Crystal cake from Wan Shi Da bakery

While American-style bakeries hew almost exclusively toward rich, cloying and frosted treats, the Chinese variety skew more towards a French cafe philosophy—merging sweet and savory elements. In Chicago’s Chinatown, ham and havarti croissants give way to barbecue pork buns, and confections come stuffed with bean paste instead of fruit. Many of these bakeries also feature adjoining cafes that, in addition to providing a space for community gatherings, offer customers the chance to luxuriate over fresh-from-the-oven baked goods or dim sum breakfast with a cup of coffee and the morning news. We plodded through a few of Chinatown’s best: More »

Arancini from Pasta Fresh

Riunite is kind of like the Italian Boone’s Farm, which is to say, it’s usually drunk by college kids, boozy moms and the homeless. For a proud Italian to have to sell these wines as a traveling salesman is akin to a Parisian butcher turning to sell Spam door to door. More »

Some people smuggle drugs. I smuggle muffuletta.

Muffuletta is one of New Orleans’ iconic sandwiches, an Italian sesame-seed-studded bread loaf split horizontally and topped with a salad of olives, celery, cauliflower and carrot marinated in olive oil and herbs, and layers of freshly sliced capicola, salami, mortadella, emmentaler and provolone. You can find the sandwich outside of New Orleans, but as with many regional delicacies, such as the Philly cheesesteak, something gets lost in translation. Thanks to my friends Brian and Sara Gronowski, who fly in a bakery’s load from Central Grocery in New Orleans for their annual Mardi Gras party, I got a shot at the best version before ever stepping foot in the French Quarter. The sandwich might as well have been the president of the New Orleans chamber of commerce, because after my first bite, two months later I was on a plane to Louisiana. More »

Scylla chef Stephanie Izard

As a first-generation American (my mom was born in Poland), I’ve seen the ease and speed in which cultural traditions are lost, and so I’m determined to preserve the meaningful ones. It’s probably why as a secular Catholic, too lazy to attend regular Sunday mass, I still try to adhere to most of the other religious traditions, and not just the ones that include bowing to massive binges of guilt. And so with Lenten season upon us, I and 2.4 million local Catholics are in need of a seafood fix for our Friday meat fasts. More »

Chef Michael Lachowicz

Restaurant Michael in Winnetka led me to coin a new phrase: haute comfort food. There was no ponzu sauce, Latin fusion, or edible menu. What they offered was simply expertly prepared French food. That doesn’t mean you don’t find the occasional shiitake mushroom or a bit of fabulously enriched polenta, but the focus is not on absorbing as many international influences as possible. It’s French. And for those of us who grew up in an age when fabulous French food was rare enough that we considered it a treat, sometimes that’s what we want: French food. I love the cutting-edge places, but sometimes it’s good to just sink into a meal of perfectly cooked French classics. Of course, being new to French food won’t preclude you from enjoying this place. It’s just that, for people who want hip and edgy, this isn’t it. It’s comfort food for Francophiles. More »

Caramelized banana pancakes at Meli Cafe

Those who might bemoan the ebb of old-fashioned Chicago patronage need only look at Greektown to change their mind. The Near West Side neighborhood is one where waiters still beget restaurateurs who beget waiters who beget more restaurateurs, a place where family and immigration isn’t a random mingling of bloodlines, but a concrete strategy in the business plan. Meli Café (301 South Halsted), a fantastic breakfast and lunch spot, and the newest addition to the Halsted strip, serves as the perfect business case. More »

There’s often an inverse proportion between the dinginess of a restaurant and the quality of the food. Moon’s Sandwich Shop, 16 S. Western, with its faded sign, rickety accordion style security bars and patchwork brickwork, confirms this rule. More »

As a kid, dim sum always seemed like ambrosia for the erudite. Growing up, it was a vague magical Chinese food term that conjured professorial characters bedecked in corduroy, or socially liberal urbanites living in Herman Miller mid-century-style-furnished salons receiving spa-like facials from steaming noodle bowls. Little did I know that the humble egg roll on which I’d gorged a thousand times in my suburban Detroit blue-collar youth was the most basic form of this ancient pleasure. More »

I like it animal style–my burger that is.

