The 10 Best New Things I Ate in 2017

It came to head for me at Diana Davila’s Mi Tocaya Antojeria, one of the openings in Chicago that was just beginning to climb into national acclaim. Surrounded by the kaleidoscopic murals of Technicolor cacti, I sat down to eat a taco campechano. It was dark, moody, complex, almost emo—basically the Kylo Ren of tacos. However, there was something missing. It felt intellectual, like I was watching Oscar-bait arthouse cinema over a comfortably dumb Will Ferrell comedy.

I was surprised because it was the sort of food I liked, or at least, the sort of food I thought I liked. And when I sat down to make this list, I wasn’t sure what I would value most this year: creativity, technical execution, comfort, and so on. “Whatever,” I said to myself. It would be borne out in the list.

And what the answer came out to be was a very writerly answer: memory and stories. Not very surprising in retrospect, but the dishes I chose ended up telling a story about friends changing neighborhoods, boredom, having more money (and more importantly, knowing people with even more money), of getting sick, traveling, and sitting on sun-drenched patios with a flute sweating in my hand.

It’s strange how we can build a diary out of the bricks of lipids and glucose chains, yet here we are. Let’s get on with it.

Salad of Hearts of Palm – State Bird Provisions (San Francisco) Takeover of The Publican (Chicago)

Hot Dog – Duck Inn (Chicago)

Apples and Chanterelles Granité – Relæ (Copenhagen) by way of Next (Chicago)

Pineapple with Goat Cheese – Leña Brava (Chicago)

Cranberry Kolac – Bakeshop Praha (Prague)

Chicken Empanada – El Cubanito (Chicago)

Cajeta Ice Cream – Giant (Chicago)

Tacos al pastor is like all classic fashion: timeless. I suspect that this particular dish will barely ever change, from when Lebanese immigrants first brought the döner kebab to central Mexico a hundred plus years ago to ten thousand years in the future when Earth has been ravaged by radiation and the only religion we have left is al pastor.

La Cecina’s version is marinated into an angry neon orange and charred with black blisters, the meat luscious and fatty, its drippings cut by cilantro and onions and a bright acid sword from grilled pineapple.

I thought a lot about whether to put this one in the ten spot because of the kitchen’s variance in quality, but for those ten grease-riddled seconds of guzzling, it was a moment frozen in amber. Some demand consistency, but sometimes Russian roulette is best.

Macaroni is deeply personal. We all have developed childhood memories, as thick with nostalgia as a true roux. Everyone thinks theirs is the best. Case in point: I’ve ordered macaroni from all over the spectrum, from hole-in-the-walls to toqued titans and always found them wanting, while my version has long been my favorite and an undeniable warhorse among my friends. So to be bettered by the clone of a generically-named River North restaurant in the suburbs—a place I’ve often called a culinary wasteland—was a terrible blow to my pride. It also meant one hell of a mac and cheese.

Farmhouse’s came in a cast iron skillet clumsily topped with a giant slab of tender shortrib and some extraneous pea tendrils and very extraneous cauliflower. It also broke my Rule #1 of simple cheese with a fancy proprietary blend my waiter was either too secretive or too indifferent to unveil. I dug into it. I stared at it. I grimaced. Though the accoutrements were ungainly, the underlying elemental form was unimpeachable, an unctuous velvet knife that cut straight to the core of you. Defeat never tasted so good.

As my friend stated, at her funeral, she wanted to be enveloped in that cheese. In her dream death scenario, the mourners would eat from her coffin before Thriller kicked onto the speakers and her body would be pulled up on strings to dance along to Michael Jackson’s falsetto. If you tried it, you would get it.

After half a day on a plane my back had stiffened up and I spent the next half of the day wandering around Prague. It’s kind of a dick move to put some of this on the list, but it was an indelible part of my 2017. I had spent hours getting lost within the hidden arches and courtyards and trudging up hills as my Google Maps spun in a dazed, meth-addled death rattle on my spotty roaming AT&T connection. The cobblestones—and there seemed to be nothing but cobblestones—were like little knives to my feet. Everything ached and was sore.

Let me tell you though, tourist trap though it might be, Prague is one of the sexiest cities you will ever go to, the whole place essentially one gigantic aphrodisiac. But it was in this limping state that I appeared, like Steve Nash, clutching my back and sweating bullets that I sat down to in elegant Field where I was served with staggeringly polite efficiency by a mob of Aryan models masquerading as a waitstaff.

