Resto 100 is, as always, a list of “essential” restaurants, which is most definitely not synonymous with “best.” We strive to reflect a world of dining in a constant state of innovative transition, to capture a snapshot of the state of the food world at this time.

As last year, when we first dropped Charlie Trotter’s, we’ve continued to cull the old guard of the high-end, both as a reflection of the economic times and as a call to action for such spots to up their game. This year, TRU, MK and Boka didn’t escape the chopping block. While we don’t deny their importance in creating the food scene we have today, there are many other places we’d rather send folks—for example, Sepia, Bonsoiree or Cibo Matto (where, ironically, chef Todd Stein is a vet of MK).

Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand are two of the most successful cooks this city has, but neither spends a significant amount of time at TRU. This is not so much an observation as it’s a cry for the fact that we really miss Rick’s cooking. We appreciate his cookbooks and that he tried to open a nationwide restaurant chain, but with that not working out, why not return to his roots? It should also be noted that Chef de Cuisine Tim Graham was doing some incredibly innovative work, but was recently transferred to Brasserie Jo.

Boka, which we loved for its Charlie Trotteresque complexity, has frankly been a little inconsistent in its execution on recent visits, and frankly maybe too Trotteresque. We love the direction Perennial has gone, look forward to Stephanie Izard’s Girl and the Goat, and think maybe they outshine the original jewel in Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz’s mini-empire.

That’s not to say you have to be cutting-edge innovative or perfect to make the list. For if you do something old-school or classic and you continue to do it well and you didn’t make your bones by being a game-changer, we honor that as well. This year, we added some overlooked classics including Marie’s Pizza, Ginza and, much to our own surprise, Hyde Park’s Calypso Café. Maybe the biggest surprise was Café des Architectes, which used to be as old-school as it gets. Martial Noguier and his pastry chef Suzanne Imaz are probably two of this city’s most underrated cooks, putting out slighty twisted old-school French gourmet plates flawlessly.

Likewise, the trend of informal, casual rustic dining doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere, and we dig that. To celebrate that movement we’ve added The Bristol, Paramount Room, Brown Trout, Kith and Kin and others.

The beauty of any list, though, is that you may not agree. So drop us a line and let us know.

—Michael Nagrant, Resto 100 editor Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

I cried watching Kid Rock on VH1 Storytellers the other day. It wasn’t a watershed, rather more of a single rolling tear. That a greasy-haired-beer-guzzling-tattooed-fedora-wearing-skuzzy-facially-haired-dude who used to cavort with a profane dwarf named Joe C and who by his own admission is “straight out the trailer” moved me, was a surprise. But, that’s hometown pride.

For decades, outsiders have been slagging on my dingy beacon on the river, Detroit. For almost as long, they never got it right. For every wolf cry about Detroit as flaking rust belt, there were still millions of blue-collar assembly liners rolling off their shifts in chrome-trimmed Cadillacs. For every crumbling rough-patinaed high rise, there was a shiny silver recently hoisted Red Wings Stanley Cup.

For every hellfire and ash-pile of a former building shown from a helicopter camera angle on Devil’s Night, or every reported carjacking or murder, there was a kid reveling, though shivering in his moonboots, on Woodward Avenue across from the old Vernor’s factory watching a Thanksgiving parade more glorious and real than that fairy-dusted televised production dream from Macy’s in New York.

Now, though, Detroit is truly busted. The Big 3 have cut to the bone and laid off too many. You hear of foreclosures in Chicago, but in Detroit you see them in crumbling realtor signs, creeping prairie grasses and cracked porches choked with weeds. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

Avenues

Since 2000, Chicago has gone from being a Rat Pack-worthy steak-and-potato-slinging stereotype to a destination for international culinary travelers. Chicago’s affordability, its diners’ willingness to suspend disbelief and its proximity to the sublime bounty of the Midwest all play a role in that transformation. Most important to the renaissance are the places that put everything together to inspire our collective culinary imagination, the best restaurants that opened in Chicago this decade.

Alinea
The history of cuisine was written in the kitchens of millions of chefs, but we only remember a few by name, guys like Escoffier, Careme and Robuchon. There are probably only three Chicago chefs, as of now, who have a shot at making that list: Jean Banchet, Charlie Trotter and Grant Achatz. Though Achatz started making a name for himself at Trio, Alinea was the game changer, the restaurant where every aspect of dining from menus and silverware to the wine service and emotional content of the food was reimagined.

Avec
Love it or hate it, this was ground zero for what is now today’s communal table free-for-all. More importantly, Avec was the place that launched a thousand salumi, the fringe of Chicago’s now-burgeoning charcuterie movement. Koren Grieveson’s restrained soulful style is still the late-night hang of choice for chefs.

Avenues
You probably don’t remember Gerhard Doll or David Hayden, the chef-stewards who drove the good ship Avenues through a successful seafood-driven era, but there’s no doubt you won’t forget the Pop Rock and foie-lollipop fantasia, the convenience-store chic of Graham Elliot Bowles. Without Bowles’ whimsical, accessible style, the emotional roller coaster of Grant Achatz’s cooking and the theater at Homaro Cantu’s Moto likely wouldn’t have quite captured the nation’s imagination, nor garnered Chicago cuisine the countless magazine features it received mid-decade. Today, Curtis Duffy, the culinary love child of Achatz, Thomas Keller and Alice Waters, is executing some of the most exciting cuisine Chicago has to offer. Read the rest of this entry »

In the kitchen at Alinea/Photo: Lara Kastner

Resto 100 is, as it has been in years past, a list of “essential” restaurants, which is most definitely not synonymous with “best.” We strive to reflect a world of dining in a constant state of innovative transition, to capture a snapshot of the state of the food world at this time.

