CAN’T THINK OF A METAPHOR FOR HOW SWEET THIS GIG IS…

Wait… I have it… Ryan Poli’s in the Catbird Seat! Oh wait, he actually is. The world-traveling Chicago ex-chef of Tavernita, Perennial and (way back) Butter is moving to the rapidly heating up dining city of Nashville to take over arguably its most acclaimed homegrown restaurant. A Chicagoan in that kitchen is no interloper, though—original co-chef Josh Habiger came out of Alinea. Country songwriters, there’s a lyric about travelin’ from Noma to Nashville waiting for you. (The Tennessean)

KARYN’S COOKED?

Karyn’s, the small empire devoted to raw foods and veganism, announced it was in trouble. Little did it know how much—when it proposed a fundraiser to come up with $300,000 (that’s a lot of raw carrots), an employee (ex?) turned up on social media with a lengthy post that alleges a lot of spoilage in the land of mindful eating. The post alleges everything from payroll chicanery (while Karyn drives a Bentley—a freakin’ Bentley), to frighteningly bad sanitary practices (read about the stained towels from the colon cleansings), to doubting her claims of her own health benefits from the lifestyle (he suggests a plastic surgeon played a role). Is any of it true? Judge for yourself here, and note that she’s already lost one lawsuit this year (per Eater), but one pretty damning item had Karyn’s full cooperation—this tone-deaf 2014 video (h/t Audarshia Townsend) she did for Chicago Business in which she shows off her Imelda Marcos-level shoe collection. Leather shoe collection.

MINDY’S BAKED?

Boy, if you want to see Foodie Twitter in a tizzy, the new Next season tickets is… Mindy Segal making pot brownies. As Eater put it in a kind of perfect storm, “Segal is the first James Beard Award winning chef to develop and co-brand a line of pot edibles.”

TOCK-NICAL DIFFICULTIES

Season tickets for Next went on sale this week. And immediately had problems. It seems resolved, but you have to wonder if Tock, Nick Kokonas’s Open Table-killer ticketing system, will ever be robust enough to withstand the pressure of opening day for the restaurant it was built for. But at least one question was answered—people still care about getting tickets for Next! (Facebook)

HAMPTISOCIAL

You either know if you want to eat at a Chicago restaurant named for the Hamptons or not: “The lobster mac and cheese ($19) comes flecked with bits of lobster as well as the novel mix-in of rainbow chard, the red stems of which mimic lobster when buried in egg noodles. In a frequent deficiency of the dish, the tide of cheddar overwhelms the subtle, scarce shellfish, leaving you to wonder why you’re paying for it when a side of mac and cheese costs $8. A high-price, low-return ingredient, lobster epitomizes the 220-seat restaurant, the latest occupant of the capacious space that housed the short-lived Baume & Brix and, before that, Rumba,” says Graham Meyer in Crain’s, not remembering what the space was long before that: Steven Seagal’s Restaurant!

GUS FUSS

The news that Gus’s Fried Chicken is pretty good isn’t really news to a lot of people who’ve been to it in Memphis or elsewhere, but Amy Cavanagh in Time Out says so anyway: “Tender chicken cocooned in a light, thin exterior that shatters when you cut into it. It’s spicy, with heat that gently sneaks up on you, though not remotely close to the incendiary Nashville-hot style at the Roost and not so hot that it doesn’t benefit from a squirt of Crystal hot sauce out of a plastic packet. I usually prefer dark meat, but Gus’s breasts are surprisingly juicy and flavorful.” Yes, we’re still talking about chicken at the end.

DIANA CANTINA

The one food person in this year’s Reader People issue—assuming you don’t count an anti-food person, a hunger striker—is hot chef of the moment Diana Davila, of Cantina 1910, who talks to Mike Sula how she arrived at what she calls her calling, Mexican Midwestern. That doesn’t rise to the People issue’s usual level of obscurity—I wrote about Davila when she was planning the restaurant—but besides going more in-depth in some areas, Sula manages to get her last name right…

FILIPINO CULTURE 101

By way of promoting Sunday’s Filipino Kitchen & Kultura Festival this Sunday, Steve Dolinsky has a great lengthy introduction to one of the city’s most overlooked cuisines (at least given its presence on the north and northwest sides), Filipino food. (If you plan to go, know that you have to have a ticket this time; follow the first link above.)

WASSAWADA U?

If you want a hot cuppa art, Brendan Sodikoff’s Sawada Coffee (opening tomorrow inside Green Street Smoked Meats) is the place, says the Trib: “Sodikoff partnered with Hiroshi Sawada, Asia’s first winner of the Latte Art World Championship in 2008. Sawada spent the last three years training Hogsalt staff on barista skills.”