Illustration: Elena Rodina

By Elena Rodina

The stretch of Devon Avenue in the Rogers Park area is mostly known for its Indian stores, and my friends head there if they want to buy ingredients for tandoori chicken, a bright sari or some golden bangle bracelets. However, in the late eighties and throughout the nineties, the area was densely populated by immigrants from the Soviet Union. By now, most of them have left the neighborhood, having moved to the greener suburbs. But there are still a couple of places that are full of hidden Slavophile treasures.

One such place is a Russian supermarket named Three Sisters, after the famous Chekhov play. When I walked in there for the first time, I immediately felt at home. Not just because the place was stuffed with nesting dolls, dark bread, sour cabbage and other things that are dear to my heart, but also because the sales clerks there project a traditional Russian attitude toward clients: grimness and neglect. It’s the perfect place for misanthropes tired of the broad smiles and unavoidable enthusiasm of American customer service. At Three Sisters, you will be greeted by silence and suspicious looks, at least at first. It’s a matter of style, though; the clerks are nice and helpful once you start talking to them.  Read the rest of this entry »

By Giovanni Wrobel

By Patrick Roberts

“Yesterday there was an attractive man,” says my girlfriend as she wheels her cart into the produce section, “about fortyish, who was ahead of me in the checkout lane. He was buying a box of condoms, K-Y Jelly, artichokes and a bag of chocolate-chip cookies. Isn’t that interesting? Why those things together?”

“Perhaps he really likes artichokes,” I say.

“No. I think it was his first time having her over to his apartment.”

“Who?”

“His new girlfriend,” she says as she picks through the tomatoes. “In fact, last night was the first time he’d slept with a woman since his divorce.”

“His divorce? Did you know this guy?”

“Of course I didn’t know him. Never saw him before in my life.”

“Then how could you possibly have known that he was divorced?”

“First of all, he wasn’t wearing a ring, and he was too good looking never to have been married. Secondly, he wouldn’t have had to buy the condoms otherwise. His girlfriend is recently divorced too, hence the K-Y Jelly.”

“What? Why ‘hence’? How are any of those things possibly related?” Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Walton

By Veronica Hinke

There’s no way the unsuspecting vandal on the fifth-floor roof of the DoubleTree Hotel in Streeterville could have known what he was about to expose when he kicked a hole in the wooden box as he walked by.

“I’ll bet he had to throw those shoes away,” Scott Walton, the executive chef of DoubleTree’s Markethouse Restaurant and Bar, says cheekily.

He’s recalling the scene last summer, when he found a stinking, slimy slop pile baking under an eighty-five-degree sun on the roof of the building where he works. It was a hot mess of coffee grounds, sections of rotting fish skeletons and decaying egg shells. The pile wasn’t a failed entree for his restaurant; it was a successful experiment in which the food that never made it to the plate would go here. Scattered in heaps on the ground, the pile was the remains of the upturned project he had christened three weeks before the vandal unwittingly stumbled upon it: a compost pile.

“It was really nasty,” Walton gloats, smirking at the prospect of his only revenge for the unnecessary kick-and-run destruction: the vandal’s unpleasantly smelly, soggy surprise.

Unfazed by the setback, Walton found himself increasingly more committed to the project. Today, fertilizing his garden with leftovers from the kitchen and dining tables is as important to Walton as growing, from seed, much of the food he cooks at Markethouse.

“There’s a little more pride involved when you grow something from seed and serve it on your restaurant table,” he says. Read the rest of this entry »

Grahamwich whitefish

By Michael Nagrant
Like most interesting people, my father is a study in contradictions. Reagan Democrat. Check. F-bomb-dropping Catholic zealot. Double check. Though he was once a staunch union organizer who worked in a dingy tool-and-die shop where the only real light sprung forth from the hot sparks raining as metal met metal, these days, he’s a manager for Ford Motor Company.

In the blue-collar days, while his buddies slammed domestic brews in Detroit pubs, he hurried home to a bottle of California Cabernet and the latest issue of Wine Spectator. Though he was in his late twenties he’d also occasionally pull his best geriatric-Sherlock Holmes and puff on a pipe stuffed with toasted vanilla-scented Churchills’ tobacco.

