Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises’ overhaul of the Hub 51 space in River North starts with the unveiling of a wallet-friendly cocktail bar. Gus’ Sip and Dip aims to prove that downtown bars can pour quality cocktails at affordable prices at all times of the day, not just happy hour.
The menu will consist of classic cocktails all priced at $12. A bar program with housemade ingredients, — including juices and syrups — as well as in-house ice making will help keep prices low.
Costs are a worry, but Kevin Beary also cites hard seltzers and ready-to-drink canned cocktails as reasons the next generation of drinkers has shifted away from cocktails that are mixed in front of them by bartenders. “It’s a concerning sign when we see folks of the younger age groups gravitating towards those,” says Beary.
“I’m so concerned for the future of cocktails that I feel like I need to expose as many people to great classic cocktails as possible,” he adds.
Gus’, which should debut next month at 51 W. Hubbard Street, is Beary’s brainchild — he’s the beverage director of Three Dots and a Dash, the Bamboo Room, and the Omakase Room at Sushi-san. For the 30 cocktails, Beary promises ingredients, techniques, and presentations that guests are familiar with and a curated selection of premium spirits. “Instead of offering a 200-bottle back bar where I have a ton of inventory, I’m focusing solely on the spirits we use to make the cocktails,” he says.
Complementing the cocktail list — ranging from a “killer White Russian” and amaretto sour to a traditional martini — will be an ambiance that channels classic taverns. “It’s supposed to feel like a bar that could have been there for the past 50 years,” Beary says. “Classic in nature, very approachable, and somewhat familiar.”
Glassware also went through a careful selection process, especially since the various glasses will be stored in freezers under the bar. “I wanted to have every piece of glassware come chilled,” he says.
Taking over one-third of the former Hub 51 space, Gus’ Sip and Dip will seat about 75 guests. Located in the center of the room, the 25-seat U-shaped bar will feature leather-wrapped arm rails. Leather booths surround the room with a few high-tops near the bar.
In addition to cocktails, a light and a dark beer have been custom brewed for Gus’. Beary says McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York, which has been open for two centuries, inspired the move. He declined to say which two breweries were making the beer. There’ll be cider, too. Wine offerings will be limited to a red and white burgundy.
The food menu, headed up by RPM Restaurants chef Bob Broskey, will feature classic tavern favorites, including a wagyu French dip, Caesar salad, shrimp cocktail, and a burger.
“I’m trying to create a bar that is going to be very appealing to your seasoned cocktail drinker but can also be a really good introduction to this classic style of drinks for the next generation,” says Beary.
Hub 51 had a 16-year run before it closed in June. Sharing the Hub 51 space with Gus’ will be Crying Tiger from HaiSous chef Thai Dang, opening next year.
Revolution Brewing will close its Logan Square brewpub in December after nearly 15 years along Milwaukee Avenue. Revolution found Josh Deth says the restaurant, which opened in February 2010 will close on Saturday, December 14. Deth owns the building at 2323 N. Milwaukee Avenue and plans on selling.
“Hopefully someone else will come around and want to take over and do something new concept in this space, and then we’ll consolidate down to one location,” Deth says.
Revolution’s taproom, 3340 N. Kedzie Avenue, won’t be impacted. It opened in 2012 and was one of the first bars in the city to able to serve beer made on premises. Deth admits Revolution canibalized its clientele by forcing them to pick between the Avondale taproom and Logan Square brewpub: “We created that component of it,” Deth admits.
The brewery, the state’s largest independent craft brewery, is known for its Deth’s Tar barrel-aged beers, Anti-Hero IPA, and more. The Milwaukee Avenue brewpub was once a hotspot with long waits, as Revolution followed in the footsteps of Deth’s former employer, Goose Island Beer. Goose Island’s original location in Lincoln Park, along Clybourn, created a strong business model mingling a full-service restaurant under the same roof as a brewery. Brewery taprooms, which don’t have kitchens and only serve the beer produced on premises, had yet to catch on.
Yet Revolution amplified Goose Island’s blueprint, bringing more of a gourmet edge to the experience without alienating the customers who came for the company’s bread and butter — beer. Now, come December, Goose Island and Revolution’s original locations will have closed, while their taprooms will remain: “The brewpub was like a predecessor, in some ways, of today’s taproom model,” Deth says. “That is a better model for most breweries they find because it’s easier to manage, right to have to manage your brewery business, and have to manage all the complexity of a restaurant is it’s a lot.”
Deth notes that Revolution’s cocktail program — something that didn’t exist when the brewpub opened — has improved over the last year as the craft beer industry declines, something Deth says was starting to happen even before the pandemic started in 2020. More and more customers are looking for hard seltzers, cocktails, and THC-infused drinks.
“Our business is going to this simplification… it’s probably going to be good for our team long term, to be the more focused on the primary thing that we’re doing these days, which is wholesale production of beer,” says Deth.
The brewpub temporarily closed during the pandemic in October 2020 as state COVID protocols closed restaurant dining rooms. While most restaurants scrambled, trying to deal with delivery and to-go, sorting through third-party couriers and their fees, Revolution had a safety net with home alcohol consumption rising and packaged good sales at stores through the roof. When it opened, the terrain for restaurants was radically different, as the cost of running restaurants had skyrocketed with labor and inflation costs exploding. The brewpub had to find new footing in this world of restaurants that had radically changed since 2010, with Chicago’s culinary expectations also changed. Revolution was once of the only games in town along Milwaukee Avenue in Logan Square, but now they struggled with standing out in a crowd that includes many heavy hitters from Federales, Andros Taverna, Bixi Beer — another brewpub — and more.
Revolution attempted to recreate the magic, searching for a chef with a new voice. Earlier this year, they hired Rasheed Amedu, a native Chicagoan who they had high hopes to breathe new life into their menu. His run was cut short. The closure, coupled with places like Kuma’s Corner in Fulton Market, paints a dreary picture for restaurants that focus on craft beer. That’s something Three Floyds will attempt to navigate as the Munster, Indiana company preps to reopen its brewpub. Piece Pizza in Wicker Park might be the most stable of all brewpub thanks to its pizza which brings a robust carryout and delivery business. It’s also a regular winner at the Great American Beer Festival.
