1. SIX DAY CAFE
It was a big week for politics—and absolutely not a subject for this food newsletter (I suspect talk about politics can be found elsewhere online). But I saw something that made me think about something. It was a frame from a writer’s Instagram reel or story or whatever they are, quoted in turn on Michael Nagrant’s Instagram whatever. Both are unavailable now, so in fairness, working from memory as I am, I will not give the writer’s name as I cannot assure that I will be quoting it 100% accurately. But the gist of it was that the writer, who has written for Eater and has the Palestinian flag in her bio, was objecting to attention being paid to a restaurant, or owners, who are Israeli, or of Israeli heritage, and she wished for “better food writers”—better meaning that they would know that you’re not supposed to write positively about anything Israeli.
Well, I guess I’m never going to be a better food writer, because there’s not much I disagree with more than this kind of attitude. Towards food—because I believe food culture is the peacemaker, that brings us together and helps us understand each other. Towards free speech, anyone telling me what I’m supposed to write or not write. And towards America, where most of us belong to families who moved here in some sense to escape ancestral hatreds in other parts of the world.
Also unlikely to ever become that kind of better writer is Ari Bendersky, whose newsletter has an excellent piece on Cafe Yaya, the new all-day cafe coming from Zach Engel and Andres Clavero, the owners of Galit—Israeli/Jewish restaurant Galit:
The casual two-floor, all-day counter-service restaurant tucked between Galit and the Victory Gardens (a.k.a. Biograph) Theater in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood at 2431 N. Lincoln Ave. is scheduled to open this winter. (ed. note: they’re currently on track for a January opening if all goes smoothly).
The team took inspiration for the 60-seat restaurant from all-day cafes that line the streets and boulevards of Paris and Tel Aviv, where people gather, eat, drink, and linger. The art nouveau vibe and color scheme seen in the above image will be felt throughout the Siren Betty-designed space.
It will, of course, reflect Engel’s heritage, which includes time spent in Israel and in prominent Israeli restaurants in America (he won a James Beard award when he worked at Shaya in New Orleans, and also worked at Philadelphia’s Zahav). Interestingly, partner Clavero is Cuban-Palestinian:
The two have encountered some difficult conversations over the years (especially the last year) about the Middle East, its people, and the food. They have always sought to build bridges and bring people together in a warm, welcoming atmosphere to share delicious food and stories. At Yaya, they hope to continue welcoming people from varying backgrounds to enjoy a broader menu that crosses even more borders.
”There’s a sense of divisiveness across our society regarding many issues and there’s anxiety and stress in all of our lives,” Engel said. “We want to create a space for people to come and enjoy themselves. This is what we need. We truly believe in putting positivity into the world. We say ‘community space’ and I really do mean there is no one we won’t welcome with open arms and make sure they feel that love and attention.”
Sounds good to me, so I guess I’ll never be a better writer. When there’s more about this place, I’ll cover it here, too. (Even if I didn’t get a box of pastries, like Ari.)
2. LET ME TELL YOU HOW IT WILL BE
Again, not wanting to bring in politics, but like Leon Trotsky said about war, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you. The restaurant and bar industry has barely recovered from a period of enforced closure, but our latest one term mayor sees it as a perfect opportunity to stick one of the city’s economic and cultural drivers with a big tax bill. The ChicagoBars Twitter account sums up the issue with admirable concision:
Chicago’s current “sin” taxes are already quite high vs rest of US and if Mayor Johnson’s proposed 35% hike on beer, wine, and spirits isn’t rejected we’ll have 2nd highest “sin” tax in whole USA on wine and spirits. docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d
I fear the energy that the industry put into coming back from COVID has simply made elected officials think they can be soaked for more.
3. A RESTAURANT FOR GEORGES PEREC
A year ago at this time, the hottest line to wait in and be able to say you’d been to the hottest thing was Warlord. Starting with its not exactly commercial/friendly name, Void feels like this year’s Warlord. Maggie Hennessy at Time Out on the Avondale restaurant, starting with the pasta that comes in a highly Instagrammable parody Spaghetti-Os can:
My inner child protested the first couple bites of Spaghetti Uh-O’s in vodka sauce, the delightful reimagining of Campbell’s canned pasta rings, at Void, the cheffy Italian-American newcomer in Avondale.
“These anelli pasta are al dente, not mushy and waterlogged!” she objected. “The tomato sauce tastes rich, tangy and complexly sweet, not like tinny V8 juice! And these luscious little meatballs taste homemade, not like feedlot beef and filler!”