Wine Spectator was often replaced by GQ. Off the clock, my father, ever the sartorialist, liked tweed sport coats (with the brown suede elbow patches!) and slate gray three-piece suits. Then again, he was also a perpetrator of the occasional fashion disaster like when he wore a zipper-licious Eddie Murphy-“Delirious” -era white leather suit with red leather shoe-booties to the 1983 Culture Club concert. Read the rest of this entry »

Note: The photos are not from the Bennigan's in this story, which is no longer in business./Photo: Kristine Sherred

By Jonas Simon

There’s an odd sort of camaraderie that develops in certain work environments, not unlike between soldiers during times of war. Born out of shared suffering and hardship; you don’t find it in every job, but I’ve definitely found it in waiting tables. Part of it comes from banding together against a common enemy (the customer). Another part is being separated from “normal” society by the nature and hours of the job. For most waiters, our living is made at night and on weekends, i.e., the times when the rest of the world is off. Our weekends are Mondays and Tuesdays; our after-work drinks don’t start until 1am. But the real separation is felt during the holidays, when everyone else is enjoying the heart and hearth of home and you’re sharing your season with your co-workers, not your loved ones.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some wonderful holidays with my various crews—Near Year’s Eve parties that, technically, didn’t start until a couple of hours into New Year’s Day, Christmas Day dinner in Chinatown followed by karaoke—but one that stands out was the Thanksgiving I spent at Bennigan’s in 2003.

Our staff was a diverse and somewhat motley assortment of individuals: musicians and college students, druggies and alcoholics, working moms and career servers. Chet was the lead singer of a not-half-bad power pop/emo group (I think they were called “The Effect”); Jennifer was a recent journalism grad from U of I writing part-time for a leftist internet zine; Viktor was a part-time drug dealer who may or may not have had ties to the Hungarian mafia (He would later be arrested—and deported—for scamming customers’ credit cards. He showed up to work one day and the FBI was waiting for him.); Tom had been behind the bar for more than half a decade with no plans beyond tomorrow night’s pub crawl; and Maria, our manager, was a single mom who made a three-hour round trip commute everyday from Rockford.

The good people at corporate, in their infinite wisdom, had decided that not only would we be open for Thanksgiving dinner that year, but that we would also be serving our very own “Bennigan’s Thanksgiving Platter.” For $12.95 you got a processed turkey breast (white meat only) with something resembling gravy, powdered mashed potatoes, stuffing (which had both the consistency and taste of a chopped-up cardboard mailer), frozen vegetables, and cranberry sauce straight from the can, which was pretty much the only thing about the meal that felt right. Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Melanie Carson

By Brendan Pelsue

I never feel the pinch of the recession more strongly than when I am standing on the outside of a restaurant window. Say it is a steakhouse; the white linens and the showy trays of raw beef cuts carried around by the waiters both seem to measure the distance between me––and my young, pseudo-employed cohort—and a life of easygoing prosperity. Looking up and down the street at the frou-frou coffeeshops and the jewelry stores with guards posted out front, it can be easy to wonder why so many of us choose to live in a place where most imaginable activities involve a cash transaction. Isn’t there somewhere we can go to avoid paying for our leisure?

I recently took a trip to the two overstuffed rows of cookbooks on the fourth floor of the Harold Washington Library. This took longer than I thought, since it is difficult to move quickly past titles like “The Spicy Food Lover’s Bible,” “The Life & Cuisine of Elvis Presley” and the cryptic and potentially misshelved “A Taste of Murder.” By the time I reached the end of the first row, I felt slightly groggy and deeply heartened––looking at these books was not so different from looking through restaurant windows, except that here the key resources are time and effort rather than cash. Read the rest of this entry »

Editor’s Note: This is a  part of a package of stories about the state of criticism. See the links at the end for the related stories.

