Usually I spend a couple sentences in my look back at the year in food mourning the new places that, despite my earnest love for them, didn’t make it past that first critical year or so. It’s by that standard that I’m going to declare 2020 one of the greatest years in Chicago restaurant history.
If Powerhouse suffered the curse of being the second restaurant I write about in a year, at least the first, Lao Peng You, is still cranking out its magnificent dumplings, if only for carryout. Andersonville’s Little Madrid is still serving tapas, and Lincoln Square’s Serbian O16 is still kicking too, converting to a sandwich shop next week. I’m nearly convinced the white ma po tofu ramen at Des Plaines’s Chicago Ramen inoculated me from COVID-19 because shortly after I sucked it up, everything fell apart really fast. I’m grateful to it, and all the others that have persevered.
One of the common denominators of these stories was that each chef was reaching back into their histories and drawing on food traditions and cultures that might not have a place in the old Chicago restaurant world, from the Vietnamese treats of the Snack Collective, to Eve Studnicka (Dinner at the Grotto) and Alexis Thomas’s (Black Cat Kitchen) Midwestern-weird mobile supper club. And then there was Furious Spoon’s Shin Thompson fully embracing Japanese curry at Bokuchan, thanks to the low overhead of a ghost kitchen; John Avila focusing on the food of Indonesia’s North Sulawesi with Minahasa; and the regional Malaysian food of Kedai Tepao—all delivered to your door by the hustling chefs who made it themselves.
