Enjoy Chicago

Mark Steuer's new German restaurant isn't named for his teenage all-accordion Krautrock cover band—though I wouldn't be surprised if he could pull something like that off. It is, however, a long-awaited return to the main stage by a chef who's veered all over the culinary map since his first days in Chicago, handling the savory side of things at Hot Chocolate, and then moving on to the Gage. Since leaving behind the nominally "midwestern" Bedford and then the South Carolina low-country wingding at Carriage House, he hasn't been idle. He manned the parilla as John Manion's chef de cuisine at the Argentine El Che, and created an underappreciated fried mortadella sandwich (among other things) at the late Orbit Room. He was even behind the tomato soup and grilled cheese and other upgraded bar foods at Albany Park's Surge Coffee Bar & Billiards, something the short and to-the-point menu at this spiffed-up pool hall that replaced the late, great Marie's Golden Cue inexplicably fails to mention.

It's worth following Steuer wherever he wants to go, and here he's gone to Germany, sort of, opening what was originally billed as a Bavarian beer hall. That's a digestible shorthand for what's happening in a long, open dining room and bar stretching away from Chicago Avenue toward a white-tiled open kitchen. And yet, in this spiffy brasserie, it's difficult to imagine beer-drenched revelers stuffed into lederhosen like sausages and bellowing "Ein Prosit der Gemütlichkeit" with their frothing steins held aloft.

Steuer came up cooking in South Carolina's low country, but his ancestral home is Germany, and it's the food of Deustchland and something of the former that he's very loosely playing with here, an approach underscored by goofily titled dishes like "Sürfentürfen," "the (Weiss) Wurst," and "Oysters Hockafeller."

The last is a play on the classic that incorporates crispy crumbled ham hock and pickled Fresno chiles to produce a luscious swirl of porky, buttery, smoky, sweet-and-hot sensations that almost made me forget how often I've complained that this is no way to treat an oyster. What's clear is that Steuer is doing what he wants. That also holds true of the bread service: two hot garlic pretzel knots, each the size of a toddler's fist, accompanied by pinch bowls of a soft pimento cheese and a mayo-and-vinegar-based Alabama-style white barbecue sauce.

The latter, even when accidentally applied to a smoked half chicken smothered in summer squash, crowder peas, and tomatoes in a silky but powerfully rich and tangy Alsatian Riesling sauce, demonstrates that an uptight attitude about southern and/or German food closes one off to the possibility of embracing gemütlichkeit, or any pleasure at all.

OK, one common cliche attached to both of those cuisines prevails: it's a meaty menu, with steak tartare, nearly emulsified with truffle vinaigrette, tightly wrapped in cold cabbage and showered with grated Gouda and pickled mustard seeds that pop brightly, lightening the load (the dish has since been 86'd). Chunks of crispy grilled pork belly and jiggly, sweet seared scallops form the aforementioned surf and turf, their hot, rich swagger checked by pureed sauerkraut and sweet, glistening Klug Farms plums. And these are just midsize plates. Feasting-size trenchers include a grilled rib eye awash in a sauerbraten-styled jus, sliced and fanned around mashed potatoes with a riff on Arby's "horsey sauce," and a hot, crispy schnitzel, dabbed with sauce gribiche, that stretches across the plate under a salad of arugula and cherry tomatoes.

By the time you read this, that bright seasonal foil to the fried madness will likely have been swapped in favor of something more seasonal, as will a few of the other veg-centric dishes, which make up a third of the menu. You'll have missed out on the sweet, cool chunks of melon and tomato tossed with hot cubes of browned Brun-uusto cheese and ribbons of salty speck. Whips of bitter broccolini showered in shaved cheddar, crushed hazelnuts, golden raisins, and creamy buttermilk dressing are loaded with an underlying heat, while braised leek coins are mounted with smoked trout and roe. There will always be some form of the soft, tubular spaetzle—an ever-changing "blue plate spaetzle," according to Steuer—but in mid-September they came dressed with basil and tossed with radish, Parmesan, roasted corn, zucchini ribbons, cherry tomatoes, and candied walnuts.