Deth sees some breweries have adopted kind of a food hall experience, with an outside vendor handling the food service — Pilot Project Brewing (also on Milwaukee Avenue) and District Brew Yards are two examples. District Brew Yards relies on Lillie’s Q barbecue in West Town and Paulie Gee’s pizza in Wheeling.
News of the closure began leaking out on Friday as Revolution told customers with private events that the brewpub could no longer host their event. Deth notes that customers often book their weddings and other functions two years in advance. They broke the news to workers earlier in the week, and hoped that workers and customers alike would hear about the news long before the annoucement made its way on the Internet.
Deth is open to hosting more food pop-ups and food trucks at the taproom to make up for the loss of the brewpub, but says he hasn’t had time to come up with concrete plan. They’re focused on closing up the brewpub and going out on positive. He has gratitude for all his customers and says the taproom is going strong. They just secured a city permit to put in solar panels to the building and hope to invest more in the venue.
While Goose Island moved its Lincoln Park operations to the Salt Shed, Revolution doesn’t have the backing of a multi-national corporation (Goose Island’s parent is the owner of Budweiser). Much like Taqueria Chingón’s Oliver Poilevey, who will closes his Bucktown restaurant later in November, Deth notes Revolution doesn’t have the deep pockets to compete.
“This is our only restaurant, right?” Deth says. “We’re not a big company — we’re not a restaurant group — we don’t have the depth that a larger company has to call upon.”
The team behind Michelin-starred Galit will open an all-day cafe next to their award-winning restaurant. Chef Zach Engel and partner Andrés Clavero plan to debut Cafe Yaya this winter at 2431 N. Lincoln Avenue, sandwiched between the Biograph Theater and Galit.
The counter-service cafe will debut with morning pastries and an al carte dinner menu, but there are plans for lunch, brunch, and takeout, according to a news release. It’s a walk-in cafe with reservations available for parties of four or more. Cafe Yaya’s second floor will be available for private events, and ownership hopes to work with local artists, teachers, and entrepreneurs.
Engel and Clavero feel the new project is a natural extension of Galit, and that the new cafe will further nurture the Lincoln Park community. Mary Eder-McClure, Galit’s longtime pastry chef is baking pastries like walnut baklava; fig, goat cheese, and zataar-stuffed challah, potato bourekia (a savory hand pie) with everything spice; and a vegan apple puff with sahleb (a Middle Eastern milk pudding).
Beyond the more casual setting, Cafe Yaya’s wine program will diverge from Galit with bottles from overlooked regions, including Chinon, France; and South America. There will be plenty of wines by the glass with the selection curated by Scott Stroemer, Galit’s bar director.
Galit set a standard for food with Israeli and Palestinian influences, and Engel is a James Beard Award winner. Cafe Yaya’s dinner menu with a blend of French, Jewish, Southern, Middle Eastern, and Midwestern touches. They’ll pour coffee from Sparrow Coffee Roastery, a familiar sight at many local fine dining restaurants.
News of Clavero and Engel’s project broke in the spring 2023, and progress has inched along. Meanwhile, Galit has continued to star with a family-style multi-course meal. Construction is still far from completion, so expect more details as 2024 comes to an end.
Cafe Yaya, 2431 N. Lincoln Avenue, scheduled to open in winter 2025
As many Indian restaurants worldwide consider serving beef taboo, chef Sujan Sarkar savored the rare opportunity to taste quality meat. Beef from Nebraska was considered a specialty at one of the Michelin-starred restaurants he worked at in London, Galvin at Windows, a French spot formerly inside the Hilton Park Lane in London. Sarkar, chef at Indienne — Chicago’s lone Michelin-starred Indian restaurant, and one of only three that have earned that status in the United States, says British beef couldn’t compete with USDA prime cuts.
Beef is expensive, not widely available in all parts of India, and is considered holy in many sects of Hinduism. However, in the U.S., non-Indian Americans tend to associate Indian cuisine only with that singular cultural practice. It’s such a widespread perception that English speakers, like Chicago baseball announcer Harry Caray, even have an expression tied to it — holy cow!Chicago Seven member Abbie Hoffman turned it into an anti-authority metaphor and is credited with saying “sacred cows make the tastiest burger.” UHF features “Weird Al” Yankovic’s playful portrayal of Gandhi in 1989 while ordering a medium-rare steak. The first wave of Indian restaurants in America brought the cultural norms of the early 1900s with them and shunned beef. Tandoori chicken was positioned in the ’60s as the Indian American counterpart to the showstopping Beijing duck popular at Chinese American restaurants. Lamb curries and kabobs emerged as stand-ins to satiate America’s beef lovers.
But decades later that Puritan image of India is fading in America, and it appears Chicago, with its storied meatpacking history, has become the center for a new style of Indian dining that embraces the beef. One tell is Sarkar who says one of his favorite restaurants is Asador Bastian, a well-regarded Basque steakhouse that’s a short walk from Indienne. Though Indienne proudly features vegetables in all menus — not just the vegetarian option — Sarkar has been experimenting with a beef dish. For private events only, he’s serving a short rib braised with a Madras curry inspired by black peppercorn sauce. It makes sense, after all, black pepper originated in India.
“Some people are cooking camel, ostrich,” Sarkar says. ”We don’t have to do it here, because that’s not from here. But in America, beef is one of the main sources of protein, and people like that — and it’s good.” These days, seeing beef on an Indian menu is hardly shocking. The protein has earned a place in prominent Indian restaurants across America like Dhamaka in New York; Rania in Washington, D.C.; and BadMaash in LA.
The beef brisket at Indus in suburban Chicago is stellar.
