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 »

A basic criterion for Resto 100 has been that a restaurant has to have real tables and silverware or a significant place to sit down. Considering a place like Hot Doug’s makes the list, service is generally optional. And, yes, we cheated and totally made an exception for Al’s Beef on Taylor. Still, in the last year, there have been a couple of new places (and lots of old ones) that were generally takeout-only that we really thought worthy of the Resto 100, and so here they are, our top five takeout joints. Read the rest of this entry »

Jennifer Gavin in her "Hell's Kitchen" days

Jennifer Gavin is now the “Master of the Market.” She has cooked her way to victory at the Chef Challenge, beating out the other contestants with sweet corn slaw, grilled vegetable sandwich on tomato focaccia and lemon pound cake with raspberry preserves.

This year’s contestants in the third annual event, held at the Daley Plaza Farmers Market—all female for the first time—include Radhika Desai, a season five contestant on “Top Chef,” and Heather Terhune, executive chef at Atwood Café. Jennifer Gavin finished fourth on “Hell’s Kitchen” in 2008 and is now executive chef and owner of Catered Excellence. Her father was a chef, so she began cooking at 15 and attended culinary school in Chicago.

“I’m very competitive by nature,” she says. She wants to make “something creative, something innovative, that people haven’t seen before, and just really try to wow people.” Read the rest of this entry »

Beet soup at Birchwood Kitchen

By Michael Nagrant

If Chicago’s newest gourmet sandwich shops Birchwood Kitchen in Wicker Park and Lunch Rolls in the Loop were twins, they’d be Julius and Vincent Benedict from the 1988 film, “Twins.” In case you’ve forgotten the plot, and really who could blame you, Julius and Vincent were the product of a secret experiment to create the perfect child from six different fathers. While the exercise spawned the superior intellectual/physical specimen of Julius (Arnold Schwarzenegger) it also created a fraternal twin, Vincent (Danny Devito) made from the leftover genetic garbage.  Neither Birchwood nor Lunch Rolls is particularly deficient like Vincent (in fact they’re both pretty decent options for their respective hoods), but as sandwich-slinging brethren they’re definitely opposites. Read the rest of this entry »

Curtis Duffy/Photo: Evan Sears

Last week, Food & Wine magazine revealed their annual “Best New Chefs” in America list, and despite Chicago’s rising culinary status, none of our local chefs got a nod. In fact, no chefs from the Midwest made the list. That being said, there’s no shortage of kitchen talent in our fair city, so we decided to stage our own “Best New Chicago Chef” competition.

We invited seventy-five of the cities top toques (many former Food & Wine Best New Chef winners), sommeliers, artisans and food experts to participate in a write-in poll naming their choice for Chicago’s best new chef. 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 »

It’s 9:30am and a crowd is already beginning to gather for the eighteenth annual Wacky 5K Run. Participants are moving around staying warm in the frigid temperatures, howling wind and swirling snow.

The Wacky 5K Run is just a little bit wacky. The race, named so because it used to be run on a portion of Lower Wacker Drive, is now wacky for a different reason. Its participants are encouraged to dress as their favorite snack foods, for the event that, this year, marks the end of National Snack Food Month as well as benefiting the Blind Service Association. But there aren’t that many people dressed as food. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

This weekend, I was chowing down in a mall food court and Tommy Hilfiger was foremost on my mind. It was as if I were reliving my junior high glory days, those times when my mom stuffed me and my posse into the back of our teal Lincoln Town Car, aka the “land yacht” (a nod to its two-and-a-half-Chicago-parallel-parking-space-inhabiting body length) and dropped us off for a parentless afternoon to unleash mayhem on the mall.

We’d spend the afternoon parsing through the latest Z Cavaricci’s or flashing white suburban N.W.A.-inspired gangster poses while trying on fresh LA Kings or Raiders hats at the Foot L ocker. Cavaricci gave way to Girbaud or Guess and eventually a phase worshipping the wares of the aforementioned urban prepster Hilfiger and his country-club cousin Ralph Lauren.

The low point of my laughable label obsession arrived in the form of a $300 Polo sweater depicting a knitted teddy bear outfitted in a reflexive ursine-Lauren-like sweater. Stewart Smalley wouldn’t have been sensitive or stupid enough to wear the thing, and here I hankered for it as a symbol of the ultimate in high-school chic. Though I begged my folks for it mightily, they never caved. To quote Garth Brooks: “Thank God for unanswered prayers.”

Tuckered out from the fashion grab, those days we often headed for a food court outfitted with the usual suspects like oozy Cinnabons or fake-parmesan-doused breadsticks from the Pizza Hut Express. If we were particularly flush with allowance, the aspirational choice was cheddar-doused spuds served in a wax-coated paper cup and griddled beef hoagies from the Great Steak and Potato Company.

