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:
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.
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