Beef can be found in India, but diners need to be in the know. It might have different names. Sarkar remembers seeing it called water buffalo. Vinod Kalathil of Thattu has memories of attending engineering school in India and seeing the reactions from his Northern India classmates when they saw beef served at the dining hall: “They were absolutely shocked,” Kalathil recalls. And Sheal Patel of Dhuaan BBQ remembers walking through night markets in Mumbai and Delhi and seeing plenty of street vendors selling beef and pork dishes.
Patel represents a wave of second-generation chefs all over America who have experimented with their home spice pantries, livening American staples from burgers to omelets to pizzas. Patel says TikTok has played a role with desis sharing techniques and photos from their travels. “I don’t think 10 years ago this would be a very welcome topic,” Patel says. Patel calls Dhuaan a tribute to the food his mother cooked as well as his visits to Central Texas where barbecue — particularly beef — is king. His brisket and masala beef cheesesteaks have popped up at bars across Chicago.
Kalathil, who grew up in India, would see beef labeled as “mutton sukka” (dry beef) offered at restaurants in the South Indian state of Kerala, where it’s more common to find beef. Kalathil and his wife, chef Margaret Pak, have served beef at Thattu, their lauded Keralan restaurant, from day one. Inspired by Pak’s Korean heritage, they use short rib in their beef fry — slow-roasted thin slices of meat fried with coconut oil and flavored with curry leaves and onions.
“We want to make sure the food is for everybody,” Kalathil says — Thattu has plenty of vegetarian options, too. “And if some people don’t want to eat that, that’s perfectly fine.” However, he says beef is essential to Keralan culture.
Thattu is playing with different cuts of beef as short rib is expensive, and while Western restaurants may use the bones for stock for soups or sauces, there’s little history of utilizing scraps in South Asian cuisines. They may even switch to boneless lamb in their biryani as some guests have expressed a preference. Pak and her kitchen crew are also tweaking a new beef burger offering.
A watershed moment in Indian American history may have occurred in 2015 when Lucky Peach, the defunct food magazine ran a recipe for tandoori steak using thick beef ribeyes as opposed to the thin cuts found in traditional South Asian beef dishes. That begot a steak pop-up run by chefs Dave Chang and Akhtar Nawab and cheekily named Ruth Krishna’s Steakhouse, though Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse attorneys quickly hit the effort with a cease and desist letter.
Flash forward to 2023 when Diaspora Spices began selling Steak Masala as a competitor to McCormick’s Montreal Steak Seasoning. Diaspora founder Sana Javeri Kadri, who grew up eating beef — she’s Hindu, Jain, and Muslim — says the spice mix, which went through four or five recipes, is a top seller that customers use on vegetables and meats alike. She says Diaspora has received zero negative feedback. The mix is made with Diaspora’s Surya Salt, Aranya Black Pepper, Sirārakhong Hāthei Chillies, Pahadi Pink Garlic, Hariyali Fennel, and Wild Ajwain.
Highland Park’s Indus also serves a wagyu beef steak.
A 12-ounce American wagyu ribeye from Vander Farms comes with spiced herb butter, “chimmichutney,” and nizaami dum aloo.
“This myth that India is vegetarian is obviously the voices of few speaking louder than the country at large,” Javeri Kadri says. “It’s a very Hindu, upper-caste take — most lower-caste folks don’t have the privilege of not eating meat.”
Chicago should be used to religious and class restrictions. Blue laws, which date back to the late 1800s, were Catholic doctrines that prohibited activities like going to the movies, traveling, or selling anything on Sundays. Even as laws loosened, some operators continued to keep restrictions. In the ’80s, many Chicago grocery stores would cover their meat coolers with a blue wrap to prevent customers from putting beef into their shopping carts.
Earlier this year in suburban Chicago, a new contemporary Indian restaurant, Indus, debuted featuring a wagyu beef ribeye and brisket cooked in a pellet smoker (Indus also smokes vegetarian dishes, like daal, with tasty results). Indus is one of the few Indian restaurants around Chicago that brings out steak knives. Owners Sukhu and Ajit Kalra say the brisket is so popular they’ve been getting requests from Jewish customers who wanted it for their High Holidays. It wouldn’t be the first Jewish-Indian crossover. In August while at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as his wife prepared to accept the Democratic presidential nomination, Doug Emhoff complimented his wife Vice President Kamala Harris saying she “makes a mean Passover brisket.”
This beef dish from Michelin-starred Indienne is available for private events only and made with American wagyu, a short rib kofta, tomato pachadi, varuval, and curry leaf.Indienne
However, many restaurants remain uncomfortable discussing the topic of beef. Some chefs around the country declined to comment for this story. They didn’t want to alienate customers with strong opinions about beef. It’s still a sensitive subject and one that drifts into politics, with Hindu nationalism driving narratives. Rakesh Patel of Patel Brothers, the world’s largest South Asian grocer, founded in 1974 in Chicago, says his company has never carried beef. He says it was challenging enough to hear objections from vegetarians when the chain began carrying fish, though frozen fish is one of the chain’s biggest money makers.
But some see the subject as a matter of hospitality. In years past, James Beard-recognized chef Zubair Mohajir has shied away from serving beef at Coach House, his tasting menu restaurant. Mohajir is Muslim, so beef isn’t prohibited, but he’s avoided it to offend any customers. It’s a form of respect. At his new restaurant, Mirra, which blends Mexican and Indian flavors, there’s a carne asada dish that, according to co-chef Rishi Manoj Kumar, is as much a tribute to Mexican cuisine as it is a way to honor Chicago’s steakhouse culture and history of meatpacking.
But as India isn’t a monolith, neither is South Asia. Chicago is no stranger to dishes like frontier beef. Local Pakistani restaurant, Khan BBQ, has served the item and other beef options like chapli kebab for more than two decades along Devon, Chicago’s main South Asian hub. A newer entry, Tandoor Char House in Lakeview — a Pakistani Indian fusion spot — has long embraced beef with items like beef seekh kebab and beef nihari. Owner Faraz Sardharia says his father being from India and his mother being from Pakistan granted him the freedom to design a menu without boundaries.
