1. UNDER THE LISTLETOE
Tis the season for… year-end listmaking! Here’s my own at Sky Full of Bacon.
I mentioned one of Michael Nagrant’s lists last time, but he actually has three: Best New Chicago Restaurants, The Very Best Things I Ate and Drank, and one I think I haven’t seen anyone do before, The Best Hospitality Experiences. The first thing I checked was whether a restaurant I knew Nagrant had not liked culinarily, but which is known for the warmth of its service, made the list:
One thing that was never in question at Feld was the genuine warmth and passion of the Feld staff. When you walk in, the cooks shake your hand. When you leave, the staff gathers on both sides to wish you a good night. It feels like running on to the court at the United Center during the line-up announcements for the Chicago Bulls. You kinda want to high five everyone. The Feld somm was a genius. The tableside storytelling about purveyors is passionate and engaging.
Titus Ruscitti always does an assortment of lists; here’s his 2024 11 Best Bites from Chicagoland, 11 Best Bites from Beyond Chicagoland, 5 Best Meals, and Roadfood Stops of the Year.
At the Trib, a bunch of their food writers (some of whom I’d never heard of until this moment, though cheers to Ahmed Ali Akbar who does the best job of conveying a distinct personality and outlook) collaborate on Favorite Foods from 2024.
At WBEZ, and
Chicago’s Very Own Eats podcast, on WGN Radio, talks its list here.
The Infatuation named the best new restaurants of 2024.
At Resy, they asked their contributors to each name a restaurant that defined Chicago dining in 2024.
The New York Times has a nationwide piece on the best things they ate in 2024, includiing one of my faves, Mike’s Ham Place in Detroit. The Chicago place on the list, though is venerable Birrieria Ocotlan:
Diners crumble dried chile de árbol over their birria, taking comfort in the steam rising off their stew. As you reach for a tostadita, a server walks by and wordlessly tops off your bowl with consommé poured from a water pitcher. This is what mornings are like at Birrieria Ocotlan, where the aroma of braising goat has been wafting onto the South Chicago sidewalk since 1973. The recipe for the signature dish dates to 1926, when Tereso Reyes — a great-grandfather of the current owner, Andres — obtained a goat from a neighbor in the Mexican city of Ocotlán and made birria out of it.
2. I GOT A FELDING
Louisa Chu reviews the semi-controversial, but increasingly lauded, Feld:
Feld isn’t quite a local farm-to-table restaurant in Chicago, but instead chef and owner Jake Potashnick describes it earnestly as relationship-to-table. After a special cheese dinner plus a 27-course tasting menu, it has surprisingly become one of my favorite dining experiences.
Those courses could be tiny, from a teeny teacup of hot chicken broth infused with the aged Alpine echo of Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese, to a Midwestern fairground in miniature, with a squiggly sweet funnel cake dusted with aromatic spicebush berry sugar.
They were in large part decidedly delicious and utterly fun, with minimalism masking the technical precision of not just Potashnick, but his team of accomplished cooks at Feld, open since June in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood.
3. RESTAURANT WEEK
Anthony Todd used to do a big spreadsheet analyzing Restaurant Week deals to see which were actually deals and which were ripoffs. (Which happened; I remember a breakfast place near my neighhborhood, now gone, that made me take the deal—which was $22 for something with a menu price of $17, but I got a cup of soup with it… at 9 in the morning.) Anyway, Reddit is where to go for the number-crunching now (though 2025’s isn’t up yet), but Todd calls out four deals he likes the looks of, like Leña Brava under new chef Brian Enyart:
The Baja Mariscada at Leña Brava was one of the 25 best things we ate this year, and it’s on their $60 Restaurant Week menu! Start with sea bass ceviche with ginger and avocado, move onto a massive plate of grilled seafood including half a lobster, mussels, and shrimp, and finish with an eggnog flan. The main course alone is usually $72, so even if they cut down on the size a little, it’ll still be a great deal.
4. A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
As all the food writers know, if you want to find something new that hasn’t been covered already and doesn’t have PR, go check out the latest in middle eastern food around Bridgeview. Steve Dolinsky does exactly that and finds M’dakhan, which has something different in the kitchen:
Like so many restaurants along South Harlem Avenue, the menu at M’dakhan is at once familiar and mostly predictable.
“Hummus, baba ghannuj and the muthamawa…and then we have the salads – tabbouleh, fatoush,” said Muhammad Baste, co-owner of M’dakhan.
And here’s the thing they have no one else does: a smoker. Wood-fired, turning lamb shanks and beef ribs into soft, supple entrees tinged with rosy smoke rings. The name of the restaurant translates as “smoke” so many guests know what they’re in for.
Meanwhile, he’s not the first to go to Oliver’s, but he’s probably the first to put it on TV:
The restaurant’s marketing spiel promises Southern California supper club vibes, rooted in the 1930s. If that means liberally using beef fat, layering flavors with lots of texture and treating richness as a virtue rather than a vice, then so be it.
Don’t be fooled by the burger and fries. Because while it may look like something run-of-the-mill, this one has a housemade special sauce, aged Hook’s 5-year cheddar and sesame buns toasted in beef fat. Like everything else at Oliver’s – an understated space on an underdeveloped stretch of South Wabash Avenue – they’re focusing on elevating the familiar.
5. NOR AN EMPIRE
Dominic Lynch at The New Chicagoan reviews Il Carciofo, the new Roman spot from Joe Flamm (Rose Mary, Top Chef):
Pasta is the name of the game here. According to Eater, Il Carciofo built out a humidity controlled pasta development space, which is prominently on display at one end of the dining room near the bathrooms. Given that level of investment, both financial and square footage, the pasta should be exceptional. And for the most part, it is.
