The idea of an organic, environmentally friendly, eco-footprintless lifestyle is no longer avant-garde. The actuality of people taking the steps to live this lifestyle, however, can be unimpressive. Lauren Yucan’s Real Naked Food, now open at 1909 West Division, makes green living a whole lot easier for Wicker Park.

Real Naked Food is a small grocery with fresh produce, bulk baking and cooking needs, frozen meals, baby food and cleaning supplies. All of the merchandise here is organic and “absolutely 100 percent local,” says Yucan. With the exception of a few frozen and pre-packaged items, this grocer is BYOC—Bring Your Own Container. While this technique reflects the European market approach the store is influenced by, it also allows patrons to decide how much or little of any product they take home. “Buying in bulk is an excellent way to save,” explains Yucan. “You can buy a pound of flour when you only need one cup, or you can get one cup of quality organic flour for cents.” The concept behind BYOC is pre-cycling—avoiding items that will become waste whether they are disposed of in the trash or a recycling bin. Taking the work out of recycling for lazy earth lovers, using your own containers at Real Naked Food is a time, money and effort saver. “The idea is so foreign to bring in your empty spray bottle to refill with our organic cleaner,” says Yucan, “but what are you going to do with it when it’s empty? Throw it away and buy a new one.” While you receive a 25-cent discount with every container you bring in, Real Naked Food has biodegradable containers to purchase for the unprepared shopper. Read the rest of this entry »

“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)

The love affair with the space between breakfast and lunch will no longer be Sunday-only for Chicagoans starting this summer thanks to director of operations Ryan Marks’ new restaurant, Brunch, an environmentally friendly establishment. Brunch aims to balance a welcoming atmosphere with modern amenities geared toward earth-loving urban patrons. Marks expects Brunch to be green-certified with its energy-efficient appliances and locally sourced commodities. Under the guidance of chef Daniel Tibbetts, the menu will offer organically produced Midwestern eggs, cheeses and meats. The restaurant’s amenities will include flat-screen TVs, Wi-Fi, a fully stocked newsstand, shoeshine station, express counter for to-go orders, and private dining areas for anything from a corporate meeting to a baby shower.

Further merging tree-hugger mentality with fast-paced urban lifestyle is Brunch’s “Reusable Coffee Mug Program.” Marks describes the program as a “win, win…win,” meaning that donating an unwanted or unused coffee mug aids the sustainable credo of the establishment, the variety of mugs creates a quirky and unique quality for the Brunch experience, and mugs with business logos are free advertisements constantly rotated and viewed by Chicagoans enjoying a hot beverage. Mugs can be dropped off at Brunch’s location at 343 West Erie, between Sedgwick and Orleans, and they’ll start cracking eggs for the public this June. (Tiana Olewnick)

Chris Garlington and David Haynes

It’s Friday night at Cigar King in Skokie, and that means CPD Sergeant David Haynes and Chris Garlington are there, hosting their online radio show. At the back of the shop, sitting amidst a crazy tangle of cords, Haynes and Garlington suck their cigars and adjust the levels on the mixer board. The pair have hosted their talk radio show, “The Dave and Chris Show!” every week since 2007, and their “Beat Cop’s Guide to Chicago Eats,” a compendium of cheap and usually greasy cop favorites, came out in January. They hold court at Cigar King, bantering for two hours about pretty much anything from family life to politics.

Hang out with them for a little bit, and it’s easy to see how their chemistry translates into talk radio. Garlington is an irascible guy with a motor mouth, and coincidentally a liberal. Haynes is conciliatory, bluff and a conservative. The conversation inevitably turns to food—Costco hot dogs, to be precise. “They actually are good drunk food,” Haynes ventures. Garlington pounces. “And the show comes to a screeching halt. They’re terrible.” Haynes just chuckles.

After the show, Haynes and Garlington, plus longtime contributor Ken Parr head out to Jimmy’s Red Hots for a late dinner. The Humboldt Park joint, which earned an entry in their guide, makes perhaps their favorite hot dog in the city. That partly explains why, even on this unseasonably cold March night, they’re willing to stand at the counter, their breath smoking in the apparently unheated stand, and wolf down tamales, red hots and fries. It’s nearly ten, but neighborhood kids are still trickling in. After a few gruesome stories about crime in the area—Haynes worked this district, 025, last summer—the conversation turns to hot dogs once again. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

At a time when most people savor the benefits afforded by an AARP card, Wayne Cohen ripped a page out of the “Jackass” playbook and pulled a crazy young man’s stunt. In 2008, Cohen, then president and owner of the now-defunct Norridge-based Maurice Lenell cookie company, was bought out of his ownership stake. Instead of sailing off to the Turks and Caicos he became a line cook.

