Entries associated with the tag "Crust":

Gourmet market owner Sara Foster discusses Sara Foster's Casual Cooking, her third cookbook, Friday at noon at the Book Stall.

Friday at 8 PM, the Architrouve presents Synaesthesia, a wine, music and visual art happening for which sommelier Jeremy Quinn will pair wines to the music of sax player Frank Catalano, who will in turn match his music to the gallery's current exhibition, "This Side of Hope." Tickets are $40; reservations are recommended.

Saturday at 10, Culinary Historians of Chicago presents "Greektown in All Its Glory," a talk by Alexa Ganakos at the Chicago History Museum. It includes a food tasting, and Ganakos will sign Greektown Chicago: Its History -- Its Recipes; admission's $5 for the general public, $3 for students, and free for CHC members.

The Whole Foods FlavorFest is this Saturday from 11 AM to 9 PM and Sunday from 11 AM to 8 PM in Jonquil Park. It boasts "more free samples than you can shake a stick at," though "free" may be an overstatement -- there's a $5 suggested donation to benefit the Lincoln Park Chamber of Commerce. In addition to the food, there are cooking demos, an eco-chic fashion show, live music, an farmers' market, and a children's pavilion.

Kilbourn Park Organic Greenhouse hosts a class on organic pest and disease control for your vegetable garden on Saturday from 10 to noon with the greenhouse's own Kirsten Akre and Angela Mason of the Chicago Botanic Garden. The fee is $20; registration highly recommended.

Crust hosts a family dinner Sunday from 4-6 PM to benefit Purple Asparagus, a non-profit organization "dedicated to bringing families back to the table." There'll be a live auction for a guest spot on the webcast Spatulatta and silent auctions for several more prizes. Tickets for adult members are $45, $50 for non-members; kids' tickets are $10 for members and $12 for non-members; kids under 5 are free.

The Southern Food and Beverage Museum's "Rebirth of the New Orleans Restaurant Industry" exhibit opens Monday at Kendall College and continues through September 21. It "explores the scope of devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans' restaurant industry...and the importance of this industry to the recovery of the city's economy, culture and singular cuisine."

A few more thoughts on Crust: for all its populist appeal, the orange plastic and formica aesthetic doesn't exactly make for a relaxing meal. Between the bright lights, plastic chairs, and just-the-other-side-of-comfortable sound level, the whole enterprise really seems designed to move units as fast as possible. Oddly enough the patio, despite its vastness, actually looks a lot cozier (it was too cold the night I went to eat alfresco).

But the moist, dense, GIANT slice of carrot cake (from Bleeding Heart) was pretty great.

In other neighborhood news, the BYOB Cosmospolitan opened two weeks ago at 954 N. California, serving Mediterranean-ish dishes for dinner and weekend brunch. Right now they're open relatively late--until 11 PM during the week and midnight Friday and Saturday--which I'm always happy to see, though it's anyone's guess whether, the Continental and the Clipper notwithstanding, that stretch has enough nighttime traffic to sustain it.

After the thoroughly run-of-the-mill meal I had at Il Covo last summer, I wasn't too surprised to hear this week that the place had changed hands. When I asked what the story was, the guy who answered the phone said, "We're now Italian men making Italian food." Dominico Fronteddu and Carol Johnson are handling the front-of-house, with chefs Nino Coronas and Giovanni Carvedda in the kitchen. The name's the same, but the menu's been revamped with a focus on Sardinian specialties (lots of seafood and meat) and handmade pastas. Fronteddu says they're planning to redecorate--just as soon as his parents come from Sardinia and bring him some carpets and stuff.

Some 20 blocks south of Il Covo, Dodo has started serving dinner Monday through Friday; it's also BYO and still cash only. No word on whether you can now get your Japanese pancake fix after 3 PM.

LTH Forum celebrates its third anniversary by sitting down for a one-hour-and-52-minute podcast discussion with Hungry Magazine. (Repeat: one hour and 52 minutes.)

There's a thorough examination of the rise of ethics in food writing, which engages at length the whole knotty elitism question at the core of the booming organic food industry, in this month's Columbia Journalism Review.

Speaking of organics: everybody goes to Crust.

And, lastly: don't you want to try a pie floater? (Hat tip to Food Chain contributor Elizabeth Tamny, at her blog Cahiers du moment.)

After 18 months and many revised schedules, Michael Altenberg's all-organic pizzeria Crust opened today yesterday. So you can probably get a table at Coalfire now.

Addendum: Who knows if there's actually some causal relationship here, but Reader contributor Anne Spiselman confirms this hypothesis. "I went to Coalfire last night (May 24), and it was almost empty. We were there from 7 to about 8 PM, and only a handful of tables were occupied. Then, remembering that Crust was opening the same day, we drove by and it was packed inside and in the sidewalk cafe."

January's not exactly the most exciting month in the restaurant biz--lots of spots close down for a week or two of well-deserved rest, and those that stay open tend to see an increase in empty tables as diners reassess their wallets and their waistlines. But it's not a total wasteland out there.

Recent weeks have seen the appearance of Sapore di Napoli, another Neapolitan pizza spot whose opening raises the question: "How much brick-oven pizza can a city built on deep-dish support?" The enigmatically named Simply It, a casual Vietnamese place from former Pasteur partner Tuan Nguyen, opened this week (after sending us an appropriately enigmatic Christmas card). It's BYO, with no corkage fee, for now. And in news that has the local food mafia abuzz, Geno Bahena (Ixcapuzalco, Chilpancingo) returns today to head up the kitchen at a new regional Mexican spot named after his hometown of Tepatulco, in the Pacific coast state of Guerrero.

In Andersonville next week, the Algerian creperie Icosium Kafe, a spinoff of Lakeview's Crepe and Coffee Palace, opens on the cursed northwest corner of Clark and Foster. The previous occupant, Corner Grille, appears to be only sparsely lamented, but I'll miss their oddly smoky hash browns. (Meanwhile, down the street, Rioja has been abruptly shuttered.)

And finally, Michael Altenberg (Bistro Campagne) says that his all-organic Wicker Park venture Crust (a change from the previous working name, Flatearth), in the works for the last year or so, will finally fire up its own woodburning oven on February 1. Our critics will be getting out to these and other new spots in the coming weeks, but in the meantime why don't you tell what you think by becoming a Reader Restaurant Rater?