit and wood chips" (this is better than adult vomit, though). Dale, on the other hand, only had one dish disaster, in the form of some butterscotched scallops. He should have simply served Scotch; we understand Johnnie Walker Black is very popular in certain high-flying Asian circles.

Wearhouse Restaurant did so well it's barely even worth discussing. Stephanie won for her superior leadership, and got a food tour in Spain as a prize. Wow, that certainly beats the bottle of wine Dale got last week! The only other thing of note is that Richard used ras al hanout again, making it the "fierce" of this Top Chef 4.

During judging, Mai Buddha's staff got eviscerated, partially by Bourdain but just as much by each other. It was a high-speed bitchfest, and we weren't the only ones that found it entertaining — Spike didn't even bother to stifle his laughter. Bourdain at least called him out on being an aloof, selfish prettyboy who only avoided elimination by doing nothing. (It's worth nothing that unlike in past ResWars, there were no serious service snafus.)

And it came down to Dale and Lisa. They'd been at each other's throats for so long we can't even remember who's at fault (either is plausible), but the difference between them is, Dale has repeatedly shown himself to be a good cook, and Lisa has not. Dale's elimination at this point reeks of injustice, since Lisa and Spike are clearly lesser chefs than he, and it seemed like Lisa did more wrong, culinarily, than Dale did this week. But since Dale was the executive, the captain went down with his ship. One can only assume he'll do fine in his next life, at least. We unhappily await one of Lisa or Spike in the final four; they both have the potential to flame out spectacularly next episode, in which Rick Tramanto of TRU takes everyone down a notch.

[Photo: Painful to look at, via Bravo]

To the dismay of local MenuPages fans, Adam’s services are needed in other menuniverses this summer. Though his food rhetoric won’t die off completely, he’s enlisted a group of menu aficionados to fill in. I’m one of them.

Like you, I rely on the MenuPages blog to beef up my morning procrastination routine. Upon arrival at the office I check email, the weather and the MenuPages blog to catch up on all things edible in Chicago before doing any actual work. To ward off any unwarranted guilt I may have over this delay in corporate obligation, my morning routine will now include posting; a productive, “for fun” activity according to Adam. Indeed. A morning at the farmer’s market is way more fun than doing my real job. Take a look at the goods:

Asparagus, $2 a bunch from Stover’s Farm Market, Berrien Springs, MI.

Chicago PD and honey bears guard Stover’s Farm jams and nut butters, $4.95.

Make the jump for cherry-filled strudel, herbs and more.

Continue reading "Farmer's Market Is More Fun Than Morning At The Office" »

We just read through John McCain's speech to the National Restaurant Association to see what he had to say that's pertinent to the restaurant industry.

As you can imagine, most of the speech is about...nothing in particular — lower taxes, more trade, and so forth. We were instead looking for substantial pronouncements about food prices and labor availability, and got met halfway.

McCain opposes the Farm Bill in its current form, much like President Bush; all those nasty agribusiness subsidies and protectionist tariffs raising food prices and eviscerating the global poor, or so goes the argument. The theory is, a McCain-authorized farm bill would lower costs for restaurants, although he doesn't go so far as to say it.

The elephant in the room for restaurants, as far as we're concerned, is workers. Specifically, finding them, paying them and keeping them in an environment where much of the traditional labor pool is not authorized to work in the United States. Remember when illegal immigration was a big deal? Wait a minute, it still is!

Last year, the NRA was up in arms about the immigration bill that McCain co-sponsored, worrying that their industry would fall apart without cheap, unchecked illegal immigrant labor; they were hoping for some kind of comprehensive guest worker program instead. America went the third way — doing nothing.

Since that time, McCain has reversed his position on the subject, leaving us with very little to go on aside from a nostrum on border security. What will we do about the 13 million people living here without papers, then? Anybody's guess!

So, how will restaurant kitchens function under a McCain presidency? We don't know, and the NRA certainly didn't find out from this speech.

McCain's Remarks to the National Restaurant Association [Real Clear Politics]
Sen. John McCain to Address NRA Show [NRA]
McCain: I would honor NAFTA; veto farm bill [USAToday]
Bush signs one-week extension of federal farm bill [Reuters]
Issue Du Jour: Immigration And The Restaurant Industry [MP:Chicago]
Industry leaders express concerns about new immigration proposal [NRN]
CNN's Bash noted McCain said he'd oppose his own immigration bill -- but not his remark days earlier that as president, he'd sign it into law [Media Matters]
Border Security & Immigration Reform [McCain Official Site]

[Photo: McCain in a NH restaurant by Jim Cole, via Daylife]

À notre santé! This week's episode was all about health; Padma is dearly concerned about America's diabesity problem, and everyone's favorite chunk (chef-hunk, duh) Sam Talbot is, in fact, a diabetic, so it's important that the cheftestants be fluent in languages other than butterese.

The Quickfire concerns "sexy" salads — Padma's line about "bringing sexy salads back" made us hackney up our lunch, and besides, when did salads ever go out of fashion, exactly? If anything, they're more popular than ever.

At any rate, successful "sexy" interpretations of salad included Antonia's poached egg and bacon salad. First of all, it's a Top Chef axiom that you can't lose on bacon, and second, Sam cooed about the indivisible sexiness of breaking into an oozing egg yolk. Woof!

Stephanie's missing artichoke chip didn't help matters and Richard's ceviched fruit had no bite, so it went to Spike's "sensual beef salad" with mint and pineapple. It was Spike's first win at anything, which he ultimately handled with a complete lack of grace.

The elimination challenge was to devise a healthy boxed lunch for the Chicago Police Department — not exactly known for its physical fitness — involving a whole grain, a lean protein, and fruit and a vegetable. So then it comes out that the "significant advantage" Spike earned with his Quickfire win is that, whatever ingredient he picks in each category is verboten for the rest of the crew. Since Spike is a little bitch — it's true, just like Lisa — he chose chicken, bread, lettuce and tomato. Which would have been fine if he intended to use the bread, lettuce or tomato! But he didn't!

Meanwhile, Andrew got a lot of camera time throughout the show, never a good sign. Andy studied nutrition for a few years, and was superconfident about his ability to make an unconventional healthy meal. But...not a healthy meal for cops, who are not known for their propensity toward raw food diets. He excitedly discussed his plans to make a carb-free sushi roll in the monologues, which were sped up and jump-cutted to make it look like he's a crazy person. It's less illegal than subliminal advertising!

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Stephanie is serious eater and knows the CPD is, too, so she made a thick soup. Richard threw together a log of a burrito, but tuna and bok choi? Yes please. Dale did some bison (if it's delicious enough, we'll rescue it from extinction) with lemongrass and herbs, prompting Antonia to predict that Dale's Asian-only limitation would eventually be his downfall. But that's not even factually correct, so we'll see. Tom offered his usual mid-episode non-insight, this time remarking "I don't think any of them want to go home for a boxed lunch." Really, producers, was that his best pull quote?

Oh, and someone set little Lisa's brown rice on fire! It could have been any of them at this point, but it was most likely Lisa herself. We all laughed on the inside a little.

The scene at the Police Academy was very nice and antiseptic. Padma said to Sam, "so, your family is cops?" And Sam responded, "yep, my family is cops." Very thrilling.

Finally, the judging happened. Dale and Stephanie landed on top with their bison and soup, but the bison was sexier. Dale won, get this, a $25 bottle of wine! Also, a trip to the vineyard in California, but come on, that's pretty sleazy overall.

The loser's circle was composed of Spike, Andrew and Lisa. Spike was a little bitch (yes, worth repeating) for blocking tomato, lettuce and bread and then NOT USING THEM, plus his apparently strange combination of grapes and olives that we do all the time because it's delicious. Andrew missed the point of making a healthy meal that people might actually want to eat, and as Lisa slimily pointed out, didn't use a grain. Lisa's rice was burnt and undercooked to be sure, but her much larger problems included undercooked shrimp and a poor flavor balance overall.

In the end, they sent Andrew home, but seemingly not for the whole grain lacuna (by the way, when Andrew said he "always goes against the grain" the first time, it was funny, but the second time, it was annoying). Instead, it seems like Andrew doesn't (yet?) have a sophisticated understanding of how to cook for an audience. He was proud of how far he got, meaning he had a sense of his experience gap with the remaining chefs. Lisa and Spike should be shaking in their toques, because their volatility is no longer serving them well.

Next week, short-order cooking and the triumphant and suspiciously rapid return of Restaurant Wars ought to make for good television.

[Photo: Ted Allen gets better every year, via Bravo]

p.s. The Times today has a piece on the emergence of contextual targeting of TV advertisements, a practice that Bravo excels at already. Did you see those ads for Soy Joy and the diabetes medication at the end? Yeah.

Weddings are all well and good, but we're just as disappointed as the cheftestants about the substitution of a Wedding Wars for the traditional Restaurant Wars of seasons past. Why? Because it's another catering job. How many have there been now, five? When Dale says he hasn't catered since he was 18, that's a goddamn lie; more like two days.

ANYWAY, the challenge turned out to be mildly interesting. But first, the Quickfire! It's a skills relay, and anyone who didn't know what a monkfish looked like certainly got schooled. Fortunately, we feel the same about eating ugly things and cute things — and smart things and dumb things — more please! Richard and Dale skin and slice the creature with equal aplomb (by the way, when Richard said "I'm up against the dragon," did he mean the fish, or Dale? If the latter, we call racism! Also, will Dale have to pay for that locker he dented? Or did the producers tell him to do that...) and it all comes down to Stephanie whipping up a quart of mayo a little faster than Nikki, who took a BREAK in the middle of it! Where's your drive, Nik? When it's down to an immunity-less eight people, neutral doesn't cut it. But she will learn soon enough.

