About Drive-Thru

Drive-Thru is the food and drink section of Gapers Block, covering the city's vibrant dining, drinking and cooking scene. Contact the staff via email at drivethru@gapersblock.com.

Editor

Robyn Nisi, Food Editor - Drive-Thru
Robyn is from Omaha, home of the best pizza in Chicago. She laments the discontinuation of such foodstuffs as PB Max and OK Cola, and continues to fight for sweet treat justice (using elite street justice). Email her at rn@gapersblock.com.

Staff

Jen Bacher
Jen has never met a vegetable she wasn't interested in eating. Despite being an omnivore, she mostly cooks vegetarian meals and believes real cooks can make a great dish without relying on meat. Outside of the kitchen, she enjoys going to local comedy shows and concerts, as well as biking around the city looking for dive bars. She was born and raised in northeast Ohio, and thanks her grandmother for feeding her so much local produce as a child.

Lori Barrett
Lori Barrett moved to Chicago from Brooklyn last summer. She's a freelance copy editor, writer and the mother of two vegetarian foodies. She fills her days in Chicago by job hunting and grocery shopping, an eye-opener in this town: Her local Brooklyn Met Food can fit into the salsa section at any Dominick's. She's trying to find out which stores have the best free samples, to better distract her little sous-chefs (when she can drag them away from the Food Network). Her goal is to find a way to blend family, writing, fake meat and work into a perfect cocktail — preferably an Absolut martini, straight up with olives.

Annie Conway
Annie is a Chicago native and hopelessly over-ambitious home cook. By day, she is a professional nerd, by night, an amateur wine sniffer, collector of obscure trivia, life coach to her canine sidekick, and devoted Chicago hot dog enthusiast. Annie also maintains that oven fires are a natural side effect of cooking with gusto.

Cinnamon Cooper
Cinnamon, being curiously strong and originally celebrated, tries to keep her ego managable by learning trivia bits as she wrestles with wayward electronic graphics by day and tames bolts of fabric and skeins of yarn by night. You can read what she learns at Did You Know? and see what she makes at Poise. (Older One Good Meal columns may be found here.)

Brandy Gonsoulin
Brandy originally hails from south Louisiana and is a true bred and born Cajun, so she knows a thing or two about food. A career that started off in dance meant she was also a server at many places in Chicago. She decided to check out that 9-5 thing and got into marketing, and then decided that she should do the MBA thing as well. When she's not writing about all things food in Chicago, she's musing on ideas in business and marketing on her blog, Better Spoon.

Joanna Kanakis
Trading pork bellies and coffee by day, then roasting them all up at night, Joanna is a commodities broker by trade, urban farmer/food adventurer at heart. She writes about her steep learning curve in Kendall's night program, the tails of Old Town hens and her eco-loving, sweet-living at GreenSugar.

Andrew Huff, Editor & Publisher
Andrew works deep into the night at his West Ridge two-flat, writing and editing and playing with the cats. He spends more time online than is healthy; follow along at me3dia.com. Email him at ah@gapersblock.com.

Alexandra Moskovich
Alex likes food. A lot. She eats it and sometimes writes about it. She spends her free time making food, art and music. You can see her blog here.

Sunny McDaniel
A staunch Midwesterner, Sunny flirts with bahn mi and curry, but secretly harbors a lifelong crush on tuna noodle casserole. She's worked as a kayak guide, journalist, head chef, high school English teacher, cheesemonger and coffee buyer, and currently runs the specialty foods department for a natural/organic grocery store. When she's not poring over sales data spreadsheets, she's teaching cooking classes and trying a new food every week for her blog Smart Cabbage.

Clarisa Ramirez
Clarisa is a Texan who ended up in Chicago after living in the coffee mountains of Costa Rica for two years. Born and raised overseas, she grew up eating amazing South East Asian and Middle Eastern dishes. She's on a mission to find the best breakfast taco in Chicago.

Danielle Snow
Danielle Snow is a recent college graduate whose primary motivation is making sure that she, as well as others around her, are constantly well-fed. She currently works cooking delicious food in a local Chicago restaurant, and recycles her paychecks directly back into the food industry by eating out as frequently as possible. Her patron saint is Anthony Bourdain, although she vehemently disagrees with his stances on vegetarian food and karaoke (they are both so, so great).

Andie Thomalla
Despite all warnings, Andie is curious about how both laws and sausages are made.

Contributors

Alan Lake
Alan has been a professional chef for 25 years and has won numerous awards, professional competitions and distinctions. He's mainly consulting now, setting up projects like kitchen design, menu development, hiring and training staff, research, etc. He has also been a professional musician most of his life, coining the term "jazzfood" to describe "solid technique based upon tasteful improvisational skills." Just like the music. Check it out at alanlake.com.

Christian Scheuer
Christian, an artist, photographer and builder of things, works for a small gourmet bakery in Evanston, bringing sweet goodies to the masses in various coffee shops in and around Chicago. In his downtime, he makes "stuff for people who like stuff" and keeps a blog about his varied interests in design and things with wheels.