Most of what you know about chefs is of the baby-kissing-glad-handing and preening-in-the-glossy-food-magazine variety. That’s the executive chef. A hard-working one maybe does a few hours of prep and surveys the quality of dishes leaving the kitchen. They work hard, but mostly motivating personnel, writing menus and finding great products. An executive chef is not a line cook.

A line cook is the sweaty dude standing over an industrial range breathing grease and fire, working six pans at a time and trying not to flare up a few years worth of burn and knife scars. The line cook is doing this for six or seven hours having spent the previous four hours destemming tiny leaves of thyme or dicing celery into perfect one-eighth-inch cubes. A line cook is also generally a 22-year-old white kid with thirty-thousand dollars of culinary-school debt or a slightly older Latino dude who’s washed a hundred-thousand dishes to earn the position.

A line cook is not a 52-year-old former executive with spinal stenosis and a nerve sheath tumor like Cohen. Frankly, a much younger Cohen couldn’t hack it. He says, “I thought I might make it a career, but after you’ve shucked 200 ears of corn in 115 degrees of heat with no air conditioning, you think maybe, this isn’t what I want to do.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »

Lincoln Park is unruffled this Saturday morning as a gentle snowfall adds another layer of white to the city surface. A handful of weekend runners and dog walkers scamper in all directions, while a steady flow of locavores head toward the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum for the Green City Market (GCM). The only consistent year-round farmers’ market in Chicago, GCM has built up a community not only for its customers but also for its farmers.

GCM’s Outdoor Market, held spring through fall at the south end of Lincoln Park, can get pretty wild. Sixty vendors, thousands of patrons, limited produce and six hours of business twice a week make for a hectic day at the office for these farmers. “It’s awesome when it’s nice and we’re outside. It’s fun but it’s way more work,” says Adam Hausman of Seedling Farms. There are just over a dozen vendors alongside Seedling Farms on the second floor of the museum. If the farm representatives aren’t talking product to market goers, they’re casually perusing the scene themselves to see what the competition is offering. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

Grant Achatz could sell ice to Eskimos. Of course, the chef/partner of the best restaurant in America (according to Gourmet and S. Pellegrino World’s 50 Best) would melt that ice, infuse it with a phase-shifting stabilizer so that it re-formed as ice the minute an Inuit shoved it in his mouth.

Point is, Achatz, who has reached a level of canonization befitting of saints (miraculous tongue cancer survivor—it’s only a matter of time) and Nobel laureates (why not), could sell his kindergarten finger paintings for a princely sum. His book released this week, “Life, on the Line” (Gotham, 400 pages) co-written with his business partner Nick Kokonas, will likely be a bestseller.

If not, the recently recorded Fresh Air interview and rumored pending feature film starring Ethan Hawke/Christian Bale/Tobey Maguire/George Clooney (okay, I made Clooney up) as Achatz, will put it over the top.

There’s really very little new I could say that would influence a determined foodie or People magazine bio-hound’s acquisition of the book. As a food journalist, I wasn’t even sure I’d write about it. What’s left to say about the toque that launched a thousand profiles? And so, I’ve decided not so much to be a food journalist here, but instead to add to the Achatz culinary canon as a genuine fan.

Having spent hours on Google chat, the phone and in the kitchen working as a contributor on the Alinea cookbook, I wish I could say I write as a friend, the ultimate insider, but few really know Achatz that way. In fact if there’s any criticism of the book, it’s that Achatz never dwells too deeply on anything. His ex-wife is a bit of a cardboard cutout, and when his long time sous chef, Jeff Pikus, who ran Alinea during his absence, quits, Achatz says, “fuck him” and moves on. Then again, this lack of nostalgia or self-examination is the essence of Achatz’s success. He knows cancer doesn’t respond to sentiment and so he gives it the big middle finger too. Read the rest of this entry »