1. BOOK NEWS
The Brindille event was a great success, with a full house of foodies and chefs who are in the book—see a little of it here. The next one is in the planning stages. Soon to come!
2. BEARDED
I had a family obligation the weekend of the James Beard Awards, and also my invitations to Beard media events have thinned a bit since I’ve spent the last several years covering the past much more than the present (but thanks to the dear, dear friends—as Monsieur Gustave of The Grand Budapest Hotel would say—who still invite me). Also also, there just weren’t that many Chicago nominations to get excited about, though one of the few paid off in a big way: Jake Potashnick of Feld won Best Chef Great Lakes, over three chefs from Ohio and Norman Fenton of Cariño. Several pieces on his win, here’s the Trib:
“I always bring it back to the team because every one of these recognitions doesn’t allow just me to call my mom and go ‘we did it,’ but it allows my team to call their moms and say ‘we did it!’” [Potashnick] said. “But if our guests don’t like their meal, none of this matters. What matters is every day we come in grounded and ready to put in the work and be our best.”
And here’s Courtney Kueppers at WBEZ:
Potashnick said when he was first starting out, he emailed 40 chefs asking for advice, and early on, Chicagoans like Grant Achatz of Alinea offered him words of support. Now, Potashnick is thinking about how he can pay it forward.
“I think when you win something like this, the next step is figuring out how to support other people in the industry, so that they get this opportunity as well,” Potashnick said.
“We have been so lucky, we have had such a light shined on us at Feld, and it’s an honor, and I’m not always sure why we won that spotlight lottery. So it’s now partially my job to point that spotlight at other restaurants and other chefs and make sure that I’m sharing that light.”
The only other Chicago-ish win all night was a media award to Ahmed Ali Akbar, former Tribune writer, for a Trib piece on bean pies (a Nation of Islam-produced specialty in Chicago and other cities). Bean pies seem to be a once-every-decade subject around here—Mike Sula wrote a Reader piece on them in 2013. Speaking of trivia, that makes Akbar—who was let go by the Tribune in July 2025—the second then-Chicago-based Muslim-American writer to win one within a relatively short period of getting laid off by Chicago media, after former Eater Chicago editor Ashok Selvam last year. (Akbar had previously won in 2022.) Who will be the lucky one with a Beard award and no job next year?
(Actually, we can point to one other Chicago win—sort of! Dave Beran, who launched Next with Grant Achatz—and talks about it in my book—won Best Chef California for his restaurants Pasjoli and Seline. Here’s his reaction on Instagram.)
Anyway, back to Feld: I of course wrote a piece about Feld 18 months or so ago, and just this week—in time for Potashnick’s win, but not before it—two more came out, covering much of the same ground, but obviously from a later perspective in Feld’s development. At Fine Dining Lovers, Ximena Beltran Quan Kiu has a piece called “Jake Potashnick Didn’t Fold,” which focuses on those first early months and how Feld still gets crap on Reddit (as you can see in the current thread about Feld’s win), despite general acclaim in other food media. I liked this anecdote, which kind of sums it up:
[A] radio host… blasted us on the radio [for not having Coke products with dinner]. We received 30 one-star Google reviews out of nowhere from people who had not dined at Feld. That’s the internet.
From Feld’s opening, there was fair criticism. We were getting reviews saying the seasoning was “a little under my preference.” That’s fair criticism. As a chef, as a business owner, you have to look at that and think about it. Now comments from 2,000 people saying, “That plate looks silly,” is not useful feedback. And it’s not feedback from people who are ever actually going to come to the restaurant. You have to be able to separate the two.
But that’s all ancient history by now, certainly to someone like me who’s about to go for the third time and ranked the second time my best meal of 2025. Maggie Hennessy has a piece on Feld, also at WBEZ, which looks at it from a vantage point of a year and six months, not six months like my piece. The events are largely the same but the outlook is different:
“I love the idea of being a little overwhelmed,” Potashnick told me later. “The whole experience of Feld is this odd dichotomy. On the one hand, I want you to be incredibly comfortable. I want the team to be warm, fun and bubbly. I want the cutlery to feel great in your hand. On the other hand, I want you to be so uncomfortable, I want the pace to be shocking.”
Spoken like a chef who’s not apologizing any more. Anyway, there’s a Feld for every taste across recent coverage, pick yours and follow the links above.
