Category: Monday Night Foodball

On the day they met in Denver, Belle and the Beast got hitched and took off across the country. It was a wild ride, but they settled down quick—right here in Chicago—and began making beautiful pizzas together. Belle, as a mobile, restaurant-sized, wood-fired, brick pizza oven, gets pretty hot—around 950 degrees F. The Beast, as […]

There’s been a startling discovery in the field of pizza research: lunch ladies invented the prototype for the Detroit-style pizza. Most people give credit for this monumental achievement to Gus Guerra of Buddy’s Rendezvous Pizzeria on Six Mile and Conant Street in the Motor City, but thanks to recently unearthed historical documents, we now know […]

Your Mom’s so old she turns four the day after Mother’s Day. Come on. I would never disrespect your moms like that. I’m talking about Mom’s Chicago, chef Kelly Ijichi’s Japanese American comfort food pop-up, which has been slinging katsu sandos, smashburgers on furikake milk bread, and coconut butter mochi for four turns around the […]

“Hey, let’s just make sauce,” said Quique. Quique and Ale both got McNuggets for lunch. Quique ordered barbecue sauce. Ale had sweet and sour. That was 2006, on a third-grade field trip to Arecibo Observatory west of San Juan, Puerto Rico, “and that was the beginning of our culinary adventure,” says Alejandro Gonzalez. “We still […]

Do you know how to celebrate 65th pop-ups? You gather around a whole grilled lemongrass- and chili-stuffed sea bream. You unwrap it from its banana cocoon and begin chopsticking morsels of its firm, sweet, steaming white flesh, folding them into soft rice paper parcels bulging with a bouquet of herbs. You swipe these pockets through […]

Jennifer Kim was just gonna let things ripen. “Sometimes you gotta sit and let shit get good,” the chef told me just days before she closed her restaurant two and a half years ago. “Let it do what it needs to do to turn into something else.” Kim wasn’t exactly talking about her own future […]

By the time the cameras showed up, the corner of Allen and Kimball had gotten too hot for Milo’s Market. “People would come by like a BYOB, and we would sell food out of the back of the house,” says Gilberto Bahena. “People came out walking their dogs, ‘What’s going on?’ And we’re like, ‘We’re […]

There was no way Ricky Hanft’s dad was gonna wait for an hour in line for an autograph from a second-string center. This was at the 1995 Chicago Auto Show, and Bill Wennington was just a bench guy who hadn’t yet won a championship with the Bulls. But that made no difference to the nine-year-old […]

I have good news, bad news, and splendid news. Bad news: through no fault of her own Alisha Norris Jones, aka Immortal Milk, has pulled out of the next (April 3) Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Ludlow Liquors in Avondale. Good: Jones has rescheduled for a Monday in late summer and […]

Joe Yim was a math teacher and football coach before he ran away to study central-Texas barbecue on hallowed ground. He has lessons to offer: “Watching five smokers with 100 briskets [is] like running a classroom,” he says. “You gotta put each one in the right place and know what their needs are.” Over two […]

You’re tired. You’re hungry. You’ve spent all day staring at the walls of your cubicle. All you want is a home-cooked meal, but the last thing you need right now is to haul up your granite mortar and pound out your own green curry paste from scratch. You don’t care about the inevitable side-eyes on […]

Tameisha Brown couldn’t sleep one night, so she rose from bed and started sketching out ideas for her future restaurant: dishes, decor, uniforms, potential locations, and names. That was in eighth grade in Waukegan, where her family settled just a few years earlier after emigrating from Jamaica. Brown’s 38 now, and all those ideas have […]