4. ANDRES RIPOV
And anyone who gets the obscure Tarkovsky joke in that headline gets a No-Prize. Michael Nagrant likes upscale chains up way more than I do—rather than drop a big wad at a Tre Dita, I’d rather do two meals at some indie place—but at least when he gets (predictably) screwed, he wields the caviar spoon of justice on them. His latest: St. Jose of Andres at Bar Mar:
Because the server was so obsessed with the presentation, he underpoured the cocktail (which resided under the bubbling cloud). I know because we ordered a second one and received about 30% more cocktail. Maybe even more hilarious, he presented the second version with the same verve as though he’d never met us before.
Food started arriving. The lobster bisque was lukewarm, the quenelle of brandy crema curdling into the broth like some kind of soup version of an Irish Car Bomb cocktail (a shot of Baileys and whiskey dropped into a pint of Guinness).
…Last year I hit the Jaleo in Vegas and had a similar meal to the Bar Mar one. The paella was gummy, some of the seafood off, and there was no socarrat, aka the crispy bits from the bottom of the pan to be found. I don’t know if it’s a trend or it’s personal bad luck, but I do think as long as Andres licenses his name, he should take a vested interest in making his properties worthy of it.
Here’s my advice: stop eating at these corporate joints from a once-impressive chef!
5. THE PIE LIFE
If anybody’s living the pie life it’s Steve Dolinsky—he could write a novel!—and he talks about two new pizza places: Novel Pizza in Pilsen and Pie Life in Glen Ellyn:
It’s a typical afternoon at Pie Life Pizza – kids flooding in after school and dudes on a late lunch break or afternoon snack run. The shop is hidden along busy Roosevelt Road in Glen Ellyn, but the regulars know where to find Joseph Smith every day. The Nutley, New Jersey native’s first job was in a pizzeria growing up, and he’s now bringing that culture here.
“It’s always a pizzeria in the front of the restaurant, in the dining room, and there’s always a little ‘how ya doin’?’” Smith said.
6. HAITIAN AUNTIES
Many years ago I remember going to a Haitian restaurant somewhere on the far north side—almost certainly because Mike Sula had written about it. Looks like it’s about to happen again with a place on the far South Side called Lior’s Cafe, whose chef cooks Haitian food, but with some personal touches from his aunties:
Most of the traditional Haitian dishes at Lior’s Cafe start with his epis—a blend of green onion, red and green bell peppers, garlic, parsley, and thyme—which he learned to make from his Aunties Myelle and Tatie Nadine. It’s in the braised oxtails and the poule avec sauce, and the five-veggie legume stew, too. You can taste the epis in the occasional oxtail poutine special, but he doesn’t use it in his sweet-and-spicy fried shrimp bombs or the boulette smashburger special he runs now and again.
“We are Haitian,” he says, “but I tried to do a little fusion too, because I didn’t want to shy people away.”
7. NOT YOUR UNCLE MIKE’S DINER
Imagine being Uncle Mike’s, the long-running Filipino short order joint, which seemed to have a minigenre to itself. Suddenly there’s another one! Bayan Ko Diner comes from the Bayan Ko people, obviously, who are doing a tasting menu in one location but a genuine diner, that can’t help but remind you of that venerable Filipino one, in the old Glenn’s space. John Ringor looks it over for The Infatuation:
This restaurant family has strong genetics: the Filipino and Cuban dishes at this all-day Ravenswood spot make us want to have every meal here.
You can share crispy lechon for a casual dinner date while hyping up the breakfast burrito you had hours ago, two seats over. But one of the best reasons to swing by for dinner is that most dishes can come in half-orders. Get a whole spread of lumpia, ropa vieja, adobo wings, and halo halo, and leave your emergency vacation funds unscathed.
8. TURKISH DELIGHTS
Well, there’s the most obvious headline, but it’s true—when we went to Istanbul in 2010. we arrived in the dark and found it rather claustrophobic, but when we got up the next morning, the sky was lapis lazuli blue, and we went to eat at a place where the great view out the window was matched by the great view of breakfast spread all over our table. In short, I love Turkish breakfast as one of the most generous and welcoming spreads on the planet, and David Hammond explains why at WTTW:
Turkish breakfast, or “kahvaltı,” has roots in the Ottoman Empire – and it fittingly reflects sultanic levels of extravagance. On a recent trip to Turkey, I often began the day by choosing from a teeming cornucopia of delights: fresh fruits and vegetables, soup, eggs, meats, cheeses, olives, and baked goods – more than you could ever try in one sitting.
