Angel's

By Giovanni Wrobel

Sometimes, especially in the winter, they come well before the sun rises. Carpools of families making their way to Ashland and Adams to stand in line waiting for the Mexican Consulate to open at 8am. These are some of the people who brought restaurant owners Pedro Angel and Luis Perea to the neighborhood to open establishments nearby.

Angel’s Restaurant occupies an odd structure sandwiched between a two-story office building and a small storefront within two row houses facing Ashland near Jackson Boulevard. The restaurant opened two years ago, when Angel moved his family’s eighteen-year-old business from the Andersonville neighborhood to the West Loop.

Angel’s start-up was not easy. “In the beginning, I think the biggest challenge was trying to get our dinner working, because the area is a little weird,” Angel says. “It’s definitely more for breakfast and lunch, people come to the neighborhood to work, so by four o’clock things were kind of dying out.” Read the rest of this entry »

While the fannypack set will be trucking through Grant Park this week, turkey legs and fried dough in hand, another high-octane food-sampler gathering will be revving up in the West Loop, with the debut of Ethyl’s Truckin’ Thursdays.

Ethyl’s Beer & Wine Dive, Scott Harris’ (Francesca’s) latest dining concept, will become a food truck city, a safe haven for Chicago’s gourmet meals on wheels when its spacious parking lot and patio will function as the campgrounds for seven food trucks every Thursday from 6pm-9pm. Ethyl’s founding partner Donnie Kruse thinks this is a big move for a city that has been slow to welcome the trucks to its streets.

“Food trucks are kind of a controversial thing in Chicago, however, they’re a big story. The Food Network had a show, ‘The Great Food Truck Race,’ and I spend a lot of time in Austin, Texas, Portland, Seattle and think they’re a wonderful part of the food community,” says Kruse. Read the rest of this entry »

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David Friedman
Owner, Epic Burger
With never-frozen beef, cage-free fried-egg toppings and fresh-cut fries, Friedman is on a quest to feed the world a more “mindful burger.” That’s cool, but it also actually tastes pretty good too, good enough to spawn a third location in the West Loop this summer with plans for nine more.

See details on the The Big Heat

“We’re not just putting cheese next to cheese,” says Greg O’Neill, “it’s going to be like speed dating.” O’Neill, the co-founder and proprietor of Pastoral Artisan Cheese, Bread & Wine, is organizing the First Annual “Artisan Producer Festival” on Saturday, April 30 at the Chicago French Market, 131 North Clinton, from 11am-3pm. With a focus on American producers, the festival will have more than forty vendors offering the highest quality cheeses, meats, pastries, wine, beer and more. “The genesis of the festival came from the idea of people meeting the maker,” explains O’Neill. The Pastoral shop maintains a European-inspired store in which the staff shares their product knowledge with customers. As a primary source of information, many of the vendors at the festival will be the actual producers of the commodity. This will make for an intimate understanding of where food comes from at this “meet-the-maker” affair. A free event with loads of samples, Pastoral’s Artisan Producer Festival is a foodie’s haven, however, “it is a no-attitude-about-food event,” O’Neill says. “This event is for everybody who has an interest in trying and learning about food.” (Tiana Olewnick)

Photo: Kari Skaflen

By Michael Nagrant

Brendan Sodikoff could be Liberace’s son. He’s got the same round cheekbones, the unmistakable wincing smile, and a pair of deeper-set eyes that draw you into a maelstrom of mischief, brooding and delight. Which is funny, because Sodikoff, owner of Gilt Bar, Maude’s Liquor Bar and the forthcoming Doughnut Vault and Ox Diner, is quite possibly the anti-Liberace. In this era of frenzied battles for food-blog scoops, Sodikoff launched his first project in February 2010, Gilt Bar, by saying almost nothing.

This wasn’t some wily move by a cunning impresario to generate buzz. It was a defense mechanism. The first-time restaurateur wanted to make sure things were ironed out before the throngs descended. Sodikoff says, “One of the worst days of my life was when I signed the deal. It was only me and this restaurant [Gilt Bar] filled with stuff. I couldn’t imagine where to start.” Add in the fact that he’d just acquired one of Chicago’s most snake-bitten spaces, home to excellent but short-lived gems like Havana, Aigre Doux and Pili Pili, during a crippling recession, and keeping quiet seemed like career suicide.

Months before he’d almost resigned his dreams. He says, “I’d been looking at spaces for six or seven years. I’d kind of given up on the possibility of finding something that would work because it was cost-prohibitive.” He lived across the street from River North’s Aigre Doux and noticed their clientele dwindling. He adds, “So, in my frustration I asked them if they’d consider selling their business. They couldn’t move fast enough.”

And the crowds, they came. Sodikoff is the fastest-rising local restaurateur I’ve ever seen. Thirteen months ago, no one had heard of him, and now he has four projects on the table. His second restaurant, Maude’s Liquor Bar, has three-hour-plus waits on weekends. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Kristine Sherred

A worldly collection of tapestries, ceramics and paintings glow in warm yellow light, while classical melodies glide through the bright display case brimming with chocolates that look almost too delicate to devour. Even traditional milk, dark and white bites dress up under intricate gold leaves or white snowflakes imprinted on the glossy bon-bons.

At Canady Le Chocolatier, one can satiate a desire for chocolate and pumpkin simultaneously with a Pumpkin Pie Truffle, or settle another craving with more than seventy sweet, even spicy, confections.

Holiday suggestions include Amerena Ganache, Creme de Tiramisu and truffles with pistachio, mint, cheesecake or red pepper. Praline and coconut mingle in chocolate ganache; hazelnut blends with caramel butter cream in a Dolce de Leche; toffee bits sweeten the slight kick of a red pepper ganache. Mix and match a personalized assortment—one or two, one pound or two pounds.

