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Rick Bayless
King of the Frontera Empire (Topolobampo, Frontera Grill, Xoco, Frontera Foods etc.)
He brought “real” regional Mexican food to the American table. He made gardening look cool again. He’s done as much as anyone to promote local farms and farmers through his foundation and restaurant work. Through Xoco, he’s found a way to serve locally farmed, consciously raised foods to thousands of people a day without making any major compromises. He’s even made it almost fun to fly again with his Tortas Frontera kiosks at O’Hare. But, none of this probably means as much as the fact that the dude won the inaugural Top Chef Masters TV competition, which means millions more know these good deeds and better ways of eating.

See details on the The Big Heat

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 »

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 »

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 »

Top 5 New Fine Dining Restaurants
Cibo Matto
Taxim
Brown Trout
Sunda
Kith and Kin
—Michael Nagrant

Top 5 New Informal Restaurants
Xoco
Café Senegal
Zebda
Han 202
Jam
—Michael Nagrant Read the rest of this entry »

Lamb Brochette

By Michael Nagrant

Zebda, a new tiny Algerian take-out spot in Irving Park, is the kinda place you’d likely drive by without a second thought. Unless you’re a cabbie who hangs out at owner Mohammad Djeddour’s coffee shop Tassili next door, it’s practically invisible. Even though I had the address, I passed it twice before spotting the word “Zebda” (which is the French-Algerian word for butter) painted on a plate-glass storefront window.

Step inside and the perfume of cinnamon from flaky pastilla, or crepe-like pockets filled with curry chicken, flares your nostrils. The entire countertop is larded with glinting confections like orange flower water, honey and sesame-coated, flaky Ramadan cookies called Shebakia. There’s also a tray of diced curried fish and pepper pastillas and a generous pile of smoky, blistered, griddled, pita-like flatbread. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

“These Vagabond shoes are longing to stray…”
“New York, New York”–Fred Ebb

When New York’s food critics wake up to find that they’re “king of the hill, top of the heap,” it’s a sure bet they can’t wait to turn their eyes to the rest of the world. Such was the case last week, when Frank Bruni, New York Times chief reviewer, ate from coast to coast, scouring for America’s ten best newest restaurants (opened between Jan 1, 2006 and December 31, 2007) and JJ Goode, a New York freelance food writer, examined the nation’s best breakfasts. Read the rest of this entry »

Pork poc-chuc

By Michael Nagrant

Last year, Xni-Pec restaurant might have been the best thing to happen to Cicero since Betty Loren Maltese got locked up. Putting a regional Yucatecan restaurant in the same category as the incarceration of a multi-million-dollar embezzler might seem like hyperbole. But for most, the Yucatan is Cancun, which means most people’s conception of Yucatecan cuisine is Senor Frogs or Carlos ’n Charlies. Any restaurant that challenged such notions had to be exceptional.

The fact that that owners Antonio and Maria Contreras worked their magic, cooking up rare regional Mexican fare like vaporcitos (yucatecan tamales) and panuchos (fried tortillas stuffed with black beans) in a brick citadel of a storefront whose exterior conjures a nondescript dive bar, was more extraordinary. Even the interior of the restaurant, filled with wood-laminate-bench-style seating that channels McDonald’s circa 1982 and an orange and yellow color palette that conjure an explosion at the Reese’s Pieces factory, didn’t promise much. Read the rest of this entry »

Huitlacoche

By Michael Nagrant

Despite Chicago’s ironclad foie gras ban, I’ve been able to keep my annual consumption of the engorged duck liver at its normal level. I indulged my once-a-year habit (last time I had it was May 2006 at Avenues) when I chowed down on a seared Hudson Valley lobe bedded down on honey and almond cake, and anchored with tossed, roasted Wisconsin strawberries, watercress and drizzled almond cream at Vie restaurant (4471 Lawn Avenue, Western Springs) on Thursday to celebrate my birthday. I’m sure as with any good illegal substance, there are many folks who started mainlining fatty lobes as if they were snorting golden bowls of Bolivian marching powder in conjunction with the ban. As for me, and I bet most other serious diners, it’s always been a respected luxury, which is one reason the ban is absurd.

Anyone who’s really serious about animal protection should instead focus their attention on the June issue of Gourmet and check out Daniel Zwerdling’s article on commercial poultry slaughter. According the article, nine billion chickens are slaughtered a year, and it’s estimated that around fifty million or so of those killings are botched. Consider that twenty-four million ducks total are slaughtered for foie gras in comparison, it seems Joe Moore and his posse had their priorities out of whack. Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Nagrant

What if you found out your girlfriend slept with your best friend five minutes before your first reservation at Charlie Trotters? Assuming you didn’t jump off one of Chicago’s movable-span bridges or cancel the reservation and go kick your friend’s ass instead, no matter how much caviar topped your third-course terrine, I bet it would probably be one of the worst meals of your life.

