…a big shrug. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very thrilled for the chefs and restaurants who received recognition and acclamation today, when the list of the Michelin starred restaurants in our fair city was released. There were a lot of well-deserved mentions in my book – Alinea’s 3 stars (expected), Avenues’ 2 stars (thrilling) and Sepia and Takashi’s 1 stars (wonderfully unexpected). I am very excited for the reinvigorated opportunities for the city to draw in more dining tourists (not that we don’t stumble over enough on Michigan Avenue, really). I’m happy for my friends in the restaurant PR industry who’ll have lots of new marketing collateral to spin. However, as I’ve been tweeting over the past several months, as a passionate, frequent Chicago restaurant diner, I really couldn’t give a hoot about the Michelin Guide. I personally don’t feel the need for what I consider an outmoded evaluation model (something developed in the early 1900s to help French motorists out with their dining selections as they promenaded up and down the French countryside during the early, novel days of automobile travel) to validate what I think are Chicago’s best restaurants. I already know that Alinea and Avenues are top dogs in this city’s competitive dining scene. I know, because I’ve been to these restaurants several times and have gone home with some of the best culinary memories I’ve ever had and expect to have. But I also know that the Publican, The Bristol, Urban Belly, and The Purple Pig (all given Bib Gourmand mentions, some sort of a second-tier recognition for restaurants that provide best value for great food, or something like that) and the surprisingly snubbed Avec (whose chef Koren Grieveson just won a James Beard award earlier this year) can give many of those restaurants deemed worthy of stars a bullet-sweating run for their money. I also fervently believe that our city’s culinary razzle-dazzle owes a lot to the variety and diversity of ethnic restaurants that seduce our diners at every street corner. If the Michelin Guide is truly a benchmark for the best restaurants in Chicago, then where are the mentions for Tac Quick or La Cebollita or La Pasadita or Sun Wah? Oh, or maybe that hazy criteria developed for last-century travelers’ palettes couldn’t recognize the brilliance and energy and cojones of food that don’t have the least bit hint of anything French in them (and as James Beard award-winning food writer Josh Ozersky points out in an invaluable Time magazine piece: what the hell is this criteria anyway? They’re so vague, Jean-Luc Naret’s anonymous inspectors probably couldn’t qualify as Olympic diving competition judges). Personally, as a 21st century Chicago food-conscious person whose palette spans continents and imaginations, the Michelin Guide is quite irrelevant.
Alinea, the seventh best restaurant in the world and the best restaurant in North America, is, without a doubt, first among equals in the dazzling gastronomic capital that is Chicago. However, if I were going to choose among our plethora of towering fine dining destinations, I’d say Avenues at the Peninsula Hotel Chicago is a close second. It shouldn’t be surprising since the Chef de Cuisine at Avenues, the mega-talent Curtis Duffy, was Grant Achatz’s second-in-command at Alinea’s opening in 2005. But if Achatz’s cuisine at Alinea is like the best of Harold Pinter-boldly intellectual, complexly layered, trafficking in big themes and ideas (his Escoffier tribute dish at my recent spring 2010 dinner captured both the complex history of gastronomy and the limitless potential of its future in one brazen, memorable plate)-Duffy’s cuisine at Avenues is like the best of Stephen Sondheim: cerebral, thoughtful, intricately and exquisitely crafted, but seemingly effortless, and yes, like mellifluous musical pieces on a plate. (I couldn’t resist using theatrical metaphors, so sue me). I had two recent dinners at Avenues – in the spring when I brought endearingly exacting New Yorker friend Hedy (who had the chandelier-sized cojones to question Wylie Dufresne to his face about a dish, but that’s a story for another blog post) and then in the summer when BFF Debra and our travelin’ buddy Reva, both accomplished world travelers and consumers of fine goods, joined me at dinner. Both times, I got to say, I was blown away (and my highly discriminating dinner companions as well).
Tags: Avenues
I’m taking a little bit of a break from theater coverage and sharing my thoughts and impressions on some recent memorable dining experiences in this great food town I call home. The next several blog posts will be restaurant-focused, and hopefully will whet my blog readers’ appetites for more!
