1. BANCHETS…
It’s awards season! I really admired The Brutalist, and expected to turn a French trans narco-musical off after five minutes, but surprisingly liked Emilia Perez pretty well. (I’m fine with the trans part, but “French musical” put me off.) Oh wait, not those awards…
So the Jean Banchet Awards were Sunday night. The phrase “wife guy” went around last summer, and this year seemed to be the wife guy Banchet awards—at least, when guys won, they tended to have the award hung around their wife’s necks, a step up from the usual (and admirable) thing of thanking your team.
Restaurant of the Year went to the kind of place you think “hasn’t it already won?” Avec, now with two locations, remains one of Chicago’s quintessential restaurants; I went in late summer and much as I like the big hearty stuff from the oven, summery dishes like a corn salad showed how that place just shines with simply-prepared in-season food. After Galit winning last year, it’s clear that housemade pitas fresh out of the oven are one key to Banchet judges’ hearts. Paul Kahan, Donnie Madia and Eduard Seitan all made sure to name many of the people who had passed through Avec over its twenty years, from opening chef Koren Grieveson to Erling Wu-Bower, whose own restaurant Maxwells Trading was also a winner. As Madia said, “The reason we read all these names is, it’s important to make sure your teams are safe and stick together.”Best New Restaurant, no surprise given the universal acclaim, went to Norman Fenton’s Mexican tasting menu spot Cariño.
Chef of the Year was Otto Phan of Kyoten—that restaurant’s second win after winning Best New Restaurant in 2020. Rising Chef went to Chris Jung of Maxwells Trading. Pastry Chef went to T.C. Lumbar of Elske, while Sommelier went to Jelena Prodan of Valhalla and S.K.Y.—a happy followup to the incident a few years ago when she was removed from the nominees following a (complete B.S., in this writer’s opinion) controversy on social media. Bisous, a cozy pocket-sized bar on Fulton Market, won Bar of the Year.
Longtime French favorite Le Bouchon won Best Neighborhood Restaurant—owner Oliver Poilevey, pointing out longtime employee Waldo Gallegos, also on stage, said “If you’ve ever had steak frites [at Le Bouchon], he cooked it.” Stumara, the Georgian restaurant in Banchet’s own suburb of Wheeling, won Best Heritage Restaurant; the owner made a reference to he restaurant being about the “stories and flavors” of Georgia, which pretty sums up the Banchet awards in a phrase. Ragadan, the curious mix of middle eastern sandwiches and Oklahoma-style onion burgers, won Best Counter Service restaurant.
Dear Margaret, a Best New Restaurant winner (in 2022), seemed to be on its way to being a perennial nominee for Best Hospitality, but won it this year. Tre Dita, the posh pasta spot in the St. Regis hotel, won Best Design, while a stunt category, new this year, of Best Pizza, voted on by the audience at the awards, went to Spacca Napoli. The Culinary Achievement award went to Roland Liccioni, who retired last year after a long career that included taking over Le Francais from Banchet and a long run at Les Nomades; looking back on a fifty-year career that started when he was 13, advised the younger cooks in the audience, “If you have a passion for what you do, keep doing it.”
Speaking of Best Neighborhood Restaurant, that’s the subject of Maggie Hennessy’s piece at WBEZ:
I stopped by for a meal at each of the four Banchet nominees, seeking common threads that connect these different places in the hope of answering the elusive question: Why do some neighborhood restaurants become instant classics?
…To me, Le Bouchon fits the bill as a come-as-you-are occasion place and a timelessly indie slice of Bucktown. Even as high-end retail chains and juice and brow bars spring up on all sides, Bouchon still churns out reliably exceptional bistro food, cooked and served by an affable, longtime crew of chefs and waitstaff who, like me, can’t quit this magnetic place.
2. BEARDS…
In the meantime the James Beard Awards took their first step toward eventual winners with the release of their list of semifinalists (who will all immediately call themselves nominees, which is the next step). Despite the controversy last year over at least one highly dubious winner (an apparently middling sushi place in the Detroit suburbs which somehow took Best Chef Great Lakes), the Beards, which are (a bit belatedly) very big on diversity, shortlisted all kinds of African-American and women chefs—fine by me, though their idea of diversity more rarely extends to Mexicans and only a little to Asians, both groups that, you know, have been known to have restaurants.
Anyway, enough of that, congrats to the shortlistees—you can see the full list here—and while some of it shows the Beards following in the tracks of the Banchets (with mentions of the last two Banchet Restaurant of the Year winners, Oriole and Galit), the Beards are the first ones to catch Feld at the moment when it went from being a WTF on the food scene to a genuine contender.
3. SWINE HUNT
John Kessler praises the southern goodness of Southern Oysters Rockefeller at Briny Swine:
At Briny Swine Smokehouse & Oyster Bar, chef-owner Brandon Rushing gets them just right — perhaps because he recently decamped here from Edisto Beach, South Carolina, where he ran the first iteration of this restaurant. Rushing gussies his oysters up with collard greens and diced country ham for the Southern Rockefeller theme, never mind it was the Carnegies who were the big coastal landowners.
4. MINIONS
Minyoli, the Taiwanese noodle shop in Andersonville, was hot the first couple of weeks it opened, and I really liked a couple of dishes there—but the couple of dishes seemed like all there was to be had there. So I’ve been waiting to go back until the menu got deeper. That’s what the Trib’s headline—”Minyoli makes more than Taiwanese noodles”—seems to imply:
“The kind of restaurant I opened, like I had in my imagination, is a noodle restaurant in a juancun neighborhood,” Wang said. “Those kinds of restaurants are usually quite small, with a very small focused menu, very much like street food in that part of Asia in general. And we started with that kind of menu.”
That’s not the kind of menu Minyoli makes now.
