Last week while I was shimmying into my white and blue striped cheer skirt (four red stars emblazoned across its form-fitting spandex torso), about to start writing my annual year-end recap of how glorious the year in eating was, food writer John Kessler over at Chicago Magazine was dropping a big deuce on the city’s restaurant scene. The former Atlanta Journal-Constitution restaurant critic, who’s been a Chicagoan for some three years now, wrote a brutal five-point takedown of a once celebrated dining culture now wallowing in complacency and blinded by its own defensive, blinkered boosterism. Or so he says. Chicago doesn’t know local from Sysco, he argued. Bloated restaurant groups are sucking the blood out of the scene and the national press only comes to the Beard Awards every May to gloat over how far we’ve sunk. So dispiriting on its face I almost wrote a year-end Worst Restaurants of 2018 list.
I felt just as passionate about Astoria Café;, in Irving Park, where the komplet lepinja, “a bun with everything in it,” is the signature among a menu of powerfully restorative Balkan grub. I described it as “an enormous toasty Serbian bread bowl filled with a thick, bubbling scramble of egg, roast pork drippings, and kaymak, the tangy Balkan clotted cream that behaves like a seductive butter.”
Similarly, Frontier chef Brian Jupiter accomplished what he’s been hinting at for years at Wicker Park’s Ina Mae’s Tavern, fully embracing the food of New Orleans, the city he was born, fed, and bred in.
Finally, say what you will about the homogenizing effect of those bloated restaurant groups. One thing they’re good at is graduating the young blood that brings life to the scene. That’s what happened with Andy Sisomboune, a Nico Osteria sous chef who launched the pop-up series Sao Song and seems destined to showcase his cheffy take on Lao party food and home cooking in a brick-and-mortar space.
