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Blog Tue Sep 16 2008
Serious Eats' Chicago City Guide Debuts
Serious Eats' City Guide to Chicago debuted last Friday, and stirred up a little controversy in the comments and elsewhere.
Written by Good Eats contributor and food-writer-about-town Michael Nagrant, it's a very solid overview of some of the best places to go in a variety of categories, from best Chicago-style pizza to best burger to best late-night eats. For the most part, I agree with Nagrant's choices -- in as much as one can choose one or two places for each of these categories in a city as large and diverse as Chicago. My disagreements were fairly small: I'm not a fan of Hot Doug's Chicago dog (his choice for city's best) -- it's average, and seems a little underweight to me. Put me down for U Lucky Dog (aka the original Fluky's). And Nagrant's pick of Aria Bar for sushi was puzzling. Katsu has to be the best for formal sushi, and if it's really about the chef, my money is on "Sushi Mike" Ham at Tanoshii.
On publication, the guide glaringly neglected to mention Italian beef. It's an iconic dish in Chicago, one that tourists and locals alike single out as one of the city's great culinary contributions. The omission has since been rectified, and I wholly endorse the choices of Al's #1, Chickie's and Johnnie's.
MenuPages Blog puts the Serious Eats guide up head to head against to the list created by Sky Full of Bacon's Michael Gebert a couple weeks ago, when Ed Levine announced the series. Plenty of overlap, and between the two and LTH Forum's Great Neighborhood Restaurant Awards (nominations for this year's awards just opened, by the way), you'll have enough places to try to keep you happy for months.
Brad / September 16, 2008 8:52 PM
Other than the Italian beef omission the most astonishing thing for me is that he picked a dim sum as Chicago's best brunch?