Illustration: Brett Muller

By Michael Nagrant

A man without a country may die wistful, pining for a homeland. But he might also rejoice that he’s boundless, tethered to no cheap allegiances, and thus able to operate freer than most. Having come up as a journalist in the last four years, launching a career via the internet and now finding myself working often for the print establishment, I very much see myself as such a man. I do not revile Yelp, but I also do not have any nostalgia for the old-time newsroom.

So much of the establishment’s criticism of Yelp and its ilk has been one long apologist rant. Newspaper columnists and editorial pages deriding the rise of citizen or social media-based criticism sounded like a grandfather telling his grandson he walked uphill both ways to and from school every day ducking gunfire and a blinding rainstorm. And gosh darn it, he liked it.

Grandpa hated the old way, he got a bad case of arthritis because of it, and his life expectancy is much shorter. If he’d really been smart, he would have packed an AK-47, an umbrella and found a shortcut home. Read the rest of this entry »

Fake Jersey people. Real reviews.®

While doing research for this issue on the growth of citizen reviewing, I came across the newest user-generated review website. Unable to ignore the astonishing depth and breadth, I wanted to share it with our loyal Newcity readers. (Michael Nagrant)

Sunda

****

Category: Asian Fusion

Neighborhoods: Near North Side, River North
110 W Illinois St
Chicago, IL 60654
(312) 644-0500
www.sundachicago.com

Mike S Elite ’10, Situation ‘10
Seaside Heights, NJ
9,979 friends
1 review

**

First off, you know I like to serve my hater juice cold, and I wanted to give this place one star, but you know my boy Billy Dec runs this spot, and that dude definitely knows how to GTL, well, gym and tan anyway. I think he pays someone else to do his laundry. Second off, it’s supposed to be Asian Fusion. Yo, I ain’t no John Mayer. My junk and my heart is totally Benetton and I like me some fusion with Asians, know what I’m sayin? But ain’t none wanted to fuse with me.  I mean this restaurant is sexual napalm – in a bad way. That being said, I still heard this was the hottest joint up on the Lake Michigan shore, but, let’s just say it was a totally robbery. I’m not talking about that chick I stole from that DraftFCB d-bag either – hey, bro maybe if you paid more attention to your lady than the Taco Bell shrimp taco commercial, youda kept her.  The nickel and diming is killer. The ladies next to us said they wanted a six pack, but forgot to bring it.  Being the gentleman that I am, I jumped over to their table quick and lifted up my Ed Hardy tee and showed them my killer abs. I mean I heard this place was BYO, and they charged them ladies a corkage fee, WTF.  Still, the food was awesome here, except the sushi.  They make it square with steak.  It’s supposed to be round with fish, duh.  The chef, whoever he is, yo, I will never cook for you.  You’re excluded from the surf n’ turf night. You’re excluded from ravioli night, and you’re excluded from chicken cutlet night. Also, listen, whoever runs this website, like this is the third time I’ve written this.  For sum reason my review keeps disappearin and The Situation don’t play that.  I think you know how I like beatin up them beats. Imagine that’s your head!!!!!! Also, it says I have 9,979 followers, and I know it’s supposed to say 9,993 because there’s no way I could have less followers than Pauly D. I just called all my peeps to confirm, so you better fix that. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rilee Chastain

It’s hard to go somewhere within the city of Chicago and not run into a shop that sells cupcakes. In the last couple of years these tasty treats have been popping up in specialized bakeries, coffee shops and markets all over the city with a local domination to rival the Asian carp invasion. But a new pastry in town just may have what it takes to steal the cupcake crown.

At the end of 2009, when foodies were pegging the next big trends in the culinary world, macarons were mentioned everywhere from New York magazine to the James Beard Foundation blog. These delicate little French confections are cookie-like pastries made up of almonds, egg whites and sugar with a center filling. While these treats are just now finding their way onto the bakery shelves in the States, they have been a staple in France since the 1500s.

Katharine Greis, the co-owner of Panna Dolce, an online pastry shop specializing in macarons, first discovered the delicate dessert while traveling abroad in Paris. Read the rest of this entry »