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 »

As Logan Square residents can attest, Chicago’s only community-owned and operated grocery store was well worth the nearly five-year wait. Even before the doors of the Dill Pickle Food Co-op opened at noon this day, soon-to-be-patrons clamored around the entrance, eagerly waiting to set foot inside.

The genuine affection that went into every element of the Co-op is one of the most striking things about the Dill Pickle. The store itself is charming—mint-green walls and exposed pipes, cozy lighting that melts away memories of a freezing Saturday afternoon wind—but it is the strong sense of community that really drives this home. Nearly every other person who enters the store knows someone involved in the Pickle’s success, and they offer their heartfelt congratulations, sometimes accompanied with an effusive bear hug. 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 »

Despite last week’s closing of Greg Christian Catering, his Organic School Project is here to stay. The OSP provides Chicago Public Schools students with healthy, organic alternatives to typical lunchroom fair and was the subject of a Newcity cover story in 2007. “We aspire to inspire children, to excite them to make better food choices,” says OSP Executive Director DiAnne Richardson. In addition to providing students with nutritious lunch options, the program also incorporates the “Grow. Teach. Feed.” model, which allows children to participate in healthy lifestyle workshops and grow a garden at school. “For young people to understand the whole growing process and make better food choices will lead to a sustainable, healthier lifestyle,” Richardson says. OSP is currently operating at Alcott Elementary, Lowell Elementary and Reavis Elementary, where it is running a garden project. The OSP has also expanded to creating community gardens, the first being at the Garfield Park Conservatory. According to Richardson, they are open to reaching out to other schools and communities throughout Chicagoland: “We are always looking to expand and bring healthy food to our young people.”

At a fundraiser for the Organic School Project, everyone mills about Goose Island Brewery, shoveling in spoonful after spoonful of mac ‘n’ cheese, throwing back brews and enjoying one cupcake (and then another). A wellness program created by Chef Greg Christian that works with the Chicago Public School System to get kids eating healthier, OSP plants organic gardens at schools, teaches youngsters about nutrition and works to combat obesity. Everyday, OSP provides Alcott Elementary with all organic, natural and made-from-scratch lunches.

This information, coupled with the images being continuously broadcast from the Goose Island TVs of OSP children eating organically and working in gardens, endows one with a creeping sense of guilt. Shouldn’t this event practice what it preaches? Nah, let’s try the Mac-tini. The Adam Seger-designed mac ‘n’ cheese-inspired cocktail made with cheddar cheese, maple syrup, fresh lime juice and CapRock vodka, flies off the bar and down the throats of fundrais-ees with surprising speed. 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

I’ve killed more plants than a Detroit auto executive. Everything, from finicky herbal seedlings to hearty tomatoes, has met the reaper that is my green, or maybe more appropriately, gangrenous, thumb. I once grew the tallest plant in a junior-high biology contest, but only after my father introduced me to Miracle Grow, and I juiced that bad boy like an agricultural Barry Bonds. That was a lifetime ago. Last month, despite their legend for weathering biblical droughts, two cacti in my living room recently developed a feathery mold.

In addition to my inherent gardening shortcomings, I happen to live in a landlocked condo, an old converted corrugated box factory in the West Loop, shadowed by a towering UIC office building. I’ve got no outdoor space or reasonable growing light and the constant brick dust from the walls chokes most things that grow. Were I just trying to spruce up my home or maintain carbon neutrality, I could probably just buy a ficus or take my cues from Al Gore and screw in a few compact fluorescent bulbs and move on. Read the rest of this entry »

Sausage Panino

By Michael Nagrant

“I don’t care if my tomato was raised in a lab or some hippie’s backyard. I don’t even care if it causes the occasional tumor in lab rats. I only care that it’s the best-tasting damn tomato available.”—Anthony Bourdain, Travel Channel TV host and bad boy foodie

You expect hyperbole from a guy whose personal logo is a toque-clad skull biting down on a chef’s knife dripping with blood. While I usually dig Bourdain’s brutal observations, my first instinct was to write this quote off as typical bobblehead claptrap to fuel television ratings. In the last few weeks though the quote’s essential truth has been haunting me a bit.

Last week I wrote favorably about Michael Altenberg’s new venture, Crust, the first certified all-organic restaurant in Chicago. According to a recent Chicago Reader article, the stringency of the organic certification process means that Altenberg can’t use the products of certain responsible local farmers, people that he’s worked with for years at his other venture Bistro Campagne, because those producers aren’t personally certified at Crust. For that matter, he can’t use many of the local sustainable farms at the Green City Market. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

Visiting a promising restaurant on opening night is probably a lot like scouting high-school and college-basketball phenoms for the NBA. It’s just too early to tell. For every fifty-point whiz like Kobe Bryant, there’s a two-point bust like Darko Milicic riding the bench. Likewise, opening night for a restaurant isn’t usually a fair gauge of future success. Sure, there’s been soft openings for friends and family to fine-tune things, but when’s the last time your best friend told you that you were ugly?

Yet many believe once a restaurateur asks for your money, he should also be ready to endure your mirth or your wrath.  And the blogosphere, for better or worse, has the print and digital media cranking out early reviews like hopped-up Kerouac-novel Benzedrine junkies.

Generally I believe it’s better to do something the best rather than to do it first, to get it right, rather than just to get it. And yet, sometimes you get so excited about a concept that you can’t wait to check it out. So I’m gonna break my rule, and review Michael Altenberg’s new spot Crust with the caveat that what follows is an anonymous opening-night review, but not a measured multi-visit extravaganza. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

The pizza served in my elementary-school cafeteria was a chewy rectangle of dough with cloying tomato sauce, a glop of cheese that recalled a semi-dry river of Elmer’s glue and greasy orange-stained pepperonis curled at the edges from the intense baking heat. We learned pretty quickly that the only thing worth eating was the pepperoni, and so my buddies and I started a contest whereby each of us would amble through the lunchroom asking budding vegetarians and unsuspecting friends if we could have their leftover pepperonis. Whoever collected the most also won the pepperonis collected by the others, thus ensuring a lunchtime treasure trove of endless mystery meat.

Today, the pizza must taste a lot better. A few weeks ago, while observing the cafeteria at the Louisa May Alcott School, a K-8 Chicago public school located at 2625 North Orchard, the lunchroom manager told me that on “pizza day” many kids who bring lunches from home end up buying the pizza instead. Still, things hadn’t gotten much better. On the afternoon I was there, the kids had a choice of beef tacos or battered fish sticks. Most of the kids chose tacos, but almost all skipped the accompanying containers of lettuce and tomato. The Alcott cafeteria might as well have been a mall food court with pizza, chicken nuggets and quesadillas filling out the menu for the week. Read the rest of this entry »