Mike Sula

Chicago

Food and Drink Writer at Chicago Reader

Chicago Reader food and drink writer. James Beardo. ธีมะ วิจิตรประพันธ์

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Articles

Las Flores rises from the ashes

1 week ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

Jazmin Flores was born of taco royalty, but the king didn’t always make it easy. “My dad would have us clean tables,” she says. “We gave out food, washed dishes. He would have us remove the stems from the jalapeños. He’d be like, ‘Be careful. Don’t touch your face. Wash your hands.’ Now, when I see the employees do it, they have gloves. I’m like, man, I remember doing that with my little bare hands.”But the cause was noble.
Basque-style tavern Gilda returns to Monday Night Foodball

2 weeks ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

It’s difficult to overstate the influence Albert D’Angelo had on a generation of Chicago cooks. The importance of the New York–based chef, who disappeared shortly after his April 1, 2008, Chicago debut in the Carter H. Harrison Water Intake Crib, two miles into Lake Michigan, easily eclipses that of Trotter, Kahan, Achatz—anyone you can name. “I think he represented this bygone era to my generation of chefs,” says Jeremy Leven.
The Focaccia Mama debuts at the next Monday Night Foodball

3 weeks ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

Don’t ask Gabriella Mazzarisi for her focaccia recipe. “I turn into my nonna and say, ‘Just watch,’” she says. “There is no build. There is no measuring involved whatsoever. We live in a city with four seasons, and you need to feel the dough. It should be squishy. It should be light to the touch. Don’t overmix it. It’s a feeling.”Don’t bother asking about her arancini, either. Or her spiedini. Or her olive oil cake or bitter green salad.
Coffee jelly at Tenjin

3 weeks ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

Reader Bites celebrates dishes, drinks, and atmospheres from the Chicagoland food scene. Have you had a recent food or drink experience that you can’t stop thinking about? Share it with us at [email protected]. “The excessive drinking of coffee in any case is an evil.
Nemanja Milunovic returns to Monday Night Foodball

4 weeks ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

I’ve been hoarding Nemanja Milunovic’s bread for more than three years. It was just last fall that I was spelunking the dark, forgotten recesses of my freezer when I came across my very last somun. That’s the pillowy, tortoise shell–shaped, steroidal flatbread that was a defining feature of Kiosk Balkan Street Food, the chef’s late, great short-lived ghost kitchen.
Brazil meets France at the next Monday Night Foodball

1 month ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

A printing press took three fingers off Chrissy Richards’s left hand when she was 18. That was her fretting hand, which meant that her days playing guitar for the southwest side’s hardcore Turkey Sandwich Sound Machine were over. “It absolutely sucked,” she says. “But the saving grace was I was so deep into the music, I cut a hole in my bandages to stick a drumstick in.
New Chicago food and beverage books you should read

1 month ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

There is a relatively small crop of Chicago food and drink books this spring (unlike last year). And only two of these new titles are available through the usual retail corridors. If they strike a fancy, please don’t reward the sniveling anticipatory obedience of the oligarchy by shopping online. Visit your local brick-and-mortar bookstore. For victory. It’s the end of the road for Amano’s biannual(ish) culinary travel journal.
Defy the lies in spring ’25 at Monday Night Foodball

1 month ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

I know. There are a thousand places you’d rather exist than in this corrupted reality, where armies of malignant goons strive to force-feed you gobs of steaming ordure at every instant. Here are nine of mine: Ireland, Brazil, Serbia, Sicily, northern Spain, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Nigeria. Hell, Wicker Park in 2014 would be preferable to this. There is a way there, if only for a few hours each week.
The Wurst-Miner Dunn Chicago Chipper at Monday Night Foodball

1 month ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

You’ve been here before. It’s 10 PM and you’ve been tossed from Darkey Kelly’s for acting the maggot with your mates. The street is spinning, your head is throbbing, and you’ve lost count of the pints o’ Beamish you’ve poured into your gob. You need something fast, hot, and greasy to quiet the churn in your guts. So you stagger down Fishamble Street looking for the nearest chipper.
Mother Prepper debuts new dishes at Monday Night Foodball

1 month ago | chicagoreader.com | Mike Sula

Stephanie Xiques’s culinary inheritance is the ropa-birria. That’s a taco built upon a crispy but pliable tortilla formed from garlicky green plantain masa. It swaddles an alloy of Mexi-Cuban shredded beef and molten Monterey Jack, dipped in a brick-red consommé. It’s only the most recent bequest from two grandmothers—and a husband—and it makes its debut on March 3 when Xiques brings Mother Prepper to the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Frank and Mary’s Tavern.