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Chris and Calvin Marty, the owners behind Best Intentions, say they “don’t make a big deal” that they’re Jewish. The brothers, who opened their Logan Square bar in 2015, grew up in Cambridge, Wisconsin, a village about 60 miles west of Milwaukee and with a population of about 1,600. Less than 1 percent of Wisconsin’s population is Jewish, per a 2020 study from Brandeis University.

”We probably experience a little private guilt that maybe we’re not the best Jews — we never went to temple, we never had bar mitzvahs,” says Chris Marty.

The bar’s menu definitely contains some decidedly unkosher items like the Cuppa Shrimp with mild sauce, a gnarly cheeseburger, and red wine-braised short rib. The harissa chicken provides another nod to the Middle East. But tucked within the menu lies a surprise — matzo ball soup — and a great version at that, with a rich broth darkened by duck fat yet brightened by heavenly wafts of ginger and lemongrass.

In Chicago, it’s not especially hard to find a bowl of matzo ball soup, as a basic version appears on the menu of every self-respecting Jewish deli in town. But in recent years, the dish has begun to spring up in some unexpected places, too, including while perched on a bar stool on a rainy Friday in Logan Square and double-fisting a dirty martini. Best Intentions manages to channel the best of Wisconsin dives and serve fun, well-executed bar food. It was immediately clear that whoever created Best Intentions had spent some time in Wisconsin’s many unironic watering holes like River’s End in rural Ontario.

“In Jewish American food, the two big things are matzo ball soup and bagels – what’s more ubiquitous than the two of those?” posits Zach Engel, chef and owner of Michelin-starred Israeli and Middle Eastern restaurant Galit in Lincoln Park. Even his mother, an unenthusiastic home cook, makes a “pretty killer” version for family holiday meals: “As far as representations of Jewish culture, [matzo ball soup] makes us look pretty good.”

Matzo ball soup was once on the menu at Galit, but Engel hasn’t served it since the pandemic began as the restaurant has shifted to a four-course menu of shared dishes; soup is difficult to share. Nevertheless, Engel says he’s watched with interest as more restaurants work to attract diners with unexpected food while simultaneously tapping into a feeling of cozy familiarity. “Matzo ball soup is a super straightforward way to get people to feel a level of comfort in their heart, but it’s still interesting,” he says.

Though their exact origin is hazy, the proliferation of matzo balls — a simple mixture of matzo meal, beaten eggs, water, and schmaltz, or chicken fat — is generally attributed to German, Austrian, and Alsatian Jews who adapted regional Eastern European soup dumplings to suit Jewish dietary laws. No matter its history, the matzo ball’s simplicity also means that even unenthusiastic home cooks can deliver a version that will please a crowd.

The mixture is formed into balls (as usual, there’s debate over the supremacy of fluffy “floaters” or toothsome “sinkers”) and simmered in boiling water or even better, soup stock, until they swell into spongy spheres. Given the relatively small number of American Jews — about 7.6 million, or 2.4 percent of the total U.S. population, and a mere 319,600 in the Chicago area, according to the same Brandeis study — Ashkenazi-style Jewish deli cuisine has made an outsized impact on mainstream American culture in general, from corned beef on St. Patrick’s Day to Meg Ryan’s infamous faux-gasm in rom-com icon When Harry Met Sally.

As a child, Chris Marty was close to his great-grandmother, Hannah Westler, who fled antisemitism in Europe around the turn of the century and immigrated to Milwaukee, where she worked “14,000 jobs” to put her sons through law school. The brothers grew up eating her matzo ball soup, which she made from a recipe featuring a special twist: vodka. Years later, her boozy invention would inspire them to create a matzo ball cocktail for a local bartending challenge, an exercise that rekindled their connection to their family’s past.

Though he’d heard of it before, Best Intentions chef Bryan McClaran, who’s worked at the Cambodian restaurant Hermosa and the Asian-influenced Bixi Beer, hadn’t actually tried matzo ball soup when his bosses pitched the idea. Research involved YouTube videos, cookbooks, and some New York Times articles from the ’80s, and in the end, the first version he wound up tasting was his own. Together, the brothers and McClaran worked to hone a recipe that would be worthy of the history it represented.

“The big thing for us, other than nailing the consistency of the matzo ball, was not to goy it up with dill,” Chris Marty chuckles. “Anywhere we go with my mom, if there’s matzo ball soup, we’ll order it. She’s always like, ‘Why do the goys have to load it up with so much fucking dill?’”

“Matzo balls aren’t going anywhere”

It’s a Saturday in March at nearly 18-year-old deli Eleven City Diner, and owner Brad Rubin is holding court from a roomy booth inside his South Loop deli-diner hybrid. Founded in 2006 as an ode to casual midcentury hospitality, the restaurant, which at one point had a Lincoln Park location, has endured long enough to become a pillar of Chicago’s Jewish culinary scene while attracting non-Jews with a retro aesthetic and plentiful plates of food.