Of course, the Beards—which to my mind are sort of the last Japanese soldiers still operating on the woke battlefield of the early 2020s—come in for some criticism on how honest or thorough they are, and Michael Nagrant, who like me was briefly a judge in some category or other, questions the mechanics of Feld’s win over Cariño, though either would have been an improvement over the apparently mid Detroit suburb strip mall sushi joint that won in 2024:
What I know is that [the Great Lakes chef award] chairperson does wield a god-like power in his current position. I know that because of the low stipends, only a few of the local judges would have eaten at any of the Great Lakes nominees, and even fewer would have eaten at all of them. I’m willing to bet that only two or three of the local judges ate at Feld and Cariño, the Chicago finalists, and that the chairperson was likely one of them.
I know for a fact that the chairperson does not like Norm Fenton of Cariño. I also know that the chair holds grudges tighter than an iron maiden.
What better way to punish those who don’t pay this chair succubinal obedience than to award the other local chef, Jake Potashnick of Feld, Best Chef: Great Lakes instead?
It’s hard for me to come up with a reliable number, but there aren’t a lot of chefs who won regional “Best” Beard awards that are only in their second year, which would give credence that Feld got an extra boost somehow. Then again, if Cariño won, it was young, too.
A couple of people have made one of these complaints, that Feld is too young to have already won. I don’t buy that; when Noah Sandoval won last year, he was plainly overdue (Oriole was a decade old and universally acclaimed at that point). Which of those extremes is more fair? My opinion is, when you’re hot you’re hot and everybody knows it, so why not give it then?
Feld and Cariño, though not especially similar in cuisine. are strikingly parallel for me personally—I’ve written in-depth features on both chefs and even placed both chefs’ restaurants at the top of my personal ten best list (it was still Brass Heart when I did so for Norman Fenton, but basically Cariño in all but name). So I’d have been happy, and considered it deserved, for either one to have won this year. What they do have in common is that at a time when tasting menus open right and left as a way for young chefs to show off and shorten their jump to fame, but don’t always have a distinct concept, these two stand out for the rarer thing of having personal artistic directions which are realized on a very high level. Feld may not be the only one to deserve it—but deserve it it does.
Finally: lots of people did the “What did out of towners eat in Chicago for the Beards?” angle, and they’re usually kind of obvious choices (no one in the decidedly insular world of name food media has yet taken me up on my suggestion from last year, that they contact Titus Ruscitti and get him to show them around). But Monica Eng’s red carpet video version of the genre is at least lively—because the people are live in it. Watch it here.
3. OUR WORLD’S 50 BEST
Chicago mag put out its 50 Best Restaurants issue. It’s mostly the places you’d expect—as it mostly should be; I don’t care for the kind of list where, say, someone dismisses Rear Window as Hitchcock’s greatest film just so they can be the weirdo who says it’s actually Marnie. Apart from some idiosyncrasies (critic John Kessler seems insensible to the pleasures of Daisies, which more than a few people have suggested is the best restaurant in Chicago; you won’t find me vociferously disputing that notion) it’s a reasonably good check-off list of widely admired places in mid-2026, only one place per group allowed (so Galit but not Cafe Yaya, El Che but not Brasero, etc.) with a few obvious ethnic places tossed in (mostly Mexican plus hot Thai place of the moment, Noodles Party, and old pro Go 4 Food, a litte surprisingly, representing Chinatown). Opposite that, there are a few places only someone with a substantial dining budget could love, which are one-and-done—or maybe never—for me.
Michael Nagrant, in the same piece as he bashes the Beards in, takes a couple of shots at Chicago‘s list:
How else does Maxwells Trading (which IS amazing) end up as number one over the generally acknowledged best restaurants in Chicago like Smyth (considered best restaurant in North America by the World’s Best org) or Oriole (2 Michelin stars, last year’s Best Chef Great Lakes winner)? How does Valhalla not end up on this list, or Daisies? Does the critic have a personal beef and let their biases win?
Why not publish the list unranked? We can not compare Noodle Party to Kyoten in any real meaningful relative way, but we can put them side by side as great and complete in achieving their individual goals. But you can not do that if you’re a dying print publication mostly read in the suburbs, pretending to skew younger on social. You need ranks so the people will fight and the hot take artists (not unlike myself, LOL) will mention the list so you can grab eyeballs and new subscribers.
Hey, listicles gotta listicle, it’s like faulting Jerry Lewis for going sentimental on Labor Day weekend, but I think picking Maxwells Trading as #1 is actually the very best thing about this list. Yeah, besides World’s Best, Michelin gave Smyth three stars. But why exactly should we locals, who know so much more about our scene than Michelin’s small cadre of ex-hotel concierges ever will, care? (Smyth comes in all the way down at… #6. Injustice!) Kessler could easily have named Oriole (which is his #2) as his best, and no one would argue with it, and no one would be that interested by it, either; we all know how good it is.