Tags: Uncle Mike's Place
Frankly, I was a little apprehensive as I approached Alinea’s unmarked door several weeks ago to meet my close friend from high school, Ageless Dr. M., and his partner G, in town from the East Coast, for our dinner reservation. Despite, arguably, being the most talked-about and most written-about restaurant in Chicago, and a true dining destination (anecdotally, I’ve heard that around 60% of the restaurant’s nightly reservations are from out-of-towners) I haven’t been back in close to three years – since my wondrous, mind-expanding dinner with BFF Rene which landed at the top of my most memorable dining experiences of that year. With the financial and time commitment it requires, it’s not like you can go to Alinea any old day of the week because you don’t feel like cooking or you feel like celebrating a good performance review or a Cubs win. I also feel that dining there is such a singular experience, creating wonderful new memories and strengthening old ones, that you want to have the right dining companions to savor its pleasures and surprises with; the unexpected, daring, yet thoughtful connections it makes between food, chef, and diner over the course of several hours. Ageless Dr. M is one of my oldest friends from the Philippines and is passionate, like me, about all things culinary (and, unlike me, is quite the home cook), so during his and G’s visit to Chicago, Alinea needed to be part of the weekend itinerary, no question about it. But part of me still wondered – would Grant Achatz’s acclaimed “molecular gastronomy” cuisine still blow me out of the water and into the stratosphere, the second time around? Might those still-vividly etched memories of my first encounter with his food lose some of their burnish because this next go-round would feel somewhat familiar or comfortable? I’m glad to say, though, that dining at Alinea in early April was like dining there for the first time once again (a very welcome culinary Ground Hog Day) – astounding, breathtaking, horizon-broadening, thought-provoking, definitely not familiar nor comfortable, and yes, delicious to the last bite. The big Chicago food news this week was of Alinea being voted #7 in the world and #1 in North America in Restaurant Magazine and San Pellegrino’s “World’s 50 Best Restaurants”, finally overtaking a restaurant owned by Achatz’s mentor, Thomas Keller, as the best in the region (either The French Laundry or Per Se had occupied the top regional slot since the list’s inception in the early 2000s). I couldn’t loudly, whoopingly, agree more, and with my recent experience, I’m pretty convinced Alinea would crack that top 5 (all held by European restaurants) pretty soon. I think that unmarked, nondescript black townhouse on Halsted St. contains, behind its doors, what 21st century fine dining is and should continue to be.
Tags: Alinea
All my close friends know that I am as passionate and as intensely curious about food and cuisine, from sourcing to plating, as I am about theater, film, and art, but I rarely write about them on this blog (in the two years and change that http://www.fromtheledge.com/ has been alive and kicking, I’ve posted approximately 16 food-related entries as compared to 143 for theater and 57 for film). There’s only so much time and intellectual capacity that I have in a year to write about all the things and experiences that have made an indelible impression on me, so sometimes culinary matters get shunted aside in favor of other blog topics. And, as I have said previously, there’s so many other people in this gastronomy-obsessed city we live in who can write about food more authoritatively and vividly than I can (plus have more gut-capacity and better digital-photo-taking skills than I have) that unless the culinary experience was quite unique, I probably wouldn’t be writing about it. So my dining end-of-year-list has always been my attempt to share the myriad of dishes and dining experiences that left an impression on me during the year past. I’ve tried very hard to keep the list to my Chicago dining experiences this year, unlike in previous lists, but I had to make an exception for the arguably singular, but also ambivalence-inducing, dining pilgrimage I made to The French Laundry in the summer, where some of the dishes stunned me into speechlessness, but where the overall culinary point of view felt somewhat old-fashioned. Here, then, are my top ten dining memories of 2009:
Tags: , Big Star, BOKA, Chicago Gourmet, Girl and the Goat, Graham Elliot, Green City Market, La Cebollita, Me Dee Cafe, Perennial, Perman Wine Selections, The French Laundry, The Publican, underground dining, Vie, Wandering Goat, X-Marx Chicago, Xoco. Mercat ala Planxa
There was general consensus that last year’s Chicago Gourmet, a “celebration of food and wine” which was designed to showcase the city as a vibrant culinary scene was quite the mega-train wreck, with its staggeringly high ticket prices (you had to pay to get in, to attend the wine seminars, and to partake of the Grand Cru tasting), the general lack of seating areas in Millenium Park’s Great Lawn where the event was held, and the commission of the most heinous crime a food festival could ever commit: making food as scarce a commodity as the black rhino in Tanzania or common sense in Glenn Beck’s head. I was quite apprehensive, then, when I bought my one-day pass for this year’s event, scheduled to run last September 26-27 (ok, so I got a substantial discount courtesy of Groupon.com, which would have made it less of a sucker punch to an empty stomach if history repeated itself and I had to run to the Randolph street Chipotle after the event). But there were some early signs of hope – attendance at the wine seminars didn’t require separate admission tickets anymore, and the number of Chicago restaurants and chefs increased substantially from last year. There were still some kvetching and doubting and naysayering in the city’s foodie community but boy, did the organizers of the event, the Illinois Restaurant Association, show us all: they picked themselves up by their bootstraps, shook off the dusty shoeprints on their back, retouched their mascara, and put on a Chicago Gourmet that was quite the thrilling celebration of a city that prided itself on being a major player in the culinary world stage.
Tags: Chicago Gourmet
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