1. LABORED CONCLUSION

The Tribune had an editorial about how Gale Street Inn’s closing was caused by the rising cost of labor, including the tipped minimum wage increase. Capitol Fax, an excellent political newsletter, says they got it all wrong (h/t John Greenfield):

Um, Mr. Karzas didn’t say the problem was high labor costs. Just the opposite. George said his problem was “Hiring and retaining quality staff” and that he hated “overworking our existing crew.”

That crew was fabulous, by the way. I never had a bad time at the Gale Street Inn.

Meanwhile, Dinah Grossman, who owns and runs Spinning J Bakery and Soda Fountain, wrote a letter to the Trib arguing that wages aren’t the only, or main, cause:

Here’s a real example: In 2018, a new walk-in cooler cost me $4,500. A recent quote for the same unit? Over $12,000. Two months later, it was $15,000 — good for two weeks only, before tariffs or inflation (or just because the company can) drove it up again.

2. VOIDOIDS

Louisa Chu reviews Void, starting with, of course, the Spaghetti-Uh-Os: 

Your server will bring a custom-labeled can to the table, then pour the SpaghettiOs-inspired pasta into a soup plate, and finish with crumbled cheese. It’s too hot to eat right away, but eat you will, slurping tiny al dente anelli siciliani by the spoonful. The Sicilian ringlets are traditionally used in baked pastas, similar to the timpano in the 1996 film “Big Night.”

Here they swim with teeny tender meatballs in a bright vodka sauce, the spirited Italian or Italian American creation of disputed national origin.

I was a Beefaroni kid, who hated sweet and soupy SpaghettiOs, but Spaghetti Uh-O’s have redeemed the concept with what’s truly Void’s identity: Italian American that’s playful yet precise with innovation and nostalgia.

3. CELLAR DOOR REVISION

Grimod at Understanding Hospitality reviewed Cellar Door Provisions in April, but he has more to say, despite the fact that the menu changes so frequently that he finds it hard to keep up:

Reviewing dishes that readers won’t really be able to taste alongside an “experience” (sit down, order a glass of natural wine, order the food) that holds few secrets strikes me as silly. However, I also think Cellar Door more than deserves a formal rating, and subsequent pieces—even if they are short on actual utility—will act as the time capsules that help me better understand (as well as faithfully judge) the work chef-owner Ethan Pikas, chef de cuisine Alex Cochran, and the rest of the team are doing.

One day—perhaps when I’ve whittled down the number of restaurants I patronize even further—I dream of writing those early “Tuesday” reviews of a week in progress. Imagine going a step further and pairing such an article (a view from the crucible) with its own follow-up written on the same Saturday (a view of the same recipes at relative maturity).

This is a not uncommon problem; I think you just have to look beyond individual dishes and look for signs of a consistent approach.

4. HAMBURGER SANDWICH

Here’s one to bookmark for your next road trip in Illinois: Titus Ruscitti on burgers across Illinois, like this one in, fittingly, Sandwich: 

Olde Thyme Inn is just down the road from our last stop. It’s in Sandwich Illinois which sits in both Kendall and Dekalb counties. Sandwich is home to the oldest county fair in the state which goes back to 1888. I cant find the dates for Olde Thyme Inn but it’s an old time bar located in the middle of Main street. There’s a long and narrow bar with old wooden vibes inside. I’d visited here before on taco night but I never had the burger until last Fall when we took a ride out west in search of a good bar burger. There was a nice crowd here on an NFL Sunday and they were all eating and drinking – beers and burgers to be exact. Half pound balls of fresh ground beef are given a light smash on the flattop behind the grill and the end result is a textbook backyard burger except this one is served in a bar.

5. LOMO AURORA

Michael Nagrant, still on his kid’s hockey beat, finds what he considers a standout Colombian restaurant in Aurora, Alice’s Corner:

The cooks at Alice’s have a way with pastry. The Salteñas, especially the steak, are the best empanadas I have ever had in Chicago or Chicagoland. Baked, not fried, stuffed with beef and salty olive, they sport the hue of golden egg yolk. The sweet pastry crust flakes like the honeycomb interior of a Butterfinger candy bar.

The milanesa sandwich features a buttery toasted bun, crisp panko-enrobed chicken cutlets dripping in a refrescante tomato salsa. While not quite a cemita (no sesame seeds on this loaf), the quality and balance of flavors reminds me a lot of Tony Anteliz’s wonderful cemita milanesa from the defunct Cemitas Puebla.

