1. ORIGINAL CARMY

In the one millionth piece about The Bear, the Trib’s Ahmed Ali Akbar visits a pair of Taylor Street area veterans that have Original Beef flavor but not the crowds—and in fact haven’t seen the show:

“Never heard of ‘The Bear,’” Mary Fontano said, the smell of giardiniera and salted meat in the air in Little Italy. She is a co-owner of the original Fontano’s Subs on Polk Street, alongside her brother, Neil Fontano. The family business has been a fixture of this otherwise residential block for nearly 100 years. She turned to the customers lined up to pay for their Italian beefs.

“You hear about ‘The Bear?’” she asked a man in a reflective construction vest holding a wrapped sandwich.

“‘The Bear?’” the customer asked. “What’s that?”

The other one is Carm’s, a few doors away.

2. MINYE ME

Maggie Hennessy says to check out Minyoli, in Andersonville, even on a hot day:

The soup whispered so gently of beefy minerality and sweet root veg-esque notes (thanks to angelica root and pineapple hearts, I’m told), that I was tempted to lower my voice as I chatted with my date between slurps and bites of tender beef shank. For a hot beef soup, it was, implausibly, refreshing. Of course, I wouldn’t have dared shush my slurping, lest I offend the bouncy, broth-flinging noodles that brought me here in the first place. Minyoli chef/owner and Taiwan native Rich Wang (Boka, Fat Rice) and his team make two shapes of standout wheat noodles in house, one thinner with more surface area for latching onto sauces, the other thicker and ribbon-shaped to remain al dente, “or ‘QQ’ as we would say in Taiwanese,” when set afloat in Minyoli’s beef or vegan broths, Wang explains.

3. SAN PEDRO BEACH BUMS

Titus Ruscitti explores the menu at Mariscos San Pedro, in Thalia Hall, from the Taqueria Chingon/Le Bouchon team:

The menu at San Pedro is flooded with seafood or mariscos as pronounced in Spanish. The menu is broken down into platters, ceviche (and aguachile), tostadas, tacos, hot seafood, whole fish and “Masa y Mas” which is everything from quesadillas to a plate of Nopales. Me being me I had to start with a couple of the seafood tacos including the classic Baja Fish taco and also a newfangled Taco Gobernador as they call them here. The fish taco was on point with a nice chunk of perfectly fried cod topped with aioli and slaw resting atop a made on site corn tortilla. The Gobernador was just as good although technically it’s more of a taco de costra con camaron or a cheese crust taco with shrimp. Gobernador tacos are typically like quesadillas as they melt a bunch of cheese mixed with shrimp and peppers but here they mix shrimp into a cheese crust and roll it all up.

4. CROISETTES FOR CROISSANTS

With Paris in the news, Steve Dolinsky goes to La Fournette to talk croissants and baguettes:

You can’t experience French cuisine without trying a baguette or a croissant. And there’s one Strasbourg native in Chicago, who’s made it his mission to expose Chicagoans to the essence of his childhood.

There isn’t a day that goes by where Pierre Zimmermann isn’t tasting either a baguette or a croissant. And if you’ve ever bought bread at a local Whole Foods, you’ve probably tasted his work. As the owner of La Fournette Bakery, he oversees a massive wholesale operation from a West Side production facility.

5. VULCAN MIND FELD

The Infatuation had 30 courses at Feld, and shows most of then, but sums them up in the first paragraph:

Flavors here can be even more inconsistent, with some dishes from their summer menu tasting more like the charcoal that cooked them. During the smooth coursing, the staff will tell you about the tiny Wisconsin farm behind that cheese, or how the fish in the bread course was caught two days ago. It often makes for good storytelling, until the spell is broken by yet another underwhelming bite.

Speaking of Feld, Michael Nagrant devotes some pixels to the business of writing a negative, but hopefully fair, review:

…the truth is when I called chef Jake and spoke to him for a while, I know he’s also an artist. I know he needs to make adjustments, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t really want to succeed. That’s why I called him and talked to him before dropping the review.  I know it’s easy to see critics as out for blood, but a review like the Feld one was psychically hard for me. I’m know it was harder for chef Jake. When we spoke on the call (maybe I’m an idiot for telling you all this) I got choked up, because just as this newsletter is my dream, Jake’s restaurant is his. I know he’s an artist too. I do really want him to succeed.

But, my role is to tell you what I see based on my experience so you can make good decisions. That’s why you’re here. I also believe providing useful feedback, as painful as it might be, is a service in a time where people are lying with positivity.  If everyone says you’re great why would you ever change until it’s too late?

6. ASIA ON ICE

Today is a day I would eat all five of the desserts John Kessler calls out in a column called “5 Asian Ice Desserts Perfcet For Summer”:

Just about every Asian country offers a version of a crushed-ice sundae. Unlike with a snow cone, ice and syrup mark just the beginning of these creations — they may include ice cream, sweetened beans, corn flakes, fresh fruit, condensed milk, springy cubes of gelatin, even corn. They look enormous but disappear quickly as the ice melts, the flavors swirl, and you keep assembling surprising, wonderful spoonfuls. Try these five.