There is one dish that's neither a dominant protein nor a lighter counterpoint to the carnality but has the potential to be a year-round classic Steuer will never be able to take off his menu: soft, house-made ricotta dumplings with cauliflower, meaty oyster mushrooms, crumbled kielbasa, and gooseberries in a glossy sauce made from the ricotta whey and reduced chicken stock, topped off with a charred rosemary vinaigrette. More than anything, it prompts a pursuit of athletic indulgence without the leaden heaviness normally associated with northern-European food.

Even three desserts seems injudicious after such intensity, but both the pastry-formal Black Forest cake and the bombolini-like doughnuts, filled with custard and rolled in cinnamon sugar, present challenges worth rising to.

The beer-hall aspect of Funkenhausen is realized with nine German imports in various varieties (kolsch, pilsner, gose, dopplebock, etc) and a focused but fascinating collection of the underserved wines of Austria and the French-German border in particular, put together by GM (and former Carriage House sous chef) Joseph Carnahan.

Like that historically shifting borderland, the food at Funkenhausen is somewhat rooted in the Old World, but mostly it's just Steuer, who's more than earned the right to ignore borders on both sides of the Atlantic.  v

At the grand opening of the Tea Pot Brew Bakery at 1802 South Wabash. The line is out the door!! People (lots of young people) enjoying delicious ice cream, hot teas and coffees, cookies, cakes and pies. Owners Veranda and Yomi are Chicagoans bringing new energy to the South Loop.

As a reminder, we first posted about this in June.  This little building has sat vacant for a long time so it's nice to see an interesting local business turn it into something.

Source: http://www.sloopin.com/2018/10/tea-pot-brew-bakery-officially-opens-at.html

Third post this week referencing the One Central Development!  Lots of interest in this development since it is rumored to cost $20 billion and could reshape the neighborhood.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Wednesday she essentially read the riot act this week to the Wisconsin developer of One Central, a massive project proposed for just west of Soldier Field.

She’s not happy with the way Landmark Development is running roughshod over elected officials and the neighboring residents they represent.

She doesn’t like the fact that developer Bob Dunn went to Springfield “under cover of darkness” to slip authorization for a $3.8 billion transit hub — a key to the project — into the state capital bill.

That transit hub, built over the rail tracks just west of the football stadium, would serve as the base for a string of up to 10 skyscrapers. But Lightfoot is not at all certain the transit center should be a priority for the city of Chicago, given the city’s other more pressing mass transit needs.

“I don’t like the way that they are conducting themselves. And I made that clear in no uncertain terms,” Lightfoot said of the City Hall meeting Tuesday, where she made an appearance “for about three minutes.”

Dowell, whose ward includes the development site, hosted an initial community meeting on One Central in March, after Landmark Development unveiled its preliminary plans. Last night’s meeting was touted as the beginning of a community engagement process that will last several months.

“I just want to say again, as I said in the meeting on March 13, this project is in its infancy. It is not a done deal,” Dowell said at the beginning of the meeting, to some applause. “There have been no backdoor deals. My office, nor the office of the city of Chicago, nor CTA, nor Metra have signed off on this project or have given its approval.”

Though the General Assembly recently signed off on a deal that would allow the developer to secure as much as $5.1 billion in equity and financing costs, the Chicago City Council still needs to approve a zoning change for the project.

Source: http://www.sloopin.com/2019/06/one-central-development-faces-questions.html

“Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now,” edited by Maggie Taft and Robert Cozzolino, with chapters by Wendy Greenhouse, Jennifer Jane Marshall, Maggie Taft, Robert Cozzolino, Rebecca Zorach and Jenni Sorkin. University of Chicago Press

As a cultural hub, Chicago always has contained a multitude of art communities, organization and scenes. “Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now,” edited by Maggie Taft and Robert Cozzolino, addresses Chicago’s art world in historical precedents and in its contemporary trajectory. The first five chapters address the many art-world eras of the city, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth, and ends with conversations by contemporary artists and scholars. The inception of Chicago’s art world, according to this book, begins with Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a Haitian-born, Afro-Caribbean fur trader who settled at the then-trading post and housed an impressive art collection which included “mirrors, French walnut cabinets with glass doors, a feather bed and two paintings.” The city—acknowledged in the introduction as having been named after the Miami-Illinois indigenous word for wild onion plants, Shikaakwa—has a strong history with civic engagement. It is a city that has, according to Taft and Cozzolino, the “strength of art education, the prominence of women in the arts and the flourishing of African-American cultural institutions, the constancy of activism and social practice” and these assets continue to attract people from all over the world to the city. Chicago’s art worlds began with the now heavyweight art organizations. This includes the Art Institute of Chicago, World’s Columbian Exposition, Fine Arts Building, Municipal Art League and women’s empowerment organizations such as at Hull House (started by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr).