The most exquisite thing I ate there was a miniature ice cream cone of smoked corn and tomato balsamic caviar, bursting in little vinegared bombs like roe and a tiny cup of beet concasse, taken like a shot of gazpacho that washed away all the baking sun and grit. I could almost hear my muscles unknotting and unwinding with every mouse-sized bite.

I used to love eggs benedict. I’ve eaten benedicts with dry English muffins, less dry English muffins, with waffles, with pancakes, deconstructed, vacuum-sealed in space. These days, it tastes like boredom to me.

So instead I got a tiny EMP Art Deco tin that I cracked open like a make-up compact and ate poached quail egg and ossetra caviar out of asparagus puree and ham gelee that was probably cured for 30 months in some indescribably expensively exotic mountain cabin in Spain while I spooned heapings of unadulterated decadence onto a microbiscuit. It’s likely the closest I’ll ever get to being the 1%. For one glorious moment I felt like popping some Veuve Clicquot on my imaginary yacht while I partook in some insider trading. It was at this point that I threw back my head and screamed in the restaurant, Kevin-Garnett-style: “Anything is possssibbbbbbblllllleeeeeee!!!!” (Editor’s Note: This did not actually happen.)

An Italian-inflected gastropub secreted away in a wine cellar on an empty street in Pest’s Jewish quarter, Fricska was the neighborhood restaurant I’ve always wanted but never truly had. I ate five courses and drank a bunch of Hungarian wine and barely broke $40. If I could have airlifted all of Budapest and Fricska back with me like they did in Age of Ultron, I would’ve been willing to break the world. They are a true chalkboard restaurant, so much in fact that the table next to us had to awkwardly stand behind to read it. If Field was Michelin-starred delicate gastronomy, Fricska was nothing but a warm, rustic cocoon.

Our waiter pushed hard on the beef cheek goulash, and the upsell was beautiful and dark and deep. But my two favorites were rack of lamb nestled on mushroom risotto and a pale, pink card deck of veal with pesto tortellini that I punctured with the tines of my fork and raked through a counterbalance of sweet potato puree. I don’t even like sweet potatoes, but when I think of winter and warmth I think of that 98-degree summer night in Budapest.

Fun Fact: I don’t really eat ice cream.

It’s a dark secret I have carried deep inside my heart for a long time, especially since I partly grew up in my dad’s café snacking on gelati. I don’t dislike it. I just don’t really care about it. It’s like telling people I don’t like puppies (untrue) or that I don’t find babies cute (true).

But ice cream is a big thing in Eastern Europe, even moreso here than in the states. And while I don’t know if this tiny parlor’s strawberry ice cream was far superior to other delicious strawberry ice creams I have had, nothing was more emblematic to me about food’s ability to be the avatar for memory. When I think of that ice cream, I think about making too many Sax-Eis “sex-ice” jokes to my friend. I think of said friend returning early to the hotel room because he was tired (or fleeing more sex-ice jokes). I think of venturing out alone at night and climbing the steps of a hill to a clock tower and instead finding a raucous party in the ruins of a castle at 10PM on a Monday night and I think of climbing back down and getting more ice cream and sitting in one of the many town squares of Graz by a fountain, bathing in the orange light and my plastic spoon chipping off pieces of ice made sweet by strawberries and life.

After Thai and Danielle Dang had everything stolen from them down to his childhood nickname, everyone and their mother was cheering for them to have a phoenix-like rise from the ashes. So it was with some relief that I liked them for their merits and not just their story.

A long time ago, during a discussion of Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, a film teacher of mine told me that too many young filmmakers avoid specificity to achieve universality. This was a fallacy. The way to achieve universality was through specific sense of place. No matter how disparate the background, the audience will find a way to identify if you were vivid enough with your strokes. This is a long way of saying it took me a while to realize that Hến Xúc Bánh Đa was nothing more than a Vietnamese analogue for chips and dip.

Giant shards of grilled rice crackers served as life rafts for piles of chilled clams, chopped up with Thai basil, lime juice, and roasted peanut, shipwrecked survivors that I shoveled, not out of harm’s way, but straight into my mouth like a conveyor belt to hell.

Eating it was a succinct summation of Southeast Asian cooking: all fire and acid and herbaceousness rolling around in your mouth like a Fisher-Price corn popper vacuum in an incredible language borne of touch and texture and tactility. Their eye might have been stolen, but in the land of the chefs, the tongue is still king.

Chicago has embraced the pork and offal scene like few other cities. So having Chris Cosentino walk in with all his attendant baggage of accolades, I bounced with nervous anticipation over whether he could show me anything new.

