FOOD & DRINK
Find more one-of-a-kind Chicago food and drink content at chicagoreader.com/food.
Kitchen crews at various Monday Night Foodball pop-ups, hosted at the Kedzie Inn COURTESY MIKE SULA
ALT-FOOD
The chef underground ain’t dead yet
Pop-ups and the general alternative food economy suffered some slowdowns in 2022, but they were still a lot more exciting than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. By MIKE SULA
I
discovered a tangle of disarticulated entrails in my backyard at dawn one Saturday late last summer: a tiny squiggle of digestive tract and an alien-like blue, bulbous, kidney-bean-sized blob. My first guess was an extraterrestrial encounter gone wrong, until I spotted a tiny paw waving up from the grass that Google suggested was rat-like or possibly squirrelly in origin. Rodents rule the alleys and postage-stamp backyard gardens of Albany Park. At least that was the case on my block up until last winter
8 CHICAGO READER - DECEMBER 22, 2022
when a pair of sharp-shinned hawks took up residence at the top of a towering oak on the parkway. In late February they claimed their turf with a shower of pigeon feathers and bloody bones on my front steps, and from then until the end of the summer, you could occasionally spot their mangled leftovers around the neighborhood. When they weren’t terrorizing the local fauna, they perched on the highest branches of the tree and shrieked at each other all day long. I loved them.
It wasn’t just their occasional crime scenes that allowed me to embody the forensic pathologist I was always supposed to be; they provided a reminder that occasionally something uncommon and wild invades the gray, human-enabled Chicago ecosystem, scattering the house sparrows and reminding the squirrels not to get soft. Usually when I stopped to squint up at them this summer, I was wrestling with my laptop, trying to wrench out some words to describe some analogous incursion into the city’s
(human) foodscape. Much like last year (and the year before) I continued to look to the underground and gray market food economy as the place to spot the most interesting, creative, and groundbreaking chefs and foodlums in the city. Even as the masks continued to come off, there’d been no great sigh of relief in the hospitality industry in 2022. The traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant economy did not come roaring back amid Omicron. With inflation and staffing shortages, operators struggled with their own kind of long COVID, and for many the prolonged struggle proved to be too much. Brick-and-mortar closings kept pace with notable openings. And yet the comeback was enough that you could see the effect it had on the underground. Plenty of cooks, bartenders, servers, and chefs made their way back to brick-and-mortars or even jobs in other industries, as their side hustles proved less sustainable as the world reverted back to something resembling what it once was, but nevertheless will never be again. I’d been hearing all year long from folks who flourished in the alt-economy about how changes in Instagram’s algorithm had made things difficult for the host of new food businesses I’d been writing about since the beginning of the pandemic. I saw it myself as social media engagement with our Monday Night Foodball pop-up promos dropped off precipitously some weeks. But that didn’t mean interest dropped off. Some brick-and-mortars continued to be in-
ll