The book points out that none of these organizations are absolved of critique and that as a city, Chicago must look to its past to improve in the future. Early art organizations were invested in a top-down model of thinking Chicago was a place “with none or lacking history” and thought to educate the masses through European models. For example, Taft states that at the beginnings of the Hull House, while the organization sought to empower immigrants and poor people with creative endeavors and culturally specific craft traditions, “most [efforts] had tinges of cultural appropriation” or “rich white lady knows best.” Art in Chicago also documents the simultaneous romanticization and erasure of the indigenous communities of the region. “The evocation of Native American heritage was a means of celebrating Chicago as an authentically American place and also of feeding the anti-modern nostalgia that was one response to urbanism, but it did not acknowledge Native Americans as actual citizens of modern Chicago.” Linking this history to a more recent time, the book recalls the 1992 Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s “Couple in the Cage” performance at the Field Museum of Natural History. In the performance, they inhabited a cage wearing “newly discovered” Amerindian clothing and “dramatized the Western cultural practice of dehumanized spectacle: displaying subjugated peoples of color as primitives, exotics, even zoo animals.” This act is a critique of museums and their relationships to colonialism, as the institutional collection of indigenous people’s remains and their ritual objects are usually tied to the nation’s appropriation of their land. Chicago as a city provides a way of challenging sedimented ideologies through bold participation in the arts.

OBAC Visual Artists Workshop, “Wall of Respect,” 1967 (now destroyed) /Photo: Robert Sengstacke

After the founding of the South Side Community Art Center in 1941 as part of the New Deal, the Black Arts movement rose to prominence parallel with the Black Power Movement in the sixties and seventies. At the SSCA, black artists such as Charles White and Gordon Parks, and Morris Topchevsky, a Russian-Jewish immigrant, taught and exhibited their work. In Chicago, black artists have always had to make their own cultural spaces. The founding of organizations like OBAC (Organization of Black American Culture) in 1967, inspired the ascendance of many others, including AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), Kuumba Theater and the OBAC Writers Workshop. Organizations such as these continue to challenge the city’s legacy of excluding African Americans from cultural institutions. For example, the iconic “Wall of Respect” mural, designed by Sylvia Abernathy in 1967, featured “black heroes in the realms of politics, music, athletics, drama, literary pursuits and religion.” It adorned the Grand Boulevard neighborhood in a time where Federal Housing Administration’s policies, in essence, affirmed the legal redlining of Chicago’s neighborhoods, a history with repercussions that continue to the present day through gentrification. The “Wall of Respect” was also a counterpoint to the unveiling of Chicago’s Picasso in 1967, during this time the city’s officials celebrated Picasso’s work and ignored the “Wall of Respect,” a cultural pulpit for the South Side black community where meetings, protests and rallies were held.

Arts and activism have always intertwined in Chicago. In October 1989, responding to the AIDS epidemic, ACT UP Chicago created a “freedom bed,” a large, street-bound theatrical installation featuring an oversized bed. It was a protest “in response to Illinois state legislation that mandated HIV testing for certain government workers.” It became a site where people held performances regarding sexual health and reproduction.

