Atale of two (food) cities
Toronto and Chicago: both cities on a lake. Delicious restaurants. Pizza. But do the comparisons end there?
As a Toronto-based food critic who has also written two cookbooks about Toronto restaurants, I can’t help but compare the food scenes I visit to the one back home. So, buoyed by “The Bear” and Chicago’s recent culinary buzz, I decided to take a weekend jaunt to see how the Midwest city stacks up.
Both Toronto and Chicago boast restaurant scenes where old-timey formality has largely been replaced by relaxed rooms that belie the ambitious cooking. There are recipes from far-off motherlands, modern twists and loads of local ingredients, too. Both cities, once provincial meat-and-potato towns, have emerged as global dining hot spots.
Yet Chicago has restaurants that have earned a lovely patina, the kind that only comes with age.
At Shaw’s Crab House, currently celebrating its 40th anniversary, I visit the Oyster Bar side of the riverside restaurant, where the swivel stools and vintage wood-panelled horseshoe bar are an elbows-out experience of crab cracking and oyster slurping.
Chicago also has long-standing pizza joints, like Pizzeria Uno, the birthplace of deep-dish (circa 1943), and Lou Malnati’s, where the steel pans look like Grandma’s favourite cast irons, and the pizzas taste like they just came out of her oven. Whatever your feelings on deepdish may be, it’s always nice to try a genre of pizza in the city where it was created. (I also scarfed down — and loved — a crispy, New Yorkstyle slice at Pizza Lobo in Logan Square, as seen on “The Bear.”) Later, I slide into a booth at the 103year-old Margie’s Candies for a homemade hot fudge sundae (apparently Al Capone was a fan), but only after grabbing a freshly glazed strawberry doughnut from the city’s oldest bakery, the 113-year-old Roeser’s.
As in Toronto, Chicago’s modern culinary era started in earnest about 25 years ago, with a handful of chefs who have since helped define the city’s hearty regional cooking. For a taste, I brunch on chef Stephanie Izard’s Fat Elvis pancakes, heaped with peanut butter butter (that’s not a typo), bananas and maple-bacon syrup at Little Goat Diner.
I also enjoy lovely meals at two Paul Kahan restaurants: Avec (order the “deluxe focaccia” with a side of “secret honey”), and the Publican in the Fulton Market area. At the latter, we have a spring feast: smoked fish spread on thick grilled bread, fried artichokes, a zippy salmon crudo, and shaved asparagus and fennel salad, along with glasses of Croatian rosé. I loved the room, a soaring woodsy space reminiscent of a European beer hall.
An architecturally gifted town, Chicago also knows how to do restaurant design right, with classic esthetics, often backed by skilful curation and big bucks. Case in point: the Chicago Athletic Association hotel, where I stay. Breakfast at the Cherry Circle Room means eggs with perfect hash browns and bottomless coffee, in a retro-chic cherry wood space that won the 2016 James Beard Award for outstanding restaurant design.
But my favourite spot in the hotel is a cubbyhole of a bar called Milk Room. When it was a clandestine space in the original Chicago Athletic Association, members used to buy “milk” — code for liquor during Prohibition — from a door in the back wall. That secret door is still there. Snag one of the only eight seats, and you’ll be rewarded with spirit-forward cocktails, like my Bunny Bonanza coupe.
After a long weekend in the city (and especially after that potent cocktail), I decide Chicago is as similar to Toronto as it is different. While Toronto may have more culturally diverse spots, Chicago has more fine-dining options and a souped-up snack scene. (Hot dogs! Doughnuts!) We have better Chinese food; they have better Mexican.
But both cities have comparably sized populations, unrelenting talent (and winters), and when the local ingredients start to bloom, diners hit the bricks, eating parkside, streetside and high up in the sky. What’s more, both cities continue to evolve, with the next generation of chefs coming up, and the one after that.
And it feels like both cities are just getting started.