There’s a common wisdom that some negative food reviews have nothing to do with the food, rather they reflect something about the mental state of the reviewer during the meal. “Check Please!” hostess Alpana Singh once told me a story about how sometimes the Everest team would read angry food reviews on Tribune’s Metromix and they could pinpoint the review to a guy who’d just been in a car accident before his meal.

So, this weekend, as I was reading a thread on local food board LTHforum.com regarding Frontera Grill’s recent nod as “Outstanding Restaurant of the Year” from the James Beard Foundation, which was filled with all kinds of vitriol from labeling chef and owner Rick Bayless as a sellout to Frontera as “highly overrated,” I wondered who pissed on these posters’ quesadillas.
Bayless, a 53-year-old ageless wonder who’s ripped like a Men’s Health cover model from his regular power yoga routines, doesn’t need me to get his back. But in January, I made a call for Chicago’s top chefs to offer high-quality eats at a more affordable price in this space, and Bayless is really the only one of the big chefs that has done this.

Frontera Fresco, located on the seventh floor of Macy’s, might be the most important development in high-quality, quick-service food in Chicago. Posters in the thread questioned his integrity precisely because of this move. They didn’t particularly elaborate on their concerns, though my speculation is they see Fresco as an exercise in crass commerce.

The reality is that Frontera Fresco is one of the only spots in the country where you can find well-crafted, fresh-griddled masa flatbreads, topped with all-natural meats, aged Mexican cheeses and high-quality roasted vegetables cooked to order all for about seven bucks. Furthermore, except for Hot Doug’s, I can’t remember the last time I saw so many fashionistas, hipsters, grandmas, children, Caucasians, African Americans, Asians and Latinos all bellying up to the same counter.

Some of the posters didn’t see Frontera Grill as being that different from the many high-quality Mexican restaurants in Chicago. While it’s true that there’s been an increase in regionally focused mid-level-priced well-crafted Mexican food, it’s precisely because twenty-five years ago Bayless took a gamble when there was no such thing.

After having interviewed almost every haute chef in the city, as well as chefs at many family oriented and ethnic joints in Chicago, I can say without a doubt, when you consider the grant program from its farmer’s foundation, there isn’t any kitchen in this city as committed to organic, local and sustainably farmed ingredients as Frontera. There are a surprising number of hotshot local chefs who show up at the markets for their photo-op trips, but their restaurant larder is filled with rows of Sysco or other commercial-grade food-service products.

The final criticism of Bayless leveled on the board was that Frontera doesn’t take reservations for small parties. This of course is one of his most democratic moves, ensuring that anyone with patience and foresight can score a meal. This ensures rabid foodies can’t hoard reservations ahead of time or rich folks can’t commandeer tables for weeks on end.

The biggest issue I have with the thread is that these accusations are submitted by folks named “Gypsyboy” and “dddane.” Like him or not, you know who Phil Vettel is and who he works for. The nature of public Internet forums is that people can hide behind e-monikers and badmouth chefs, which, in a forum like LTH, a significant local tastemaker, has consequences. Certainly Bayless can withstand baseless insults, but some small restauranteurs cannot. Folks who choose to go negative have a responsibility to use their real names, just as any journalist would.  I’m an occasional poster to the forum, and I added a tagline with my real name almost six months ago, because I believe, even in an informal public space, you must be accountable.
Speaking of regional Mexican cuisine and value, I had a chance to pop in to Mundial Cocina Mestiza in Pilsen (1640 West 18th) a few weeks ago. A recent article in Time Out Chicago suggested they have been struggling during the week.  The handiwork of husband and wife Katie and Eusebio Garcia, everything from the Chiles en Nogada (roast poblano peppers stuffed with tender pork and beef mixed with sweet fruit) to the earthy huitlacoche quesadillas was spot on. Best of all, it’s BYOB, and if you’re lucky, you’ll score one of their Dale Earnhardt Jr.-logo ice buckets to chill your surplus Sauvignon Blanc. Of course some of those folks on the Frontera thread probably wouldn’t settle for anything less than a Baccarat crystal decanter.

Frontera Fresco, 111 North State, Seventh Floor, (312)781-4483; Mundial Cocina Mestiza, 1640 West 18th, (312)491-9908.