1. AWARD STUFF

The James Beard awards for restaurants are Monday night, so who knows what will happen there. But the media awards were Saturday night; congrats to Ashok Selvam of Eater Chicago, winning the Jonathan Gold award for local voices in food, Emma Janzen, winning for the third time for co-authoring a cocktail book, The Bartender’s Pantry, and long-ago Grub Street Chicago editor Helen Rosner for a profile, “Padma Lakshmi Walks Into a Bar,” in the New Yorker.

The other big award that Chicago was contending for—Top Chef—ended with Bailey Sullivan of Monteverde becoming the second chef at that restaurant to be a runner-up, after owner Sarah Grueneberg; Sullivan was one of the final three contestants, but she and Shuai Wang of Jackrabbit Filly in Charleston both came in behind winner Tristan Epps of Houston. Here’s a piece about her at WTTW, by Lisa Futterman:

Sullivan, along with competing Chicago chefs Zubair Mohajir (the chef behind Lilac Tiger and Mirra, who was Epps’ sous chef in the finals) and César Murillo (the chef at North Pond, who was eliminated in the penultimate episode) represent the future leaders in Chicago’s culinary scene. “I’m obsessed with Chicago and can’t imagine being anywhere else,” says Sullivan, a native of suburban La Grange. “I’m so glad we got to share that pride with the world.”

2. GRIM STUFF

Latest update on the charges against former Chicago chef Jake Bickelhaupt of 42 Grams, in the Miami New Times: 

On June 7, the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office filed additional charges against Bickelhaupt: two counts of tampering with a witness, victim, or informant and one count of violating a domestic violence injunction.

Although the court had issued a no-contact order prohibiting Bickelhaupt from reaching out to the woman, he violated the order by calling her twice on June 5, according to a police report.

During both calls, he allegedly asked for help paying his bail.

UPDATE: Additional charges have been filed, including attempted murder. (H/t Phillip Marro)

3. EAT LIKE AN EGYPTIAN

I wonder, sometimes, why with so much middle eastern food in town, there are small countries we get a lot of (Lebanon, say) and big ones we don’t seem to get much of. So I was instantly excited to see Titus Ruscitti go in-depth on Egyptian food at a place called North Avenue Falafel, which he was hipped to by our mutual friend, LTHForum co-founder Rob Gardner:

At some point in the recent past North Avenue Falafel introduced an Egyptian Street Food menu. I had no idea it was Egyptian to begin with but Middle Eastern food like shawarma and falafel is fairly common in Egypt so it’s not surprising. I’ve visited North Avenue Falafel a handful of times now and it’s always been the same two guys in there. There’s one that’s usually at the register who’s name I forget and another who’s commonly stationed on the right where he’s most often playing with dough, that’s Amar and he can be seen in the video above. Amar is from Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, and he’s responsible for making most of the stuff on the Egyptian Street Food menu. Many of those items are made with fresh dough which Amar assembles every morning. He uses it for a variety of items including pizzas, pies, and sandwiches.

4. MI TOCAYA, YOU OCAYA

Grimod at Understanding Hospitality takes a look at Diana Davila’s Mi Tocaya Antojeria, which I went to a bunch early on but haven’t been back to since before the pandemic:

Mi Tocaya, by comparison, felt more uncompromising. The menu was written in Spanish (with secondary descriptions mostly in English), and, while the dishes didn’t shy away from showcasing quality ingredients, they rejected luxurious interlopers and borrowed forms. Dávila approached contemporary Mexican cuisine in a more reflexive manner: pushing the boundaries of technique from a position wholly within the culture. This is not to say her thinking was insular. Rather, flashes of outside influence were assimilated into a pervading style rather than obscuring or cheapening the menu’s approach. The results, in turn, might be called “rustic” (which really only means unbetrothed to any outside standard). They could just as easily be termed unpretentious, unapologetic, uncommonly delicious, deeply inspired, and, at times, challenging.

