Innocuous, I thought, as I took in the oak tables and brown leather booths at Nicksons Eatery. So the reach of Nick Baca’s regional American menu—East Coast sea scallops, Colorado elk burger—took me by surprise. The crab cakes were much like the room—pleasant but hardly novel. The andouille gumbo, however, put my spice meter on … Read more
In this town, crowd-pleasing Italian fare is a hop, skip, and a jumbo crab cake away from crowd-pleasing steak houses. So it’s no surprise that Ben-ny Siddu (Volare) latched on to beef. Prime aged steaks, seafood, a global wine list, and signature cocktails sound familiar, but Siddu snagged a star-studded team to execute the plan: … Read more
Any barbecue joint whose menu boasts “No prefabricated crap” had better bring its A game. On paper, Avondale’s Pork Shoppe has reason to be cocky: Its meat, smoked for hours in a blend of hardwoods, comes from local farms in Forreston, Illinois. The chef, Jason Heiman (Tizi Melloul), developed the menu, which includes “hot-out-the-smoker” pulled … Read more
BETTER BETA?: A Bucktown favorite gets a controversial face-lift
TURNING THE TABLES: The idea was simple: I would invite Tramonto (a complete stranger) to our West Town condo to join me, my wife, Jen, and a few friends for dinner.
Monday is the inaugural trip for Flirty Cupcakes, the mobile cupcake seller that managed to find a way to comply with Chicago’s strict food-truck laws. Here’s where the Flirty van plans to stop…
It’s Friday, so I thought I’d take a break from frantically searching apartment listings on Craigslist to kick back and consider one very important real estate question: which bars could I stand living near? You see, the new owner of my longtime building on Mohawk Street has some pretty wild ideas about how much a certain writer…
Burgers in Bloom
Three weeks ago, we reported on a new, more upmarket second location of Poag Mahone’s planned for 195 North Dearborn Street. Dan Rosenthal, Poag’s owner, tells us a more downmarket Poag is in the works as well…
When you buy a wagyu burger, you enter in a cycle of pampering. The cows legendarily get their massages and beer, and then you indulge yourself by spending a mint to buy the burger. A new menu item at The Bad Apple (4300 N. Lincoln Ave.; 773-360-8406) puts that cycle in a whole new gear…
When Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas, business partners at Alinea (1723 N. Halsted St.; 312-867-0110), drop even a few crumbs of information about their future projects, people become like teenage girls around rock idols. (Case in point: Normally intelligent journalists thought Achatz and Kokonas were opening a bar called Boom.) Well, get ready for unbridled screaming. Achatz and Kokonas plan to open Next, a restaurant with a concept unlike any we’ve heard of before…
