1. BEARLY SO

At Chicago mag, veteran food reviewer Carroll Kvetch looks at the ultra-hot restaurant The Beef, a rejuvenated version of a longtime River North beef stand:

What was going on here? I’ll tell you: Carmen Berzatto, that’s what. This scion to the Beef name has recently taken the helm of this venerable institution and turned things around. Why, even the booths have gotten a good scrub. And though I still brought a safety cushion, I wasn’t at all averse to taking my meal in the sun-dappled dining room.

When I rang up Mr. Berzatto, he modestly gave credit for the risotto to one of his cooks, Sydney Adamu, but I could see right through his ruse. A little digging revealed that “Carmy” had trained at the world’s finest restaurants, from Noma to the French Laundry to Chicago’s very own Ever, where he served as chef de cuisine under the illustrious Andrea Terry, who has always been very kind about taking my requests for last-minute reservations. This chicken had come home to roost!

By now you’ve no doubt guessed that this is a put-on, a review of where the restaurant is in the third season of The Bear and a parody of self-absorbed food media (though to me, not so much Chicago’s food media, which is more down to earth), by Chicago mag’s John Kessler.

2. CHICAGOANS ON THE MARCH

Maybe The Bear really is helping draw attention to Chicago—here’s Steve Dolinsky talking Chicago pizza at the BBC, and wiener admirer Dennis Lee has been talking hot dogs all over: quoted in the WaPo and at the site MASHED, and interviewed at a podcast called Taste here.

3. THE ORIGINAL BEEF

There must have been one, no? David Hammond investigates the origins of Italian Beef and other key Chicago foods at WTTW:

There’s some contention regarding the person responsible for first putting Italian beef on a menu. The sandwich itself was the product of “peanut weddings” in Chicago’s turn-of-the-century Italian neighborhoods. At these humble nuptials, there was little money (peanuts, you might say), so the newly arrived immigrant newlyweds stretched a dollar by securing a modest quantity of beef, slicing it thin, and serving it on a bun doused in beef broth, giving their guests a hefty handful of food.

…Thus was born the Italian beef sandwich. Or was it? According to the website for Ciccio, a pizza and Italian beef operation on Navy Pier that’s run by the Ferraro family, the sandwich was “commercialized” in 1938, but we’re told the Ferraros began selling Italian beef three years prior.

4. EAT IT

I’m just not a sports guy—including, I should say, the kind that involves eating 87 hot dogs. But with champ of such things Joey Chestnut barred from the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest for reasons I haven’t cared enough to research (okay, fine: apparently he has an endorsement deal with Impossible Foods, which hot dog-wise, is worse than Pete Rose), the winner this year was Chicagoan Patrick Bertoletti. Michael Nagrant, who calls Bertoletti a longtime friend, has a fun piece about hanging out with Da Champ:

When we rolled up to Great Sea Restaurant on Lawrence Avenue home of the legendary spicy soy-chili glazed lollipop chicken wings, something changed in Pat.

I didn’t know what was going on. Did Pat hate Chinese food? He was a Kendall College-trained chef with one of the more open palates I know. That couldn’t be it.

Did Pat have an epic fight one night and get banned from Great Sea?

We walked in the restaurant. There was a bulletin board in the lobby with photos of people hunkered down over heaping plates of Great Sea’s wings. Each photo had a name and number attached to it. The first photo had a pretty low number. Each photo progressively rose in numerical value. The second to last photo was numbered in the twenties.

…When I looked at the last photo, it said “86” over a picture of a smiling dude with a mohawk, aka Patrick Bertoletti.

5. ANTHONY IN PARIS

Anthony Todd on Bar Parisette, the new incarnation of what was, fairly briefly, Attagirl in the former Dos Urban Cantina space:

In a year that has been filled with new French restaurants serving very similar menus, [chef Madalyn] Durrant wants to revise the definition of what a bistro is and bring it back to what modern French cooking actually looks like right now. “French bistro cuisine is not so much about a regionality, as it is about an ethos. It’s affordable, it’s simple, it’s well prepared and it’s technique driven,” she explains. “The more modern bistros in Paris are having a moment that new American cuisine had a while back and are incorporating a lot of flavors from around the world.” Put another way; “We aren’t intending to reflect the American stereotype of bistro food, but more what is currently being produced in the bistros of France.”