5. WARLORD 

Apropos of the Jake Bickelhaupt story, Michael Nagrant talks about it and the situation at Warlord/Enemy, where there are always rumors about one of the three chefs, but no one has managed to verify them to the point of doing a reported story. Nagrant put it on his Essentials list some time back, but is now taking it off:

I do know that humans are complex. We are not all bad or good. People make big mistakes. Some of these same people save the world.

But when past abuse is still alleged current abuse, the least I can do is not celebrate a chefs’ genius on the plate while looking the other way.

6. PHAROAH SANDERS

The Infatuation sure liked Sanders BBQ Supply in Beverly, though in their inventory of the top food items they don’t mention the thing I wanted to check out when I went there, which was the sausage. I wanted to know if they could cook as well as smoke barbecue and the answer was a pretty triumphant yes:

The juicy rib tips slathered in BBQ sauce are sweet, snackable, and truly worthy of the “meat candy” nickname. Rich gumbo comes with smoky oxtail where the meat and bone separate effortlessly like an amicable divorce. And that sweet potato cornbread works equally well as a brisket sidekick or as a dessert. Even when the brisket is slightly dry, the salt and pepper-crusted bark makes up for it. Sanders’ dining room is often busy with regulars grabbing weekday lunch or picking up take-out for dinner.

7. BELIZE YOU ME

The best thing Dennis Lee wrote this week was his Instagram post for Father’s Day,  but the second best is what he wrote about a Belizean restaurant on the west side, The BlōōhoL:

But damn, everyone, I am going to come straight out and say it: The oxtail ($35 for the dinner) is some of the best oxtail I’ve ever eaten in Chicago.

The meat was so perfectly cooked it was falling apart (I’m surprised it even made it onto the plate intact), and it comes doused in a rich and deeply savory gravy that has so much natural gelatin in it that you can feel it coating your lips as you’re enjoying it. It’s seasoned perfectly too, salted just right, to really amplify the meat’s beefiness.

8. FIERY CHEESE

David Hammond in the Trib on the celebrated Chicago invention, flaming saganaki:

The word saganaki comes from sagani, a small, two-handled Greek pan. In Greece, the dish is straightforward: firm, dry cheeses such as kasseri, feta or halloumi are pan-fried until golden. No fire. No flair. Just cheese doing what cheese does best, served with crusty bread.

In Chicago, we lightly coat the square or triangular cut of cheese in flour and fry it in a little olive oil until crisp and golden. Then we flip it once, warm it through, splash it with brandy (usually ouzo or Metaxa), light it up, and before setting it on the table, flamboyantly extinguish the flames with a lemon squeeze and a hearty shout of “Opa!” That word — part cheer, part celebration, part call to “let’s dance!” — adds the perfect exclamation point.

9. CHEFGPT

After the stories last week about Next’s A.I.-invented, or conjured up or whatever, chef, John Kessler is tempted to try it too:

The AI invented a pretty funny backstory about Glen and the terrible tripe stew his mother cooked, but what really caught my attention was just how sophisticated the recipe was. It involved an apple cider cure, a slow braise in a broth of chicken feet, anchovy, and charred mirepoix. It was then served in a lacto-fermented tomato broth and set with fried gnocchi and “a whisper of mint oil to cut the funk.” Honestly, I’d upload my consciousness to the cloud just to eat this dish. Perhaps we needed to look at a more challenging cook to join the brigade.

So, it does a pretty good job of… feeding back the answer you are looking for. I think it’s sort of like asking someone to cook you dinner, and they look at your cookbooks and decide from that what you like. You know me so well!

10. BOOK NOOK

I’ve gotten a lot of books relating to Chicago or Midwest food lately, and Mike Sula covers nearly all of them at the Reader.  Anyway, here he is on Curtis Duffy’s memoir, Fireproof:

I’ve read few as harrowing as this one. Duffy’s tragic origin story and rise to greatness have been told plenty of times in print and film, but I’ve never encountered a version this raw and unflinching. That’s particularly true in the first chapter when he recounts, at 19, the graphic and cruel encounter with the police when he had to identify the bodies of his parents after his father murdered his stepmother and then killed himself—or the chapters where he describes the incident itself and its sorrowful aftermath.