However, many Pakistani and Bangladeshi American restaurants (and other countries within the South Asian diaspora) still label themselves as “Indian” for marketing purposes — it was easier to conflate rather than to explain nuance to American diners Googling “butter chicken near me.” Beef is often absent from these restaurant menus to avoid sounding off any alarms. Others, however, were bolder, sneaking beef onto the menus — dishes like Bangladeshi beef tehari — to pique the interest of non-South Asian customers.
Indian American chef Hetal Vasavada, a recipe developer and writer, competed on Season 6 of MasterChef when Gordon Ramsay and the gang made her recreate the chef’s famous beef Wellington. Vasavada, a vegetarian, rose to the challenge. She read through Reddit threads full of comments from uneducated viewers who weren’t familiar with India’s diversity, attempting to pigeonhole her. She had never cooked or tasted beef in her life, and the show’s fans saw that as a liability. They wanted her off the show. She relished her success in that environment. When it comes to celebrating holidays like Diwali, which is traditionally vegetarian, Vasavada keeps an open mind.
“I think because India is so vast and everyone celebrates it so differently, it’s hard to say what’s right and wrong. In the end, I truly do not care what you eat,” she says. “Practicing as a Hindu, an Indian American, I don’t eat meat, but if you want to eat meat, go for it — I am unbothered. Celebrate and eat however you choose. And I think we just need to be a little bit more open-minded and less pushy about our beliefs on others.”
Many objections to serving beef at Indian restaurants in America come from immigrants who long left South Asia and believe their hometowns or villages have stayed the same since they’ve left, Kalathil says. He wants to see more restaurants serve beef and pork. That philosophy is shared by many of his colleagues, including Sarkar. The old-fashioned mindset poses a danger to creativity.
“That is with all Indian food — not only the beef,” Sarkar says. “People still have an outdated understanding of how things should be.”
If you were anywhere within 10 feet of a Wi-Fi connection this week, you may have come across the still image of what appeared to be an unstacked Italian nesting doll of dimples and unconventional shoe choices on the Tonight Show couch of Jimmy Fallon (who was wearing extremely conventional shoes under his desk, I’m sure). What you may or may not have known is that the bodies attached to those shoes belonged to three mega-viral TikTok stars—who are, in fact and importantly, all Italian.
Todd Owyoung/NBC
This image, and the interview that went along with it, ripped through the internet like a Costco pizza cutter. First, there was Fallon’s response to his guests, two of whom were children, which ranged from occasional bemusement to borderline tolerance to complete derision for the antics of the TikTok act he had booked on his show. More importantly, there were the optics: Fallon appeared to be hosting the call sheet for a multi-timeline show about a Batman villain. But the final reveal for the uninitiated, which happened entirely post-airing, was what took this piece of the historical record over the edge of virality: This adult man and the two children next to him … who look like the Animorphs book cover of a very specific Italian male species … were not all related.
The large- and medium-sized gentlemen with the eyes of a husky and the vocal cords of the Cookie Monster and Donald Duck, respectively, are the Costco Guys, a.k.a. AJ Befumo and Big Justice, who are obsessed with two things: bulk shopping and going viral. The littlest one to their left, however, was a little more of a mystery to new audiences. First, there was his vibe: quiet, considering, frequently unsmiling, but seemingly there for a pleasant time. Then there were his shoes: neon green, in constant motion, jutting out horizontally from his body, without so much as a suggestion that they’d ever touch the floor. Because he is a child, you see—even despite immediately establishing himself as a person (a person with the distinct aura of a wise and magical toad, but a person nonetheless) deserving of the utmost respect. He somehow seemed like AJ and Big Justice’s elder and Fallon’s boss. He’s 3 feet tall, 8 years old, and probably learning how to subtract in a third grade classroom as you read this. And his name? Is the Rizzler.
If you knew none of this, then congratulations—your algorithm is built different. If you knew any of this before the Rizzler started proliferating through social media at large following the Fallon segment, then you are probably a straight white man. The Rizzler may not be related to the people he makes viral videos with, but he certainly has cultural cousins: Hawk Tuah, Baby Gronk, Theo Von. These are words and names that could kill a Victorian child, but words that I know nonetheless. You could call the Rizzler the human Moo Deng … and you could also call him the baby from Dinosaurs. But if you think you’ll make it far on the internet without calling him the Rizzler—you are wrong.
Yes, visually and spiritually, he’s like if Grogu knew meatball subs existed, but culturally, the Rizzler’s whole bit—other than eating things with two guys who are, again, not related to him—is that he is a child who demands respect. When Fallon asks him to do “the Rizz face” (more on that later), he obliges, I believe, out of the goodness of his heart, and not because he’s a dancing monkey. He does the big booms with AJ and Big Justice because he supports his friends’ ambitions, not because he’s a clown. He offers up that he likes chocolate-covered raisins when Fallon strangely yells at Big Justice, “THEY’RE GOOD FOR YOU!” after Big Justice—a kid—complains about raisins as a Halloween treat. The Rizzler is the head of families he doesn’t even hail from. The Rizzler is an aura bomb, wrapped up in charisma and comic timing, who looks like a Squishmallow and smells like pastrami, but in a good way.
Or that’s what TikTok would tell you when there aren’t enough reverent words in the English language with which to praise the Rizzler (government name: Christian Joseph). Trying to convey this to a Tonight Show audience who thought they might be seeing Zendaya or Ryan Gosling, or even that young “Brat” woman they’ve been hearing so much about, is a Herculean task that no one at TheTonight Show even attempted. When an internet trend hits the harsh, NBC-studio-scented air of the real world, it’s like seeing a teacher at the mall. Or maybe it’s more like seeing the school mascot at the principal’s desk. Something doesn’t quite feel right, and suddenly everyone is asking questions like “Who got fur in the coffee maker?” and “Why are Jimmy Fallon’s ears bleeding like that?” and “What’s a Rizzler?”