These days, while Great Steak still lives, my mall-food-court grazing isn’t quite as pedestrian, at least not when I’m at Macy’s on State Street. Over the last year or so, I’d been making it around the place one kiosk at a time. Rick Bayless’ killer huaraches at Frontera Fresco and Marcus Samuelsson’s juicy patties at Marc Burger have both gotten positive nods from me. (And just so I know it’s not some anomaly, my wife ordered a burger this weekend at Marc Burger and it was just as good as the last one I had. I stand by my assertion that this is one of the best burgers in the city. And Bayless was meeting with his kitchen staff while we were there too, proving he’s no absentee toque.)

This time around, I stopped in at Noodles by Takashi from the James Beard Award-winning Takashi Yagihashi, chairman of the eponymous haute hood hangout in Bucktown. I’d been tough on his gourmet operation for its lack of value, but his kiosk at Macy’s offers the ultimate in cheap eats, and maybe the ultimate in upscale chef-driven noodle joints.

Noodles by Takashi offers a spectrum of pop-Asian delights from spring rolls to pork buns to steamy soups. I settled for some Shoyu Ramen, a kettle-sized bowl of broth. I tucked in to the thing and worked my way through star anise-perfumed pork, toothsome broth-coated veggies and silky noodles, until only a dinky little puddle was left. As the micro-broth spots on my shirt could attest, the bowl was slurptastic.

This bowl also reinforced my disappointment in the value of the soups I had at Bill Kim’s Urban Belly in Avondale just a few weeks before. Takashi was charging $9 (downtown no less), while Kim $13 for what was essentially the same thing. Kim’s pork was slightly better and probably of higher quality, but I preferred Takashi’s noodle texture, and that his pork was seasoned with five spice, rather than overwhelming the whole broth as at Urban Belly.

While sucking down the bowl, I’d heard that Tommy Hilfiger was in town and about to light the Great Tree about a hundred feet away in the Walnut Room. Sated on good well-priced noodles, and intrigued at spotting a glimpse of the inspirational haberdasher of my youth, I headed on over. A group of festively garbed Dickens-novel-worthy carolers made their way through the Christmas canon, while I craned my head a couple of times, jostled for a prime viewing position and eventually decided it wasn’t worth the wait.

I wish you could take this as a metaphor that just as I’d reformed my bad food-court ways that my decision to spurn Tommy Boy meant that I was clearly over my label obsession. But, a few moments earlier I’d spotted a cool baby blue toddler-sized long-sleeve Polo rugby and bought it for my 19-month-old son. I’ll protest that it’s because I really love the new distinctive multi-colored super large Polo logos (Lauren’s re-tooling his brand by imitating the successful Louis Vuitton/Murakami collaboration). But, when I really think about, the hyper-steroidal-sized logo is kind of a billboard that partly says, “My dad is a label-whore.” Clearly, I still have some bad habits to work out.

Noodles by Takashi, 111 North State, 7th Floor, (312)781-4483

By Michael Nagrant

A few weeks ago, some folks suggested I was an elitist jerk potentially in need of a hooker to loosen up. Most of this vitriol was from readers who took umbrage with my negative review of Yats, the Cajun Creole spot in the West Loop. In response to this hellfire, I went back and checked the last few years of my columns, and the data suggests I’ve spent more time lauding ethnic storefronts and casual spots over high-end fine cuisine. There was no need to call Eliot Spitzer to acquire the Emperors Club VIP hotline.

I wrote what I did, because I felt Yats had broken the culinary social contract of providing honest good food in a welcoming environment, more so than any place I’d been to that wasn’t operated by YUM Brands. My reaction had nothing to do with Yats being quick-service, low-key or casual. There are many informal places in town that I’ve lauded: Spa Café, Wow Bao and Take Me Out Chinese, among others. One of my favorite Cajun Creole places in the country just happens to be Lagniappe, a scrappy storefront, on 79th Street, where the food often takes forty minutes or longer to prepare from the time you order. What these places do that Yats didn’t is deliver a superior, often unique product at a great price in a clean and hospitable room. Read the rest of this entry »

Sit down, relax and have a cup of coffee.

The coffeehouse has become a center in the contemporary city, serving as a meeting place, a “home office” and a study hall for the community. And the best serve as counterpoint to the prevailing corporate culture: shaggy, friendly and, rather than studies in the science of turning tables as quickly as possible, welcoming enclaves where lingering is virtually encouraged. Chicago has a wealth of great coffeehouses, and with due respect to the chains, it’s the independent, locally owned and operated institutions that give the city its caffeinated flavor. Treasure them and support them, though, for many are fragile endeavors. And as we learned this year when Filter gave way at one of the liveliest spots in Wicker Park, it’s not necessarily Starbucks that threatens their existence. Apparently, it’s the inexplicable need for a bank branch on every corner.

We’ve put together this selective indie coffeehouse guide as a service to those of us who value their existence, and as a service to the spirit they inculcate. Read the rest of this entry »