If your idea of fun is listening to food writers tell stories embarrassing themselves, there’s a banner two days in a row coming up. Chicagoist editor Chuck Sudo will be among the lineup at That’s All She Wrote on Sunday, July 20, at the Savoy. And the very next night at Homestead, there will be a bevy of food people, including Fountainhead chef Cleetus Friedman, Molly Each, David Zivan, editor of CS magazine, Time Out Chicago and Sun-Times Splash contributor Samantha Lande, Kelly Aiglon of Red Tricycle, and . . . your humble correspondent hisself. The $30 ticket includes appetizers, Crafthouse cocktails, and Dark Horse wines, and benefits Un86’d, which helps restaurant professionals in need; get tickets here.
• Want to be on The Taste? There’s an open call for the ABC cooking show on Saturday; go here.
• Check out Eater’s interview with the owner of old-school steak house Gene & Georgetti. Though, as a friend tweeted, “Forgot to ask ‘How many times do you have to eat at G&G before the waiters stop treating you like a roach?'”
• At the complete other end of dining in every imaginable way, check out Sarah Freeman’s report on dining at TMIP, the farm-based tasting-menu thing in Michigan City, Indiana, from the much-written-about Brandon Baltzley.
• Salo, the Filipino pop-up series I wrote about here, returns to Chicago on Sunday. Info here.
• Check out this radio interview with Rick Shepro, who’ll be presenting a paper on the way the modern international seafood market works at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery this week. I am informed that one of the citations in the paper is this Reader piece.
• Crumbs, one of those cupcake chains, suddenly closed. Did you make fun of them? You’re everything wrong with men, says leading news self-parody site Slate.
• Gael Greene, onetime New York magazine food critic and stranger in the night with Elvis, now lady who lunches and tweets about it, has a report on a visit to Chicago that reads like any tourist’s for a bit . . . Then it gets to Blackbird, and suddenly a sharp eye and palate are at work. (Check out her frank discussion of getting the receptionist to Know Who I Am too.)
• Missed your shot at Lollapalooza tickets? Quartino, whose chef will be in the new Key Ingredient this week, will give several pairs away on July 14 through 16 to late-night diners—they’ll be automatically entered and the winner will be announced at midnight.