On the latter, at least, I can help. No small being has sparked this much curiosity with so few answers since your mom started asking you what Moo Deng was. And I’m certainly not trying to pit round things against each other—that’s billiards, and this is actually bigger than that. Because nothing produces more questions and anxiety over where we are as a culture than when the lawless, lore-driven celebrities of social media meet the tidy, media-trained couches of late night television. So for those just catching up, allow me to answer your questions about how the Rizzler got there (other than, again, by possibly being a magically materializing toad). Let’s start with the obvious and most frequently asked question about the Costco Guys and the Rizzler …
Why doesn’t the big one simply eat the smaller ones to grow stronger and defeat Jimmy Fallon?
Great question with a not so simple answer: In joining forces, AJ, Big Justice, and the Rizzler have created a viral ecosystem that simply doesn’t work without all of the biotic and abiotic components working in unison. Less scientifically speaking, these three are the holy trinity of BroTok. AJ is God, Big Justice is Jesus Chrst, and the Rizzler is the Holy Spirit that keeps us intrinsically connected to them all.
AJ, love him or tolerate him, has been trying to go viral or get famous—whichever comes first—since Big Justice was in “larval form,” to quote a TikTok comment lost to time. Before he started vlogging about his family on social media, AJ was a semiprofessional wrestler who went by “American Power Child, Eric Justice.” But he was also, like … making parody songs and putting Big Justice in his “backbling” (a Baby Bjorn, goodness, this lore is deep) to go shopping. Until something finally stuck: Costco. In March, AJ and Big Justice went mega-viral (56.7 million views and counting) for their “We’re Costco Guys” video, and eight months later, they have more than 2 million TikTok followers and their very own Beans (which is to say, an unrelated minor who maybe lives with them).
The Rizzler is simply a funny kid who seems to like doing characters and bits. It’s a tale as old as time, but whereas I pretended I was a puppy dog for, like, my entire fourth year of life and nothing happened but my parents getting annoyed, the Rizzler went viral precisely this time last year for fully embodying his Black Panther Halloween costume: “Just because I’m Black Panther doesn’t mean I’m going up a ladder! Mommy said it’s dangerous.” As legend goes, Big Justice saw this video and wanted to meet the Rizzler, so he traveled with AJ to New Jersey—shockingly, the Costco Guys are not from New Jersey, but Boca Raton, Florida—and the rest was history …
But realistically, the degree to which AJ was like, “OK, and what if I just got an even smaller guy”and recruited the Rizzler to start making content like he was related to them—something many fans still don’t even realize—is kind of unreal. AJ knew what women decorating homes have always known: Getting the tinier version of something normal-sized is simply more fun. I like tiny bowls because I can put even tinier things in them. And I like the Rizzler because he’s a tiny Big Justice, who is a tiny AJ, and there’s no verifiable proof that they didn’t find an industrial-sized vat of the Substance at Costco that made this all possible.
But where did the Rizzler get his name? The other day I heard the words “sticking out your gyat for the rizzler” floating from underneath my 13-year-old’s door. Are these two things related?
Sort of. But also, gross!
The easiest way to put it is that “rizz” is Gen Alpha slang for “charisma,” and a rizzler is someone who has it in spades. I’ll explain “gyat” just because we’re here, and so you can get your kid to stop listening to that song (but it will never leave your head again, I’m so sorry, it’s like the video from The Ring, you just have to pass it on now). Gyat stands for “girl your ass thick” and is basically a replacement word for “a woman’s butt,” so to stick out your gyat for the rizzler is to show off your behind to attract a charismatic gentleman …
I don’t want you to talk like this, OK? But you need to know that there are people talking like this, and they are mostly under 5 feet tall, and we need to be able to talk to them! We also need to speak this language to understand that, in a matter of months and with a handful of viral videos, this 8-year-old boy went from being a rizzler to being the Rizzler. According to the lore, the Rizzler’s friends started calling him the name before he even knew what it meant, and he started making the face that’s made him famous—“mewing,” as the kids say, or “Chad face,” as the slightly older kids say—even before that.
If you were paying close enough attention, you may have noticed that on The Tonight Show, the Rizzler taught Fallon and the Roots how to do the eyebrow raise and lip pursing—but not the signature cheek stroke. Some things are simply proprietary.
What we all need to understand is that generational talents used to debut on the Disney Channel with a show about being a tween private investigator who has a medical condition that gives them a wolf’s sense of smell. Now those little talents are on TikTok. The idea that they can all make it to The Tonight Show one way or another is as concerning and alarming (for us) and exciting (for the Rizzler and Chloe Wolfe, PI) as ever before!
But why do people love the Rizzler so much?
It seems to be one part “he’s so cute, I want to eat him like a Haribo gummy,” a dash of “this kid is just innately weird and funny,” and a heavy pour of “this is a child who I see only on social media that I can assign a character to and have a little fun never knowing whether it’s true.”
The cuteness is often rolled out in the Rizzler archives—cute home videos from before he was a mononymous internet personality—and the humor is in the content he makes with the Costco Guys and the extended Costco Universe (more on that later). But the character work is going down in the comments, where Rizzler fans observe a mafia-dom-like energy from this itty-bitty Michelin Man. Any suggestion of an insult is met with an insistence on respect for the Rizzler’s name. Any suggestion that perhaps Costco food taste testing isn’t what children should be doing for their after-school snack is met with a stern “The rizzler doesn’t even eat the double chunk chocolate cookies you fucking moron.” And, in general, something about that Fallon interview: The fact that he was at the right hand of the host, the fact that he sat quietly confident as his colleagues fawned and fretted over their big moment, the fact that it was preceded by starring moments at Knicks and Mets games this month—all of this just kind of made it feel like the Rizzler had moved beyond his corner of the internet and into the mainstream.
And I don’t know what to tell you—the source material is there. I have officially been Rizzler pilled. This third grader simply has the gravitas of Gandolfini or Don Corleone, whether he technically has access to a (toy) horse’s head or not.
On that note, are we sure this is … a child?
