1. FELD SO GOOD
So as you may have noticed (but I’m pluggin’ it anyway), I did my first new feature story at Fooditor since early on in the four years I was working on the book (which I am told will have a publication date soon, huzzah). It’s about Feld, the controversial “relationship to table” restaurant. Go read it here. I think Feld is interesting and promising, though at this point I would say I liked it as a culture inside a restaurant more than the actual meal, so there’s a lot about that.
Will there be more Fooditor feature stories? I honestly don’t know, depends if I discover something cool to write about, but I assume I’ll be working more on the book in the nearest future.
2. DAEFAULT CHOICE
When my kids were young and would have classmates over, I would often take everybody to a Korean barbecue joint—usually Chicago Kalbi (which ironically is Japanese-owned, just as many Japanese restaurants in Chicago are run by Koreans.) It had many attractions, not just cooking meat over coals, but baseball paraphernalia, those Japanese soda pop bottles where you have to pop the glass marble, and so on. It was always a hit with a table full of boys.
John Kessler is of a similar outlook:
When extended family — ages 3 to 81 — came to town over the holidays, Korean barbecue seemed like the only good choice for a night out. It’s fun, interactive, and charged with that frisson of danger that keeps little ones rapt. Noise and mess are built into the experience, so there’s little that a toddler could destroy.
And this: Korean food has become a kind of international love language.
Daebak is his default, but he seems to prefer the spectacle at Gangnam Market: “if you haven’t been to this grocery store/food court on a Saturday night, you’re missing a great scene.”
3. RIZZ SOTTO
Michael Nagrant visited Sotto, the new basement hangout at Italian Village, and offers the kind of pull-quote action a restaurateur can only be thankful for:
Sotto is “dibs”-level pure 100% dipped in Italian beef gravy Chicaaaagooo.
Sotto is for burgeoning geriatrics like me seeking an umbilicus that connect a hundred years of the city and one family’s shared personal history. But, Sotto is also crack for younger TikTok troops, a real experience in a real place for those seeking the real real.
As that second paragraph suggests, Nagrant has some interesting things to say about what a place like Italian Village, approaching its 100th anniversary, means in Chicago—and means to downtown as it recovers from the COVID years. Might be a good time to subscribe, so you can read it and think about it.
P.S.: Friend of Fooditor Anne Spiselman writes in to say that with no elevator that she knows of and steep stairs, Sotto is not for geritrics!
4. I, THE WURST OF ALL
I went to Wurst Behavior’s opening party, but would have gotten there soon enough anyway, since I go to the Tony’s up the street all the time. Anyway, Dennis Lee writes about it this week, and though sausage is an obvious pick, he says you gotta have the pierogi:
Davida and I made sure to start with a plate of the potato and cheese pierogis ($10), and they’re pitch perfect.
The wrappers are thinner than most handmade pierogis I’ve previously had, and the potato filling is creamy and silky without being overwhelmingly starchy. I’m not surprised that they’re so good, considering one of Wurst Behavior’s sister shops is a pierogi specialist. They’re masterfully made, and if you’re at all into pierogis, you should get an order.
5. LISTEN, SUP
A couple of years ago a place to get dinner while playing records was supposed to open in the South Loop or somewhere, but I’m not sure that it ever actually did. Still. food and/or drink with vinyl seems on the verge of becoming a new thing, with Parachute Hi-Fi spinning beats and serving bing bread, and the Reader has a piece on one called Charis Listening Bar, opening soon in Bridgeport:
Longtime Chicagoan Alex Jandernoa felt a gap in this scene and decided it was his time to create the type of listening bar he wanted to see.
“When I was looking around Chicago, I really thought that there was kind of a dearth of a place where you can go in and grab a drink and listen to a record and not have to buy a whole dinner,” Jandernoa says. “Traveling around, I have seen some really beautiful listening bars, but none that took a more casual approach to it. They’re either very intensive, based on the Japanese kissa cafes where you sit in reverence and listen, or they’re very dance-focused.
Instead, his forthcoming bar, Charis Listening Bar, will have a midwestern spin, creating a more laid-back environment where drinks can be shared and music listened to; there isn’t a requirement on how either should be enjoyed. “It’s a little 1,200-square-foot bar, so it’s more about just vibing with the DJ, which I think is sometimes lost nowadays,” says Jandernoa.
6. HALLELORIOLE
The Infatuation gives the highest rating I can remember seeing from them: 9.7 out of 10. What is it—an especially wel-crafted saketini? A place offering foie tacos with a Who’s the Boss theme? No, it’s Oriole, and I can’t argue (or get snarky) about that:
If Oriole were a person instead of a restaurant, it would be an impeccably dressed date who showed up at your house with a great bottle of wine and a thoughtful gift for your dog. In fact, if Oriole weren’t so approachable and considerate, you might even think it was out of your league. Instead, this place manages to feel unpretentious while serving one of the best and most well-thought-out meals currently available in Chicago.
Indeed it does, though I imagine chef Noah Sandoval chuckled at “impeccably dressed.”
7. TACO STAR
With Cariño having just picked up a tire company star, Steve Dolinsky visits it and talks to chef Norman Fenton:
Fenton packs an enormous amount of thought and effort into each bite. Just consider highlights from his first three courses on the current menu, starting with “chips and salsa.”
