- Michael Gebert
- Sushi takes the cake this year on Chicago‘s list.
In a food-media world where 90 percent of what’s written are listicles and the remaining ten percent seems to be Dennis Lee making us sorry we asked, there’s one list that still has the solemnity of tradition to lend it a certain amount of gravitas. Of course I mean Eater’s “The 21 Hottest Burgers in Chicago 2015”! Alas, the article wasn’t quite what I expected (“With a surface temperature of ten million degrees and the gravitational pull of Saturn, Oxheart & Truncheon’s Plasma State burger is capable of reversing the flow of time and proving that P ≠ NP”). So let’s talk instead about Chicago magazine’s annual best restaurants list.
In short, it’s a solid, thoughtful list full of places I’d recommend—so why does it feel a little thin? Part of it is that in some ways it’s seemed like a year that was aiming for doubles and triples at best. That’s not fair to Momotaro, certainly, which comes off like a Disney-size gamble on importing someone else’s culture lock, stock, and barrel, and in some ways it’s probably not fair to places that were big gambles for their small owners, like Parachute or Tete, but nothing feels to be shooting for the moon the way an El Ideas or a Grace or a 42 Grams did in recent past years.