“It’s totally up to the customer,” says owner and chocolatier Michael Canady, whose demeanor matches the serenity of his store. “I get the opportunity to experiment once in a while [with flavors], and I like that. It’s always nice to come up with new recipes.” Read the rest of this entry »

Octopus

By Michael Nagrant

A.A. Gill is not a nice guy. Over his career as a restaurant critic for “The Sunday Times,” a UK newspaper, he has offended gays, Germans and the Welsh. He was once thrown out of a Gordon Ramsay restaurant because he’d written that the sauté-Satan of TV’s “Hell’s Kitchen” was a “second-rate human being.” In one review Gill decried the citizens of the Isle of Man as “hopeless inbred mouth-breathers.” Still, when it comes to food criticism, Gill, as foul and hard as a writer can be, has nothing on my boy.

When last I wrote of my son’s food adventures, he was a grinning eight-month-old happily gnawing pieces of Manny’s pastrami, one of the first solid foods we’d ever given him. We thought we’d hit the jackpot. The kid sucked up ratatouille, curried cauliflower and purees of organic vegetables I’d dutifully procured from the farmers’ market. Pretty soon, I figured we’d have him on to sushi and Indian. By age two maybe we’d convince Alinea to serve him a five-course toddler pre-fixe. He was a foodie. It was ordained.

One thing they don’t tell you in the baby books is that most kids between six months and a year-and-a-half will pretty much eat anything. Put a bowl of foie and black truffles in front of the average one-year-old and they’ll probably gum up a storm. Read the rest of this entry »

Pho

By Michael Nagrant

Unless you’re a Pritzker, a Zell, a Wrigley or a Winfrey, or a member of any of the other handful of elite Chicago clans, living in the city usually means making some compromises.

If you just graduated from college, you’re apparently forced to live in Wrigleyville and wallpaper your third-floor walk-up with “Twilight” and Lady Gaga posters. The good news is you now have a job and no longer have to buy Natural Light. The bad news is your rent is more than your mortgage will be in a few years, so you can only afford to trade up to Miller Lite.

If you live in certain places on the South Side and you want a farmers market, a venti latte, and the promise of no random drive-by shootings, you’re generally screwed. However, you do have more Harold’s Chicken franchises than most, not to mention a pretty good selection of BBQ joints.

If you’re a cop or a fireman, you’ve probably got a nice bungalow on a tree-lined street on the Far West or South Sides. The bad news is airplanes are roaring over your home all night and the only bars you can find are fake Irish-pub/Bennigan’s clones. Read the rest of this entry »

Girl and the Goat

By Michael Nagrant

If he weren’t dead, I’d sure like to have a few words with Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable about the weather in Chicago this past July. I mean I’m sure in 1779, Lake Michigan’s unbesmirched shores were breathtaking and all that. But, as the area’s first non-indigenous settler (usually this means Native American-exploiting white dude—but, refreshingly du Sable was a black Haitian who married a Potawatomi woman and became a high-ranking member of the tribe) Du Sable must have known (he set up a fur-trading post on the north bank of the Chicago River) that, when the pelt business dropped off in July because it was hot and swampy and no one wanted to drape their sweaty bodies in beaver, well, the sticky heat might also be a minor annoyance for future generations. Of course, Du Sable was no Al Gore, and thus couldn’t be expected to anticipate global warming, let alone invent the internet, and so I guess the jungle climes we’ve endured most of this past month aren’t entirely his fault.

Still, what to do when my curly blond fro is frizzin’ like one of those “just add water” sponges that turns in to a four-foot-wide dinosaur from the humidity? Head to Las Vegas in August. Crazy, right? Well, as the joke goes, it’s a dry heat.

Actually, while I’ll relish swimming next to Elvis-jumpsuited dudes in huge football-field-sized pools while sipping on suntan-lotion-scented pina coladas in the shade of fake plastic architecture, my real intent, as it always is, is to discover the real side of Vegas food. While I’ll check out French masters Joel Robuchon’s and Guy Savoy’s places and local boy Shawn McClain’s new Vegas spot Sage, I’ll also be out searching for what some consider the best Northern Thai food in America at Lotus of Siam and the Japanese charcoal-grilled fare at Raku. However, while I’m baking in that arid desert, I couldn’t leave you without a few of my new favorite things. Every single one of these tasty treats is as sure a bet as a pair of panties gracing a Tom Jones concert stage. See you in a few weeks. Viva Chicago, baby! Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

Few people ignore Rick Bayless. Those who do usually get their ass handed to them—see Chef Ludovic Lefebvre on the first season of Top Chef Masters. For Laura Cid-Perea, the Mexico City-born Le Cordon Bleu Paris-trained pastry chef, things turned out a little differently.

In 2000, the former Frontera Grill cook asked her old boss what he thought about her dream to open a Mexican-style bakery. Though Bayless believed in his protégé, he told her he wasn’t sure Chicagoans were ready for a concept like that. He was probably right, for at that point if any non-Latino Chicagoan had stepped foot in one of the Near South panaderias, they’d be rewarded with leaden churros and stale industrial-shortening larded cookies. It would be tough to get past that reputation.

The weight of Bayless’ recommendation was heavy, for he knew something about launching a concept before its time. Back in 1987, when Clark Street was still a semi-seedy district, he opened a little regional Mexican joint, with his mother and mother-in-law’s retirement savings, called Frontera Grill. His first customer, expecting Tex-Mex style fare, warily scanned the menu, then got up and said, “This is not Mexican food. You’re going to fail.” Read the rest of this entry »