…Carbonara is one of the most basic Italian dishes to cook yourself, which makes a $24 price tag a little difficult to justify. Additionally, the rigatoni in our dish was much too al dente for a restaurant of this caliber. But this carbonara otherwise hits the mark.
The tagliatelle was $28, but was easier to justify. The oxtail ragu it was served with was perfect, and unlike the carbonara, the pasta was precisely cooked al dente without going over or under. Both dishes were worth the price, but between the two, the tagliatelle was more worth the upcharge.
6. THINGS CHANGE
A moving piece by Michael Nagrant about life changes for three people from the food world, one of them himself as he tells the story of getting laid off in 2023:
I was in year eight of my current job. I’d never had better work/life balance. I was very good at it.
A random “all hands” meeting was called. My previous meeting ran over, so I joined the “all hands” late. The meeting which had started five minutes earlier was already over.
Thirty seconds later I received a pop-up window on my laptop.
I’m not going to spoil what the other two are; just read it here (if you subscribe).
7. PORK ET-TER
It’s roast pork time at Sandwich Tribunal; he recently did the Philly roast pork and greens sandwich, which you can find versions of locally at places like JT’s Genuine, and now he does Iron Range Porketta, a variation of porchetta from northern Minnesota:
The Iron Range’s take on porchetta is similar… but different. Like many a crowd-friendly pork recipe, it uses pork butt rather than belly or loin, butterflied, rubbed inside and out with garlic and herbs and spices, rolled up and trussed like an Italian porchetta, but now instead of being roasted hard and crisp, it’s cooked low and slow and long until the meat collapses on itself and can be pulled apart with forks. Italian pulled pork, essentially.
8. BARI NONE
I’ve heard the story of the falling-out between Italian deli Bari Foods and its neighbor, D’Amato’s Bakery, but a 2018 post at a Facebook group called True West Loop was just reposted in another group, so if you want to know the story, which turns into a story about Friend of Fooditor J.P. Graziano, check it out here.
9. LATKE FAMILY HISTORY
I guess Table Donkey and Stick makes latkes at this time of year—when we went to Nettare the other night, they had “Latkes a la TDS” on the menu (chef John Dahlstrom worked there)—and owner Matt Sussman sent me a story, which I had already seen on his Instagram stories, about his family’s latke tradition. I told him I’d run it here if it had a permanent link, and here it is (scroll right through the photos to read it). It’s a moving remembrance.
10. LISTEN UP
Paul Fehribach (Big Jones) makes it to The Splendid Table to talk about midwestern cuisine traditions.
Supper With Sylvia is a fairly new podcast by TV journalist Sylvia Perez, who to be honest talks like a slick TV vet, lavishing praise on her guests. But it’s still worth hearing (and watching) her interview with Phil Vettel.
I just went to Dear Margaret again and, well, click on the very first link in this week’s newsletter to see what I thought. Anyway, Lacey Irby, who went from PR to restaurant owner, is on Joiners to talk about the much-loved neighborhood spot, which won Best New Restaurant at the Banchet awards the first year it was open; look for it on your podcast app.
WHAT MIKE ATE
I cooked a lot for Christmas and around it—not just Christmas dinner but a lot of breakfasts, too—so once we were past it I really wanted to go out to a restaurant. We first went to Jason Chan’s new restaurant Gavroche, where chef Mitchell Acuna does French classics—we started with a version of Oeufs Arpege, last seen locally (so far as I know) at the Blanchard; we also had charred French radishes with butter and a very nice freshly-baked baguette, a Lyonnaise salad that was a bit heavy on the tart citrus dressing, Parisian gnocchi, Turbot au Troisgros, thumbelina carrots with an orange sauce which tasted like orange chicken in a Chinese restaurant (a good thing!) and Koji dry-aged poussin rouge. Oh, and Chan sent us French onion soup and all the desserts—literally, all four of the desserts. (He also wound up comping everything but the carrots—I assume to allow him to open the check, so we could leave the servers something. Did not expect or intend for him to do that.) Anyway, it was nearly all delightful, and the room—with its 70s single bar look—fits perfectly on Wells in Old Town. We’ll be back.
I’ve wanted to go back to Nettare ever since I went there some months back and felt it was full of promise—partly because I sat at the kitchen counter and watched chef John Dahlstrom (a Banchet nominee for rising chef this year) practice making pretzels. I liked the spirit of experimentation, even if the meal wasn’t quite as accomplished as other new places (see my ten best list). So we went back on Saturday, and continued to generally like the place, which aims to be locally focused, even down to the liquor used in the cocktails. We started with parsnip butter on housemade focaccia, which we liked a lot, and a big bowl of cacio e pepe dip to be spread on dinner rolls, which was too hot with pepper for entirely pleasurable eating. I asked for a recommendation on a vegetable side, and got charred cabbage, tossed with some feta and sprinkled, I guess, with dark chocolate and some chili crisp—I need to remember that I really like cabbage done like this. (Charred, I mean, not with dark chocolate necessarily.) Then we had gnocchi with an “espuma” of butternut squash and miso, and a perfectly happy piece of pan-fried walleye on a “risotto” of little potato cubes. I feel like I did a year or whatever ago; a friendly place, doing some interesting things that don’t always come off exactly, but mostly pleasurable; I’ll probably be back again sooner, I hope.