1. FELD SPARRING PT. 2
Last week John Kessler wrote about the tasting menu at Feld refreshing his experiences of such menus after too many similar meals with the same luxury ingredients. This week Michael Nagrant—whose dislike of Feld in its earliest days now has him typecast as either the last honest food writer in town or an uncomprehending a-hole, depending on your point of view (especially if you are Chef Jake Potashnick)—responds to Kessler. Basically, his critical premise is pretty simple: what Kessler sees in Feld (as opposed to all the tasting menus before it), Nagrant saw in Oriole:
Oriole is so thoughtful in its execution that it almost defies comparison to anything else. And yet, a lot of people, some who are known and some who have been invited by the restaurant to dine for free, are now touting Feld as the superior amazing antidote to what restaurants like Oriole are doing.
Note: I have no idea who’s dining at Feld for free; not me, not Nagrant, and not John Kessler, who may not have paid for some of his meals at Feld, but Chicago magazine did, so by the old rules which Nagrant prizes, all’s fair. Anyway, I am firmly on both sides; I agree that tasting menus can get to be a bit routine—if it’s an hour-plus in and you just had fish (salmon or halibut), the next course is pretty much guaranteed to be beef or venison—but you know, if I think of something “I ate [that] persisted vividly in my memory,” as Kessler put it last week, well, one dish in particular at Oriole in 2021 is precisely what I think of:
…a bowl of silken tofu with young coconut and honeydew melon—a study in white and pale green—perched inside another bowl from which sprigs of leaves burst out. With just two colors to tease the eye, this dish is about texture—the soft, slippery tofu (made in house) and the firmer, slippery coconut. When Sandoval comes by a few courses later to ask how we’re doing, most of us cite this dish as a particular pleasure—a little ironic in that it’s one of the few that doesn’t have a luxe ingredient like truffle or king crab in it to justify the evening’s price. (Another standout has both.) But you’d have to be blind, or insensate in other ways, to hold that against it.
Now, I don’t know how much of a relationship with his farmers Noah Sandoval has—I assume not with a coconut farmer, anyway; if you want to talk about chefs with relationships, I say check out Daisies, where Joe Frillman is literally related to his main farmer—his brother Tim. But on every other level, I agree with Nagrant, that the tasting menu that transcends tasting menu cliches already exists around town. If Feld is another one, great for them, but as Nagrant says:
Anyone who dined at Charlie Trotter’s or read the French Laundry cookbook where Thomas Keller and writer Michael Ruhlman tell the story of the relationships with their greatest purveyors like the late Ingrid Bengis and her lobster or the Keith Martin and his Elysian Fields lamb knows that Feld is just repackaging these same ideas as “relationship to table”.
Potashnick might protest, saying what he’s doing is different, posting IG shots of staff trips to see farmers on days the restaurant is closed as evidence.
But Bruce Sherman was focused on hyper-seasonality and regularly traveling with his North Pond team (which included a young Danny Grant of Maple & Ash) to spend time with and forge meaningful relationships with their purveyors just like this back in 2008.
Not to mention these guys and this farm, back in its time. One thing I learned doing my upcoming book is that, as Sherlock Holmes quoted Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the sun. Whoever you think was the first person to do something got it from Trotter, or Banchet, or Jovan Trboyevic. Nagrant again:
What’s happening here is that people who have forgotten local or even national food history are being sold. I do appreciate what Feld is trying to do. More restaurants should know and showcase the farmers they work with. But, also human biases for attractiveness, youth, and privilege are being acknowledged.
Or as another chef just down the street from Feld said about buying from farmers, “We all do that now.” Anyway, I had never read the piece Nagrant links about Bruce Sherman visiting farms in 2008, but it’s well worth checking out.
2. ALINEA GROUP NEWS PT. 2
Nothing earth-shattering, just a little thing called announcing the next season of menus at Next. First up is a pretty logical followup to Next’s Trio menu and its current Charlie Trotter menu, Alinea Year 1:
We transport you back to Lincoln Park, 2005, the first year of Alinea… How will guests respond to a piece of dehydrated, butterscotch-bacon dangling from a trapeze string to be eaten with their fingers? It was a year of unbounded experimentation to create transcendent dining moments.
The next one is a tribute to Massimo Bottura’s Osteria Francesca in Modena, Italy, which has topped the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Resaturants, among other accolades. The third is called Space, and it seems like a throwback to Next Year 1, with its conceptual menus tied to a year in the past—or the future:
We transport you to the final frontier. Endless exploration possibilities, sparking intrigue, excitement, and unease. A human race beyond Earth. Life in an altered atmosphere. Order within new constraints. What is interstellar dining? Envision dining on Mars, in a rocket ship, or in a galaxy far, far away.
Okay, you’ve got me curious about what this will prove to be in practice.
3. HERE COMES THE SUN WAH
Steve Dolinsky pays a visit to Uptown’s Hong Kong BBQ veteran Sun Wah:
“The term barbecue is a little misleading when it comes to Hong Kong-style barbecue. It isn’t just roasted meats, we do a variety of marinated meats,” said co-owner Kelly Cheng.
“We do whole roasted pig, we do barbecue pork, we do roast duck,” she said.
As a classic Cantonese restaurant, they also do egg rolls, the bane of Cheng’s existence.
“It’s a love-hate thing, but it’s the peanut butter,” she said.
Weirdly, I went there Friday night… and had their egg rolls for the first time, I think.