So JP and Corey come out of the wings and are introduced as wedding caterers who need their wedding catered, and pronto. Moments later, the internet told us their entire life story, including how they completely scrapped their planned ceremony in Kansas, and instead, threw new plans together for a 'ding in Chicago in the space of 27 days. Why? Because TV!!!

The structure of the challenge involved the Quickfire teams choosing a pre-spouse and making a buffet to their specifications. Team Functional (Richard, Steph, Andrew and Antonia) chose the bride, who wanted fancy meat and potatoes (remember: Kansas), while Team I Hate You (Dale, Lisa, Spike, Nikki) were assigned the Italophilic groom. Nikki and groom hit it off immediately, and so they chose to make an Italian feast! Which would be easy enough if 1) Nikki took a leadership role and actually planned the menu 2) Dale wasn't a selfish control freak. But neither of those things were the case!

In fact, much of the middle of the episode was spent chronicling the collapse of Team I Hate You. Lisa's worried that Dale is stretched too thin and his quality is dropping. Spike is pulling back and saying, if our quality is going down, I'm going to find me a raft. In the form of a Chilean sea bass. Nikki's like, weeeeeeel, I'm making a pasta. Even though I should be running the show and the judges will eventually kick me off for not being in charge! Instead, she's busy mumbling about her differences in ragout philosophy with Dale. If there's one thing you don't want at a wedding, it's philosophy.

Meanwhile, the highlight of Team Functional's prep phase is when Andrew starts waxing psychosexual, with his 18-hour "culinary boner" (if you're cooking with fat, does that mean you have a "lard-on"? Does making a salad give you a "Swiss chard-on"?) and the ways in which his spinach resembles "Popeye's wet dream." First of all, wouldn't that be Olive Oyl, actually? And second, it really brings a whole new meaning to "creamed spinach."

During the wedding, which was very nice, it became clear that Functional was besting I Hate You by some measure. Everyone from guests to judges to the newlyweds were oohing and ahhing over the brisket, while rock-hard bruschettas and awkward pastas were politely passed over. The profound visual disparity between the cakes — Stephanie's soaring and splendid lemon vs. Lisa's stolid, Brutalist German Chocolate — turned out to be mostly symbolic since the judges ultimately liked the chocolate better, but still. (By the way, when a lady on the buffet line responded to Dale's comment about his exhaustion by saying "you're like a med student," we call racism!)

Functional's win was no surprise, but the episode's (maybe even the series'?!) nicest moment was when Richard bestowed his win on Stephanie, and in return, she gave him half of her $2000 Crate and Barrel prize. Awww! You can't manufacture love like that, or ceremonialize it.

Finally, what we've been waiting seventy-five long minutes for: the kill. Lisa gets a pass for her tasty cake, and while Spike and Dale fall into a little exhaustion-induced hissy fit, you can't lose on decent Chilean Sea Bass. It practically sautées itself into extinction it's so good! No, it came down to Nikki the Lazy and Dale the Overeager. But trouble is, the judges have been wanting to kick Nikki off since she squeaked by in episode 5 when Zoi got booted instead. Also, it would be hard to make the case that Nikki's a better chef than Dale, even though she's clearly a better person.

Will next week's episode right the balance of boys vs. girls? Not if Season 2's Sam Talbot (who The Stew, MP:Boston and we all agree is the "tall, dark and handsome" guest chef in the previews) has anything to say about it!

[Photo: Hello Clarice (butsugiri/flickr)]

Things you know about Myanmar/Burma:

1) On May 3-4, the country's Irrawaddy delta region was hit by a powerful cyclone, killing 22,500 and leaving over 40,000 missing as of publication time (nationwide population: 55 million)

2) Last fall, the ruling military junta cracked down on widespread, monk-lead demonstrations, leading to the political imprisonment of hundreds and quashing hopes of a democratic revolution

3) Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel prize-winning democracy activist, has been under house arrest there for much of the past two decades

Things you may or may not know about Myanmar/Burma:

1) "Myanmar" is a pre-colonial name that the junta encourages you to use, and "Burma" is the somewhat racist colonial appellation that Aung San Suu Kyi prefers, because one really sticks it to the junta that way

2) Until a few days ago, Burma — let's just go with that...stupid junta — was a net exporter of rice, but the country's rice bowl (this is an official term) was storm-surged into oblivion. Maybe China will give them rice?

3) Burma is shunned by most of the world for its human rights violations and narcotics-based export economy. The junta is reasonably good friends with China

Things you don't know about Burma:

1) The junta is being pretty cagey about taking aid from the international community, but you can donate through the Anglican Relief & Development Fund

2) Burma has a unique and wonderful cuisine that's hard to find in the United States but always a joy to come across. It's a natural fusion of Indian, Chinese and South-East Asian traditions, meaning you can get chicken biryiani, durian ice cream and night market rice noodles in a single sitting if you so desire. They even have their own form of tofu, made from chana dal (split, skinless chickpeas) or yellow split pea flour, depending on the ethnic group. Better than soy-based tofu? In many ways. You like dumplings? The Burmese have half-a-dozen indigenous varieties to try. And so forth.

For us, though, the single biggest achievement of the Burmese kitchen is its myriad and exotic salads. Thai salads are more famous, but the Burmese do a job at least as sophisticated throwing raw and pickled vegetables and miscellany together into something greater than the sum of their parts. Observe:

• Pork Ear & Tongue Salad from the recently closed Burmese Cafe in Queens, NY (Jane! Jane! Jane!):

• "Burmese Feast" Tofu Salad from Golden Triangle in Whittier, CA (Tales of an LA Addict):

More salads than you could properly digest, after the jump...

Continue reading "The Salads Of Myanmar/Burma: A Timely Appreciation" »

You know what marginal group of tens of millions of people are being put at risk for poor nutrition by the global surge in food prices? American's school children! Back in the salad days of 2006 when money grew on houses, glowing accounts abounded on plans to revamp the way kids eat at school, trading the fattening and soulless frozen pizzas and burgers that fueled the childhood obesity crisis (remember that?) for the new religion of local/seasonal/organic.

Now that reality has set in, schools are swapping fresh for canned, seeing higher demand for subsidized lunches, and wondering how they'll cope with 30% to 50% cost increases while the federal per-meal subsidy remains static at an unrealistic 23 cents. Probably not all that well! Our youngest citizens have been historically poor budgetary advocates for themselves, so when their slice of the pie shrinks, that's generally the end of the story. Federal law will see to it that students are provided with a minimum number of calories each day, but that's also true for prisoners.

In this rapidly shifting environment for school meals, you have to wonder, just what are the children eating? Thanks to the wonders of the internet, hundreds of cafeteria menus are available for our inspection. Here's a sampling from around the country of what's being served for lunch today:

• Wicomico County, Maryland — Pork dippers with dipping sauce and dinner roll or hot dog on bun and potato rounds, cole slaw, pears

• Fulton County, Illinois — tortellini, pork tenderloin/bun, baked potato, salad bar, uncrustable PBJ, garlic bread, tossed salad, pineapple chunks, shape up in cup

• Fond du Lac County, WIsconsin — Grilled cheese, chicken noodle soup, raw vegetables and dip, mandarin oranges

• Pinellas County, Florida — Cheeseburger, Cuban pork with yellow rice, cheese stick munch and dip, potato wedges, beans, broccoli, Cuban toast

• Tate County, Mississippi — Salisbury Steak w/Gravy, Baked Chicken Nuggets, Fruit and Yogurt Salad, Ham & Cheese on Bun, Black-Eyed Peas, Straight Cut French Fries, Seasoned Cabbage, Chilled Peach Slices, Mixed Fruit, Fruit Juice, Central MS Cornbread, Rice, Saltine Crackers.

Illuminating! Almost everyone is eating pig products for lunch, and there also seems to be a preponderance of dippable items. Regional themes are clearly in play, like the Cuban toast in Florida and the intriguing "Central MS Cornbread" in Mississippi. It's heartening to see that, however unhealthy the dishes and low quality the ingredients, there's still a nod to culinary heterogeneity. Every school seems to be offering fruit and vegetables in some (unexciting) form, but that's a legal mandate; and besides, one of the articles mentioned that broccoli is now cost-competitive with flour!

But even as our school lunch program is stymied by high costs and crappy product, at least we don't have massive food poisoning outbreaks at our nation's cafeterias! For now, anyway.

Economic crunch seen in school lunch rooms [Bradenton Herald]
Food Crisis Forcing Cafeteria Managers To Try New Menus [AHN]
Food prices take bite out of school lunch menus [Star-Ledger]

[Photo: pingnews/flickr]

A politically active reader wrote in, wondering where he should fuel up next Saturday after he Gets Out The Vote for important presidential nominee [REDACTED] in hotly contested Gary, Indiana. Gary is known for many things — its rapidly shuttering steel mills, poverty, malaise and generalized decay — but much less so for its culinary offerings.

Let's assume for the sake of argument that you're really dead-set on eating in Gary, as opposed to Hammond or East Chicago or Hobart or Portage or, heavens forfend, Valparaiso. Because that would make this too easy! And obviously, you don't need our help finding the local Bennigan's (apparently one of the most popular restaurants in town), although it's worth pointing out that the Pepe's in Gary was the company's first NWI location when it opened thirty-two years ago.

