eating

Context for everything I will post about eating

There are probably loads of think pieces that cover what it means to be 'qualified' to talk about any of the things on this site, and I surely don't meet any of those requirements. But relative to the other areas of this site, I must be most qualified to talk about this one. I love to go out to eat. I feel strongly about the whole dining experience. The food, the service, the vibe, all of it. I have done it a lot, it is the focus of most of my social life when I leave my apartment, and I know the industry, the players, the drama like people do their favorite sports teams or entertainers. The purpose of this piece, which isn't about any particular dining experience per se, is to provide the background for how I think about and will probably write about food.

I grew up eating food in the same way I imagine a lot of people currently in their 30s or 40s grew up eating food. At least those of us from flyover country. And especially those of us that are White. There seemed to be some lingering effect that the Great Depression had on our parents, passed down by their parents, as to what we ate and how we ate it. Hamburger mixture was a favorite dish of mine. This was just ground beef over rice? I fucking loved salisbury steak. Even knowing what I know about food now, I couldn't tell you what salisbury steak is or is meant to be. Shit was fire, though. Porkchops cooked to 200F internally. Like chewing on a rock. We had something in my house called Chips and Cheese. I ate it as a snack all the time. It was tortilla chips that you put on a plate, then you sprinkled shredded cheese over them. Name made perfect sense. I started putting hot sauce on mine at a certain age. One of my favorite breakfasts was Mush. This was just like cornmeal circles, cooked in a pan, with syrup over them. Again, I liked a lot of this food. The porkchops were objectively horribe, and I hated porkchops for a long time because of it, but that is neither here nor there. My Mom was a decent enough cook, and I think would have been a lot better if she had the time or energy to expand her horizons, but she was just doing what most anyone was doing with three kids in the 90s presumably. My Dad couldn't cook for shit. Still probably doesn't have much of a clue there. Ignoring his obligation to his children - that he fulfilled lovingly - I think my Dad's only objective with respect to food was to figure out the point at which he could guarantee survival at the lowest possible cost. One of my lasting memories of childhood is when I told my friends over lunch in like 6th or 7th grade that my favorite cereal was "Marshmallows and Stars." Didn't even know this was off-brand Lucky Charms. Just thought that was what it was called. Realized quickly that wasn't the case. Shout out Aldi and my Dad. I don't want to be too critical of my food experiences growing up, though, mostly because I think this was just the way that a lot of people I talk to grew up eating, and I was content. But I am sure it shaped my experiences with food in some way; you can figure out how and tell me after you see how I write about it going forward.

Nothing really changed in college. I had more fast food.

I assume this is a common story, but my relationship with food changed a lot when I entered adulthood, moved into my first apartment, and went to an office every day. I had a big boy job, I felt flush with cash, and I ate fast casual food for lunch and ordered food in more than any reasonable person should. One of the most telling things to me about my opinions on food was how people who were a few years older than me ate in my office. They packed lunches, often the same food most days of the week, and they primarily ate fast casual food on Fridays. This wasn't true of everyone, but you get it. At the time, I found that depressing. I didn't want to eat a turkey sandwich and lays chips every day. I wanted to eat Chipotle and Naf Naf and Blaze Pizza and Taco Bell. Honestly, a disgusting way to live, and I became a fatass because of it. Far more damage than even college did to me. But I'm also one of those people who takes home leftovers, puts them in the fridge, then never eats them. My fianceacute;e is the same way. It is fucking terrible behavior. I seemingly always prefer something new, and "new" is just newer than yesterday's meal. Anyway, I wasn't actually flush with cash, and I spent my disposable income on the weekends at bars and on whatever other dumb shit people fresh out of college spend their money on. So, I didn't dine out much, probably because it never seemed worth it at the time. At some point before I hit 200 pounds and after I got bored of Chipotle and Naf Naf and Blaze Pizza and Taco Bell, I realized that maybe I should cook more. Novel concept. I'll put the relevant thoughts in the cooking section, but having to cook more made me think a lot more about food, what I wanted from it, and how much in money and time I was willing to pay for it, etc.

The cooking thing was hot and cold for a few years, I got older so my interests expanded beyond Sports Bar by some small amount, and I made a little bit more money over time. I took an interest in going out to eat more, and a small group of my friends did something called "Family Dinner," where the same 4 of us would go out to eat, one person picking a new restaurant each time. It felt less about the restaurants and more about the friendship at the time, but it forced us to think about our choices. For me, that really grew exponentially when I moved to New York in 2019. I moved to New York City (NYC) partially for work and partially because I worked there for a few months and the city seemed cool. But I had a fairly small social circle, and the friends I made in my new office were mostly a few years younger than me (see above for what they were doing, just more aggressively and more costly, obviously). So, I spent a large bit of my time figuring out what to do in NYC, and it turns out, in your late 20s, going out to eat and drink makes a lot of sense. I spent an even larger amount of time, like a genuinely insane amount of time, figuring out where to do these things. I read article after article and recommendation after recommendation. I was still not actually flush with cash, and now I was paying an exhorbitant price to live in a 400 square foot hallway, so most of that time was spent trying to figure out how to do it "right." I did this shit every Tuesday through Thursday before figuring out where to go and what to do. Then I did those things, and I became obsessed. I thought about a future article dedicated to NYC eating, but I think I should just cover it in some detail here, as it is a huge part of how I think about food and eating today.