Does the Rizzler kind of appear to be an adult wearing shoes on his knees like Gary Oldman in Tiptoes? Yes. But by all accounts, that’s just part of his general aura. It’s not, like, an Andy Milonakis situation. (Although I would be fine with the Rizzler getting his own talk show, maybe even just usurping the Tonight Show gig the next time he’s on. He’s the head of the family now, after all.) There is a strong video trail that shows the Rizzler being an actual baby just a few years ago. Which, it also can’t be overstated that after a summer spent getting wildly internet famous, the Rizzler simply … went to third grade.
Why did it seem like Jimmy Fallon would rather be at a vegan butter-churning festival than play along with the people—two of whom are children—he invited onto his show?
Pretty rich for ol’ James to be annoyed by childlike behavior from two actual children and their kinda-sorta guardian! At various times throughout the interview, Fallon seemed to roll his eyes or attempt to move on from the kind of bombastic, repetitive clownery the Costco Guys intentionally use in their videos—you know, the kinds of things kids like? The internet astutely pointed out that Jimmy should be careful. By disrespecting him, Jimmy was treading awfully close to turning the Rizzler into the Joker.
My pet theory is that Fallon didn’t know, until the second the house lights went down and the stage lights came up, that the Rizzler was a child. Just look at the way he looks to the Rizzler for help when AJ and Big Justice bellow out their 20th Big Boom of the night. Also, Jimmy didn’t help the Rizzler when the kid asked him what to do with the licorice that received only two measly booms, and because he was too polite to put it on Jimmy’s desk, he just had to eat it. That is absolutely no way to treat the Rizzler, a person I learned about four days ago.
Why do theysay “BOOM!” like that, though? Is it a sloppy homage to Emeril’s “BAM”?
You know what, maybe? But sometimes virality really is just as simple as rhyming, and someone like AJ knows that. The Costco Guys invented the “Boom or Doom” scale to rate their Costco findings, immediately abandoned ever “dooming” anything, and resorted to rating everything on a five-boom scale. One boom is no good, three booms is solid, and when something is a home run, it gets “Five! Big! Booms!” The booms must be both verbally and physically performed, and they must be loud (sorry, Jimmy Fallon).
The booms are more native to the Costco Guys than the Rizzler, but he does participate when called upon and always backs them up when they’re giving big booms, even when Fallon is sighing down his neck a foot away. He’s magnanimous that way.
Wait, but if AJ isn’t the Rizzler’s dad, who is? Did he spawn from a Costco baby back rib like Adam?
The Rizzler has parents. His dad is especially present on the Rizzler’s own social media pages, filming and sometimes doing skits alongside him and his little brother (yes, they get even smaller). The Rizzler’s dad even has his own moniker within the Costco Universe: Uncle Savasta.
Sorry, did you say the Costco Universe?
I’m suspicious of AJ and where he falls on the scale of “monetizing your children—and also not your children!—to live out your dreams vicariously through them,” but to be honest, I find his laugh while spending time with his child (and not his child!) so genuine that the jury’s still out. Plus, it’s all such a gender bend of the Toddlers & Tiaras mom trope that I’m almost impressed by the subversiveness …
But I’ll hand this to Costco dad every day of the week: He’s incredible at talent acquisition and world-building. Get this guy out of the amateur wrestling ring and into a Marvel studio. Even before AJ and Big Justice acquired the Rizzler, they’d been branding their entire family and adding newcomers to the Costcoverse. There’s Cousin Angelo, who, like Cousin Olver, seems to be a less preferred member of the crew but who also has an admirer in Vita Coco, which is endlessly funny to me; there’s this guy Makeshift Zach, who gets all the exclusive interviews with the family; and regularly appearing in the videos are MBJ, a.k.a. Mother of Big Justice, and the sister Ashley, who simply goes by Ashley, which I personally find iconic.
And of course, the Rizzler debuted in the Costco Universe at the beginning of the summer, rating chocolate chip cookies (pronounced exclusively: DUWBA CHUNK CHOCK-LUT COOOOKIE) with the gang. Every member of the Costco Extended Universe gets their own added verse in the viral song “We Bring the Boom”; there’s a line in the Rizzler remix that is funnier and more astute than anything a band of bloggers could ever conjure: We’re like the three ev-o-lutions of a Pok-e-mon.
Not to start any beef, but at this point, has the Rizzler become bigger than Costco Guys—bigger than any one fictional universe can contain?
Technically speaking, the Rizzler isn’t bigger than most things. You could roll him up in a ball and save him in your pocket for later, like a jawbreaker.
But in terms of power and influence—yeah. He’s the Steve Urkel of bro-y TikTok: a guest character brought in to jazz things up who stole the show so completely that you’re pretty sure the show was called Steve Urkel. But I firmly believe that the Rizzler needs the structure and support of the Costco Universe as much as they need his star power.
Ok, but, is this … bad? Is it bad to enjoy the Rizzler as a sort of funny little internet character who is, in fact, a child who isn’t really in control of his own online presence? Is this going to haunt me? Is this going to become a Baby Gronk situation?
I assume this tricky final question is payback for telling you about sticking out your gyat for the Rizzler, in which case, I do understand, but wow, what a doozy.
I’ll say this: The feeling I have when I look at the Rizzler is the same one I have when I see a Shiba Inu puppy. Can you please just stay like this forever? Can you be cute just like THIS forever, even though I know the future thing you’ll be is just as good???
And for that reason, I would really love for the Rizzler’s parents (and OK, AJ, too) to talk to the Corn Kid’s parents. Remember him? The 7-year-old with a naturally hilarious way of communicating who accidentally got famous on another person’s social media channel? And then he took a few big brand deals, threw a few baseballs, rode on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and then just … went back to school without usever even learning his last name? Because his mom didn’t want us to know it! And one day, after that kid has hypothetically finished four years of college paid for by one Chipotle ad and the good personality he had when he was 7, if he still wants to be famous, or work for Big Corn, or make viral TikTok videos—he can! (And listen, even with all that care, internet rumors still went viral saying that he died, which Corn Kid had to clear up on Instagram. Which is exactly why it was a good idea for Corn Kid to go back to being just a kid.)