4. NOODLE ME THIS
Titus Ruscitti checks out five newish noodle places in town—yes, of course Minyoli is among them, but there’s also a Japanese chain from Nagoya that Tony Hu just opened an outlet of in Chinatown, and a ramen place in Noble Square called Rudy’s:
While I’ll always love tonkotsu due to it being the first real type of ramen I ever tried (shoutout to Santouka) it’s a bit rich for me these days and not something I commonly crave. So with that I decided to try the Tantanmen which is the Japanese version of Dan Dan. The recipe at Rudy’s starts with a fairly potent pork broth that’s got a very nice Sichuan peppercorn spice profile. It comes loaded with spicy miso minced pork, bamboo shoots, bok choy, scallions, and thin ramen noodles. Go ahead and add the ajitama egg to your bowl.
5. YES, CHEF
I got an email from a recruiter recently inviting me to apply for a sous chef position. Somehow I think manning the breakfast grill at Mickey D’s decades ago isn’t going to be good enough experience for that. But food writers do occasionally go to the other side, and that’s what Laura Yee, who manages a publication, Food Fanatics, for US Foods, did by starting to bake cookies for Bill Kim’s Urban Belly. Amber Gibson in the Reader:
Her cookies were so well-received that Kim suggested she do pop-ups at the side window of Urban Belly’s Wicker Park location. That was the encouragement Yee needed to launch her fledging baking business, the Chinese Mom Kitchen.
…You can research, interview, and write about the business for the last 25 years like I have, but you don’t really know how hard it is until you do it regularly,” she says. “It’s certainly not lucrative, at least not in the beginning.”
6. ORGANIZING THE RECORDS
I know what Parachute HiFi is… but I kind of don’t. Anyway, Parachute’s new incarnation playing records with Korean food gets reviewed this week by the Infatuation:
One night you might get a Hank Williams serenade while digging into fantastic bing bread—a throwback dish from when Parachute used to be a full-fledged Korean spot. Another night, they might be spinning Korean classics while you make your way through chewy tteokbokki pad thai. And you can’t swing by without getting their innovative, food-inspired cocktails, like a mezcal sour cosplaying as blueberry pancakes or a frozen makgeolli bingsu cocktail that’s more like an adult dessert.
7. A CHEESEBURGER SHOW
I mentioned Kevin Pang’s Poochie and Pang (eat Chicago) last week; Anthony Todd tells more:
Pang thinks that their differing perspectives echo another fancy Chicago TV pair. “I thought of the idea of Siskel and Ebert,” explains Pang. “Siskel was erudite, scholarly, wore tweed jackets, Ebert was the everyman from the liberal union paper.” On the show, Pang is often more attentive to technical details of particular dishes, while Poochie mocks him and tells him to just eat the dang food.
Though I disagree with his characterization of Siskel & Ebert (Siskel was a sports fan, Ebert was the movie scholar).
8. IS THERE ANYTHING FINER?
At WBEZ, Maggie Hennessy pays tribute to the disappearing old school Chicago diner:
Dragging seared-edge ham through a puddle of yolk, I began wondering what constitutes a diner anymore, when the word gets casually thrown around by chef-driven brunch spots cosplaying as diners. Lately in Chicago, I’ve witnessed a crop of what Massachusetts-based diner expert Richard Gutman calls “hipster diners” multiplying, with their self-consciously retro decor and $20 French toast.
…“In the old days, you knew what a diner was when you saw it, and what to expect,” said Gutman, who has written four books on the subject, including the definitive history American Diner Then and Now. “A wide menu, reasonable prices, breakfast all the time. Now you don’t know whether you’re going to empty your wallet on specialty cocktails and $20 entrées. More places are calling themselves diners to capitalize on the magic lure of that word.”
Hennessy also has a piece about people who bus their own tables, at Bon Appetit:
Chad Hall, a server at Dear Margaret in Chicago, is all too familiar with the industrious self-busser, whom he dubs the “A-plus student.” He’s noticed a demographic pattern to this behavior too. “Folks in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s are leaning more into it,” he says. “They’re very aware that I’m doing a job for them. Maybe it’s strange to give themselves up to somebody else rather than take ownership. But that’s the name of the game; it’s service.”
9. LISTEN UP
John Manion talks about the style behind his restaurants (Brasero and El Che) at the podcast House of Style; go here to watch it or look for it at your podcast app.
At The Dining Table, David Manilow talks to Kevin Hickey (the Duck Inn) about his early days working on the old Rush street.
Joiners talks to Joe Flamm of Rose Mary, etc. No episode link yet, just find it in your podcast app.
WHAT MIKE ATE
A piece I linked last week about omakases in Chicago reminded me that Casa Madai in Pilsen existed, so we went to the self-described “Mexican sushi” spot. There’s only a little bit of the Mexican part, but the main thing we had from that side, a maguro tostada, was a little hot and deeply satisfying. Perhaps knowing they have a winner, the tostadas come with the table omakase of sashimi or nigiri. Which are in the style that I associate with Kaze Chan of Sushi San—topped with a range of other flavors, from shiso leaves to nuts. It was fine, if not something I’d drive halfway across town for (I used to be able to go to Kaze’s restaurant barely two blocks from my house)—basically, as I said afterwards to my wife, this is the kind of thing that would impress me if I was 25, because it would all be new to me. I’d love to see them lean in more to the Mexican flavors, because reminding me of Cariño now was more impressive than reminding me of Kaze c. 2009.
Speaking of things close by me, I was going to check out lunch at a place called Wurst Behavior, which serves housemade sausages and which I mainly noticed because it’s just down Elston from a Tony’s grocery store that’s one of my regular stops. Then I got an invite to their opening and went to that instead. The Polish couple behind it have Pierogi Kitchen in the old Lillie’s Q location, and started it because the sausages at that place took off (bigger than pierogi? bigger than the beet salad I wished didn’t get pushed into the glob of hot mustard?) Anyway, I just had samples at the party, but I liked the housemade sausages, and will be back for an actual meal. If you want to know more about it, Daniel Hautzinger wrote about it for WTTW.
Buzz List will be off next week, and return on December 2.