But the top of the list is dominated, unsurprisingly, by the places that stood out in the last few years before COVID—Oriole (opened 2016), Smyth (likewise), Kyoten and Virtue (2018), Monteverde (2015), and so on. At some point you have to stake out what’s great among the newest wave of restaurants, and give them recognition so they go on to further recognition from the Beards, the tire company, and everybody else who takes their own opinion too seriously. Kessler loves and knows Asian food, why shouldn’t he stake a claim that a really good and creative example of that is in fact the best place to go eat in Chicago right now? Lists pretend to objective measures—but in the end it’s all personal favorites that rub somebody’s belly just right.
So make a sub-list of only the places that have opened since March 16, 2020, the start of COVID—Feld, Creepies, Johns Food and Wine, Mirra, etc. etc.—and see what they say about where the dining scene is now. (Meanwhile, I’ll see you at Daisies for breakfast pastries, and certainly for dinner as soon as the Overpriced Tomato is in season. It’s rare I go and don’t see someone from Chicago food media there.)
4. ARLA GUTHRIE
Four letters, a name which doesn’t tell you anything about what cuisine it represents… I guarantee you in three months someone will ask me if I’ve been to Arla and I will have to think for a moment what that name refers to. Anyway, here’s Anthony Todd on the new place from the Adalina crew:
Arla’s focus on Japanese and Mediterranean flavors is inspired by travels taken by [chef Soo] Ahn and his business partners. “We came across another restaurant doing Japanese and Mediterranean, and in our heads we thought ‘there is no way this is going to work,’ but it did — we’d never tasted anything like it.” That spark of inspiration led Ahn to design the menu for Arla.
But don’t call it fusion (it’s not 2006, after all). “When a guest tastes a dish, I don’t want them to think ‘this part is Japanese and this part is Mediterranean,’” Ahn says. “I don’t want them to see that divide.”
5. FELDIES
Oh, let’s talk about Feld some more. Here’s Grimod astutely encapsulating the struggle to get past still being a punchline to some (though at this point that’s not much of anyone besides Reddit; I expect an updated review from The Infatuation any post-Beards day now—or sooner if Feld switched to Open Table; at least that’s what chefs say about how to curry favor with The Infatuation):
Treating the restaurant as a lazy punchline or a scapegoat betrays a callous disinterest—say what you want about the “relationship to table” tagline—in where the city’s dining scene can and should be going: toward individualized sourcing and nimble, minimalist compositions (paired with intimate, engaging storytelling) that turn traditional notions of luxury on their head.
Chicago will never go toe-to-toe with cities like New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles when it comes to serving caviar, truffle, wagyu, or a whole host of Japanese seafood. Sourcing these ingredients is ultimately an arms race, and we do not have a population that can sustain or reward the highest strata of quality.
Frankly, it grants us a golden opportunity to excel in ways that those totemic items rather perversely restrict. And it’s hard not to respect Potashnick (and maybe even feel somewhat defensive about the hatred he inspires) for helping to lead that charge.
Since I was off last week, that also gave Grimod another chance to re-review another favorite—Creepies:
Creepies remains relevant and engaging to me because it forms such a successful entry point into the kind of challenging, intellectual cookery I’ve been tracking at Elske (its sister establishment), Cellar Door Provisions, Feld, and even Smyth: concepts whose resonance might not be obvious but, if we trade specifics for spirit, feels certain.
6. BANH MI DADDY, EIGHT TO THE BAR
Possibly the best pho in town, Pho Nam Lua up on McCormick Boulevard had a fire and is currently closed. But that removes any distraction from trying a newish place in the same strip mall: Bánh Mì Ông Mười, per Titus Ruscitti who did not have the chance to educate Ruth Reichl or Andrew Zimmern on regional banh mi styles:
I was able to communicate with the old man on my initial visit, he told me that he’s from Southern Vietnam and they make Southern style Bahn Mi. What’s the difference between a south style and a north style Banh Mi? Well according to some digging I did in the South they use a wider and airier baguette with a very light, crispy crust that produces lots of crumbs.
7. DIVE!
I could believe Nick Kindelsperger that Sky Ride Tap is the last great dive bar in the Loop after his recent piece on Monk’s Pub, which seems unrecognizably posh and sophisticated compared to how I knew it in the 90s:
It’s cash only. Beer comes in bottles, not out of a tap. And forget about a cocktail list. Liquor is dealt out in shot glasses, not coupes.