Chains aside, there are credible indigenous dining options if you look hard enough. Our first suggestion comes from an encyclopedic post on LTHForum on Coney Island hot dog stands around Gary. Coney dogs are covered in beanless chili and have very little to do with Coney Island, Brooklyn; they first started to appear in Michigan around World War I, when place names were more appropriable, and continue to be popular throughout the Rust Belt (recently opened Cincinnati-themed bar Cinners offers Coneys for $2). In Gary's heyday, there were Coney stands on every other street corner (okay, not really), but in modern times, your best bet is probably Koney King, spelling it wrong since 1920. A Koney Dog runs $1.99 here, and you can eat it at the countertop atop totally mod red and blue diner stools. Be sure to arrive before 6pm, because this is not a late-night destination.

While you can't get anything pret a manger at Southern-style butcher Tennessee Country Meats, you can get a variety of exotica like salted spare ribs and the coarse, rustic, Hammond, IN-made sausage delightfully called "Bolshevik." You can serve it at your next USSR-themed soiree!

Finally, the somewhat out-of-place Miller Bakery Cafe has been serving fine food to Garyites (precious few letters away from Gary-itis, a common affliction) since the 1980s, when it took over a space formerly occupied by the Miller Bakery. If you thought you couldn't get wood-grilled organic quail stuffed with apple and prosciutto and served on lentils with a cherry liqueur-green peppercorn demiglace in Gary, you were dead wrong. But the fact that you can get it as an appetizers for $6.50 is truly astounding. Mains include a 7 Hour Lamb Shank, roasted with a savory spice rub, raisins and Zinfandel served on top a root vegetable hash for $22, and there's even an attached wine bar if your campaigning runs late.

Have a counterintuitive, hyper-specific query concerning Chicagoland dining? You've come to the right place.

Hillary Clinton arrives in Gary [NWI Times]
Pepe's Gary [Official Site]
Gary IN - Coney Dogs and Urban Decay [LTHForum]
Coney Island Hot Dogs [Wikipedia]
Cinners [MenuPages]
Cinners [Official Site]
Koney King [Google]
Tennessee Country Meats [Google]
Anyone heard of the lunchmeat "bolshevik?" [LTHForum]
Miller Bakery Cafe [Official Site]

[Photo: there are definitely more restaurants signs in Gary than actual restaurants (Vannah Von Terror/flickr)]

Pastries. It was going to happen eventually; Padma reminded us that pastries have historically been an Achilles' heel for cheftestants, and it presents a good opportunity to see who's been paying attention to that fact. Lisa claimed she had sworn to herself she wouldn't do a pastry on the show, but how stupid is that? We don't even believe her. Spike, on the other hand, memorized a particular dessert recipe because he knew this moment was coming.

What none of them knew was that the pastry Quickfire would have the disproportionally prestigious prize of a spot in the Top Chef cookbook. Now obviously there will be other Top Chef cookbooks that include a larger chunk of this season's chefs, but still, it's pretty hot to slip in there at the end. All of the desserts, despite the chefs' crows of ignorance and fear, looked professional and appetizing, but Richard's pseudoscallop bananas and avocado was certainly the most interesting and original of the bunch and the only one whose recipe we'd actually like to see. Kudos also to Dale for making halo-halo, an underpraised dessert if there ever was one.

It was really funny (but not funny haha) when Mark disinterestedly rattled off the notable Second City alums by way of introducing the improv troop. Either New Zealanders are not impressed by the likes of Belushi and Colbert, or the man was completely exhausted and depressed by his crappy showing in the Quickfire. Both explanations are plausible; the life of a cheftestant is not a leisurely one!

The conceit of the challenge — dishes that connote the colors, emotions and foods yelled out by the audience during the improv show — is a clever one. Like in the movie challenge, here is a case of the chefs having to abstract a narrative to sell their dishes. Will they have learned the lesson of how critical it is to get the theme right? No, apparently not!

So let's see, there's...tofu+green+perplexed, yellow+love+vanilla, drunk+magenta+polish sausage, orange+turn-on+asparagus, and purple+depressed+bacon. And now that there's only ten people left and they all know each other pretty well, they were allowed to pair off on their own. This is the first of several elements of meta-improv that go on in the main challenge. While it isn't stated explicitly, the lack of electrical equipment (BTW, what the honk are robocoups and vita-preps, anyway? Too insidery! There should have been a pop-up explainer) and the chefs' forced relocation to the TC house for cooking are both improv devices, even if they didn't seem to have a negative impact on any of the teams.

It was certainly telling when we're treated to lengthy exegeses on the Spike & Andrew (goofy egotists) team, the Jen & Steph (competent professionals) team and the Richard & Dale (high-end superstars) team, but nothing much at all about Mark, Nikki, Antonia and Lisa. Because these people are all going to go away soon! But not just yet; as Nikki (and many others throughout the episode) pointed out, the show is now at a stage where chefs are eliminated for error, not for general incompetence.

First, the good. Richard and Dale's tofu-with-an-identity-crisis impressed the judges, who like pretty much everything Richard does (except for scaly sous-vide salmon). Dale seems to ground Richard, making sure the high-concept doesn't interfere with taste and quality assurance. But since it was Richard's "brainchild," as Dale called it, he was the winner. Now, winning the Quickfire and the challenge is pretty impressive, right?

Spike and Andy make a butternut squash soup (yellow) with vanilla creme fraiche to avenge episode 5's debacle, and pull it off very successfully. Because sometimes, it's better to be good than avant-garde! By the way, when Antonia said "if he wins with a soup I'm going to vomit in my mouth," we LOL'd a little.

Mark and Nikki pass through with a bacon dish because no one ever loses on bacon. We sort of took offense at Mark's contention that the bacon was "depressed" because it had to share a plate with brussel sprouts; brussel sprouts are like our Zoloft! Anyway, both of these people are on thin ice, and we bet one of the two will go next episode.

It was unusual this week that the top four chefs were men and the bottom four were women, especially given how much Bravo is touting the ladies this season. Lisa and Antonia were reamed for completely rejecting the Polish sausage aspect of their dish. Lisa's like, "I'm too good for Polish sausage peasant food." Well you know what, little Lisa? Polish sausage is damn good, and comes in more varieties than you can shake a stick at. Stop being an idiot and make what you're told; your ego has one foot out the door! Also, always serve the guests tequila.

But the real sadness is Jen and Stephanie, two people we would not have expected to see at the bottom already. Their vaguely uncomfortable ménage à trois with orange, goat cheese and asparagus was a total failure for the judges. First of all, Jen going on and on about the phallic imagery of the asparagus was kind of a lost cause. Second, how lucky are they that "orange" happens to be both a color and a food? You'd think they'd have been a little more grateful. Thirdly, they should have ditched innuendo for total obscenity and had the asparagus actually penetrating the orange slices...and along those lines, we can also think of a more clever way to deploy the goat cheese. Haha ew! It is somewhat tragic to have soggy croutons be your downfall on Top Chef, but that's the way the stale bread crumbles. Jen's departure, in which she calls Richard her [hair] brother, is classy. We will miss her!

Next week, important Oprah chef Art Smith (now of TABLE fifty-two) and his various charities.

[Photo: lost in thought (BravoTV]

An intrepid reader, doubtful of our matzo shortage claims, took this damning photo at the Dominick's on Roosevelt and Canal. The barren shelves! What a powerful visual metaphor.

But there's a secondary scandal: the particular box of matzo you see pictured is Streit's Onion-Poppy Moonstrips, which, according to Serious Eats, aren't even Kosher for Passover! A shande, truly.

A torrent of articles from around the country have made certain what we noticed anecdotally the other day at the supermarket: America is in the grips of a severe matzo shortage. While there was just enough to go around for seders on Saturday and Sunday nights, observant Jews are scrambling to find supplies of the unleavened bread to sustain them for the rest of Passover, another five or six days of dietary restriction.

Theories for why this is happening this year abound, but are ultimately limited in scope. The aforementioned articles have pointed to recalcitrant retailers like Trader Joe's who have declined to carry matzo this year, stymied suppliers like Manischewitz that couldn't make Tam Tam mini-matzos because of equipment failures, and cantankerous consumers who didn't plan ahead and rushed to buy the limited cache of matzo all at once.

But these explanations ignore the reality that, while matzo is certainly a niche product, what this amounts to, more or less, is a bread shortage. As people around the globe are increasingly — and for many, painfully — aware, the price of wheat has DOUBLED in the past year. Matzo, as you may or may not know, is made of NOTHING BUT wheat! So it costs more to make, and less was made. We're merely implying causality here, but let's put aside our lack of hard evidence and consider the following:

All of a sudden, the people of the developing world are rapidly increasing their average daily calorie intake while the land, water, and energy resources used to grow food products are rapidly diminishing in quantity and quality. The wealthiest ten percent of the world has been materially unaffected by this imbalance, but billions are forced to sacrifice and hundreds of millions are on the brink of starvation. It is unfortunate that the richest decile of the world's population — the people who are in the best positions, politically and economically, to address the food crisis — have little in the way of structural incentives to make the sort of wholesale systemic changes to the global food/energy system that is necessary to ensure sufficient, reliable and equitable supplies of foodstuffs.

Earth Day and Passover are just the kinds of navel-gazing opportunities we need to encourage us to consider how to go about feeding ourselves in this new era of unprecedented high demand and low supply. While many await a technological panacea to rescue us from our present conundrum, no real solution is possible without a shift in attitude by the world's producing class (that, or we could start eating a hell of a lot less meat). The matzo shortage story may not exactly be a warning shot across the bow, but it's certainly a sign that no one's entirely immune to global commodities turmoil.