6. RENDANGNABBIT

I keep meaning to go to the new Lao place, Lao Der, and the new Indonesian place, Rendang Republic, but (in the latter case) it’s hard to want to go have a hot dog (even an Indonesian one) right around a holiday built around grilling hot dogs. Anyway, you can read about them, at least; Maggie Hennessy reviews Rendang Republic at Dennis Lee’s The Party Cut:

This Indonesian-Chicago dog doesn’t even start with a snappy beef dog, but rather a fat, succulent Duck Inn chicken thigh sausage made even juicier with duck fat, as is customary at the Bridgeport restaurant where Avila previously worked. A pinkish squiggle of sambal aioli acts as the tangy, fiery glue for a confetti of sweet acar acar (Southeast Asian pickle) made from carrots, cucumbers, and shallots, then a shower of crunchy, savory fried shallots (bawang goreng) and juicy diced tomato and cilantro leaves grace the top of the griddled poppy seed bun. It’s a delicious, zeitgeisty creation, like a Chicago dog dragged through the glowed-up Gen Z garden.

7. MANILA GORILLA

There was a Chowhound post c. 2002 where I talked about the notion that Filipino food was going to be the next hot thing. Didn’t happen then, still hasn’t quite—but I could believe it now, because of the activity in the stretch of the north side that’s serving as an incubator for new Filipino food businesses, as Maggie Hennessy writes in the Sun-Times:

Technically, Chicago doesn’t have a Filipino neighborhood. But Julius Tacadena, the chef and owner of Kanin, thinks a gastronomic Little Manila could be brewing in a small pocket in and around Ravenswood, where he opened his buzzy Filipino-Hawaiian bodega in March.

…“This little stretch, from our corner at Foster and Damen down to where Boonie’s [Filipino Restaurant] is at, over to Bayan Ko and up to Del Sur, it could be Little Manila,” Tacadena said. “We have so many people now doing this crawl, right? Where they start their day at Del Sur in that massive line and end their day getting a cup of coffee and musubi [nori-wrapped Hawaiian rice snack] with us.”

She also offers a listicle of Chicago Filipino food at WBEZ.

8. FRIENDS WITH BEVERAGES

Anthony Todd expresses something that I, as a fellow recipient of press releases, have felt for a while:

I spend a lot of time writing about big restaurant openings, and sometimes it seems as though each operator feels the pressure to insist that they are the greatest, biggest, most exciting, and most innovative restaurant ever to exist in Chicago since the day when du Sable built his trading post. That’s why it was so refreshing talking to the folks behind Friends of Friends, a new bar in West Town (2001 W. Grand Ave.). The key players are experienced experts, the drinks sound delicious, and the space holds a lot of history, but their goal isn’t to reinvent the wheel, just create a great neighborhood watering hole.

The place is called Friends of Friends, and it’s from Heisler Hospitality (Queen Mary etc.), Terry Alexander (The Violet Hour), and Abe Vucekovich (Meadowlark).

9. DEPT. OF PASTRAMI-BASED CORRECTIONS

Last week I mentioned having a smoked meat sandwich at Dunn’s in Montreal, and said smoked meat was like corned beef. A couple of people wrote in to say, smoked meat is more like pastrami. Which… is probably right, I mean the “smoked” part is a major nod in that direction. But… I haven’t had smoked meat at a more famous place like Schwartz’s in a decade, so what do I know, but the steamed meat at Dunn’s was, to me, way more like corned beef—no particular smoke flavor, no cracked pepper crust. So I stand by “like corned beef” in this case.

10. MEATHEAD SPEAKS!

Friend of Fooditor Meathead will talk about his new book The Meathead Method on a Zoom call at Culinary Historians of Chicago on Wednesday, July 16; go here for more details.

11. LISTEN UP

The Dining Table talks to Jenner Tomaska and Scott Weiner of the Fifty/50 Group about redefining the Chicago steakhouse at The Alston.

Pizza City USA talks to Chris Pandel about Boka Group’s new pizza place, Zarella.

Supper With Sylvia talks to Maya Camille Broussard of Justice of the Pies.

The Chefs Cut talks about the James Beard Awards with Stephanie Izard.

The Dish From Chicago Magazine talks about what makes a great cocktail bar.