“We just have this salsa verde jelly that’s dusted in fennel pollen. We put on a spoon with tortilla crumble, topped with avocado puree, a little bit of lime gel, pickled ramps, coriander flowers and some licorice,” he said. “Familiar flavors in a very unfamiliar way. So when you look at this thing, it doesn’t look anything like chips and salsa, but then you take that complete bite and you get that experience.”
8. SOUTHWEST MIDDLE EAST
Realized something from Eater’s listicle about middle eastern food in the near southwest suburbs: M’dakhan, the place with a BBQ-style smoker which Steve Dolinsky talked about on NBC 5 last week, is the latest occupant of the space formerly belonging to Oozi Corner, which I wrote about here (and which had ambitious plans, but they ran into COVID). Of the places mentioned in my first piece about this part of town, at Time Out years ago, which put Al-Bawadi on the foodie map, the only ones still there per Eater’s article are Al-Bawadi and The Nile Restaurant.
9. LISTICLES WITH THE MOSTICLES
Last week I rounded up all the year-end listicles I could find. But I didn’t see this at first—Maggie Hennessy talking about what goes into making listicles for the publications that love them. I will note that my plan when I was doing a lot of them for Thrillist and such was, pick something that I already knew what eight of the top ten would be, and then I’d just have to visit a couple of spots I’d always meant to go to, not eat nachos morning noon and night for a week on my own dime. Anyway:
I’m not a Jonathan Gold type by nature (nor am I backed by the annual salary and in-house budget of a national or regional publication). That is to say, I’m not someone who will methodically eat at every single taco joint in X neighborhood simply to determine the best one. (I fear slogging through too many mediocre meals to invest that kind of time and cash.) Nor am I thirsty to uncover the hidden basement noodle spot or arepa joint that no one’s ever heard of. My interest and writing prowess lie more at the cultural end of food and drink, and I’m OK with that.
…Much to my surprise, the editor didn’t respond with the usual ghosting (lols) or very bland “No worries! Thanks for considering.” Instead, she acknowledged the flawed nature of the contemporary listicle and asked what I might require to reconsider: Additional time? A couple hundred more bucks? Yes and yes. We settled on a two-month turnaround time and a few hundred dollars’ worth of research budget—insufficient given today’s drink prices, but honestly far better than I’m used to.
10. CHICAGOMATIC FOR THE PEOPLE
What do you do when you close a burger joint? In Eddie (Edzo’s) Lakin’s case, so far you write some blog posts about being an ex-burger joint owner. In this first one he talks about thinking about what he might do next; in the second one he gets more philosophical about not having a plan yet:
When my first marriage ended I decided to take a leap and go to Europe without much more than a backpack and some chef’s whites. I only had “concepts of a plan”, but I ended up living in Barcelona for a year, finding a great job I loved working for a chef I consider a mentor, and living in an apartment owned by the folks who ran the restaurant I was working at only a block away. It ended up better than I could’ve ever planned or imagined and I never would’ve done it at all if I had gotten hung up on having the right paperwork, the proper work visa, or feeling the need to ensure everything was all set up for me before committing to going.
So now, finding myself at another turning point in my life, not knowing what I’m going to do next, how I’m going to pay my bills beyond the few months my personal savings will provide, I feel surprisingly ok about it all.
11. FELIZ NAVIDAD
Obviously a Christmas post is past its due date, but I still recommend this segment from CBS Saturday Morning talking about Rick Bayless spending Christmas every year in Oaxaca. The CBS crew doesn’t get any closer to Oaxaca than Bayless’ backyard, but it’s still worth seeing as he talks about and makes, on camera in his Chicago kitchen, some of the traditional treats from that part of the world—with a guest appearance by his granddaughter Charlie (an obvious natural for television). If you want to see more of Oaxaca, check his Facebook posts from December starting here with Christmas radish carvings.
12. LISTEN UP
I’ll admit that sometimes, depending purely on how my podcast listening permits, I’ll link things that sound interesting to me, and then catch up with them over the next week or so as I drive or do dishes or whatever. But sometimes there’s one I have to listen to as soon as I know it exista, and that was the case with Joiners talking to Omar Cardenas of Omarcito’s. The proprietor of the little stand slinging Latin American sandwiches, which won the Banchet award for Best Counter Service last year, is a big personality, and his life story as a Chicago Latino kid is interesting as heck. So don’t miss it—find Joiners on your podcast app.
At the Dining Table, David Manilow kicks off 2025 by talking with Crain’s Jack Grieve and Ally Marriotti, about what’s going to open in 2025, the economic changes restaurants and diners face, and the dining story that most surprised them in 2024.
WHAT MIKE ATE
I had just noticed Taquizas Valdez on Irving Park when Michael Nagrant wrote the piece about it I linked to last week. I probably would have gone last week anyway, but especially then. You can see what I had: a pastor taco, and a grilled chicken one. Lots of meat on each one—they give you a fork, and you’d be well advised to use it and eat the stack of meat down to the point where you can actually pick up the taco without meat flying everywhere. The pastor was adirably crispy; chicken, usually boring in taco joints, was well-seasoned and juicy. The room was a little lifeless, at least at lunch midweek, but it’s one of 2025’s first discoveries, check it out.