It’s Passover. Who’s Hiding the Matzo? [NYTimes]
Matzo in short supply for Bay Area Passover [SFGate]
Hit or miss with finding matzo as Passover looms closer [MercuryNews]
As Passover nears, matzo in short supply [Contra Costa Times]
Matzo shortage at many Reno stores looms for Passover [Reno Gazette-Journal]
Price Volatility Adds to Worry on U.S. Farms [NYTimes]
In Lean Times, Biotech Grains Are Less Taboo [NYTimes]
Rising Demand for Meat Takes Toll on Environment [NPR]

[Photo: no more matzo, in any language (missapril1956)]

N.B. Special bonus! There's also a shortage on Kosher-for-Passover margarine because farmers planted ethanol corn in lieu of cotton last year. Hope you like your flourless chocolate cakes dry!

We got a review early Saturday morning entitled "nice place - never going back" for Blue Agave that, whether the story is true or not, struck a chord:

They put soemone else's food into my doggie bag.
I don't want to see a half-eaten chicken wing that someone was gnawing on when I open the box.

I will never return to that place.
I will tell everyone I know to never go to that place.

Meanwhile, did you know that the doggie bag was invented right here in Chicago? The Wall Street Journal reported:

In 1949, Al Meister, the head of a Chicago-based packaging company called Bagcraft Papercon, came up with an iconic American invention. He developed a special coating to make a paper bag grease-resistant. Onto the bag went the drawing of a dog and a poem by his wife beginning, "Oh where have your leftovers gone?" With that, the company laid claim to the world's first dedicated doggie bag.

Blue Agave [MenuPages]
'A Doggie Bag, S'il Vous Plaît' [WSJ]

[Photo: lickyoats/flickr]

We can't help but think that Runway's challenges are more interesting than Top Chef's have been this season, which is to say, not very much at all. High-end catering, low-end catering, high-end catering, low-end catering...has it been this way every season? We have a very short memory for this kind of thing.

But before we move on to the tailgate challenge at Soldier Field, there's the little matter of Koren Grieveson's AWESOMENESS to attend to. The head chef of Avec looked fierce on that particular morning; our notes say "koren is a f[*]cking monster. love her tshirt," and we stand by that. The consummate working chef, she presided wearily over a beer pairing competition; who can best bring out the subtle flavors of Michelob Ultra! That would be Richard, who makes a tuna sandwich to go with it. Stephanie does a mussels and Hoegaarden thing, and we agree with Mike Nagrant that she totally cribbed from Hopleaf. But in a much less execrable way than Cindy McCain cribbing from the Food Network, right? And Jen won for her shrimp beignets in honor of Zoi's departure last week/last night.

Our main criticism with the beer pairing thing was not that they used crappy, commercial beers (although this bothered other bloggers), but that the judging didn't at all touch on whether the dishes were properly paired with the given beers! Maybe this was an editing choice, or maybe because, as Spike said, all the beers did taste the same, but it seemed like they just completely elided over the intellectual justification for the Quickfire. Maybe we're asking too much...

The challenge to make tailgating grub for a Bears game is so close to the block party thing from a few weeks ago that we're mildly offended. But, you know, it's good for branding. Highlights from preparation phase include:

• Ryan's claim that he does not look like a sports fan, and instead is a "metrosexual"

• Jen's dedication of her Greek quinoa tabouleh dish to Zoi; the only way that could have been more Sapphic is if she'd served it in squash blossoms

• Mark's faux-upsetness at not being able to throw some "shrimp on the barbie"

• Lisa, when talking about her skirt steak and corn cakes, saying, "I'm just there with a rolling pin, beating my meat." COME ON!

• Tom's charming-to-the-point-of-boring patness with the chefs during the mid-episode interviews. Also, he's looking a little chub these days (this is not a problem for Top Chef viewers, half of whom would rather touch him during a football game than Padma or themselves. Padma is the most likely of the three to sue.)

After the prepping, they went back home. The best part of the episode was probably the hot tub scene, where Spike decides that because Mark has curly hair, he's friend-for-life material. To each fetish, his own.

Finally, game day. They seemed pumped, and early on, everyone liked everything. We appreciate that each cheftestant is getting face time, except for Lisa and Jennifer who will obviously not play a role in the judging phase. Extra attention is lavished on bottom three: Nikki, who ran out of food, Ryan the showboater, and Mark the slob. Can we tell you how excited we were to see Paul Kahan of Blackbird, and then how disappointed we were that he was barely on camera? No justice.

We were convinced during the judging that Nikki was going to go; not because she ran out of peppers and onions for Tom and Padma and Paul, but because she bought sausage at a store and had non-integrated shrimp on the side and didn't see anything wrong with any of that. Maybe girl spent too much time on her interstitial updo to bother to make a homemade shrimp sausage sandwich or whatever. And her initial justification for why she appended shrimp onto her dish was "in case people don't eat [pork] sausage." Who is this subset of people, exactly?

But no, it was Ryan's turn for petulantly making a fey four-course supper instead of tailgate food, and doing a crappy job at it to boot. During his goodbye speech, he copped to learning that he's not "the sh*t," but also repeatedly said his full name in order to be properly remembered by the viewing public.

Stephanie was in the top three again, but Dale won the challenge with his fancy ribs and got a football jersey and the grill he cooked with as a parting gift. We wonder if he's still "bitter" about Lisa's prize last week; is he "clinging" to that trip to Italy? HA!

Next week might actually be funny, because Second City and pastries are involved. Pastries are funny.

[Photo: so right about Koren's t-shirt, BravoTV]

No. But they are from Chicago.

Last night's episode was all about taste. As opposed to the rest of the season, where taste has no bearing! Much-ballyhooed chef Ming Tsai was on hand for the day's challenges, which involved a blind taste test (conceptually interesting) and catering the first course for the Meals on Wheels Chicago Celebrity Chef Ball (worthy, but less interesting).

Ming introduced the blind test by saying "if you can't tell what tastes good [...] you might as well pack up your knives and go home." Who wrote that line for him? Totally lame to plug one of the show's catchphrases. Nevertheless, the challenge itself was elegant in its formality and objectivity: each of the cheftestants tried cheap and expensive versions of fifteen food items (olive oil, bacon, chocolate, etc.), and the one who most often identifies the pricey item, won.

But it is not as easy as you'd think, apparently, since poor Stephanie only got six out of fifteen. Antonia, of all people, won with twelve correct IDs (note that underachiever Ryan got eleven). Which made us wonder, how much of taste is nature and how much is nurture? You can train ad infinitum, but not everyone has the same amount or distribution of taste buds. A discussion for another time, perhaps. What you should take away from the Quickfire is, this would be a great party game for foodies.

The main challenge was creating a first course for this Meals on Wheels chef ball, whose theme is the elements:

• Team Water, led by Richard, made scaly sous-vide salmon. So many scales! Andrew pointed out that not removing the scales is like "leaving a fish head on." Although that can work sometimes: witness the deliriously delicious cod cheek. But anyway, Tom Colicchio doesn't even like sous-vided salmon, and didn't understand Mark's parsnip puree.

• Team Earth, led by...well, no one, unfortunately, made bland-ass beef carpaccio with mushrooms (poor Zoi!) and sunchokes. Antonia had immunity from the Quickfire and shot down Spike's soup idea, which turned into a giant bone of contention later on when Earth ended up at the bottom of the heap, but oh well. Our favorite moment involving Team Earth was when two fancy ladies in their 60s were chatting and one of them said, "I would be telling someone on the Earth team they're going home tonight," and the other one said "Ouch!" Okay in our book: fancy ladies saying "Ouch!"

• Team Air, with Jen and Ryan and Nikki maybe (Nikki is a character we know almost nothing about. Soon, she'll do something stupid and get eliminated), made duck breast, an herb salad, and a prosecco cocktail. Air got in second place and there's really nothing to say about them.

• Team Fire, with Stephanie mediating between ever-squabbling Dale and Lisa, made spicy shimp with spicy chili and an innovative cross-cut bacon component that won Lisa a lil' trip to Italy. Dale was so pissed that he didn't get to go to Italy! Well, he should have done something with bacon then, right?

So Lisa won for her neato bacon, and Zoi lost because of her underseasoned mushrooms. We're disappointed because, there was some promise of Zoi and Jen's relationship becoming an *issue*, and now there's not. Human dignity one, us zero.

Now that we're down to a dozen chefs or less, the show's format is changing a tad. Tom got some extended interview time with the chefs as they were preparing their dishes, and then had a monologue at the camera where he discoursed on their relative strengths and weaknesses. He also forced the chefs to identify themselves with the components of their dishes for the purposes of easy elimination later on.

When does Top Chef start to get really compelling? Is it at nine chefs? Six? Possibly never? We will have to stay tuned for the next episode, which involves hot tubs.

[Photo: BravoTV]

When Rosscoe's Chicken & Waffles opened last month, we cautioned that

trying to ride the coattails of the established LA institution doesn't sit all that well with us. We realize the owners are just trying to maximize their business, but given the dearth of decent dining options in the area, simply providing good food and decent service would have taken care of that. Using the name Rosscoe's (misspelled as it might be) just opens you up for increased scrutiny and ire.

Equally relevant is Roscoe's logo, which is also protected. The trademark has a disclaimer that states "NO CLAIM IS MADE TO THE EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO USE "CHICKEN N WAFFLES" and the illustration of waffles APART FROM THE MARK AS SHOWN." Let's take a look at the mark!