The strongest take that I have about eating in NYC is that the best eating is done at the ~most expensive and ~least expensive places. There is unlimited food in NYC, but if you just leave your house to go find a place that is open, you are making a mistake. First, you're not that special. I have strong opinions on the effect that social factors play on what we perceive as the best restaurants, but it is still mostly a solved problem, especially in NYC. The market has spoken. But second, and probably more important to the point, everything in NYC is expensive. I don't want to sound like one of those people who doesn't understand this because I do, and I have no problem with it, but it is true. If you leave your house and wander into a random bar or restaurant, the burger is fucking 26 dollars (probably more now). There is a good chance that no matter how much you like food, you will morph into the guy who says shit like "it's just a burger" if you are not careful. I have a lot more to say on this, but I will stop now at simply stating how much making these decisions and tradeoffs on a weekly basis impacted my understanding of and interest in dining. It's basically all I did in NYC for a year.

I moved back to Chicago during COVID, spent less time outside of my house, especially at restaurants, but in the course of the next couple years, I moved to the West Loop, first with a friend of mine who is probably as passionate about food and dining as I am, then on my own. We were going anywhere and everywhere in the city that we wanted to try, but the West Loop was building fast, and a lot of the oft-talked-about chefs were putting restaurants there, so that made things easier for us. We were closer to Pilsen, too, which was great in different ways, mostly for us for the Mexican food, though they did have a few gems there in the value-on-the-more-expensive-side-of-things genre. Generally speaking, all of my friends are just....older, so we do older people things. And the things we happen to all seemingly like are going out to eat and drink. I don't think this is unique, but I would say the level of interest and value that we have in it and derive from it, respectively, is quite high. And I would say that is especially true for me. I just love this shit. Could talk about it forever, and that is what I hope to do here. For whatever it is worth, I live in Chicago now, so this content might be tilted toward that experience. Take it for what it is.

The best restaurant I've ever been to is Le Bernardin in NYC. My favorite restaurant is Tuome. The best value food I've eaten is Jenni's Quesadillas in Mexico City. The worst meal I can remember having was at Pollen Street Social in London. I think Alla Vita in Chicago is grossly overrated. That little exercise is to possibly give a taste of places and things I might talk about, but also to briefly talk about the words "best," "favorite," "value," "worst," and "overrated." I am sure I ate worse food at some point than I did at Pollen Street Social; it wasn't so much the food as it was the collective experience - which does include the food - that I disliked so much. For the price, I am sure I have been to better places than Le Bernardin, but I don't want to dig that deep and I don't think it is really the point. You could probably argue that Jenni's Quesadillas was better from that claim alone. But we are not going to define these perfectly, and I don't think there is a way to do so. When I talk about food or eating or restaurants, I will do what I can to focus most on the overall thoughts, tradeoffs, and other factors that go into my experience and least on one-word descriptors.

That said, what would we be without a rating system. A way for us to box ourselves into definitions for those words above that we don't want to define. Not everything on these pages will be a reivew, but I am sure a lot of it will end up that way. Beli seems to have a decent method for this whole process, but I want to have a system of my own, and people like the simplicity of a single number. For now, my rating system is not going to be anything special or clever, but we are going to do it sort of like how things get graded in school in America. There is a bottom that is technically 0, but no one actually ever really achieves a 0. We pretend to start at 0, but we don't really, not in effect. So, that's what we'll do here. The scale is 40 - 100 except for the special "U" rating. Unsatisfactory, exactly like when your work was so bad in elementary school that you had your parents called. For the sake of understanding, because the number itself never really makes sense no matter how you scale it, I can best describe this as the Guilty Pleasure Rating System, where all things get rated relative to such pleasures. For me, that guilty pleasure is Taco Bell. Not specifically because of its quality or service or value or whatever. I can't even really describe this so much as to just say that we all know what a "guilty pleasure" is meant to represent. And in my grading system, those are a 70; Taco Bell is a 70. Don't think too hard about it. It's not like saying "a 65 means the food is worse than Taco Bell's" or "a 75 is barely better than Taco Bell." Think more about how your guilty pleasure makes you feel. From there, we just try to make it make sense. The goal is to have the meaningful part of content in the writing. The rest is just a number. Maybe one day we will do something more involved; I have vague ideas, some of which stem from acknowleding that not every reviewer's review should count the same. For the time being, I will do them like the above, and please remember, the ratings are mine. Or yours if you want to write.