Rubin bursts with pride as he recounts his family’s Ashkenazi immigrant history and explains the meaning behind each photograph, vinyl record, and painting on its walls. His clear, resonant voice rings out as he bids farewell to customers (he learns all of their names) and jokes with employees.

It’s also impossible to ignore that at least a cup, if not a bowl, of matzo ball soup can be found on half the tables. The broth is light but not additive-yellow, with fluffy-yet-firm matzo balls noteworthy for both their ample size and distinctive green flecks of parsley, mostly for color. However one feels about parsley, the diner’s version serves well as a baseline matzo ball soup — uncomplicated, nostalgic, and reminiscent of a bubbe’s concoction with slightly more polish. There are no surprises in Eleven City’s bowl, and in this way, it’s a stark contrast to McClaran’s melange of elegant aromatics and ducky character at Best Intentions.

Rubin’s resonant tone, however, drops to a hush as he admits Eleven City hasn’t had kreplach since COVID began. The diners who used to order it have since moved out to the suburbs, he says. Kreplach are small and plump dumplings stuffed with fillings like meat and mashed potatoes — cousins to Polish pierogi, Russian pelmeni, Italian stuffed pasta, and Chinese jiaozi. The difference between matzo balls and kreplach is mostly negligible, but, according to Rubin’s numbers, the gap in sales was significant. “Matzo balls aren’t going anywhere,” Rubin affirms.

Indeed, in recent years they’ve also cropped up on the menu at seemingly random spots like Armitage Ale House, Lincoln Park’s British pub from Au Cheval owner Hogsalt Hospitality. In West Town, chef Zoe Schor also served a pepper-laden matzo ball soup at Split-Rail, which she closed in late 2023. Schor isn’t shy about her Jewish American identity but the restaurant, a neighborhood hit known for fried chicken, was never positioned as a particularly Jewish spot. But for Schor, the soup was about something bigger than Split-Rail – its presence marked a broader movement among chefs seeking to connect with their own background.

“I feel like in terms of the zeitgeist of becoming classically trained and cooking the food you grew up eating, Ashkenazi Jewish culinary traditions were a little later to hit the trends,” she says. She’s been happy to see the ripple effects manifest in spots like Russ & Daughters, the 110-year-old New York appetizing store that launched a wildly successful cafe in 2014. “I think it’s very cool and important that we continue these traditions and the conversation.”

The early 2010s saw a matzo ball revolution of sorts, arguably ushered in by the 2013 debut of Shalom Japan, a Brooklyn restaurant where chefs Aaron Israel and Sawako Okochi have made a major splash with their matzo ball ramen. In Chicago, some had the audacity to suggest adding jalapeno, and in 2020, the short-lived restaurant Rye in West Loop made matzo balls with blue corn masa. The dish has come a long way in, at least in the canon of Jewish culinary history, a very short time. But by its very nature, matzo ball soup is relevant not due to its ingredients, but rather, the sensory and emotional experiences it evokes.

It’s difficult to pin down why exactly matzo ball soup has risen to such a cross-cultural level of notoriety. But a look back at the soup’s lore in the U.S. may shed some light. Take Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller — please. It’s hard to imagine a worse pairing than the legendary Hollywood sex symbol and the Jewish Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who devoted much of his career to shedding light on the American everyman.

As the story goes, the couple frequently dined at the home of Miller’s mother, Isadore, who served a lot of matzo ball soup. They ate it so much that at one point, Monroe reportedly quipped, “Isn’t there any other part of the matzo you can eat?”

With that, a star was born and the humble, homely matzo ball was catapulted into American pop-culture history.

In the wake of the Holocaust, the mid-1950s (the couple married in 1956) was an unusually optimistic era for American Jews, who began to enter the middle class and seek higher education. For the first time, the American public was exposed to stories like Oscar-winning 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement, which starred cinematic icon Gregory Peck as a non-Jewish reporter who poses as a Jew to research an exposé on antisemitism.

Despite ongoing institutionalized discrimination at universities and social hubs like country clubs, American Jews at the time saw broader social acceptance than perhaps in any other millennia of Jewish history. And suddenly, that cultural validation reached new heights. Monroe, the blonde bombshell herself, was eating matzo balls too, lending mainstream credibility to a tradition that’s endured in Chicago and across the country well beyond Miller and Monroe’s marriage, which lasted less than five years.

Though reluctant to get “too high-minded” about what it means to serve Jewish food in a non-Jewish context, for Chris Marty, it points to a desire to push back on a national political shift toward exclusion. “I think society is pretty shitty right now,” he says. “People are highly intolerant and very insular… The beauty of the bar and restaurant industry — especially in Chicago — is that you have that willingness to just love it if it’s good.”