Chicago’s culinary press-darling (and Newcity’s best new restaurant of the last year) Schwa, 1466 North Ashland, has closed indefinitely. Adam McKay, one of three permanent employees at Schwa but the only person left to answer phone calls, was tight-lipped on the reason why the restaurant closed amidst becoming an overnight success. “All I can really say is we all have to figure out our personal issues before we can decide if and when we’ll reopen,” he says. While not completely ruling out the chance of Schwa reopening, McKay sounds less than optimistic of that prospect. Schwa’s last service came on Friday night, when it hosted Charlie Trotter and some of the world’s most well-known chefs in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Trotter’s restaurant.
Foods of Our Own: Unique Deliciousness, Made in Chicago Here are two of those Chicago originals, foods—and one Chicago original drink—found many times nowhere else but here and that, for better or worse, have become something unique, a Chicago thing, foods of our own.
Hot Chicken Gets Warm Welcome in Chicago: Cluck It! Cluck It!—a ghost kitchen on south Wabash that opened last month—served us a more moderately spiced chicken. This is the kind of comfort food that many of us are craving.
What Would Jesus Drink? Israeli Wines in Israel and Chicago Driving through Israel’s Negev desert, amidst shrub brush and sandy mountains, along the extraordinarily saline Dead Sea, it’s hard to imagine what might grow in such an apparently hostile environment. One of the well-publicized goals of Israel, of course, has been to “make the desert bloom,” and Israel has had many successes in their efforts to cultivate crops in what…