His first few dishes were solid to good: a Chinese-accented riff on shavings of beef tendon in chili oil, a lesser carrot successor to the Publican’s barbecued version, a buttery hunk of calf’s brain on toast that was practically Hannibal-esque.

The true slap-to-the-face moment was when they brought out the lobster, a two-pound monster straddling a brick of pork belly slathered in more chili oil and studded with a pox of fermented black beans. I don’t really believe in ordering lobster at restaurants. It’s typically overpriced, under-portioned, and best served naked. Any and all protests were drowned away in the cacophony of cracking claws and splitting exoskeletons. The oil accentuated the sweetness of the meat, the funk of the beans shouted in counterpoint. Instead of the usual subtleness fading into blandness, it was bold on bold on bold.

It tasted like Sunday dinners in Chinatown with my family, and it tasted like the leftovers in my fridge. That day Cosentino was cooking with some deeper primal alchemy. That night he was a force of nature.

There is little to write about Alinea that hasn’t already been written. Somehow a little walk up in Old Town contains America’s closest thing to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Do not let the military austerity of the kitchen and the clockwork Walter White precision fool you. Grant Achatz has the twin souls of a poet and an inventor, mortared together by xanthan gum. To say they fed me would be entirely missing the point. It was one of the most purest expressions of artistic creativity I have ever encountered. And this dish was the best dish of the best meal of my life.

Black bass. Orbs of cucumber. Coconut Meringue. Fried Parsley. Sesame Dumplings.

It was such a whimsical, lustful evocation of Thailand that I had to take a moment. There was no river of chocolate but coconut curry and not enough Oompa Loompas to drag me away.

When I heard the server’s explanation of this dish and Central’s concept was based off of altitudes and an attempt at the unification of land, sea, and air, my eyes damn near rolled out of my head. I am no stranger to pretention—I grew up watching Frasier when I was 10, which truly confused the hell out of my babysitter. But this was classically cheffy, overly cerebral, overly-fussy tweezer food. They make movies like Chef about this. People running away from solemn Michelin-starred temples and tablecloths to open up Cubano food trucks or nonna’s pasteria or whatever “their” food is.

But I had chosen to be here, and I was complicit.

When it arrived, it was bizarre-looking. Once I was reading a quantum physics book, and the author was expounding on the Calabi-Yau manifold, a series of images trying to depict a multitude of dimensions crammed into a singular space. It was nothing but loops and folds and whorls of compressed jicama dolloped with uni and foam and slick ropes of razor clam. Tendrils of seaweed curled about it. The fancy sushi dish I had been expecting was replaced by an alien impostor.

It’s difficult to describe such a dish in normal terms. If I said, Farmhouse’s mac and cheese was one of the best mac and cheeses I have ever had, you have some semblance of understanding because you have a foundation. If I try and describe the color red to a blind man, I would describe heat and leaves changing and blood and passion. If you asked me to make up a color, it is harder to do so. In truth, marine soil tasted like marine soil.

It tasted like climbing down a mountain to sea level. It tasted like the air, salt and brine, like your burning lungs expanding and collapsing and barnacled rocks and falling into sand more like wet clay and the one salt sea. It also tasted of time. I do not want to say I was having a hallucinatory experience, even though I actually may have had a fever at the time, because it was not that. It quite simply tasted primordial. In the great British fantasist Terry Pratchett’s book Nation, a character explains that “someone had to eat the first oyster, you know. Someone looked at half a shell of snot and was brave.” It felt exactly like that. Like I was a Cro-Magnon or a Neantherthal or some such, and I was discovering the first oyster, like if God had come down and set it before me as a test. It tasted even older than that. It tasted like evolution was happening, like a billion years ago, when life was climbing out of the roiling oceans and curling onto our beaches and spreading itself naked for the first time before our boiling, radioactive sun.

I tried to imagine chef Virgilio Martínez first conceptualizing this dish. Then making it over and over again, editing it over and over again. All of those ruined cooks and sketched out platings and standing by the sea and tasting soil before he could achieve this singular thing.

We use overly cerebral as an insult, and talk about these ineffable things like heart and soul and guts. I only half remember the parade of dishes I ate that night. I was incredibly sick, bursting with food, chugging water, and without hyperbole, I can say I probably went to go pee every 15 minutes over the course of a 3-hour meal. It was hellish.

And it’s hard for me to consider criteria. There are other dishes I would eat on a regular basis. Other dishes that speak of comfort and nostalgia and memories of travel and things I hold near and dear and precious to me. But only one dish I have ever tasted has brought me to the beginning of time.

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