Their lu wei, aromatic braised starters, may be most traditional, the street food snacks translated as lovely little dishes piled high with Phoenix Bean firm tofu, silky soft daikon and kombu ribbons, all served chilled.
The tropical pineapple tart à la mode began with an aunt’s Taiwanese pineapple cake recipe, X Wang said, though the family elder disapproves of their adaptation. But I love it, with its glorious golden shortbread crust filled with house-made amber pineapple jam. You can choose your ice cream flavor, including Alishan oolong and coconut, but really there’s no better scoop than the nutty black sesame.
5. DUCK SEASON!
I know chef Donald Young, ex of Temporis (RIP), but have not attended his much-praised Duck Sel pop-up. Anthony Todd talks through how it works:
After a toast, Young begins the meal the same way he will announce every course: by blowing a duck call. What follows is a whirlwind of flavors, beginning with six canapés, each more elaborate and whimsical than the last. Among them: a spring roll made with aged salmon and served with a syringe of watermelon nuoc cham, and a single-bite cheese curd with caviar and A5 wagyu. “The first courses are always the snack attack,” Young says. “It’s what everyone remembers.” After that, courses come out fast, and not surprisingly, duck is the highlight of many of them.
6. CHINESE NEW YEAR
I’ve heard a lot about Chengdu Bistro, a hot new Szechuan restaurant, but Steve Dolinsky finds another one in increasingly Chinese Bridgeport, Szechuan Alley:
“The Szechuan people, we like spicy, which makes life – life is spicy too,” said Perry Zhao, the manager at Szechuan Alley.
A creamy peanut and sesame sauce is amplified exponentially by a pair of different chili oils; this is the base for Dan Dan Noodles, which will envelop a tangle of boiled egg noodles, then a top layer of crunchy bok choy and mild ground pork. Be sure to combine everything at the table.
7. YOUR CHICAGOLAND AND NORTHWEST INDIANA DINERS
Michael Nagrant has a piece on eating on the other side of the border—the Indiana border:
They don’t do Lolla down here, but they do pierogi-palooza, which honestly is more my speed anyway. What I don’t know about NWI could fill the hole they once dug for the foundation of the unbuilt Calatrava “Spire”. But what I do know is it’s also one of the best food regions in all of Chicagoland, rivaling Chicago itself.
Yeah, there are no tasting menus, but there are legions of multi-generational hamburger huts, rib shacks, and taco stands.
Specifically, he talks about a very American taco style, and then visits an old school burger joint I know from my days entertaining my kids around the region, and feeding them:
Opened in 1932 at 5440 Calumet Ave in Hammond, Indiana by Harold Miner and Ralph Dunn, the six stool burger shack became such a local institution it grew to multiple locations including one at 80th and Ashland in Chicago.
Today one survives at 8940 Indianapolis Blvd in Highland, Indiana. The current location still has tulip seats, porcelain signs, and a mint chocolate chip ice cream paint scheme. Adorned with garland and all the Christmas accoutrement I felt like I’d fallen into a lost scene from A Christmas Story when I entered.
Although my favorite in the area is probably John’s Blue-Top Inn, a little ways up Indianapolis boulevard—at least its signage is the coolest.
8. UNDER THE SPREADING CHESTNUT TREE
I’ve been wondering what Grimod would write about next; after Feld, it seemed like he had reviewed every place that seemed to justify his in-depth style. The answer: returning to Smyth to talk about what it’s been like since 2023—and perhaps more to the point, since getting a third Michelin star:
Sheer hedonism competes with ruminative, surprising, and totally singular sensations for attention—vexingly so. A proportion of first-time and experienced diners alike think that the several hundred dollars you spend for the pleasure of this meal should secure a greater sense of satisfaction. The most outspoken take aim at what they perceive to be an absentee chef, an obsession with esoteric ingredients, a tendency toward “baby food” textures, and a cuisine so stripped of substance that the evening feels like one long, perverse sort of tease.
This kind of polarization in matters of taste is to be prized so long as it represents a good-faith disagreement between diverse palates encountering food made with the requisite care and intention. That is to say: yes, the emperor is wearing clothes—they are just tailored and colored in an extreme manner that is not to everyone’s liking. Indeed, the restaurant you speak of represents the victory of distinction over the temptation to deliver lowest-common-denominator mass appeal. Just the same, it is not a pyrrhic victory that punishes the most inexperienced portion of the public for the sake of celebrating the cynical preferences of privileged gastronomes.
Well, one consequence of that third star: Smyth now reportedly commands a price starting at $420 per person. (Not sure where you find that on either its own site or Tock.)
9. EVERYONE HAS THEIR OWN LADDER
The Reader Bites writeup of seafood udon ramen at Shinya Ramen House is after my own heart:
How good is the seafood udon ramen at Shinya Ramen House? Allow me to dig out my cinephile credentials and count the ways. Whenever I get the urge to rewatch one of my favorite movies, Juzo Itami’s Tampopo (1985), Shinya is where I carry out from.
10. MEMENTO MAURI
The Infatuation visits a new Neapolitan pizza spot in the South Loop, Pizza Mauri:
Forno Mauri is a South Loop pizza destination for anyone scouring for a noteworthy Neapolitan-style pie. Inside this small boxy spot with abstract paintings and an Italian pop soundtrack, you’ll see a handful of couples sipping wine and maybe a tourist family digging into some pizzas. And those excellently charred pies, along with the ease of snagging a table, make this a good dinner idea for something last-minute.
11. LISTEN UP
Joiners talks to Greg Hall, who again owns Virtue Cider and was, before that, the leader with his dad of Goose Island. Find it at your podcast app.
Here’s a good question, asked at The Dining Table: how do hidden gems survive? David Manilow talks to the family behind Suda’s Lebanese Cuisine in Lincoln Park.