I Suppose We’ll Have To Forage In Memory of Bad Hunter By Evan Williams Photos By Rebecca Oh
Bad Hunter, a veggie-forward restaurant in the West Loop, closed down during the pandemic. With it went a meal my mom and I had planned four years in advance. When she first visited me in Chicago, it was October. At home, bow-hunting season was in full swing and our family was stocking their freezers with deer sausage. Having been in the city a month at that point, I was, for all intents and purposes, still a visitor, vexed by the constant noise, the light pollution, and the replacement of the term supper with dinner. And so, we were tourists. We took a tourist-ride in a water taxi, we bought tourist-goods at Navy Pier, and we sent tourist-Shedd-Aquarium-postcards home, but God forbid if we were to have a tourist dinner too. “No deep dish, no hot dogs, that’s surface level,” I said to my mom. “I know a place,” I continued, and panicked, for I did not know any place. We walked about, ambled, meandered, and flaneured, until lo and behold, before our eyes stood Bad Hunter. I’d heard of that one, somehow. Aha! Said I, Dinner! And so in we went, meeting empty glass bottles stacked to the ceiling, a hipster bar to rival any that Portland might offer, and white tablecloths—the nice kind, not the ones that come with crayons. We were forty-five minutes early for dinner service, but were greeted warmly with a basket of bread nonetheless.
24
2020 bite | winter fall 2020
We waited the forty-five minutes, inventing elaborate, tragic backstories for the belugas at Shedd. We quietly mocked the phrase dinner service. We munched on the rustic, oat-encrusted loaf before us. At six on the dot, a waitress brought us menus and more bread. As we soon learned, Bad Hunter is so named for its tiny dishes and—given proper botanical know-how—largely forageable ingredients. When our something-with-mushrooms and som thing-with-potatoes dishes arrived, we laughed, enjoyed our few bites of each, then ordered a second round. We had more bread. We ordered dessert: parsnip-plum-ginger cake, raspberry sherbet, and a pair of cookies—the only dish that was, in fact, large. It was a fête. I’d found a vestige of home in Chicago, a place where a dinner felt a little more like a supper. Mom and I walked out of the restaurant and back into the nowrainy West Loop. We hailed a cab, and drove back to Union Station. We hugged, and swore we’d return to Bad Hunter once I graduated to have a couple rounds of mushroom-something with a side of potato-something, and a lot of bread. Now with no dinner service to crash, I suppose we’ll have to forage our own supper instead.