Whenever I get off the plane in L.A., I go straight to the nearest In-N-Out Burger and order up a mustard-cooked beef patty with cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickle, extra “spread” and grilled onions, or as it’s billed on In-N-Out’s “secret menu”–”animal style.” (The secret menu, which is actually available on the Web site, is the worst-kept secret since Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s White House tryst.) More »

Shanghai Lumpia from Uni-Mart

For the last three years, I’ve woken up on an October Sunday to constant wailing, throbbing drumbeats and clanging cowbells. Somehow my realtor forgot to mention that my condo was located right off the Chicago Marathon course. More »

Photo: Tuan Bui

I’m no culinary Luddite. In the last year, I’ve eaten and relished bacon ice cream, tortilla foam, Rice Krispies with strawberry Pop Rocks, pineapple sponge, Dover sole with dehydrated banana powder and a chocolate-raspberry-and-foie-gras milkshake. More »

One Incarnation of Surf and Turf, Moto Style

As I headed for Moto, my expectations were high, which worried me a little. Granted, Chef Homaro Cantu had been getting a lot of notice, but I have discovered over time that often, hype is just “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” More »

Life might be a journey, but sublime food is a destination, and there’s no better destination than the apple fritter at Old Fashioned Donut. People always ask “what’s the best?”, and the answer is usually a subjective handful of choices. Consider it a lock, like the Daley administrations over the last half century, the Old Fashioned apple fritter is the best. These deep fried and super icing slathered concoctions make Krispy Kreme look like the health food section at Whole Foods. Most apple fritters should be called cinnamon spiced donuts, because if you’re lucky they might have one chunk of apple. The fritters at old fashioned are dotted with toothsume hunks and an orchard’s worth of apple perfume. More »

The hashbrowns platter at Hashbrown’s

The early morning crowd gathered outside Nookies on Halsted looks like a Boystown rave. I’ve watched people read most of the Sunday New York Times while waiting for a seat at Wicker Park’s Bongo Room. Forget Alinea or Schwa, everyone knows the toughest table in town is Sunday breakfast. More »

Etouffée and all the trimmings at Lagniappe

Before it was settled in the nineteenth century, the South Side neighborhood of Auburn Gresham was once flat swampy land. This might explain why some of the best Cajun Creole cooking outside of the arid Louisiana bayou can be found at Lagniappe restaurant on the corner of West 79th and Justine. More »

Red’s Eat’s Lobster Roll

Mid-nineties songwriter Juliana Hatfield, whose tune “Spin the Bottle” anchored the Reality Bites soundtrack and Maine’s best lobster rolls have one thing in common: They’re both from Wiscasset, Maine.

Unlike Hatfield, who’s undoubtedly the only major songwriter to hail from the sleepy mid-coastal Maine village, there are plenty of roadside stands and seaside shacks serving up lobster rolls. Hungry magazine stopped at two of the best. More »

Quick, name a regional specialty for northern Utah?

Okay, besides skiing and beautiful vistas of the Wasatch Mountains. Chances are, the culinary peaks of the Salt Lake Valley elude most of us. In fact, talk to most people, and Salt Lake comes off as a cultural and culinary wasteland. Maybe that’s why coming across an example of American fast food greatness in Utah felt and tasted so good. More »

Max’s Ghetto Fries

Chicago is the land of the obese, the corporate home of McDonald’s, purveyor of deep dish pizza, slinger of fat Vienna franks, and yet we still cede our title of supreme imperial culinary hedonism to Quebec by not adopting poutine, a cholesterol bomb of French fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. More »

The Jibarito from Borinquen Lounge

It took ethnic comfort food to make me forsake my own mother, but, Puerto Rican jibaritos (hi-bar-itoes)–deep fried plantain sandwiches–and Vietnamese pho (fuh)–beef tendon soup–have displaced her chicken noodle and grilled bologna and cheese in my personal comfort-food pantheon. If you ever saw my mom tenderize a recalcitrant pork chop or bring the gleaming business end of her Wusthof cleaver to bear on bloody tenderloin, you’d know that I’m betting a whole lot on the notion that the mother and son bond will keep me safe. More »

Gennaro’s Gnocchi

Gennaro’s is the kind of restaurant no one writes about until it closes.

It’s not the oldest restaurant in the city, it doesn’t have liquor license number one, they don’t dip the Italian sausage in liquid nitrogen and the interior doesn’t look like a Frank Gehry dream of imploding stainless steel. It’s just an old red-sauce emporium in Little Italy whose stoop is darkened by the shadow of the ABLA power-plant tower and the crumbling remains of Jane Addams Homes. More »