IN MEMORIAM

Eileen Berke Kaplan, wife of WBBM newsman and restaurant reviewer Sherman Kaplan, and mother of restaurateur Josh Kaplan, who is mentioned below, died July 1 at 82. The Kaplans were married (and ate out) for 63 years.

WHAT MIKE ATE

I keep in my head a list of places to grab a bite in farflung corners of the city and burbs. Last weekend was the opening week of the peach truck delivering Georgia freestone peaches out in various suburban parking lots, so we drove out to Batavia—if you’re not as indefatigable as me, they’ll soon be in closer-flung places like Morton Grove or Glendale Heights—and then from there to Ream’s in Elburn, the sausage and butcher shop in what I would still consider a small town in farmland beyond the city, but no doubt not separated for much longer. Anyway, box of peaches (I counted 67) and Red Hot Sweeties (a kind of hot link made with jalapeno and honey, highly recommended) in hand, where to grab lunch?

I follow a place called Legit Dogs and Ice in South Elgin on Facebook—not sure why, maybe James Van Osdol did Car Con Carne there or something. Anyway, with their punk/heavy metal decor theme they’re basically kind of Hot Doug’s dialed up to eleven. I got a kind of chili dog absolutely heaped with chili, salsa (with plenty of jalapeno—I was digging the big chunks out by the end), cheese and sour cream. Excess hardly covers it, but I enjoyed it, the fries were good, and the ice—I expected Italian ice but in fact they do the Japanese/Taiwanese/whatever style of shaved ice, with a lump of ice cream at the bottom and coconut milk drizzled over it, the ice dyed red white and blue. More than I need, most days, but it suited an overgrown, extra spicy chili dog just fine.

I forgot to buy hot dogs at Ream’s, not that they’re not easy to find elsewhere, so I was happy with my Red Hot Sweeties and Toulouse sausages. A day or two later, I saw a tweet by Dave Burge/”Iowahawk“, a sardonic commentator and Midcentury Modern enthusiast worth following for his weekly Dave’s Car ID service—post a photo of your grandma when she was young and hot with a car from the 30s or 40s and he’ll ID the make and model down to an amazing level of precision. Anyway, the tweet was not about that but a butcher shop in Highwood (he used to live on the north shore, now in Austin—I had lunch with him once at Meier’s Tavern) called Poeta’s, which he said has the best hot dogs on earth. Highwood, though a drive, is a lot closer to me than Elburn, so I figured I needed to go get some Poeta’s dogs for the fourth.

I’m not much of a fan of the north shore, but if there’s anything I like about it, it’s the parts that feel like they’re still small towns in the 50s. Poeta’s, with photos of the sports teams they sponsor over the cash register and a guy manning it who was chatty about the weather and the upcoming holiday, pleased me just fine. But then, where to grab some lunch? Hey, didn’t Kevin Pang just talk about a Hawaiian place in Highwood? Wonder how far it is? I looked it up… and Da Local Boy Cafe was, in fact, about three doors down Green Bay Road from Poeta’s. Coincidence, but not really because pretty much everything anyone’s ever heard of in Highwood is along a three block stretch of Green Bay Road—Froggy’s, an old French cafe which made that Great Chefs of Chicago PBS series alongside Banchet and Roland Liccioni back in the 80s; Washington Gardens pizza, which just opened a delivery-only branch in a ghost kitchen near me; a 100-year-old Italian joint called Del Rio, with a nice old neon sign; and Deere Park, the new place from Todd Stein and Josh Kaplan (who I interviewed here with his dad).

So, on to Da Local Boy—which seemed unaffected by New York Times fame (but then I’m guessing the table full of GI’s in camo from Fort Sheridan weren’t big readers of Thomas Friedman, good for them). I ordered a combo plate which came with grilled chicken breast, in the customary sweetish marinade, what gets called “Bourbon Chicken” in a mall food court, and the chunks of pork shoulder in a calamansi marinade which wowed Pang (not so much me, I thought it was tart and bitter, and they could have trimmed some fat), along with the customary sides of white rice and macaroni salad. I was not so impressed as I ate half of it for lunch, and considerd Kanin in the city obviously superior, but I have to say,  by the next day, when I planned to eat the other half for lunch, I was looking forward to my old friend. So if you’re near Highwood, check it out some time; same for South Elgin.