In these particular hard economic times, we find ourselves dining out a lot more at the BYOBs, mom-and pop-spots and small ethnic joints than we do at the high end.  That being said, while we didn’t set out to consciously create a list to address our lighter wallets, it sure turned out that way.  More than ever, this list is a cross section of the wealth of culturally diverse and reasonably priced restaurants Chicago is lucky to have. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

Do you like pinball?

What do you mean?

You know, do you play it? Do you find it fun?

A minute or so passed without an answer from one of Chicago’s mega-celebrity chefs, as he faced a local food reporter while they stood near a pinball machine. The chef was usually so prepared that he’d given the same answers to many questions for almost twenty years with almost no variation in delivery or syllable. His ability to stay on message made even the disciplined Barack Obama look more like the drunken political godchild of Gerald Ford and Sarah Palin.

But that’s when the chef expected to be interviewed. The reporter had not given the chef a heads up that he’d stop by this particular photo shoot. And when he did, the chef was so befuddled he couldn’t even answer a simple question about an arcade game without calculating what the answer might say about him.

Sure, chefs are the new rock stars, but rarely have they acted like them. I chose to write about chefs and restaurants in no small part because I had no interest in profiling celebrities so doped up on fame that their paranoia and control made Kim Jong Il look asleep at the wheel. Read the rest of this entry »

By Sarah Klose

Hotdogs and liverwurst: two things I wouldn’t eat as a child. My aversion to eating hotdogs stemmed partly from wondering what the heck was in them. Since my mother told me “all beef” meant any part of the animal, this aversion lasted into my adulthood.

Recently, I passed Drew’s Eatery and noticed his green leaf logo and “organic hotdogs” sign. Was this an oxymoron along the lines of “military intelligence,” or could these hotdogs really be healthy? I decided to bite into one—a fire-roasted red-pepper, jalapeno-pepper, organic-chicken and turkey-sausage one, to be exact. Surprisingly, the hotdog was delicious as well as oh-so-healthy. I decided to talk to the owner and learn more. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

Growing up a Detroiter, there was no mustard-only hotdog religion. The only encased-meat principle that was inviolable was that you got your chili-slathered Coneys at gritty Lafayette, and not the theme-park-like American when you were downtown. With no cultural taboo to hold me back, there were days I ate ketchup on my hotdogs.

June 10, 1983, my first Detroit Tigers game, was one of those days. They played the Cleveland Indians. Dave Rozema pitched for the Tigers and Chet Lemon (a former White Soxer), famous for robbing hitters of home runs with a Michael Jordanesque vertical jump and a sure glove, hit a home run of his own, and the Tigs won 7-1.

I remember the wide-eyed moment most kids probably have of emerging through a narrow tunnel and out to the verdant expanse of grass and an azure sea of plastic seats. I remember how juiced (not like Barry Bonds, but more like in the hopped-up Sunny Delight way) I was to see Sweet Lou Whitaker, Alan Trammell and Jack Morris and his “Magnum P.I.” ‘stache in the flesh.

Thrilled as I was, what I remember most was the hotdogs. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the word “debris” had one meaning in New Orleans. It was an iconic roast beef po-boy served at 401 Poydras Street at the corner of Tchoupitoulas at a spot called Mother’s. The lore is that a customer asked original owner Simon Landry to add the bits of roast beef that had fallen into the gravy while Landry was carving slices for the customer’s sandwich to his bun. Landry allegedly replied “You mean some of the debris?”

These days the sandwich is so popular, lines at Mother’s make the weekend queue at Hot Doug’s look like a women’s bathroom line at Augusta National Golf Club. And God help you if you stop by in the middle of Jazzfest, as I did, only to wait an hour and a half for a table. Ravenous, and never one to turn down pork, I opted for Mother’s other iconic sandwich, the Ferdi, which is basically a debris with ham on top. Beef strands blanketed in salty pork fat is a magnificent combo. As with so many things from that trip, I’d longed for a Chicago version of the sandwich to keep me inspired in between trips to the Big Easy.

Our Italian beef is certainly a close cousin of the debris, but it’s much leaner and the shaved sheets of beef don’t quite resemble the tender shards found at Mother’s. Enter Fred Markoff, owner of suburban Glenview’s fRedhots and Fries. Markoff, unlike most of the corner dog stands in Chicago, makes his own Italian beef and gravy. He found after he roasted off a side of beef, he was left with a sediment of beef bits and veg seasoned by the gravy. For a while, he ate what he could as a kitchen snack and chucked the rest. Then he decided to throw it up as a sandwich on his regular menu. Read the rest of this entry »

By Christine Badger

Back in the nineties, Doug Sohn and three of his friends went seeking the truth. A truth that many of us have pondered—what makes a good hot dog? Over the span of two years, Doug and his cohorts ventured to a little over forty hot dog places. “It became very self-involved,” Sohn says. “You know, we’d grade it and write a little review and it was funny to us, referencing other places, referencing what happened at lunch and so forth.” Out of this wiener madness, a light bulb went off in Doug’s head. He knew what worked. He knew what didn’t. Bing! Why not open his own place? Thus begot Hot Doug’s, his two-year-old gourmet hot dog stand.

Nestled in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, Sohn’s shop appears small and unassuming. But when you enter his world. the yellow-, red- and blue-painted walls strike you. The pictures of Elvis—young Elvis mainly, Britney Spears, Madonna, Cubs memorabilia, and the Morrocan tiled tabletops reel you in. There’s a fun, almost carnival feel to the place, like you’ve just entered summer. Toss the ball and you win a prize. Read the rest of this entry »