Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Have you ever read any of the stuff from the Westernathon, written about on Chowhound shortly before we all became LTHers? We actually did try to cover the entire span from 95th to Howard, though I can't use it to say "hey, how'd you miss THIS place" because so many of those places are gone (indeed, were gone in 2 or 3 years). And save for Margie's, I think almost everything on your list didn't exist yet...

http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/112355

Admirable attempt, although if I really wanted a better Big Mac, I think I'd just go eat a Big Boy. What would really impress me, though, is if you could make a better Galley Boy.

Also, if you actually look at the pies... you could call stuffed a casserole (actually it's inspired by an Italian savory pie called scarciedda). But there's nothing casserole-like at all about, say, a Malnati's pizza-- deep dish. It's just a tall pizza...

Thanks for the plug, Adam!

I'm sure they're not making a fortune because they're not enjoying the economies of scale that a restaurant does from being open night after night. That said, I hardly think renting a place for a night is MORE expensive than launching a restaurant and getting all the legal permits and so on in a city like Chicago (and I was just listening to a major restaurant backer speaking rather cynically about THAT process yesterday; the aldermanic shakedown is alive and well).

The social aspect, well, maybe sometimes that's magical and cool and sometimes it isn't. But it's not as if you can't get that other ways-- obviously the whole shared table thing is about creating some of that serendipity, too.

I like the idea of the underground dinner. Cool that people try to find ways to connect in the big city; cool that chefs who don't have restaurants want to create interesting experiences. But you have to deliver... something. If the food isn't Blackbird, and the price is, then you better deliver something else, and that's what the underground dinner in Steve Dolinsky's review (which inspired my rant) did not do. It's emperor's clothes time to get mediocre food and then go out raving about it just because you're invested in the fact that you're in the in-crowd doing cool secret things. Ultimately, and I said this in my piece, I'd like to see underground dinners do stuff restaurants can't do, serve kinds of food that are commercially impossible, offer experiences totally outside the paradigm of restaurant dining.

Thanks for the link, much appreciated.

Slate finds it impossible to just write about anything. Their whole point is to come up with the quirkily ironic take on something, so they can be hipper than you.

I'm pretty sure my brain downloaded instructions to assassinate Senator Jebediah Slocum from that jingle.

England and Ireland make great breakfasts, when they stick to stuff Americans eat for breakfast. Just no beans, kippers, or blood sausage.

@skyfullofbacon, imagine that

Thanks for the link, Robyn!

As a longtime opponent of the brown sugar and marshmallow candy approach, I did the banana thing some years back and it just tasted like bananas to me. Maybe this recipe is better, but so far, the only things I've done to make sweet potatoes more grownup that I really liked were (no surprise) curry powder or, bake the potatoes with orange slices in between, then discard the orange slices and puree. The hint of burnt orange really works well.

Thanks for the link, guys. JJChampion-- yeah, sometimes details like that are hard to explain in a video without eating up a lot of time, and since that's the sort of thing you can find out elsewhere, I decided to focus on other parts of the process and how he arrived at doing things his particular way.