6. BURG SMASH!

Champion of the smash burger Titus Ruscitti has a roundup of some local smashburgers and what makes the genre, starting with a 4th of July defense of American cuisine:

I’ll tell you what American food is – it’s fried chicken, it’s bbq, and it’s hot dogs and burgers among other things and it’s all very regional. The bbq is different in Texas than it is in North Carolina. In New Mexico they put green chiles on burgers while in Oklahoma they smash balls of ground beef into thinly sliced onions. Have you ever had a burger outside of the United States? They’re never as good despite the fact all you need is ground beef, a bun and some cheese. Yet that hasn’t stopped people in other parts of the world from making burgers. In fact the biggest trend in food right now is the smash burger which is a regional specialty from right here in Illinois. I’ve seen ads and or posts about smashburgers everywhere from Paris to Jakarta. They’re so big right now we went from having a few spots in Chicago that make them to an innumerable number. I can’t keep up. But here’s five I’ve tried over the last six months or so.

7. DAD BEEF

Dennis Lee remembers his late father through the one Chicago food he truly loved: an Italian beef combo.

In his nearly 50 years in Chicago, it was inevitable he’d adopt some Chicago-specific habits. Davida caught him saying “a couple-two-three” once (if you know what I’m talking about, this is the funniest thing ever), and he grew to love one food in particular.

He f—ing loved Italian beef. But not just any type of beef, he loved the Italian beef combo. You know, the one with both Italian beef and Italian sausage stuffed into the same French roll. I’d all but forgotten about this until my uncle brought it up during his eulogy, because in his later years, Dad had adopted lighter eating habits.

8. REVIVAL REVIVAL?

First the announcement was that Revival Hall, in many ways the first and most successful of Chicago’s pre-COVID food halls, with prestigious above-Sbarro’s-in-a-mall-food-court offerings like Smoque, Danke (from Table Donkey, and Stick) and LaShuk middle eastern, would be closing, unable to negotiate better real estate terms that reflected the lower post-COVID traffic downtown.

Then the vendors started saying wait a minute, we don’t want to leave. And so the building’s owner, CBRE, seems likely to keep it open minus original operators Bruce Finkelman and Craig Golden, who still have the food hall in the old post office building (not to mention a little venue called Salt Shed, among others). Gregory Pratt in the Trib:

Matt Sussman, who owns Danke at the Revival Food Hall, said the announcement followed a long process but the vendors were told by CBRE that they intend to continue operating the food hall.

“There will be a transition but my understanding is that CBRE plans to keep the existing vendors. Of course there could be future changes, but it certainly seems in their best interest to continue operating a busy food hall in that space,” Sussman said in an email to the Tribune. “We plan to stay and my guess is most of the other vendors will too, unless there are onerous changes to our lease agreements.”

It’s an interesting turn of events. On the one hand it might just be real estate hardball in action between developers. On the other hand, it might show that food halls, which were the future of food a few years ago, always had limited appeal (limited to the people working in an unnatural neighborhood like the Loop)—when I’m downtown (not often, admittedly), I often go there, but I have to admit I nearly always look over the many offerings and end up getting the same thing (chicken and hummus from LaShuk). So who knows what this tells you. Anyway, back in the day Fooditor did a couple pieces, like everybody did, on this shiny new thing: here’s Danke in 2016, and here’s one no one else did, on how Smoque barbecues on the 20th floor of the building.

9. SUMMERTIME, AND THE EATING IS MESSY

Maggie Hennessy at WBEZ discussing the twenty things to eat in the summer in our city:

With so much to do during the summer months, eating necessarily becomes far less precious. We need sustenance: often cold and nearly always handheld. If savory, it must be well-ratioed, sustaining and fairly easy to wolf down on the go. If drinkable, we’d like it ice cold and packing an invigorating punch. We won’t say no to something sweet, either; after all, we’re treating ourselves — at least through Labor Day.

10. PLESKAVICA HUT

Albania is right next to Italy, even if it seemed like the other side of the world under the mad dictator Enver Hoxha, and The Infatiuation eats Albanian pizza and other things at Zimi’s Pizza & Grill in Rogers Park:

…hiding among the margherita pies and fries are tasty Albanian dishes, like a flaky spinach and cheese burek and all sorts of traditional meat options. The stuffed pleskavica is a glorious ground beef slab full of cheese, like a juicy lucy that divorced the bun, and their qebapa and spicy qofte have an excellent charred flavor and pair perfectly with the creamy tart kajmak on the side.

Other new reviews include venerable Cedar’s in Hyde Park, and Marrakech in Noble Square.

11. SANDWICHA UKRAINA

At Sandwich Tribunal, the subject is a Ukrainian sandwich—of Alberta, Canada, the Kubie Burger:

 Those central provinces with their vast arable lands and temperate climate, their long cold winters and warm summers, were familiar to these agrarian immigrants, and the parklands of Canada similar enough to their homes in the Carpathian foothills that in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Ukrainian setttlers formed communities in Alberta, in Manitoba, in Saskatchewan, and despite some struggles–such as internment as enemy aliens during World War I–Ukrainian immigration continued in waves throughout the 20th Century. As of the 2021 census, Ukrainian Canadians make up a notable percentage of the populations of these central provinces.

