“A MUST-READ FOR CHICAGO’S FOODIES”
My book doesn’t come out for two months, but it already got a review—in Publishers Weekly, the main trade pub for booksellers. They liked it! They called it “entertaining” and “delightful” and “a must-read for Chicago’s foodies.” Can’t argue with that! You can read the whole review by going here.
GET YER TICKETS
Tickets are on sale for the Banchet Awards. Get yours! It’s always a good show that, as host/organizer Michael Muser said at the nominee party a couple of weeks back, offers a timestamp on the food scene—here’s what stood out, what mattered, in 2025. The show is Sunday, January 25. 2026, and you can get tickets here.
1. IT’S THE LISTIEST TIME OF YEAR
We’re starting to get year-end lists:
The Infatuation lists its top 11 openings of 2025 here.
Eater Chicago lists its apparently annual awards (have they existed before? Beats me). Spot the pizza place that made both so far.
The Robb Report (the magazine America reads while getting its car detailed) picked national winners for the best steakhouses in America and at the top, #1, was Chicago’s Asador Bastian, together with Swift and Sons (#21), The Greggory in Barrington (#33), Gibsons Italia (#42) and Gibsons (#47). Don’t be too impressed, though; New York City landed 20 spots out of 50 on the list.
2. ATELIER, I TELL YA
Anthony Todd talks to Atelier owner Tim Lacey about his new space including a bar, his new chef Bradley Kawcak, and other stuff:
The new bar may get the attention, but the classic tasting menu is still going strong. Kawcak has had ideas for a long time which he wasn’t able to execute in the old space. Now, he has a slew of new equipment and with that comes new experiments, like a foie gras-filled take on a pizza bagel and a housemade fruit roll-up tongue tattoo (really). Right now, the first menu is focused on Mexican flavors, and once the kitchen team is established in the new space, we can expect menu revisions every couple of months.
3. AN OCTOPUS TACO UNDER THE SEA
Michael Nagrant goes to Tepalcates, a Mexican spot not far from my house (or his) which has good tacos and a very congenial owner-host:
I’d ordered up a round of octopus pibil, carne en su jugo, gobernador (shrimp), and suadero (beef brisket confit) tacos.
Jose leaned over the counter and said, “Have you been here before?”
I responded, “I have not.”
He said, “How’d you know to order all the right things?
Though it’s probably the understatement of the century, I responded, “I like to eat!”
Jose asked me if I’ve had horchata before. I said yes. He said, “Not like this you haven’t.”
At which point he does what he does for all first time customers. He slings you tasting shots of every single agua fresca and horchata he has on tap, going a little crazy mixologist by finally mashing up some guava with Mexican lemonade, a concoction he calls the “perfecto”.
He’s done this so often, he doesn’t even pause before he gestures to the full serving cups and says “What size you want?”
“Large perfecto, please!”
He also writes a paean to the McRib, currently at your local Mickey D’s.
4. SWEATY EATS
Titus Ruscitti visits Chicago Sweatlodge, the Russian-style sauna with Russian-style eats that Fooditor visited some years ago:
There’s about 8-10 sets of tables and most of the people there are joined by a few friends, some are playing card games and others are eating, none of them have anything on except a towel covering their torso and everything directly below it. I’m not going to lie the first thing I wondered was whether or not this place was up to health code standards as far as none of the customers having shoes or socks or even shirts on but I didn’t think about it much past that. I ordered a can of Sapporo and then another plus a Chebureki which is a deep fried turnover stuffed with minced meat and onions. It’s a popular street snack in former Soviet aligned counties. The version here is made with both pork and beef and comes served with sour cream. I enjoyed it for what it was which is basically an Eastern European empanada. I was tasked with doing most of the ordering and I had to explain to our group that Eastern European food is unique but maybe not for the reasons you want it to be. There’s not a ton of spicing used when it comes to this type of food but I still ordered pretty well starting with a salami salad. Nothing to fancy but this was fresh and filling and a good start for a group. I also got us a plate of the homestyle potatoes made with sliced and fried potatoes tossed with mushrooms, onions and sour cream. I suggest adding some steak sauce too.
