T he Reader has covered food and restaurants in Chicago throughout its half-century existence, though not nearly as consistently or comprehensively as music, film, drama, or most of the other arts—certainly not every week when I came on as a starving editorial assistant way back in ’95. Back then there was a very occasional visual […]
Category: Food & Drink
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Limón y Sal launches pozole season at Monday Night Foodball
The nights are getting colder. Your body, sensing the darkness ahead, craves warmth, reassurance, fat. It’s finally pozole season. But for Javier Garcia it’s never not pozole season. He grew up in Guadalajara, eating bowls of the thick, sticky, hominy, and pork stewy-soup (stoup?) for every event, birthday, and celebration. His mom’s pozole ruined him […]
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Get down with Don Pablo’s big Chilean empanadas at Monday Night Foodball
Pablo Soto has delivered empanadas to me on two different occasions. Each time these plus-sized, Chilean-style pockets of pleasure have tasted as if they were pulled directly out of the oven or fryer and delivered straight into my greedy gob. I don’t know what sorcery Soto uses to maintain the extraordinary flaky freshness of his […]
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The return of the roti at Cafe Trinidad
In 2016, Darryl Hicks shuttered the city’s first and only Trinidadian restaurant, Cafe Trinidad. It was a serious responsibility to stand as the sole representative of a Caribbean cuisine that synthesizes centuries of contributions from African, Indian, Indigenous, Creole, Syrian, Lebanese, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese cooks. And it wasn’t an easy decision to close. But […]
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It’s Ethan Lim’s Khmerican bar food vs. your wolfish hunger at Monday Night Foodball
Earlier this summer I sat down to one of the most exclusive tables in town. No, not Alinea. Not Ever. Nor was it The Crib, (RIP). It was an eight-course blowout at Hermosa, Ethan Lim’s tiny sandwich shop by day, six-seat “Family Meal” prix fixe by night. Lim’s ongoing nocturnal pop-up—during which he buries his […]
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Kiosk Balkan Street Food ghosts the old ways of cooking
Nemanja Milunovic became a chef because he didn’t like his mother’s cooking. “I just wanted to be better,” he says. “Growing up, her food was not that good. She was working all the time. She cared, but not really. She was always cooking fast. She didn’t have passion.” Operating out of an Avondale ghost kitchen, […]
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Check the menu for Pizza and Donuts at Monday Night Foodball
Tuesday, I was still dreaming of Funeral Potatoes’s pimento cheese hash brown-stuffed jalapeño poppers from Monday Night Foodball, when I was summoned back to the Kedzie Inn’s kitchen for a secret pizza and donut conclave. Not many know this, but Miguel Hernandez, one of the Kedzie’s regular chefs, is a 15-year veteran of Marie’s Pizza, […]
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Please line up for Funeral Potatoes at Monday Night Foodball
Last week, Eve Studnicka, with an assist from her Funeral Potatoes partner Alexis Thomas, took part in an amazing pop-up with Borneol, Texas butcher (and former Chicagoan) Kriss Abigail. Abigail had arrived in town with an axis deer carcass harvested in the Hill Country, which she broke down at Saint Emeric in front of 30 […]
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Autumn is about to drop a cornucopia of local food books
While my comprehensive four-volume opus on freeganism was derailed by the pandemic, it seems like it was a particularly productive period for a whole bunch of local food writers who have books coming out this fall. I’m excited about all of them. Instantly Mediterranean: Vibrant, Satisfying Recipes for Your Instant Pot, Electric Pressure Cooker, and […]
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Nobody’s Darling is for everyone
When longtime friends Angela Barnes and Renauda Riddle decided to open up a high-end cocktail bar in Andersonville, they never predicted the enthusiastic fervor that would follow. Just months after opening, Nobody’s Darling has enjoyed a word-of-mouth popularity usually reserved for the main Boystown or Andersonville thoroughfares, ones that reflect the current culture in the […]
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Monday Night Foodball Goes to Mumbai with Tasting India
Jasmine Sheth wants you to know Mumbai isn’t all about samosas and chaat. OK, there will be samosas and chaat (kind of) at the Kedzie Inn when Sheth brings her Tasting India pop up to week three of Monday Night Foodball, but if you’ve followed her biweekly thali series over the past 16 months you […]
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Don Pablo’s Kitchen is one man’s ode to empanadas
Among the poems about common things Pablo Neruda wrote during his lifetime are a number of odes to food: “Ode to the Artichoke,” “Ode to Tomatoes,” “Ode to Conger Chowder.” But somehow, the Chilean Nobel laureate forgot to write an ode to one of his country’s most ubiquitous signature dishes. Not only are baked and […]
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Eat Malaysian with Kedai Tapao at Monday Night Foodball at the Kedzie Inn
Hey! It was great to see you at Monday Night Foodball at the Kedzie Inn the other night, the very first stand in our weekly chef pop-up series. How about Giong Giong’s banh mi, eh? Good thing you got one before they all sold out. Wait a minute. You weren’t there? Oh, jeez, I’m so […]
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Are you ready for some Monday Night Foodball?
In January 2020 I assumed I had a lock on the annual Kedzie Inn chili cookoff, with a three-day smoked brisket braised with Cremeria La Ordena mole picoson. I spent a lot of time peering into the Dutch oven, building it, finessing it—no, caressing it—making sure the judges would drown in its smoldering, head-spinning complexity. So I […]
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The Iconic Chicago Restaurants Map
Along with Chicago’s many beaches and tons of interesting things to do—plus the fact it’s relatively cheap to live here and generally fairly easy to get around without a car—our city’s diverse, affordable, and appetizing eating scene is one of the main things that makes this a terrific place to live. I first came up […]