Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Yes, I get it. Bacon is good. Can we move on already? Bacon/pork belly as the new second coming from the gods is getting ridiculous. It's like a few years ago with using chipotle in everything.

Totally dumplings. Soup dumplings, har-gow. Or even Banh mi would be awesome.

Chicago style. With only Vienna Beef dogs. Gotta have the little red specks and natural casing. Celery salt too. Poppy seed buns are impossible to find though.

What? No Charlie Trotter? He's world class and would make meals fit for world leaders.

And what about Homaro Cantu? He's definitely cutting edge. Albeit a poor man's Ferran Adria.

I do think Bayless and Smith are definitely in the running since Smith is Oprah's chef (not a healthy food chef) and with Bayless, Barack's been known to love mexican food.

I think part of it is due to portion sizes and America's preconceived ideas of what chinese food is. Chinese restaurants typically are family style and people go in expecting, fried rice, bbq pork, Genral Tso's chicken (invented in America!) and stir fries. I think if chinese restaurants branched out into high end tasting menus and use more "chinese" ingredients like dried and fermented products as well as branch into some molecular gastronomy or modern techniques, Chinese cuisine will become elevated to hip. Recently italian cuisine has had a resurgence due to the additions of modern innovations.

Restaurant marketing also plays into it. Thai restaurants have been great at reinventing Thai cuisine into a hip atmosphere (lots of ikea/futuristic style looking restaurants).

But most of all it's education. Right now there aren't any real innovative American Chinese Chef Stars other than Ming Tsai. And and he's not really that innovative! Michelin stars people. There needs to be world calibre chinese restaurants. Also, most people don't know that the chinese food they get in the US is different from the different regional cuisines in China.

How is that a banh mi? Might as well call a hoagie a banh mi, a cuban or a meat sandwiched on a rye roll a banh mi. This is ludicruos. If they mean the literal vietnamese translation on Banh mi = sandwich, then I guess so. BTW, at first I thought the slaw was cheddar cheese. Now that would be blasphemy.

Oh yeah. What about the muffuletta sandwich.

Chicago is the worst place to diet. When I was in art school, I gained over 25 lbs. Everything at a sandwich shack came with a free order of fries and portions were always ginormous and cheap. Dominick's had the worst grocery selection at the time. Vegetables and lettuces were either bad or went bad in a matter of days. I will always remember Chicago being the place where I gave up vegetarianism. It was a still a good place to live though. Mexican food there is much better than the stuff in New York and I always miss the signature. hot dogs. Plus they pronounce Gyro, Yeer-oh.