It’s changed a bit—when Rob Gardner and I went a decade ago, the food was mostly pickled fish and pelmeni.
5. KYETAGAIN
Understanding Hospitality goes to Kyoten for the umpteenth time this year and offers his take:
There’s a rawness to Kyōten that survives even as the concept’s refinement (as well as its price) has grown exponentially. Some might find this attitude abrasive, yet it forms the core of an overall approach (educational and irreverent in almost equal measure) that feels perfectly attuned to a city that also rejects pretension.
Which partly explains why Michelin doesn’t get him, I suspect.
6. SLICE OF LIFE
Trying to be at a certain place on the one day they serve a particular type of pizza is annoying to me. Being at a place that is humble in its limited aspirations, on the other hand, is just my kind of thing, and for that I’ll race to get there before they run out. Here’s Dennis Lee on such a place, Chomp Pizza:
It’s run by Travis Hezel, who’s the owner and sole employee.
Travis and I are connected through our past lives, though loosely. He once worked for Paulie Gee’s Wicker Park, while I am an alum of Paulie’s Logan Square location. We never worked directly with one another, but we have kept in touch through the years. (Pizza really does bring people together.)
…He only has the capacity of making 12 pizzas a day, so when he’s out of those 96 slices, he’s done. And he doesn’t sell whole pies, because it’d be unfair for other customers later in the day if he ran out early. But his aim isn’t to serve just any utility walk-and-eat slice, he wants to make you a great one.
7. YOUNG TURK
Nick Kindelsperger finds a Turkish place, Bereket, in the Loop that stands apart from a million other middle eastern joints:
You’d be forgiven for believing Bereket Turkish Mediterranean is another of the Loop’s many, many quick-service Mediterranean spots. Cones of meat spin behind the counter. A menu hangs high by the cash register.
…But take another look at that menu, and while you will see a falafel wrap, you’ll also encounter braised lamb shanks and manti—Turkish dumplings in a garlic yogurt sauce. Place your order, and you’ll get freshly baked bread, along with a small plate of olive oil with lemon.
8. TAKE OFF, YA HOSER
Chicago mag does a round up of what to eat at the airports—I mean, you know where to eat at O’Hare (Tortas Frontera, obviously), but it might be too early for them or something.
9. NORTEÑO LIGHTS
Eater Chicago has a new but busy freelancer named Brenda Storch doing profiles of individual restaurants of interest. One I noticed this week was for Canton Regio, a Mexican restaurant in Pilsen known for selling grilled beef by the kilo, with a stack of freshly-griddled tortillas. I’ve been a few times and like it, but this struck me as funny and emblematic of how news sites work now. The last times Canton Regio got mentions at Eater were in 2018 and 2021, when this was the headline:
Owner of Popular Pilsen Mexican Restaurant Accused of Attacking an Employee for the Third Time in Three Years
Restaurant worker Felipe Acevedo, 43, alleges that [owner Daniel] Gutierrez Jr. hit him on the head from behind on Saturday after a misunderstanding with a waiter, according to Telemundo Chicago. saying he was dragged out of the restaurant like a dog. Chicago police confirmed to reporters that they received a phone call about the incident. Gutierrez Jr. disputed the allegations to Telemundo, saying he had video evidence showing that he never struck Acevedo. However, he hasn’t provided the video to the station and stopped answering its reporter’s questions.
I kind of remember speculation that this was part of an effort to unionize the restaurant, which is owned by members of the family behind now-gone but long-running Nuevo Leon. (Either that the fight was an anti-union response from management—or the union’s attempt to put heat on management, take your pick.) There was never a followup, as was typical for Eater, but I feel if they had not let editor Ashok Selvam go, there’d be at least enough institutional memory four years later that they wouldn’t be writing a chirpy news-you-can-use piece like this without at least some mention of the past brouhaha.