The chicken on the left belongs to Chicago's Rosscoe's, while the chicken on the right is property of LA' Roscoe's. There are differences between them, to be sure; um...for example, they're looking in opposite directions. The owner of Chicago's Rosscoe's, Darnell Johnson, is quoted as saying:

In a court of law, in a civil case, we feel we can win 9 out of 12 jurors. If they get the whole story.

Nevertheless, this infringement suit seems to have legs, given that the "likelihood of confusion between the two is pretty high for unsuspecting Chicagoans. It's one thing to use the name "Rosscoe," which is a recognized variant of Roscoe (meaning "deer wood" in Old Norse) — after all, during the interwar period, one out of every two hundred male babies was named Roscoe!

But the similarity of the logos is pretty damning. At the end of the article, Johnson states he'd be fine changing the name except for the high cost of switching the signage. We're underwhelmed by this argument also, but doing so would be a lot cheaper — and arguably less insulting — than getting shut down by government injunction.

L.A. restaurant cries fowl over Chicago eatery's name [Tribune]
Roscoe's House Of Chicken N Waffles [USPTO]
Trademark infringement [Wikipedia]
Roscoe - Name Meaning and Origin [Think Baby Names]

[Photos: top, the appropriately titled "Our efforts thwarted" (Chicago White Meat/flickr); middle, our own construction using Google Maps Streetview and dcfud]

Potatoes are a terribly versatile starch; you can mash them, smash them, fry them, scallop, dice, puree, bake, roast, gratinate, chowederize and latkefy them...they take well to almost any preparation. Now that the UN Food and Agriculture Organization has decided that they are the food of the future by dint of their caloric yield per acre (a critical metric in an era of unmitigated cereal price spikes), there will be opportunity for even more permutations of potato dishes, like some of these exotic specimens:

"Tornado Potato" — as purchasable on the streets of Seoul (superlocal):

After the jump, spuds galore!

Continue reading "Potatoes: Feeding The World In Their Many Guises" »

Last Friday, we wrote about our sticker shock when we saw the price of a certain (tasty-looking) main course at Szalas on the Southwest Side. We argued that we've come to expect Polish food in Chicago to be cheap, and we're somewhat suspicious when it's not.

This generated the slightest pique of ire from Louisa of Movable Feast, who was concerned we were reopening the X-food-is-meant-to-be-cheap message board war (veterans of which are currently suing for more generous meal stipends).

But we never meant to imply that there's a reason inherent to the cuisine itself for it to be universally inexpensive, or that we would not be willing to pay a lot for imaginative, high quality Polish food served in a sophisticated restaurant. It's just that, since such a venue empirically does not exist in Chicago, and because the overwhelmingly vast majority of Polish restaurants in the city are conspicuously inexpensive, that we've come to view Polish as a "value" option. In fact, we think there should be a temple to fancy Polish food in Chicago, and that there's a market for it.

However, commenter "Bart" disagrees:

There are no good Polish restaurants in the Chicago area, and I doubt you would find one in the US at all. Simply this kind of cousine doesn't sell, and is not existent except withing old country. For real taste of Polish cuisine try some more upscale restaurants in Warsaw, Krakow. But don't expect the bill to be running under $40-$50 per dish.

But truth is, Szalas is still serving it right, even if their menu is bit on a countryside - but you are served a traditional stuff.

The set menu (like a prix fixe except you don't have any options) includes pierogi, sour soup with smoked bacon, beef roulade in mushroom sauce with buckwheat and warm beetroot salad, "cream cake on the mirror of strawberry sauce" (!) and a glass of cherry vodka, and is 175 zloty, or $80, a person. That's not insignificant in a country with a per capita GDP of $16,600, around half that of the United States.

But only tourist eat set menu, yes? Should we ever find ourselves in Krakow, we are ordering: foie gras in wild rose and apple preserves ($42), crayfish soup with sour cream and dill ($16), and the roe deer and quail duet served with wild rice
and many-colour pepper sauce for $50. Ooh! Or maybe the veal leg stewed in dark mushroom sauce, served with roasted potatoes and sweet pea, a hefty $57. And we can't say we're not intrigued by the apple strudel with linden tree ice cream for $15. All this comes to upwards of $130 or so before beverages (tax and tip are mostly included, in all likelihood), which is nothing to sneeze at.

While an opulent, 650 year old Polish restaurant that regularly plays host to visiting foreign dignitaries may not be in the cards for Chicago, surely there's still room for something special, eh? Something with foie gras...

Szalas [MenuPages]
Szalas [Official Site]
Wierzynek [Official Site]

[Photo: Daniel Matysiak/flickr. That "GRILL" awning is atrocious]

This week's Top Chef revolved around being able to cut vegetables and watch movies. These are things we do in our spare time! We can be Top Chef!

Okay, so in addition to chopping vegetables, we also need to learn how to: blanch, grill, curl, chiffonade, tournée, brunois, and supreme them. These are not all verbs, but you get the drift. The classically trained chefs did well (especially the ones who worked under Boulud! More Richard than Ryan, who couldn't take the heat), and the self-taught ones mostly underperformed. Tellingly, Manuel's effort was called "Level 1," which is totally harsh (and probably true!)

Dale wins with a dish that Boloud decided "showed something amazing." But the most fascinating part of this challenge was that Jennifer and Zoi, the show's resident lesbian couple, both made vegetable plates that involved poached egg. That is so Freudian we don't even know what to do with it! Delightfully so. We were told that this episode would feature "a big editorial focus on the lesbian relationship and the competitive advantage of having your significant other on the show," which seemingly happened in one or two sentences at the very beginning of the episode. But the real commentary was in the eggs, most certainly.

Padma (whose blue dress nearly stopped time) reveals the main challenge to be...creating a dish inspired by a movie. Uninspired, to be sure, but maybe Richard Roeper really wanted to be on Top Chef? The people we were watching with think he's a horrible movie critic, while we have no opinion on that front. As a food critic, though, we do not approve of the little we heard. His gustatory populism has no place at the judges table! But we digress.

The real tragedy of this challenge is that half the battle — the easy half — was coming up with a narrative that links the movie to the dish. So many of the chefs failed to understand this! Maybe they didn't think it mattered, but the deciding factor in these early rounds often comes down to which chef more closely hews to the theme, rather than the tastiness of the dish itself. So when Spike and Manuel chose "Good Morning Vietnam" as an excuse to make a crappy summer roll, we totally wanted them to lose. And they did! How gratifying.

But other things happened on the way. The dream team of Richard, Dale and Andrew won with their inspired salmon-faux caviar-wasabi-chocolate whimsy complete with fizzy lifting drink — sufficiently appropriate to "Willy Wonka," but couldn't they have made it in gum form? Stephanie continues to be able to do no wrong. Zoi and Antonia pick a good movie ("Talk to her"), but their narrative about two strong women being represented by two skinny lamb chops is pretty stupid. Nikki and Jennifer get away with choosing "Il Postino" because at least their Italian dish is "rustic." Mark and Ryan deftly steer clear of "Dumb and Dumber" and manage to pull some crazy-ass sh*t out of the bag with a scene from the "Christmas Story" involving Chinese food, and a well-prepared quail. See, because it's all about creating a narrative!

Anyway, it was time for Manuel to go. His "Level 1" skills simply were not paying the bills, as evidenced by his real-life dismissal from Dos Caminos a few weeks ago. Plus, he was way too beta for this crowd of preeners. Oh well! Next week promises to be a huge bitchfest, which we're excited about.

[Photo: the winning salmon/chocolate dish. Not much to look at, but evidently very impressive, via BravoTV]

The other day, we asked if anyone had a sense of where Top Chef episode 3's block party took place. Much to our surprise, someone actually took the time and energy to write in! Commenter and brilliant deductress Beth Berlin surmised the following:

I'm pretty sure the block party was in Ravenswood. I was trying to figure out where it was because it looked like a slightly more upscale "typical" Chicago neighborhood but still with a lot of houses and bungalows, but mostly all older houses; no new tall brick-y things. I think Richard called his paella "Richmond Ave. paella" at one point and that set off the lightbulb. Also, in the car Dale was saying there were passing a lot of Korean restaurants; there are lots of those in Albany Park, just north and west of Ravenswood, although they also showed them driving by Hard Rock and other River North spots, so who knows. My best assessment of where they were, though, is somewhere in Ravenswood, or just north or south of it.

[Photo: tervaja/flickr]

Many life lessons from last night's Top Chef, in which Stephanie eked out a victory with her Mexican cinnamon wonton shells, as served at a block party in an UNNAMED Chicago neighborhood. Could somebody please name it?

1) Rick Bayless is a fashion icon, with that blousy purple shirt and the very light facial hair. Maybe a Mr. Wizard with a twist? OF LIME AND CILANTRO!

2) Jicama can be used in lieu of a starch. Also, if Miguel is willing to lapse into Spanish pronunciations for "taco" and "chorizo," the least he could do is pronounce jicama properly (i.e., HEE-cama instead of hicamma, like a hiccup)

3) Richard's restaurant, Trail Blais (Blais being his last name), would be better named "Blais of Glory" (thx Anthony)

4) Mental note, upon viewing Quickfire upscale taco challenge: lesbians ironically can't make tacos (zing!)

5) Corporate sponsorship — Padma tells the contestants to "jump in your [product placements]" and drive to the (Clorox front) mealstogether.com block party. Mmm, Cloroxtinis for everybody! Alternatively, "Sexy Drink," made with lavender. Is lavender really sexy? We think of it more as laundry

6) This is the second time in a row that no one knows how to cater. We hate things in a row!