Fame isn’t linear, and nothing can stay golden forever. Nor can it stay perpetually round and fully detached from the Tonight Show floor. Internet main characters, even the young ones, are like the plucky ingenues of the aughts—we lift them up onto pedestals so high, they can only ever fall from them. And while I feel confident in the Rizzler’s Anne Hathaway–like ability to bounce back, I’d love to see him not have to. I’d love to see the adults around him help him avoid any descent that’s too painful. We’ve learned to respect the Rizzler. Let’s—all of us—keep it that way. Because I certainly don’t wanna find out who gets the horse head first.
Just in time for Halloween, Agatha All Along concluded its nine-episode run with a two-part finale that featured dueling witches, Death incarnate, and one sarcastic, purple ghost.
On Wednesday night, the WandaVision spinoff released its eighth and ninth episodes simultaneously, as Agatha Harkness and the remnants of her coven reach the end of the Witches’ Road at last. And almost all of them get what they desired the most when they first set off on their perilous journey: Jen reclaims her powers after discovering that it was Agatha who bound her 100 years earlier; with Agatha’s help, Billy locates Tommy’s soul and places it in the body of a drowning boy. Only Agatha is left empty-handed, as she returns to her home in Westview as powerless as ever, demanding her “prize” from Rio as if she’s just been cheated in a carnival game.
Instead of an action-packed final episode, as per MCU tradition, it’s the penultimate installment that features a climactic final battle between Agatha and Rio, the latter of whom is the very personification of Death. Billy, wearing his full Wiccan costume for the first time, arrives to save Agatha from Rio just in time, and he even lends her a bit of his power. But Agatha ultimately gives herself up to her former lover with a literal kiss of Death in order to allow Billy his second chance at life.
More crucial than the war of the witches is the series-altering twist that the eighth episode offers: Billy creates the Witches’ Road. Much like Wanda Maximoff, Billy can use his Chaos Magic to turn his fantasies into a reality. Although he didn’t realize what he was doing at the time, Billy transformed the imagery that decorates his bedroom—much of it composed of famous witches from pop culture—into an actual Witches’ Road, bringing the ballad to life.
While the penultimate episode is a standout in an entertaining season of MCU TV, the finale itself is disappointing by comparison. “Maiden Mother Crone” goes all the way back to 1750 to tell the tale of Agatha Harkness and how her son, Nicholas Scratch, was taken from her. The finale shows a softer side of Agatha as she loves and cares for her only child during his brief time on Earth, but it also skips some of the more interesting aspects of her backstory, such as how she became lovers with Death, how she obtained the Darkhold, and even how she became pregnant with Nick in the first place, the last of which remains an untold story in the comics as well. (Really, it feels like we were robbed of a meet-cute between Agatha and Death. Aubrey Plaza is left mostly on the sideline in the finale, as Agatha All Along fails to expand on her character in any compelling way after revealing Rio to be as important a figure as Death.)
Agatha All Along ultimately sacrifices a deeper look into Agatha’s origins and her relationship with Rio in order to allow enough time to set up the next step in Billy Maximoff’s journey, with the ghost of Agatha Harkness now serving as his guide. But creator Jac Schaeffer still pulled off another strong MCU series to build off of the success of WandaVision and carve out a new corner of the cinematic universe that revolved around magic and witchcraft.
As the last live-action Marvel Studios project of 2024 comes to a close, let’s break down some of the biggest moments from the show’s two-part finale and examine how Agatha All Along sets up the future of magic in the MCU.
The Truth about the Witches’ Road
At the end of the eighth episode, Agatha All Along reveals the truth about the Witches’ Road and its creator, Billy. When Wiccan returns home after a very eventful 24 hours, he looks around his bedroom and begins to recognize objects that represent the trials that he and the rest of Agatha’s coven faced on the Witches’ Road. He sees a poster of Lorna Wu, a figurine of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz (and the upcoming Wicked), a Ouija board, and other pieces of evidence that signify that his interests served as the inspiration for the Witches’ Road’s designs. And to drive the point home, Agatha All Along weaves in brief flashbacks from the preceding episodes, in which Agatha drew attention to the fact that she already knew that Billy was responsible for creating the Road.
In WandaVision, Wanda turned the sitcoms she watched as a child with her family into a safe haven for her to cope with her grief as an adult. In Agatha All Along, Billy was desperate to both find his brother Tommy and escape the clutches of the Salem Seven, and so he used Chaos Magic to create a world of his own without any real intention or formal training in witchcraft—just as his mother did.
The (presumed) series finale goes a step further to explore the origins of the famed “Ballad of the Witches’ Road” and its original songwriters: Nicholas and Agatha. (Not to be confused with the song’s actual Oscar-winning songwriters, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, who cowrote the “Agatha All Along” bop in WandaVision as well.) Back in the 18th century, the duo would lure witches into Agatha’s web, allowing her to both feast off of their power and pile up bodies for Death as she tried to buy as much time with her son as possible. All the while, they would sing and develop the song that would grow into the ballad. And when Nick finally died of natural causes, Agatha kept the tradition alive for centuries, using the song—and the fable of the Witches’ Road—to prey on other witches.
In the series finale, Agatha returns in spirit form to explain all this to the confused Billy, who is just coming to terms with the fact that he’s essentially responsible for the deaths of Alice, Lilia, and Sharon Davis (even if Agatha will never remember the latter’s name). “Unlike your mother … sorry. Wanda … You actually did something interesting with your power,” Agatha tells Billy.
“You’re making fun of me,” he replies. “This is just one of your tricks.”
“The ballad was the trick,” Agatha says. “It was just a con to lure other gullible witches. The song doesn’t mean anything, it never did. The Road wasn’t real until you made it real.”