(There’s another one I remember from Eater that I’ve always wondered about. There was a barbecue place on Western—it might have taken over the Honey 1 spot—and the story in Eater was that the owner was accused of having murdered an employee and relative, as in gruesomely with lots to mop up, in the restaurant space. Should have been a big story—and yet I never heard any followup at all. How does an incident like that just disappear—or, turn out not to have happened after all?)
10. DON’T DO THE HUSTLE
I saw Alpana Singh’s initial social media post talking about how restaurants are getting shaken down by people posting fake one-star reviews, and how the companies behind the sites they appear on—like Google—react slowly and put the onus on the small businesses to fight the scammers. Block Club has a story on the scam:
As a result, Alpana’s score on Google dropped from a 4.5 rating to a 4.1, “a death blow for restaurants,” Singh told Block Club.
One reviewer named “Peter Vicious” asked the business owner to contact him on WhatsApp to have the negative review removed.
…The extortion attempt, known as review bombing, isn’t a new headache for Chicago restaurants. Chef Beverly Kim of Parachute HiFi and Anelya in Avondale dealt with the scam when it emerged in 2022. But the negative reviews are still knocking stars off independent operators’ ratings. That’s a problem for patrons, who often use Google to find restaurants, and owners, who may not have the time to fill out Google’s merchant extortion form, a reporting measure the company rolled out in November to address the scam.
11. CLOSINGS
This one is a bummer: on the heels of the retirement of owner Emanuel Nony, of Sepia and Proxi, Chef Andrew Zimmerman announced that Proxi, the “coastal Asian” spot, would be closing at the end of the year. It’s particularly regretted becausse Proxi had just reworked its concept a bit with a new chef de cuisine, Jennifer Kim (Passerotto), who was doing a menu from a country you probably haven’t eaten from—North Korea. (Her family has roots on that side.) I spoke to Kim briefly at the Banchet nominee party and said, so what is it besides rice, and Kim said no, probably millet. That’s all I know but it would have been interesting to learn more. The last night will be New Year’s Eve.
If you’ve driven up Milwaukeee Avenue to Niles, you’ve probably seen the banquet hall and restaurant complex The White Eagle, which has hosted thousands of Polish weddings and the like. Turns out it closed several weeks back, according to this piece in the Tribune. In its day it was a place where politicians went to touch base with the Polish-American community, but former owner (and mayor of Niles) Andrew Przybylo sums up, a touch sardonically, why the end came for a traditional wedding and reception, even for the Polish-American community: “Back then, it wasn’t a matter of country clubs or getting married on a horse on a beach. You would go to your local banquet hall. And my father had one of the better ones.”
12. MAKING A LIST
Chrissy Camba, a veteran Chicago chef (Laughing Bird, etc.), appeared on Top Chef several years back, which has now led to hosting a show of her own for PBS Food called The Grocery List Show, in which she talks to the people behind grocery stores of different ethnicities around the countryto see what they offer, and then cooks it. Here’s a piece that talks about her background, and here’s the actual series—starting with episode 1, in which Camba (who is Filipina) goes to Chicago’s Seafood City.
13. LISTEN UP
Joiners talks to Bailey Sullivan of Monteverde, who was just on Top Chef, and to Martin Kastner, creator of all those funny serving devices at Alinea.
Supper With Sylvia talks about the top restaurants in different categories.
Dish talks about the best fries in town and the article (mentioned above) on where to eat at our airports.
The Dining Table talks to chef Theo Gilbert (Terragusto, Chicago Bite Club) about cooking around the world.
The Chef’s Cut talks to Food Network’s Maneet Chauhan.
Culinary Historians of Chicago put a bunch of recent talks up all at once—including Maureen Abood talking about Lebanese baking, a farmer who made a business out of all the pecans growing on her property in Oakford, Illinois, and cookbook author Jyoti Mukharji on her new book, Cookbook From an American Kitchen.