Dawoud Bey, “Lauren,” 2008. From the series ”Young Chicagoans,“ commissioned as part of Character Project /Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Daiter Gallery

The book closes with conversations by contemporary practitioners including Michelle Grabner, Hamza Walker and Tempestt Hazel, Gregg Bordowitz and a comic strip by Kerry James Marshall. This last section features a snapshot of the contemporary cultural moments in Chicago, involving both Chicago as “a site of destination and departure.” A conversation between Stanislav Grezdo, curator of the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art and Cesáreo Moreno, curator of the National Museum of Mexican Art, reflects on the necessity of establishing cultural spaces to address the needs of specific communities. Moreno shared the reason for creating the National Museum of Mexican Art in 1987 by a group of teachers, saying “[They] did not really know anything about art or museums. What they did know was that although twenty-five percent of the students they were teaching were of Mexican ancestry, there was nothing in the curriculum that touched on their history or their culture.” The nature of Chicago as a city that contains multitude is reflected in many organizations that continue to shape the legacy of the city throughout time. Studs Terkel reportedly once remarked that “All roads lead to Chicago.” All roads lead to community and Chicago is a place where anyone can build them. The nature of the city is like a magnet, attracting, repelling, shaping, building and rebuilding hybridity as it spans time and space. (Hiba Ali)

“Art in Chicago: A History from the Fire to Now,” edited by Maggie Taft and Robert Cozzolino
University of Chicago Press, 2018

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A wildly popular Cubs-centric look at baseball’s past. Here’s a handy Cubs timeline, to help you follow along as we review select scenes from the rich tapestry of Chicago Cubs and Major League Baseball history. The embedded links often point to articles that I’ve chosen as illustrative of the scenes, from The Society for American Baseball Research, reproductions of period newspapers, images, and other such material.

Today in baseball history:

• 1884 - Pitcher Larry Corcoran, who had signed with the Chicago team of the outlaw Union Association, breaks his contract to re-sign with his old club, the Chicago White Stockings of the National League. (3)
• 1898 - After the death of Charles H. Byrne, team secretary Charles Ebbets replaces the one-third owner as president of the Bridegrooms (Dodgers). The team’s former office boy and future owner will also manage the Brooklyn nine for the last 110 games of the season, finishing tenth in the 12-team National League circuit. (1)
• 1904 - The Highlanders (Yankees) announce plans to play their Sunday home games this season at Long Island’s Ridgewood Park. In March, the National Commission’s chairman August Herrman will announce he will not allow the club to play there due to the close proximity of the ballpark to Brooklyn, the home of the National League’s Superbas (Dodgers). (1)
• 1918 - The Chicago Cubs acquire Boston Braves pitcher Lefty Tyler in exchange for Larry Doyle, Art Wilson and $15,000. Tyler will win 19 games for the Cubs this year. (1)
• 1942 - Rogers Hornsby becomes the 14th player selected to the Hall of Fame, getting 78 percent of the vote, while both Frank Chance (58%) and Rube Waddell (54%) miss out. Hornsby’s offensive numbers rival those of any player before or since. He and Ted Williams are the only players to win the Triple Crown twice, and Hornsby’s .424 mark in 1924 is the highest National League batting average in the 20th century. (3)
• 1977 - Mary Shane is hired by the Chicago White Sox as the first woman TV play-by-play announcer. (3)
• 1995 - Five bills aimed at ending the Major League Baseball strike are introduced in the United States Congress. (3)

Good article on the strike by Cliff Corcoran.

• 2002 - Tony Tavares, citing he is tired of losing, resigns as the president of the Angels. The 52 year-old executive, who was also the chairman of the NHL’s Mighty Ducks, assumed the baseball post after Disney bought the team from Jackie Autry in 1996. (1)
• 2005 - Wade Boggs, a five-time batting champion, and Ryne Sandberg, a nine-time Gold Glove Award winner at second base, are elected to the Hall of Fame. Boggs becomes the 41st player elected to Cooperstown in his first year of eligibility, while receiving 474 of the record number of 516 votes cast (92%). Sandberg receives 393 votes, six more than the minimum number. Relief pitchers Bruce Sutter (66.7%) and Goose Gossage (55%), and outfielders Jim Rice (59.5%) and Andre Dawson (52%), are the only other players to be named on at least half of the ballots cast. All four will be voted in over the next five years. (1)
• 2008 - The city of Chicago gives approval for the Cubs to add 70 ‘bullpen box seats’ and to incorporate additional signage at Wrigley Field. The 93-year-old ballpark, due to its landmark status, needed permission from the Department of Planning and Development to make the changes. (1)
• Cubs Birthdays: Al Bridwell, Alex Metzler, Ted Lilly, Kris Bryant.

Sources:

Thanks for reading. #Cubsnews