This leads to a writeup of a place called A Thousand Tales, in Mt. Prospect, but he lists a few in the city as well.
9. SUGAH MAMA
Well, here’s a heartwarmer at WBEZ’s site: Vamarr Hunter would go regularly to a south shore bakery called Give Me Some Sugah. Given up for adoption as a baby, he started searching for his birth mother—and found her… at Give Me Some Sugah. Now they work side by side.
10. A DAY IN THE LIFE
WTTW’s site spends a day at Manny’s, showing what it’s like starting at 5 am.
11. HENRY’S TURKEYS
Some years ago I did a profile for the Reader’s People Issue of Henry (or Harry) Carr, owner of Mint Creek Farm in a little town south of Chicago, Stelle, which started as home base for a UFO cult. (I’d link my story but the formatting for the decade-old piece is all messed up.) This piece at WTTW doesn’t talk about UFOs (in fact it says Carr’s farm is in Cabery, another town nearby) but it is interesting on Carr’s modern-day obsession, soil health:
“The reason the plains were so fertile is because the buffalo were grazing the grass,” Carr says. “Even if we weren’t eating [livestock], they provide a vital metabolic function in the earth for the regenerative cycle of the planet.” While it is true that plant-based diets in humans are less hard on the environment in general, a rotational grazing system can reduce the carbon footprint of meat and benefit the environment. [Farming policy advocate Margaret] Krome cites long-term research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggesting that “well-managed grass-based systems, that is to say, grazing systems, can sequester carbon.”
As Carr puts it, livestock “get a bad rap. It’s not the cow, it’s the how. If you raise them in a feedlot, they’re hard on the climate and the environment. But if you keep moving them around like we’re doing, they’re actually replicating what the buffalo did.”
In this case, it’s not the cows but Thanksgiving turkeys that are the main focus.
LISTEN UP
David Manilow at the Dining Table talks about why Mirra is (he says) one of the hottest restaurants in town.
Michael Nagrant talks to Billy Zureikat, the pizza maker who has collaborated with practically everybody.
Speaking of pizza, Joiners talks to the increasingly unavoidable John Carruthers, of Crust Fund Pizza. Again, no link, just find it on your podcast app.
This is mainly for people in the biz, but Plate magazine will do an online symposium on counter service models with… can you guess which Chicago restaurant will be involved? You are correct, Tom Rogers and Adam McFarland of Johns Food and Wine. Go here to register. for it.
IN MEMORIAM
Chicago restaurateur Billy Lawless (The Dawson, The Gage, Coda di Volpe, etc.) has died at 73. (This is Billy Sr.; his son Billy Jr. continues to run the business.) There are various obits from Chicago sources, but I recommend this one from the Irish Times, which talks about how his Chicago success brought him honors back home—he was named a Senator in Ireland in 2016 for his advocacy on behalf of Irish emigres. (H/t ChicagoBars)
WHAT MIKE ATE
I found that I ordered twice from the same location recently—once for Japanese food, once for pizza. How’d that happen? It’s a ghost kitchen, up on Spaulding near Addison. Ghost kitchens no longer seem like the future, exactly, as they sometimes did during COVID, but a permanent minor fixture on the scene. Here’s how they were:
Morikawa Bento is, as you might guess, the Japanese restaurant. I often check GrubHub to see if anything in the way of Japanese food looks more promising than grocery store-level rolls, and I thought I might have found it in Morikawa’s array of bento box meals, so I ordered Saikyoyaki, which is black cod cooked in, it turned out, a pale imitation of Nobu’s famous dish. As a friend would say, it was Meh-rikawa, the black cod a little undercooked and slimy, the side stuff absolutely uninspiring, like the portion of slightly (which is to say under-) cooked cabbage with no particular flavor. Among other things, only a sweet potato croquette stood out (so it’s good to know you can order that by itself, not that I’m recommending doing so).
WG Pizza is a city location for a 40-year-old pizza place in Highland Park called Alex’s Washington Gardens. Do we need suburban pizza places in the city? Well, I like any venerable place taking a shot at winning us over, and WG Pizza is old school in the right ways—a crispy cracker crust that calls to mind city places like Roseangela’s, a sweetish sauce like D’Agostino’s. I liked a sausage pizza fine; I spotted barbecue chicken pizza as a choice and decided to give that a try too, but the dry chicken reminded me to leave that to California Pizza Kitchen (does that still exist? In malls in the burbs, apparently) Anyway, it was kind of good and different for tavern cut ‘za, I might get it again when I need a break from my tavern cut standbys (Bartoli’s and Armand’s).