Restaurants

In a year in Chicago, the app Too Good to Go has redirected around 108,000 meals from landfills by allowing consumers to buy unsold surplus products from restaurants and other food service businesses at a reduced price. 

When Chef Manny Gonzalez had his mother's tacos de canasta at a party, he knew he wanted his restaurant to be centered around the popular Mexican street taco. Gonzalez owns Guapo Taco in Brighton Park, and he explains the origins of "basket tacos."

FoodLab Chicago has been working with restaurants in South Side neighborhoods in the hopes of uplifting Black restaurateurs, especially after the pandemic brought new challenges for local business owners. Their goal is to make major corridors, like 75th Street, an established culinary destination for locals and tourists alike.

What does it take to make a fine dining restaurant run smoothly—especially one like Avondale's Wherewithall, where the menu changes every week? A creative and organized chef de cuisine and multitasking general manager, for one. 

Damarr Brown, the Chef de Cuisine at Virtue in Hyde Park, wasn't sure he wanted to do Top Chef at first. But after his mentor, Chef Erick Williams, encouraged him to take the opportunity, he went far in the competition. Brown discusses representation in the Chicago restaurant industry and shares his recipe for Chicken and Andouille Jambalaya.

The basic model is simple: “Why don’t you give us some funding to keep our restaurant workers employed and we’ll just feed people for free?” Restaurants like Mi Tocaya Antojería and the nonprofit Community Kitchen and Canteen have taken it up during the pandemic.

After remodeling, Lincoln Square's LC Phở n Grill reopened with an expanded menu that features harder-to-find Vietnamese dishes that the husband-and-wife owners workshopped while exploring Vietnamese restaurants in California.

Han Bat serves basically one thing: the milky, restorative Korean soup known as seolleongtang, which takes hours and hours to make. "When [Koreans] come to visit Chicago, they come over here, because... we are the only one who does this kind of food," says the owner.

"I never really loved high school lunches or any of that, anything outside of what my mom prepared in the kitchen," says Ray Espiritu, the owner of Isla Pilipina in Lincoln Square. When he didn't know what to do after graduating, he decided to take over a restaurant.

Himalayan Sherpa Kitchen serves many hard-to-find Nepali specialties, which combine Indian, Tibetan, and Chinese culinary influences, unlike many other Nepali restaurants in Chicago, which offer mostly North Indian dishes.

Andrea Andrade and Jose Navea didn't plan to stay in Chicago when they came to visit. Now they operate their own restaurant serving arepas, a nostalgic staple food of their home country of Venezuela. "You can't say Venezuela and not say arepas," Navea says. 

"For me, sustainability is developing and training the largest sum of African American and brown young men and women that I can possibly find," says chef Erick Williams, who has recently garnered national acclaim for his new Hyde Park restaurant, Virtue.