Dining and food culture in Chicago
Most Thanksgiving leftovers sandwiches, no matter how creative and delicious, still taste for the most part like a Thanksgiving dinner, rearranged. I look forward to those Thanksgiving leftovers as much as the next guy, but I have different ideas about how to use them.
As people in growing cities began to disconnect from the work of farming, what people knew about farming diminished rapidly. In Illinois today, ninety-six percent of all farms are family owned. That’s roughly 70,000 family-owned farms, of which nearly 9,000 have been in the same family for more than a century.
Well beyond a collection of recipes, “Midwestern Food” is an ambitious history of modern Midwestern “foodways” that developed here over the past two centuries when people from many different cultures descended upon this part of the continent to create better lives for themselves.
Looking ahead to what’s happening in Chicago’s restaurant culture.
Currently, works by Emmy Star Brown are on exhibit at Esmé, created specifically for the restaurant. We had some questions for her about her creative approach and how her work complements and supports the creative foods and the community-minded goals at Esmé.
The words “street food” are beginning to appear in the description of more and more Chicagoland Asian restaurants. I was interested in finding out how this dining culture was making the transition—and why. Was it meeting the needs of a growing population for which this was a taste of home? Was it reaching out to increasingly adventurous diners?
There is probably no recipe that cannot be improved with higher quality ingredients, and Sorkin’s version of the Chicago Italian beef sandwich leverages the prime meat that’s served at Smoque Steak.
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