7) The show's editing leads us to believe that the Red Team is going to win, and the suddenly, no, the Blue Team comes out on top. Because when all we get is hyperkinetic half-second shots of fifteen different food items, we really can't make independent assessments (unlike on Runway, where at least we have the same number of senses as the judges do). So the producers can jerk us around as much as they'd like for the first half of the season, until enough of the chaff has been whittled away that we can start paying proper attention to who's doing what

8) The Red Team defends itself by saying, oh, it's a Middle American block party, so we made lowest common denominator food. This is incredibly condescending — bunch of New York chefs go to bungalow country and think people don't know what they like? Chicago is, in many ways, a purer eating city than New York, and its avant-guard culinary scene and copious fatness prove it. As Rick Bayless himself put it during the judging, "good food sells to everybody." And condescension sells to nobody (except a small set of high-income strategic self-deprecators, but that's another story)

Yes, life lessons all. Next week: Daniel Boulud and Richard Roper for some reason!

[Photo: Stephanie's winning recipe for "Mixed Fruit with Oatmeal-Pine Nut Crumble, Cinnamon Sugar Fried Wontons." Seems like all you need to do to win this competition is cook well! (Bravo)]

IMPORTANT ADDENDUM

MP:Boston's Leila — with whom we watched Top Chef last night — noted that the block party street looked like John Hughes' fictional town of Shermerville, IL:

What we found out is that each one of us is a molecular gastronomist and a locavore, a sous chef, a classicist and an innovator. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Block Party Club.

You all know by now that Grant Achatz was very seriously considering plopping a version of Alinea in New York, but has decided against it. In an email to Time Out New York, he writes:

Sure, it would have been easy for us to clone Alinea and plunk it down in Manhattan. But what does that get anyone? Sure, we make some money if it is successful, but really that is not compelling. It would mean cannibalizing the very philosophy that makes Alinea what it is. New York would have a knockoff, and it would stretch our resources here at Alinea to the point of jeopardy for no real gain to anyone.

1) Mr. Achatz could charge $400 for the Tour, and people would still pack the place. It would be disgusting.

2) Could it really be that someone out there is doing it for the art and not the cash? Bless you.

3) Certain things should be unique in the universe for deeply philosophical reason, and Alinea is a prime example.

4) New York simply doesn't deserve it. Really. It's too good for them. And we should know.

Even if one day, forces beyond our control dictate that Mr. Achatz launch a New York project, at least today, we can savor the victory of good over evil; that's how strongly we feel about it.

Exclusive: Achatz fills in the blanks on Alinea NYC [Time Out New York]
Alinea [MenuPages]
Alinea [Official Site]

* Note that we have virtually no emotional reaction to Charlie Trotter's entré into the New York market. Account for that as you will.

Guess the thing:

We'll tell you tomorrow, but please to write in with your ideas. Correct identifications will be noted. Hilarious identifications will be lauded!

We watched Top Chef last night, laptop in one hand and Johnnie Walker Black (product placement!) in the other. We typed notes with our nose and toes, leaving our eyes and ears free for actually watching the show. The brain, busily coordinating these activities, was mostly bored.

• Catering episodes are usually underwhelming, in part because they are overwhelming: keeping track of twelve people's little canapes, which chefs belong to which animals, what the judges love and hate, and so forth. It would be great if Top Chef were a dual-screen event, with one providing the narrative and the other one doing macro shots of the food. Then we'd pay better attention.

• Anyway, the quickfire was enjoyable enough. We're sort of annoyed that they chose Wylie Dufresne of wd-50 in New York to be the guest judge instead of one of Chicago's many celebrated molecular gastronomists, but at least he's an interesting guy. He burned Richard for his crappy eucalyptus thing and lauded Mark the Kiwi for his sideburns, which proves the maxim, "the quickest way to a man's heart is through his facial hair."

• When the cast started calling out their various wild animals for the elimination challenge, we were hoping it was going to be like Carnivore in Nairobi, where they actually serve giraffe and zebra and what have you. But no, it's a zoo function. Shame!

• So they're going to be at Whole Foods for ingredients every week? What of Chicago's indigenous gourmet supermarkets? Another shame!

• Chefs, heavily edited, say the most asinine things. When Tom Colicchio asks Richard, "what do you think of the challenge," Richard responds, for all intents and purposes, "well, it's a challenge!" Later, when Andrew was asked, "how are your icicles going," referring to his gelee glacier, he yelled back, "we're sexy." Which is kind of a good line.

• Then a lot of things happened quickly, what with the party starting and all. Richard used ras al hanout again; Padma sounded totally chilled out, but more Ativan-style than pot-style; Wylie only approves of the "odd stuff" when it doesn't suck; Andrew is excited in an asshole way about Wylie's approval, which will only get worse during the judging.

• Repeatedly reminded by the commercials that we're not the target demo for this show. Tostitos are going to save me from motherhood, according to one ad? Cyanide would be faster. Yuppies in their late 30s who aspire to be "hip" and socially semi-conscious are really despicable for some reason.

• The judging. Well, Stephanie was never really in contention because of her obvious but tasty banana bread. So it was between Nikki the Alpha Woman and Valerie the Sweet Local Girl, and, well, the producers like drama. Sad to see Valerie go; we had such high expectations at the beginning of the episode, noting to ourselves, "200 black olive blinis from valerie? mmmmarscapone." But no one could taste the marscapone! Happens. She was very gracious about it.

• Andrew wins. This is terrible for his ego, with respect to us, the intolerant viewer.

Sigh. A little dull around the edges. Next week, no less than Bayless!

[Photo: Squid ceviche, the winning dish, Bravo]

[Above: wild local salmon at Farallon in San Francisco]

Another depressing bit of seafood news: Following on the heels of our general freakout over the likely shut-down of the West Coast salmon season, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a follow-up article today insinuating that the entire California and Oregon salmon fishing industry is on the verge of collapse. From the Chronicle:

Barbara Emley, 64, who has run a commercial fishing boat with her husband out of Fisherman's Wharf since 1985, said salmon makes up about 70 percent of her annual income.

"We'll probably try crabbing longer, but if everyone shifts from salmon to crab, there will be more competition," she said. "I think we can survive the year, but I'm afraid it will go on."

If the crisis continues, she said, it could spell the end of a unique, nomadic culture of people who love the sea.

But the Chronicle also quoted a chef who simply wouldn't use farm-raised.

"We'll stay away from salmon for a while," said Ryan Simas, the head chef atFarallon restaurant on Union Square. "I will definitely not use farmed salmon."

Paul Johnson, the president of Monterey Fish Market, a high-end seafood wholesaler at Pier 33 in San Francisco, with a retail market in Berkeley, said things won't be the same without local salmon.

"Oh man, I'm telling you the king (chinook) salmon is the icon in the Bay Area; this is going to be devastating to the economy," he said. "It's put everyone on edge. A lot of small-boat fishermen are going to go out of business."

Threat of closing jolts fishing industry [SF Chronicle]
So Long and Thanks for all the Fishing [The Grinder]
The King Of Sushi [CBS]
Farm-Raised Fish Given Tainted Food [Washington Post]
Farallon [MenuPages]
Farallon [Official Site]

Photo credit: Passionate Eater

Many things have already been said about last night's Top Chef Season 4 premiere, but that doesn't mean we can't add in our own two cents! And also the two cents of MP:Boston, to whom we live-emailed our thoughts during the show and received responses from this morning, after much reflection. So really, you're getting almost a nickel! To it:

• Why are there no Chicago chef judges? Because Bravo doesn't want to scare its loyal Top Chef audience with exotic Midwesterners? We call bullplop! Also, MP:B is concerned that A. Bourdain will be a judge in every other episode. Concerned in an excited sort of way.

• The new interstitials are low-budge Iron Chef-style or something. Come on, Bravo, don't use interstitials.

• Richard, the smoked Moroccan spice guy with last year's fauxhawk, used the royal "we" when describing how he made his dish. We can't blame chefs for doing this - obviously - but we wanted to call attention to it anyway. Also, he's wearing pink Crocs in his Bravo photo, which is derivative.

• Dale, of Chicago, reminded us too much of Hung for comfort. The second Dale utters the word "sous-vide," we're calling the cops.

• All wine commercials are stupid, especially the ones for Rutherford Hill, which ran a few times during the show. Beer commercials at least have the potential to be funny, or make us particularly angry. Wine commercials that tell us the good life comes from drinking a glass of merlot and pretending we're standing on a cedar deck overlooking a vineyard in Napa...just shut the f*ck up. Waiter, we'll have another Scotch, please. (MP:B notes that she watches via DVR, duh.)

• That scary bald biker guy, Erik, is not scary at all! He almost cried during the low-scoring grill session, but at least got off a graceful joke and the end that made Bourdain smile (he saw a kinship of sorts or something). Also on the not scary front - he grew up in Chappaqua, a.k.a the new homeland of the Clintons.

• We had a sense that Nimma was going when she referenced her crap-tastic cauliflower why-isn't-it-a-flan to call attention away from her Dead Sea shrimp (MP:B thinks she shouldn't have even sent it out. Then she would have lost with dignity). But oh well! At least she tried.

• Stephanie Izard is too adorable not to win! May we make reference to the fact that many adorable people have won in the past? Plus that Yoda backpack or whatever she was wearing in her application video is telling. She has a little green creature in her head telling her how to cook! So it's a shoe-in.

