Posts for May 2, 2012

Is Wolfgang Puck a Foie Hypocrite? Or Just a Bad Gambler?

Puck with the "3-D" dessert he served at the Oscars Governors' Ball this year.Photo: Lesley Balla/Grub Street LA

OG celebrity chef Wolfgang Puck may have made the wrong bet when he came out staunchly against foie gras this year, now that 100 of his most esteemed California colleagues have signed a petition to overturn the upcoming ban. Puck, who's set to receive a lifetime achievement honor at the James Beard Awards next week, was exposed yesterday in Food Arts for still buying and selling plenty of foie gras, despite the righteous letter he mailed out to his fellow chefs and restaurateurs in February discussing his support of the ban — and which all of them clearly laughed at and tossed into the compost with the kitchen scraps.

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Investigating the Hidden Mysteries of Korean Fire Chicken

Grillin' at Dancen.Photo: Matt Zatkoff

LTHforum can be exasperating on a daily basis but on a macro level, several times a year, at least, something pops out that breaks entirely new territory and reveals a side of our food scene we didn't know we didn't know about. Exhibit A: this post by Matt Zatkoff (who posts as "Laikom") on the Korean bar-grilled chicken scene. It started with a distant memory of something like "chicken bulgogi" (which, since bulgogi is beef, was sort of like saying "chicken pot roast") at a long-gone 24-hour Korean joint. On a visit to check out a Korean bar, Zatkoff spotted something called buldak— and that was it.

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Help Name Efrain Cuevas' New South Loop Bodega and Win Lunch

Efrain Cuevas at... what's its name.Photo: Sky Full of Bacon

Like Ryan McCaskey of Acadia, before he was the chef of a new place in the South Loop, Efrain Cuevas was... a guy who wished his South Loop neighborhood had more places to eat. In the case of Cuevas, the proprietor of the longrunning underground dinner club Clandestino, his hope was (and still is) eventually to open a European-style cafe. But in the meantime a friend took him to see a bodega— a New York style-combination of mini-mart and sandwich shop— in an apartment building at 611 S. Wells, which had recently closed. The equipment was gleaming new, the decor wasn't bad at all— what it needed was someone like Cuevas making food that would draw folks from all around the neighborhood. Well, that and a new name— the current one, East Coast Pantry, was generic and out of place. And that's where you come in, Grub Street readers. Read Cuevas' story, and then post your name suggestions in the comments or send to chicago@nymag.com. And if you come up with the perfect name and Cuevas adopts it, he will treat you to lunch for four with all the extras (hint, he's got a really nice beer selection).

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"It was the most amazing sausage I'd ever seen..."

Hot Doug Sohn wants your story. Specifically, he's got a book contract and he's eager to shift some of the work to you, the customer for whom Doug's radical rethinking of the sausage-bun paradigm was a life-changing event. Or as he puts it: "The part of my job I enjoy more than anything else is the interaction with the customers, and I want this book to be a reflection of that. Plus it’s less work for me. So please, send... us your stories, photos, memories, drawings, poems … anything that can go in a book. We’d love to consider including your contribution. Post it on Facebook, or email us at: HotDougsTheBook@gmail.com." [Facebook via Reader]

2nd Arami Rumored For River North

B.K. Park, chef of Arami.

"If you know sushi in Chicago, then you know Ukrainian Village's Arami is a serious power player," 312 Dining Diva says. Frankly we're a little shaken by this notion that there is a power struggle going on in the sushi world; we go to Arami to zen out at the bar watching chef B.K. Park's consummate skill with the sushi knife, it's kind of alarming to think that Rahm Emanuel may suddenly turn up next to us, demanding some fucking swordfish milt— now!— to recharge his mojo for tough negotiations with the police unions or something. (If you want to see Park in zen-action, check out his Key Ingredient episode.) Anyway, 312 Dining Diva reports a very solidly sourced anonymous rumor that the owners of Arami are planning a second location around The Shops at North Bridge (ie., near The Purple Pig and P.F. Chang's), and potentially others down the road. The kitchen menu may be easily replicable; the experience of Park precisely slicing your dinner in front of you, not so easy, so we'll be curious to see how this idea of rolling out multiple Aramis plays out.

Swedish Restaurant Owner, Leader of Vanished Community Dies

Kungsholm restaurant, where Ingrid Bergstrom worked before founding her own restaurant.Photo: courtesy Chicago History in Postcards

Occasionally an obituary seems like a dispatch from a long-lost world. That's how we reacted to the Sun-Times' obituary for Ingrid E. Bergstrom, 91, a prominent leader in Chicago's Swedish-American community in the 1960s and the owner of the Verdandi Club:

With a huge painting of Stockholm behind the bar and a jukebox that played “Halsa dem da rhemma” and other Swedish songs, the Andersonville restaurant reminded immigrants of their homeland.
Nearly every weekend there was a wedding reception or other event, and once a month there was Scandinavian dancing that packed the house.

The Swedish and Norwegian community on the north side was once one of the city's largest ethnic concentrations, and of course named a major neighborhood ("Andersonville," which at the time was a rather sardonic allusion to a much more infamous place of the same name), but it has left little permanent imprint on the city other than a couple of places for Sunday breakfast. So Bergstrom's death reminds us that it wasn't that long ago that Swedish-Americans were a major constituency in the city— including on the restaurant scene.

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José Andrés Named Dean of Spanish Studies at International Culinary Center

More time in New York, huh.

Congratulations to the unstoppable José Andrés, who has been named dean of Spanish studies at the International Culinary Center. Along with Colman Andrews, Andrés will "develop a curriculum that can begin to foster new apostles in the art, history, and future of Spanish cuisine." Anddd it's another reason for him to hang out in New York building tapas restaurants and minibars and stuff over the next two years.

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