In other words, much like the German-Americans of Wisconsin hybridized their favorite sausage into the brat burger, the Ukrainian-Canadians of Alberta came up with the kubie burger.

12. YO FUND ME

There’s a Go Fund Me for Chef Julio Mota of Jinsei Motto, who was attacked on the Green Line leaving work. Go here to donate to support his recovery.

And there’s one for Alexander’s Restaurant, a diner on Clark in Edgewater (yes, seen in The Bear—it’s where Sydney had dinner with her father in Season 1, I believe) after a car slammed into the building’s entrance. Go here to help them patch things back together.

13. LISTEN UP

I think Michael Muser’s Amuzed podcast isn’t dead, but it might be resting, or pining for the fjords. Anyway, he’s the guest on Joiners; since both he and his interviewers are industry beverage guys, they go deep into how all that stuff works, with a lot of insight into life on that side of the food and beverage business.

Ink Stained Wretches is a politics and media podcast I listen to, not something I ever expected to mention here, but they talk about food media today with Vic Matus, who has written about all that for various places. It’s especially interesting in that he’s Filipino-American, so he offers perspective on how Filipino food is finally becoming a thing in America.

WHAT MIKE ATE

A while back I mentioned following a Russian food business called Mangall, making things like khinkali (big fat dumplings) which I eventually found at Fresh Farms. I assume that’s why Instagram, which is good at giving you more of whatever you like, suggested a Georgian shop in Wheeling selling pre-made foods, including khinkali, called Pirosmani Georgian Food Art. (Niko Pirosmani was a Georgian folk artist; I once saw a Soviet film about him.)* I had not managed to check it out—how often do I pass through Wheeling?—but then I saw that the owner was opening a full Georgian restaurant next door. That was more intriguing for a drive up there. Then I got an email from their PR person announcing the opening, and I responded that I was glad to hear they were opening because I’d been keeping an eye on their Instagram account. I wasn’t exactly fishing for an invite, but I can’t say I was entirely surprised when they extended one.

The restaurant is called Stumara, and both it and Pirosmani are located in a strip mall at Dundee and Elmhurst road, which also has a Polish grocery and… a Sherwin Williams paint store. Anyway, we came in and sat in the attractive dining room decorated with charmingly illustrated pictures of Georgian life, that look like 40s childrens’ illustrations. The owner greeted my party and explained that they were basically in a soft opening, and the menu was xeroxed sheets. He told us that he had recruited a well-known Georgian chef from somewhere—not Georgia, I think maybe he said Spain, but I wasn’t in journalism mode and I don’t remember. I recognized a few things on the menu, but not that much; seeing my puzzlement, he started to suggest a few things, and we soon asked him if he wanted to just send us what he would like us to try. So he did—a full Georgian feast.

One notion that has stuck with me recently came from Johnny Clark of Anelya, which is that we may associate that part of the world with gray meats and heavy, potato-based sides; but they’re like any peasant culture, eating the fresh things they grow and sometime pickling them for winter, and there’s no reason those cuisines can’t be as fresh as, say, Italian cooking. So we began with salads—a very fresh salad of tomatoes and cucumbers and big leaves of parsley, and little salad balls (they looked like falafel, colored by their main ingredient—beets for one, leeks for another. The idea was to spread them on what our host called cookies (more like biscuits). Interestingly, though mostly the meal was traditional, there were occasional bits of modernism that let you know it was a professional chef, not Grandma in the kitchen—a salad of rolled eggplant slices was coated in “soil” made of ground walnut, and a main course of hunks of smoked pork came in a smokebox that reminded me of Moto. Walnuts figured in many things, often as a sauce—like the dish of beef cheek, or some smoked chicken—and a couple of things used corn flour as a base (the beef cheek came with an accompaniment of what looked like unusually sticky mashed potatoes).

We also had a sampling of Georgian wine—Georgia claims to be the birthplace of winemaking—and of course, we were as overloaded with desserts as we had been with entrees; I especially liked a honey cake, something called Opium Berries (I guess that means it’s addictive) and a kind of parfait that had fruit, marmalade and whipped cream in it (which honestly, I would make for Christmas. (Several of these were for sale next door at Pirosmani, along with a chocolate ball amusingly named, simply, “Potato” for its shape.) In all it was a delightful adventure, that took me back to the my early Chowhound/LTHForum days, when we’d find an immigrant restaurant and simply order half the menu to see what the food from such and such country was all about. Sometime when you can’t think of anywhere to go tonight, make the drive to Wheeling and check it out—I hope you find it as captivating as we did.

You can see more of my photos at Facebook or Instagram.

* Georgians seem to like naming restaurants for cultural figures; the only other Georgian restaurant I can remember going to before this one was in Skokie, and was named for a medieval poet, Shota Rustaveli.