The stools are creaky, the bathrooms are comically tiny, and the lighting can best be described as unflattering. The dominant color inside is brown—from the well-worn bar to the wood paneling on the walls. Oh, and though “sandwiches” is scrawled prominently across the bar’s sign out front, there’s no food.
His other most recent Substack piece contains news I never would have expected: you can now get a jibarito in the Loop.
And he wrote his first piece for Block Club! If you’re on Instagram, maybe you’ve seen the southwest side Italian place, Vince’s, whose lunch buffet items have started turning up there—though the presenter isn’t a bundle of social media-ready energy and quirky humor like, say, Judy who has the best pancakes! in Galesburg:
Just about every Instagram video of Vince’s Restaurant and Pizzeria opens with an older gentleman in the frame saying the address of the Italian restaurant in Clearing, then proceeding to patiently describe every dish on the buffet line.
Because he never says his name, most commenters assume he is Vince, but his name is Michael Parmigiani — though everyone calls him Micky. He co-owns and cooks the food at Vince’s Restaurant and Pizzeria with his older brother, Johnny.
8. DENNIS GETS FANCY
No, he didn’t go to Feld, but Dennis Lee did visit #28 on Chicago mag’s list, Anelya:
We also love the pashtet ($10), which is the chicken liver pâté, and the Korean carrot salad ($9).
The pashtet was maybe the biggest hit of the table that night, with a silky smooth texture and a jam on top to offset the rich mineral flavor of the liver mousse. One note is that it doesn’t come with bread, so you have to order a portion on the side ($7), which is supplied by Publican Quality Bread. And that Korean carrot salad is actually a pretty fascinating dish. It originated from Koreans who lived in what was formerly known as the Soviet Union; this was sort of a loose way to turn local ingredients into a mock version of kimchi. It definitely doesn’t taste like kimchi, but the amount of savoriness packed into these threads of unassuming carrot is impressive.
9. WAY MID
Kevin Pang is looking at the food choices at both of Chicago’s airports, starting with Midway.
10. DA EIGHT POINT SEVEN
The Infatuation is going to have to expand beyond ten points at this rate—giving nearly nine points, 8.7, to the Loop location of north shore Hawaiian spot Da Local Boy:
Each clamshell styrofoam container is a packed treasure chest of delicious Hawaiian entrees and mac salad. You can go all-in on one entree—we’ve very happily tackled a mountain of loco moco with charred beef patties, glistening egg yolks, and an ocean of drizzle-it-yourself gravy.
11. EATER ET
Well, dinner is over for Eater; the online food site, best known lately for its considerable quantity of layoffs, has been sold along with the rest of Vox Media to a Murdoch-backed venture fund. At least I think so; here’s a summary of the deal in The Hollywood Reporter (which the new outfit also owns) and I defy anyone to read it and know exactly who owns what now without drawing a chart:
Vox Media, the digital publisher that rose in the 2010s with ambitions to build itself up as a modern version of old school magazine titans like Time Inc., has sold off its remaining assets in a deal that winds down an era.
Publishing brands, including food authority Eater, tech destination The Verge, sports network SB Nation, travel brand Thrillist, lifestyle site Popsugar, animal story-focused The Dodo and drinking culture site Punch, were acquired by Penske Media, the companies said on Thursday.
…Eater, The Verge and the other publishing brands were cleaved off into what was called RemainCo, run by Ryan Pauley, the revenue, strategy and operations-focused executive who has been at Vox Media since 2013. Speculation at the time of Murdoch’s New York buy centered on whether each of the publishing assets would be sold separately or be shopped as whole package. One factor in the dealmaking was a 2023 pact between Penske Media and Vox in which the Jay Penske-run company had taken a stake in the Bankoff-led media firm.
Now those brands, along with Vox’s ad tech products like marketplace Concert and data platform Forte, will join a publishing company that also owns The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, Billboard, WWD, Variety, ARTnews, Robb Report and other publications.
Not mentioned in all this corporate maneuvering: writers, readers. (H/t Richard Shepro)
12. LISTEN UP
Joiners talks to Justin Lerias of Del Sur Bakery, and to Richie Farina, best known for his time at Moto.
At the Dining Table, David Manilow talks about the riverfront with the owners of the lavish new spot on the water, Naia.
The Chef’s Cut talks to newly minted Top Chef winner, Rhoda Mogby Tang, and about how to shop a farmer’s market like a chef.
Needless to say, The Dish from Chicago magazine talks about the list from Chicago magazine.