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…
From a tadpole comes a frog: Now open, from the mother-and-son owners of Blue Frog Bar & Grill (676 N. LaSalle St.; 312-943-8900), River North’s charmingly scruffy go-to karaoke dive, is Blue Frog 22 (22 E. Hubbard St.; 312-527-1200), a more polished and spacious second location stocked with board games, 14 flat-screen TVs, an expanded menu—and, yes, karaoke…
