Stay pizza-positive with Crust Fund Pizza

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 10/16 8:05A Mike Sula

Food writer John Carruthers auctions his tavern-style pies for social justice. Back in the days when one couldn’t possibly keep up with all the restaurants that opened every week in Chicago, I used to...

Bokuchan’s ghost curry holds up in transit

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 10/13 10:35A Mike Sula

It’s Shin Thompson’s pivot to Japanese soul food, from a virtual kitchen. In early March, Shin Thompson’s Furious Spoon ramen minichain was humming, with five locations in the city and Evanston, and a...

Fill up with Pat Badani’s Comestible 7-Day Meal Plan

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 10/6 9:10A Mike Sula

It’s a manifesto of ecological cooking. Pat Badani’s seven-day meal plan includes a recipe for greens that calls for “a measure of moral evaluation.” She recommends that, on day two, readers serve a...

Rachel Kimura goes all in on Japanese farming

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 9/29 9:55A Mike Sula

Hinata Farms is a natural. Rachel Kimura conducted more than a few experiments during the first growing season on her 1/8-acre Hinata Farms.…

Jennifer Kim's pojangmacha and more food and drink to look forward to in the fall

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 9/25 7:00A Mike Sula

Everything is terrible, but we're not starving. Yet. Earlier this week, the city dropped its outdoor dining rules for winter: all about tents, heaters, and safety protocols, and all about as agreeable...

Ethan Lim's seven-course Cambodian ode to mom and dad is live

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 9/18 8:00A Mike Sula

Family Meal @hermosachicago is the chef's next step toward a culinary Khmerica. It hasn’t even been a year since I first wrote about Ethan Lim and Hermosa, his extraordinary sandwich shop in the...

Jennifer Kim is bottling love

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 9/16 11:35A Mike Sula

As Passerotto closes, its chef reimagines the future by preserving the past. Jennifer Kim’s mom keeps a bottle under her kitchen sink containing knobby, gnarly roots and a continually replenished...

Gone but not frog-otten

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 9/14 11:45A Megan Kirby

A zinester remembers Rainforest Cafe. I watch a TikTok where the Rainforest Cafe frog sits on a trailer in a parking lot, dismantled.…

Get weird with mustard beer

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 9/11 8:50A Michelle Bruton

Are Chicagoans ready for some of the yellow stuff in their brews? In the days between summer and fall, past scorching July with Oktoberfest looming, almost nothing hits the same as a grilled sausage...

Kedai Tapao rocks Malaysia’s cradle of flavor

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 9/9 10:30A Mike Sula

Love in the time of corona begets a promising new pop-up. “J,” a pastry chef who grew up in Kuala Lumpur, says that her husband “M,” a savory chef who grew up in Kane County, is making problems for...

Adobo Loko is taking special requests

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 8/24 10:10A Mike Sula

Filipino street food chef Rob Menor sees his future in a cannabis cloud kitchen. The Ube Doobie is a chewy, vivid purple pastry showered with toasted coconut flakes. Rob Menor, the chef who created...

Yuta Katsuyama is the once and future rice ball king of Chicago

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 8/17 7:30A Mike Sula

His Onigiri Shuttle Kororin rolls to a stop next week—but he’ll be back. When Yuta Katsuyama landed at the Illinois Institute of Technology four semesters ago, in the very real food desert of...

My new book is bulletproof

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 8/14 5:40A Mike Sula

50 stories. Hundreds of animals. Some laws broken. Remember back when the Reader was divided into four, thick, black-and-white sections that stained your fingers by the time you paged through the...

Jasmine Sheth is Chicago’s first dabbawala

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 8/4 4:20A Mike Sula

Each week her Tasting India delivery service dives deep into a different regional Indian cuisine. Each school day the dabbawala delivered a fresh, hot, home-cooked lunch to Jasmine Sheth (and many...

Cookbooks for isolates

Chicago Reader (Food & Drink) 7/27 5:00A Mike Sula

Lose yourself in two more local food books, about barbecue and ramen For the Books Issue out now, I wrote about two cookbooks inextricably tied to the community events that inspired them, the...