Okay, we're still deciding if this is going to be a weekly feature or what. Your reactions, or lack thereof, will probably be a determining factor. Love it!

Top Chef Season 4 [Bravo]

[Pink Crocs]

Following our earlier post on the possible future reduction in meats, cheeses and flour on restaurant menus, a colleague pointed out that the food facing real trouble these days lives in the ocean.

In addition to the over-fished tuna featured on 60 Minutes earlier this year, the San Francisco Chronicle and a host of other West-Coast newspapers reported today that, due to abysmal salmon returns, this year's salmon fishing season may be canceled altogether. That means nobody fishes legally for salmon off the coast of California, Oregon and Washington.

The canceled season comes on the heels of an oil spill that shortened the Bay Area crab season, and follows a string of bad salmon years. It also joins news of high mercury levels in New York City-area tuna.

The upshot? Welcome the eve of destruction, seafood-wise. You may not have a hard time getting used to more vegetables and less meat on your restaurant menus, especially as livestock doesn't seem to be going anywhere, but will you be able to face a future with no wild-caught seafood? We will have a hard time of it. Better start paying attention to those sustainable seafood charts.

Feds warn entire salmon season could be halted [SF Chronicle]
Habitats: Overfishing Our Oceans [Nat'l Geographic]
The King Of Sushi [60 Mins]
High Mercury Levels Are Found in Tuna Sushi [NY Times]
Seafood Watch Pocket Guide [Monterey Acquarium]

Photo credit: Wilderness Classroom

Above: On the way out? A meaty meal at the Slanted Door

It's no secret that restaurants are tightening their belts economically. Rising food and fuel costs have led to smaller portions, less rich food and generally weaker value across the board for customers.

But we're wondering if that same economic frugality could lead to a literal belt-tightening among increasingly girthy consumers. From the Florida Times Union:

Beef, flour and cheese are among the commodities with rapidly inflating prices that are integral to running a restaurant. Flour prices alone shot up 67 percent between January 2007 and this January, according to Ephraim Leibtag, an economist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service. Cheese prices climbed 29 percent during that period, while beef costs increased a more modest 3.1 percent.

But rising prices have prompted a furious new round of behind-the-scenes shuffling. San Francisco's The Slanted Door is known for its rack of lamb. On many days, chef and owner Charles Phan offers a more-profitable lamb sirloin stir-fry instead, shaving his food costs by a third. It is a temporary fix that draws some complaints. "Everyone wants that rack," he says.

Localvorism already calls for more vegetables transported shorter distances, and the economic necessity might help integrate that into all our diets. As chefs play with spices and vegetable cooking techniques, we may not miss that big slab of meat as much, which will be good, because we may not be able to get it.

Restaurants on a diet in tight economy [Florida Times Union]
Cutback Cuisine [Wall Street Journal]
The Slanted Door [MenuPages]
The Slanted Door [Official Site]

Bad news in the follow-up to our Pink Grapefruit Mentos post yesterday: Candy Blog maven Cybele commented yesterday, and Mentos parent company Perfetti Van Melle confirmed in an e-mail today, that the pink pellets of grapefruit goodness are over and done for.

According to Jacqueline (no last name given) of PVM, "Pink Grapefruit was a limited time flavor and is no longer available." Oh. Okay, then. It would appear that the time is right for moving on, however now that seems impossible. Now that it's confirmed we'll never get to taste this candy that received a "10" from Candy Blogs, and that our friend went on and on about Sunday, it is the one and only goal we have left in life.

So what are your/our chances of ever tasting this mystery candy? Well, slim, obviously. Cybele indicated the grapefruit may still be in production for the Indonesian citrus-mix Mentos. Meanwhile, a Google search turned up a store in San Francisco, Miette, that is tracking the issue.

"Yes we have carried them in the past and I'm trying to find them again," says Miette Confisserie manager Kelly. "Currently, I'm searching for them. I'm trying to find a vendor." Kelly said the candies moved well, but that if they must be imported in future, the price may jump. It might still happen, though. These Miette people are enthusiastic about their candy. "We're in love with them. We're obsessed with the grapefruit flavor. We make a macaroon [and a layer cake] with grapefruit flavor and we carry Haro gummies. They make a white and a pink grapefruit slices... We also carry Jelly Bellies' pink grapefruit jelly beans."

Well, if anybody can track down this mystery sweet, surely Kelly will. Meanwhile, it looks like this will be a chocolate-and-jelly-bean kind of Easter. Boring.

Miette [MenuPages]
Miette [Official Site]
Perfetti Van Melle [Official Site]
Candy Blog [Official Site]

Photo: Jeffrey Zalesny [Flickr]

A friend of the blog (who chose to remain anonymous) went to Moto recently for the Grand Tasting Menu. The meal and accompanying wine pairings were reportedly quite tasty, if a tad overpriced in a head-to-head comparison with Alinea, but he or she was impressed by the email Moto sent out the next day. It contains a recipe for "Doughnut Pancakes" from Chef Homaro Cantu and Pastry Chef Ben Roche (even if it was more the brainchild of the latter, the former cannot go uncited) that, despite the esoteric kitchen equipment Moto frequently uses, can be made at home. The recipe is simple enough, and it smacks of the alchemy and whimsy that Moto is famous for:

Doughnut Pancakes

5 doughnuts
2 eggs
1 quarter cup powdered sugar
2/3 cup milk
1 tsp baking powder
2 tbs flour
1 half tsp salt

Method:

• Roughly chop doughnuts
• Combine doughnuts, milk, eggs and powdered sugar in a blender
• Blend the ingredients until smooth (approx. 1 minute)
• Add flour, baking powder and salt
• Pulse in a blender until combined
• Cook in a greased skillet as you would a typical pancake

Alchemy and whimsy, yes, but also how the world's most precocious five year old would make pancakes.

Might we recommend the donuts at Old Fashioned Donuts down on 112th and Michigan (did you know Michigan goes down to 150th street? No, you shut up!), which are often said to be among the best in Chicago? Or maybe it would sort of be a waste to use high-quality artisanal donuts for this project. Then again, you are going to be eating donuts while preparing the pancakes, aren't you?

Moto [MenuPages]
Moto [Official Site]
Old Fashioned Donuts [MenuPages]

[Photo: Apple Fritter from Old Fashioned Donuts, a perfectly reasonable substitute for doughnuts in this recipe, sazerac2k/flickr]

being on Michigan Ave. you'd think it's too posh to enjoy but not really. it's pretty cozy, dark, and private.

one thing though that threw me was the hostess... when we walked in she wrote down visual descriptions of us all the way down to the piercings in some sort of short hand. the only reason i saw it was because the waitress accidentally set the card down on our table when she was talking to us. i understood most of what was written about me, some of it made me go hmm but that was just weird and made me uncomfortable to know that detailed descriptions were being written down about us.

anyway, the waitress was very nice and the food was very very good. as per usual with Bandera. and pricing isn't too high but it certainly could be lower... but that's just my opinion and i really doesn't cross my mind when eating there.

I worked at Bandera for a little over two years and just wanted to clarify the previous reviewers unsettling experience with the extremely detailed description that the hostess took. Bandera refuses to use the pager/ beeper system feeling that it makes the dining experience much less personal. Thus, as a host, we have about a minute to take a quick description of the guest as we write down the name, time they came in, party size, and amount of time quoted. When you are on a twenty minute wait, it is extremely easy to find your guests. When you are on an hour and a half wait and have taken over 50 names, it becomes much more difficult - thus, the crazy descriptions. So- if you want to guarantee that the hostess will find you an hour and a half after you have put your name in - be a little more creative with your dress! You would be shocked on how many men / women wear jeans, black sweater and black shoes.

Just a quick follow up regarding the hostess description issue. Just to clarify, the hostess did not accidentally leave the card on the table. One is placed on every table, with the description in plain view (no one's trying to be sneaky here) so that the servers know if or if not the table has been greeted. Once the table has in fact had an initial greeting from a server, the card is either written on and or taken off the table by their server. Point being, there is no discriminatory system going on here.

To: MenuPages Feedback
Subject: LEAVING YOUR MENUS ON THE FLOOR AT 600 S. DEARBORN IS A VIOLATION

LAST NIGHT YOUR DELIVERY PERSON LEFT MENUS ON THE VARIOUS FLOORS OF THE TRANSPORTATION BUILDING AT 600 SOUTH DEARBORN. THAT IS A DIRECT VIOLATION OF THE RULES!! THIS IS YOUR ONE AND ONLY WARNING ABOUT DOING SUCH A TRASHY THING! IF IT HAPPENS AGAIN, YOU WILL BE BANNED FROM DELIVERING TO 600 SOUTH DEARBORN. LEAVING MENUS ON THE FLOOR IS DANGEROUS! WE HAVE TWO SLIGHT INJURIES FROM PEOPLE THAT STEPPED OUT THEIR DOOR AND SLIPPED ON YOUR MENUS!

"I have a piece of chocolate every morning, every morning...dark chocolate," said Senator Stevens. "I get fetishes. I don't eat white potatoes. I don't eat things that have white sugar in them. I get hooked on stories I hear and things I read, so I love sweet potatoes. Sometimes she cooks something and I don't eat it. And she says, 'You're a nutritional terrorist, that's all,'" said Stevens.

Continue reading "Menu Update: Old Town Brasserie" »

The pasta was terrible, overcooked and dry to put it lightly... Then they attempt to add some taste by putting their cheap cheese on-top.....The supposed tomato-sauce tastes like tomao-paste on the pasta. I eat a lot of Italian food, this was by far the worst pasta I ever ate. My girlfriend got a salad, she had no complaints... The serivice was lousy, need more personel working...