7. DINER NEWS

In a rare example of a vintage diner closing and then coming back, the Bridgeport Restaurant has returned to life as Stussy’s Diner, says S. Nicole Lane in The Reader:

In the spring of 2024, [Erik] Nance was walking down 35th Street to grab pizza when he noticed the diner was available for lease. Nance’s 17-year-old daughter—nicknamed Stussy—will begin college next year, and he and his daughter’s mother, Quiana, realized this could be the perfect opportunity for her to work toward something, learn about the business, and fund her dreams.

…He says the restaurant is his daughter’s going-away present and a way to pay for tuition. Nance says she’ll be hosting and learning about the business on the weekends before she leaves. “We wanted to give our daughter something she could work [for] and be proud of,” he says.

8. UNRECOGNIZABLE

I’ve never fetishized being unknown to chefs and restaurateurs, because I have never been unknown, as long as I’ve been a working food writer/video producer/whatever. Most chefs I first met when we shot Key Ingredient, or I talked to them for a piece at Grub Street or the Reader, so, obviously not unknown then. And if I go somewhere that the chef knows me, I usually find a way to blow my cover ahead of time, because if they notice me in the dining room, it might worry them that I’m spying on them. That sounds silly (and a bit egotistical of me), but it’s happened more than once—I was a last minute sub when my friend Kenny Z went to Schwa once, and I was later told that the kitchen was buzzing, “Mike Gebert is here—under a fake name!” So I’ve been known (in my very narrow way) about as long as anyone has had any reason to know me.

Maggie Hennessy writes about being known and being obscure in her newsletter:

The fact is, I don’t go to any lengths to hide my face—partly because it’s kind of my brand as a full-time freelance writer. My face is on social media. It’s on my website. My face also likes to go eat at the same six restaurants over and over and over, where it sometimes consumes too much wine. But I had successfully flown under the radar for pretty long, slinking into new spots unannounced, using fake names for reservations. Plus, in the years before the pandemic, it seemed like a new chef was opening a new place every week. Who could be sure that that regular white woman with the brown fringe was really Maggie Hennessy?

I think what made this especially hard to internalize was the fact that I had just spent the past two years living in a place that reinforced my anonymity like nowhere else I’d ever been.

Living in the desert is good for anyone who wants to remember how insignificant they are.

9. IS A POLISH A SANDWICH?

Sandwich Tribunal roams the world, but he also writes about the Chicago Canon of sandwiches, and this time, it’s a Maxwell Street Polish:

The sausages spend quite a bit of time on the griddle, so long that they become nearly blackened in spots and the surface tends toward a crisp texture, lending additional teeth to the expected natural-casing snap. Some imitators will deep-fry the sausages to approximate that crisp snap, but as far as I’m concerned, this is wrong. Maxwell Street sausages are not served with ketchup, nor raw onions, nor pickles. “Everything” at a Maxwell Street stand means mustard and grilled onions. Order a burger with everything and you’ll get a burger with mustard and onions. Similarly the hot dog and the pork chop sandwich, also ubiquitous at the true Maxwell Street stands. Everything means mustard and grilled onions, and you have to ask for the hot peppers separately–but every sandwich includes an order of fries.

10. LISTEN UP

En Process has Tim and Danny from Joiners on.

Tim and Danny talk to New York City mixologist Harrison Ginsberg.

And on The Dining Table, David Manilow talks about three new downtown restaurants, with PR veteran Karrie Leung.

WHAT MIKE ATE

I got a last-minute call from a friend, Toronto-based food writer Renee Suen. She had a dinner set up with a mutual friend—but our friend tested positive for COVID. So I got invited to her influencer meal at Sifr, the middle eastern restaurant from Sujan Sarkar of Indienne. It may seem slightly off that an Indian chef is doing middle eastern food—like we wouldn’t know the difference?—but the fact is, a lot of Indians have food businesses in the middle eastern world, so although they’re quite different cuisines, it’s by no means unusual—I wrote a piece about a Saudi restaurant in the burbs with an Indian owner some years back.

In any case, it jumps quickly onto the short list of genuinely artisanal middle eastern restaurants in town. In fact, you could drop much of Sifr’s food in front of me and tell me it just came from Galit, and I’d probably say “Oh yes, I’d recognize it anywhere.” Freshly baked puffy pita come out with a platter of mezze, small dishes—lush hummus, spicy muhammara, a bowl of pink pickles. I would come here and just nosh on these with a glass of wine and be happy.

But we were there to feed Instagram, not just ourselves, and so we made our way through a survey of meats. A tagine was brought to the table containing chicken and lamb skewers, and a few lamb chops, in a bed of rice with raisins or something slightly sweetish in it (I forget what goes into this kind of rice, though I’ve made something like it out of one of the Ottolenghi cookbooks). We got two strips of branzino, each seasoned in a different way but more or less identically delicious, scallops served from the woodburning grill with dollops of caviar on top, slices of wagyu steak topped with Australian black truffles, and a head of cauliflower roasted with middle eastern spices. I enjoyed all of these too—especially the next day—but honestly, start by digging deeply into the mezze, and see where you want to go from there.