Category: Food & Drink Feature

Alejandra Rivera kept burning the pastéis de nata. The flaky Portuguese egg custard tartlets, known the world over, should have a bit of dark-brown caramelized stippling on top, but the numbers on the old oven in her little flat had worn off, so she kept scorching the iconic pastries. Rivera and her husband were reluctantly […]

Thirty-one years ago, the Leo Burnett Company, on behalf of Michigan Avenue’s erstwhile National Live Stock and Meat Board, branded cattle flesh onto the American brain with the slogan, “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” That’s not a bad run by advertising standards, but it’s nothing compared to “One head with a hundred tastes,” or “일두백미,” […]

A 25-gallon oak barrel sits upright on a pallet among hundreds of others in a former furniture factory in Hammond, Indiana. Drew Fox lays it on its side, yanks out the bung, and inserts a long, copper whiskey thief into its depths. From that he drains a luminous, tobacco-colored liquid into a pair of juice glasses […]

When Max Mirho, a Lakeview resident, lived in Pittsburgh three years ago, he found himself at a secret party. It was a gay, techno sex club downtown, next to a tiny ATM, underneath a gay bathhouse, “in the middle of frickin’ nowhere.”  To get in, Mirho used a passcode found on a Facebook page called […]

One Off introduces PM at PQM, a casual after-hours cafe featuring a debut menu of plates that is at once hauntingly Mado-esque and evolved, coming from a chef who’s done a lot of eating, cooking, and living since 2010.

Punks love waffles, and Andy King has proof. At the release show for Cut Your Losses’ self-titled debut Reflections of Ghosts at Schubas Tavern this past spring, local podcast producer and DIY chef King only had a few minutes to talk with acoustic punk artist Joe Costa, professionally known as Tourist Season, and rising punk […]

Last November, chef Matteo Lo Bianco took a crash course in Persian food. Each day he’d show up at Farzad Shahsavarani’s house and begin cooking under the eye of his former boss, and his sister Farideh. They made all the classics: the intensely herbaceous lamb and bean stew, ghormeh sabzi; the fruity egg-stuffed meatballs, kofte […]

For more than a year, Flour Power has produced almost no food waste. It all gets tossed into two large Amazon courier totes Wilson Bauer stores just to the right of his toilet.

The first Sri Lankan Panda Express quietly opened in Rogers Park late last March. That’s what Kiso Sivarasa and his partners hoped when they launched Café Nova on the ground floor of Loyola University’s Granada Center, just a few doors down from Subway and across Sheridan from Taco Bell and Potbelly. “We want to grow […]

By creating a wine club for residents of the Pilsen neighborhood, Rodriguez and Sanchez knew they could make a bigger impact in the beverage space and positively contribute to the community. And so Bummer Wines was born. 

Middle Brow’s Pizza Wine has the dark ruby-red color of a Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon, like something you’d want to drink with a thick porterhouse: jammy, tannic, boozy. With that on your mind, your first sip might come as a surprise. Sure enough, it has a rounded, full body, but it’s simultaneously ethereal, with a […]

There’s no such thing as brunch in Vietnam. . . . Nevertheless, Argyle Street’s DaNang Kitchen recently started offering a “Vietnamese brunch,” featuring a few relatively uncommon dishes that can address a Western appetite for hangover-mitigating egg skillets.