Others (presumably less grim) include a book about serviceberries (aka Juneberries—I know a patch of them near my house, and also a Target they grow outside of), The Wisconsin Whey (I met two of the co-authors, and many of the cheesemakers, on a Wisconsin cheese tour 15 years ago), Marc Malnati’s book about you-know-where, and our sponsor Meathead’s The Meathead Method.

11. QUESADOPOLOUS

Skepasti is a “Greek style quesadilla,” according to one source, and Sandwich Tribunal dives in: 

Nick’s Gyros offers their Skepastis with either gyros meat or grilled chicken. The meat is served with shredded mozzarella cheese, tomatoes, onions, and fries between two pitas, griddled until the cheese is melted, much like a quesadilla. It is then cut into 4 wedges, arranged pointy-side up on the plate much like a club sandwich. The sandwich can be served with standard tzatziki sauce, but the gentleman doing the cooking–Nick, I presume–recommended I get “street sauce” instead, which turned out to be a lemony aioli that was served inside the sandwich, atop the sandwich, and drizzled over the fries that were served on the side, and the dish was finished with a sprinkling of paprika.

12. LISTEN UP

Joiners talks to Tigist Reda, chef at Ethiopian restaurant Demera.

Another Round talks pizza with folks including Derrick Tung (Paulie Gee’s) and Cecily Federighi (Pizz’Amici).

And there’s a new documentary on southern food maven Edna Lewis; WBEZ did a story on it and her, here.

WHAT MIKE ATE

The story of nearly every upscale chain that comes to town is that they spend a ton of money to open here, the opening is kind of a mess, and then they hire a local pro to come in and fix it to meet the tastes of Chicagoans. At Le Grande Boucherie, which has a stunning Art Nouveau interior in, ironically, a building originally built to look like the work of Chicago’s Louis Sullivan (it was a steakhouse called Sullivan’s, and then Ruth’s Chris Steak House), that pro who saved the day is Michael Taus, a Trotter veteran (I interviewed him for my book, but way back when also interviewed him around the time of Trotter’s closing in 2012) who had Zealous, Duchamp and other restaurants around the area. He, and a sous chef who was with him at Topaz in the burbs and The Wit on State Street, have made a well-oiled machine out of the aspiring steakhouse, and he invited me to dine there.

The old line about “if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you like”? It’s usually a bit of a dig, but that’s exactly what La Grande Boucherie is—a bunch of classically indulgent dishes executed exactly as they’re meant to be. A torchon of foie to spread on toast with quince paste, a Niçoise salad, a dry-aged strip with a little pitcher of Bordelaise or something like that, pasta with crab, a side of very long asparagus with Hollandaise and another of fries with truffe mayo—it was classic, luxurious, entirely satisfying, and quite the scene to be dining in this decadent interior while demonstrations and sirens were going off outside.

At the present rate Gosia Pieniazek and Artur Wnorowski should have about six dozen Polish restaurants by this time next year, after opening Pierogi Kitchen, Wurst Behavior, and now Spoko on Armitage in what I remember (when my kids were at Lincoln Park High School across the street) mainly as a hot dog stand. The theme is allegedly Polish street food, but I see it more as a mix of classic grandmotherly food—you can get a pork schnitzel and some housemade pierogi (where so many cook up factory-made pierogi from Kasia’s or Alexandra’s)—and some modern, American-influenced snack-ish food like zapiekanka, the open-faced sandwiches topped with broiled cheese and a squirt of ketchup.

There are also what Next might have called Poland 2050—a couple of sandwiches with things like pulled pork or smoked brisket, which I’m pretty sure are not to be found in Poland but remind you that Pieniazek and Wrorowski have also owned a couple of American barbecue spots (Earl’s, on the far northwest side, and Ella’s which was in Lincoln Park but is no more). Anyway, the sausage-making and cooking gets better with each place they open, and I admire that Polish food, never hip in Chicago but one of our highlights nonetheless, has someone trying to make it artisanal.