Japanese cuisine??? Give me a break the sushi I ordered smelled funky… I told the so called manager my opinion, and they responded that it is how it is supposed to smell. I ate some and right away regret it… after further arguing with one of the rude employees there, I decided to leave, so paid my bill, which was over-priced with a bad feeling in my stomach.

FOOD IS TERRIBLE AT THIS RESTAURANT, THEY HAVE ALL THESE T.V'S THOSE WHICH CAN BE ENJOYABLE AT TIMES, BUT APPEARS TO BE REDUDANT DUE TO THE FACT THERE ARE SO MANY.. MY HAMBURGER WAS COLD AND OVERCOOKED, HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE I AM NOT SURE??? THE FRIES WERE GOOD, BUT SERVICE WAS LOUSY… A BUNCH OF YOUNG-ADULTS WORK AS WAITRESSES AND HOSTESSES, MAKING SERVICE UNBEARABLE.

I have had many burritos in my time, and the gold standatd still remains this great local chain, El Famous Burrito. They are huge and meaty. My preference is a steak and pork combination with sour cream and and onions. If your're eating in, all orders come with tasty chips and salsa. This is one of the best values in Mexican food in Chicago

Forget your local taqueria slinging up greasy burritos, tacos, and nacho dinners. Los Nopales goes above and beyond what you normally find on every other corner of Chicago. They're cuisine is fresh, delicious, and a fantastic value. Sure, you can get burritos and tacos...but they are prepared beautifuly, often coming with several colorful sauces, whipped up in the kitchen that day. Otherwise, try some of the traditional dishes like the Skirt Steak special, pork tamales, or Pan fried tilapia in Garlic sauce. The staff is outlandishly friendly and genuine and the restaurant is charming and clean. A total gem.

My friend brought me to this restaurant and I quickly fell in love with it. The food is great, well prepared, and quickly served. What I love the most however, are the margaritas. I highly recommend the jamaican flower margarita and if you go on Tuesday or Thursday you can get their house margaritas for half price! The service is excellent. The servers pretty much recognize my friend and I when we go and always make an effort to talk to us and make sure we are getting good service. The only downfall is when the patio isn't open; the space can be cramped, but after a few margaritas it doesn't really matter

place to go for authentic, inexpensive Mexican food! Our favorite time to go is on Saturday nights, when they serve a four course meal (from a different state of Mexico each week) for only $20! Make sure to make a reservation, as it's usually packed!

Although the decor would be best suited in a 3 star restaraunt. Tepatulco's food belongs in a five star. We started off with the quac, although it was not my favorite it was damn good and a nice start to a meal that I can still taste (over a month later). For my entree I ordered the Carne Asada. This was the winner of the evening. It was absolutely phenomenal. Tender beef served with homemade tortillas, plantanes, rice and yummy beans. The boy ordered the grilled Salmon in green mole which was out of this world. He doesn't even like Salmon and ate every bit including the leftovers on my plate.
For desert we were talked into the chocolate lava cake, and like every chocolate lava cake this one was better then the last. yummy dark chocolate with gooeyness inside...yummm!
Oh and that Margarita was soooo good!

i purshase a jr cb 01/23/07 2:pm that with one wing and link and tips the tips were so tough and rubber i didn't enjoy them at all my husband is very mad because he told me to go some place else i told him ive been with rosa since 55th street ,and she very good with her food and sauce, this is the first visit she she moved from 55th i'm taking the tips back and i can't go back here any more pork should be well done this was not cook well at all

Well, in fairness, people shouldn't try restaurants the moment they open for the sake of a review, either. It's reasonable to expect outages and glitches the first week or two. (I was going to say "bugs," but thought better of it.) If you're all but a household name posting reviews on an Internet forum read by tens of thousands, give the poor place a couple of weeks to shake things out, maybe.

This is from Javier's own kitchen across the street from where I live in Irving Park. Javier's family have or had their own bakery in Bogota for many years. Javier followed the love of his life here to Chicago a few years ago. A bad shoulder injury left him unable to continue working at Swedish Bakery in Andersonville where he was the head pastry chef. He has just decided to start baking things at home and hopefully can generate some interest. He and his wife Diana are the loveliest of people.

My daughter and I celebrate each of our birthdays at the Houlihan's in Oakbrook IL each year. We always order the delicious fahitas. We were excited when the new Houlihan's in Orland Park opened nea

r our mixed-income, high density housing development, and planned our birthday celebration there months in advance. When the big day arrived, we rented an iGo, parked at the far end of the lot so we could get a nice walk in before dinner, and were ushered to the best table in the house by the maitre d' (she had a delightful Irish lilt; maybe she's a transfer from the original Houlihan's in Kansas City!)

We were handed our menus, which we scanned for our favorite appetizer, the fajitas - the menu spells them with an 'h', a charming error that must owe to the restaurant's Gaelic heritage. But to our horror, we couldn't find the fajitas anywhere! When our waiter told us that Orland Park's residents voted to have the fajitas removed from the menu in a special ballot initiative, we were horrified and incensed. How dare our neighbors be so brutish and narrow-minded!

Principle dictated that we leave immediately, although we left a small but fair tip for the server's trouble. My daughter and I conferenced on our walk to the car, and decided to head to Cicero for some Yucatecan cuisine at Xni-Pec, which we had read about on LTHForum. Well, we could not have been happier! My daughter had the Chiles en Nogada, while I tried the Huevos Motuleños and the Tic Xic. It was immensely satisfying, and I think we may have just found a new birthday tradition. Oh yes, y Feliz Navidad!

Continue reading "Top 100 Hottest Menus Of 2007!!!" »

I tried it. I even tried a fourth time, and it sucked harder with each visit. The food is astoundingly bland, and they send out mountains of it on plates are the size of serving platters. This would be wondrous if the food was tasty. The drinks are gross too, so you can't even drink away the suck. The worst part of all? Everyone loves this place and orders from it constantly. They also have two locations. We'll never escape.

Continue reading "Menu Update: Room 21" »

I TRUELY LOVE RED LOBSTER IT OUR ANNUAL GIRLS NIGHT OUT EXSPECIALLY DURING THE HOLIDAY WE DO OUR GIFT GIVING THERE FOR THE LAST 6YEARS UNTIL I MOVE AWAY I WAS GOING TO THE ONE IN CHAMPAIGN,IL AND THEY ALWAYS HAS GREAT SERVES AND PEOPLE LOVE THEM FOR THAT,AND THE FOOD IS SOOOOO GREAT AND THE SERVES IS GOOD, THE OLY THING YOU JUST HAVE TO WAIT BECAUSE IT BE FULL, BUT IT HASN'T STOP ME FROM WAITING, I DON'T CARE BECAUSE THE SERVE IS GOOD THANK YOU FOR MAKING MY TIME WONDERFUL THERE.

People, people, people...

I've never blogged before and perhaps I'm wrong, but isn't this blog for "spicing up your fish" and not compliments or complaints about RL? If you have a problem, you need to advise the store manager and then follow up with corporate, they do have an area to do this. Also, if you'd like to compliment a store or person imparticular, let the store manager and corporate know.

And so for me, on this blog, I'd like to say: Thank you Chef, for the spice recipe above, I plan to try it this weekend.

As I noted in my message of November 7, the Co-Op is facing very serious financial problems from which it will be difficult, if not impossible, to recover. The Co-Op is currently over $5.5 million in debt and does not have sufficient assets to pay off that amount.

.....

The University, which owns the Hyde Park Shopping Center in which the store is located, has narrowed the search for a new grocer to either Treasure Island or Dominick's...both of these stores have committed that they will be able to open in that location within two weeks after the Co-Op closes although there may be a period of closure later in the redevelopment process. The University and a new grocer will invest over $5M into the physical facilities in order to create a vastly improved shopping experience.

.....

The Co-Op has sought and been denied financing on numerous occasions, and there is substantial doubt that it would be successful in this current attempt. Without this capital, the Co-Op will have to liquidate, which means the immediate loss of jobs for employees, smaller payments to creditors, and a potentially long period in which the store would remain closed before the legal system would allow a new grocer to open.

One of the best local eateries I have been to in a long time! Very hospitable service; they made me feel as if I was the only patron in the establishment. The appetizers, especially the pita tart and hummus were delicious. The filet mignon is my absolute favorite and you cannot leave without having tried the cheesecake. Kudos to [REDACTED]!

I was in town on business and heard about the Polish section of Chicago from my sister in Florida. I searched the web and took a chance on Smak Tak. What a find!!! I was pleasantly surprised how quaint and authentic the decor was, it reminded me of Zakopane in Poland. I started with a bowl of borszt which was really good and then couldn't decide between the pork cutlet or the pierogi so I got them both. They first brought out the pork cutlet which looked wonderful. It was huge and covered with mushrooms. It was accompanied with real mashed potatoes covered with dill, a nice portion of marinated carrots and a delicious cucumber/sour cream salad. About half way through that I was already stuffed but they brought out the pierogi, 13 of them! I asked for an assortment and they delivered. First one was blueberry, then plum, then cherry, then cheese, then meat...I had to stop before I burst! They were delicious!!! I had to pack up leftovers. The best part...the whole thing with a drink was just around $20. I HIGHLY recommend this palce and will definitely go back next time I'm in Chicago. Na Zdrowie!

Continue reading "$250 Foie Fine Less Than Cost Per Pound" »

Continue reading "Foie Gras At Alinea, Now And Forever" »