The reveal of the Witches’ Road’s true nature stands as the biggest twist of the season, while also creating a clever thematic connection to WandaVision that echoes that series’ narrative structure without simply recycling it. WandaVision was a mystery box of a series that forced the viewer to question everything from the pilot’s opening moments, whereas Agatha All Along packaged its greatest mystery in secret, using Teen’s (not-so-mysterious) identity as a smokescreen. And just as WandaVision paid homage to decades of sitcom history by switching its TV inspirations from week to week, Agatha All Along used its various trials to celebrate classic fantasy and horror films. In the end, the Witches’ Road was Billy’s version of the Westview Hex, as the fledgling superhero continues to take after his mother without even realizing it.
Agatha the (Unfriendly) Ghost
Agatha Harkness is no more. But her spirit is very much alive.
After showing up in Billy’s room in the final moments of the eighth episode, Agatha returns in the finale in all her ghostly glory. True to form, one of her first moves as a specter is to try to slap Billy across the face. Twice. Even in death, Agatha is one of the most unserious protagonists ever to grace the MCU. And, thankfully, her story isn’t over quite yet.
While the silliness of her return dampens the dramatic impact of her death, Agatha now assumes a role her character has often held in the comics: spirit guide to a powerful witch. (And her brown hair has even turned a silverish white to match her comic book look in full.) In the comics, Agatha has died, become a ghost, returned to life, and died again. And just as she does in life, in death she trains the Scarlet Witch in the ways of witchcraft.
Vision and theScarlet Witch (1985) no. 3Marvel Comics
In Agatha All Along, Billy attempts to banish Agatha’s spirit before sealing off the door to the Witches’ Road that remains in Agatha’s basement in Westview. (It’s hard to blame him for wanting to get rid of a sassy ghost who’s trying to spirit slap him.) But Billy submits to Agatha’s pleas to spare her when she finally confesses that she isn’t prepared to enter the afterlife and face her son. And so the pair agree to form a new coven of two and embark on a quest to find Tommy.
It’s always possible that Agatha will eventually find a way to return to life, giving Kathryn Hahn’s purple witch another chance to shine in the spotlight. But at least for now, she returns to the supporting role that she often plays for Wanda in the comics, accompanying Wanda’s son as his much-needed mentor and witchcraft teacher. It feels as if Agatha All Along left a lot on the table with a character whose layers were only just beginning to be peeled back, but as long as Hahn is fine reprising her role in its new, ghostly form, there may still be time to learn more about the notorious Agatha Harkness.
Finding Tommy and the Future of Billy Maximoff
As Agatha All Along revealed at the end of Episode 6, Billy’s decision to travel the Witches’ Road—and, really, to create it—was driven by his desire to find his long-lost brother Tommy. In the penultimate episode, Agatha helps Billy use his powers to finally locate Tommy’s soul and find it a new home, just as Billy did with William Kaplan on the day he died in the car crash. Billy finds a boy who’s been pushed into a pool in a prank taken too far, moments away from drowning to death. He can sense that “there’s no one to love him” and that “he’s got no one,” possibly alluding to the character’s fractured home life and experience growing up in juvenile halls in the comics, in stark contrast to Billy’s upbringing with two loving parents. Now, Billy and Agatha just need to find the boy who will soon become Tommy Shepherd.
In true MCU fashion, Agatha All Along ends with Agatha providing the audience with a tease: “Let’s go find Tommy.” Without any official announcement of a direct follow-up to Agatha All Along, it remains to be seen when or how the continuation of this story will take shape, but the path has been laid for it—starting even before this series began.
Marvel Studios has been slowly assembling its team of Young Avengers across its TV shows and films for years, with 2023’s The Marvelsfinally confirming the upcoming project’s existence and the teen supergroup’s first three members: Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), and Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton). Wiccan and Speed (Tommy’s superhero alter-ego) are prominent members of the Young Avengers in the comics, and it seems like only a matter of time before they join the rest of the MCU’s next generation of superheroes.
Given the trajectory of Billy’s story in the MCU, it appears increasingly likely that Marvel Studios could adapt a popular storyline in the comics, Avengers: The Children’s Crusade. While the 2010-2012 miniseries by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung bears the name of the Young Avengers’ parent group in its title, it’s really a story about the Young Avengers, with Billy at its center as he struggles to control his powerful, reality-altering abilities. Billy, Tommy, and Co. search for Wanda Maximoff, who had been missing since she lost control of her powers and who rewrote the entire Marvel universe in the House of M series, not unlike what she did to Westview in WandaVision. In Children’s Crusade, Billy and Tommy reunite with their mother for the first time since their souls occupied new bodies and they became superheroes.
Avengers: The Children’s Crusade (2010) no. 6Marvel Comics
While the context would have to be significantly changed to fit within the greater MCU narrative, Marvel Studios could adapt elements of The Children’s Crusade to center either on Billy searching for Tommy, or on the Young Avengers as they attempt to resurrect Wanda after her apparent death in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. What with Wanda’s obvious connections to the world of Agatha All Along and its leading characters, many viewers expected that Elizabeth Olsen would reprise her role as the Scarlet Witch for the show’s grand finale. But such a star-studded return would have surely overshadowed a story that belonged to Agatha and her pet-turned-student Billy, and Marvel can now save that tale for when the timing is right.
Whatever journey lies ahead for Billy and the soon-to-be-reborn Tommy, it’s also unclear whether Schaeffer will have a direct part in shaping it. With Schaeffer busy with Agatha All Along, Marvel Studios tapped another showrunner to lead the second WandaVision spinoff, Vision Quest, across the finish line. And Schaeffer recently told Deadline that there isn’t anything else in development with her and the powerhouse studio: “I’m not working on anything right now for Marvel, but it is my hope that there will be more for [Billy], both because I’m such an admirer of Joe [Locke], and because I think the character is really interesting.”
Given the success of Agatha All Along, which received strong reviews and promising viewership numbers that increased as the series went on, it would be a mistake on Marvel’s part to simply let Schaeffer go after she created two of Marvel’s most popular streaming titles, especially considering the scarcity of consistency and creative direction across the vast majority of Marvel Television’s shows. Schaeffer has proven that she is exactly the kind of filmmaker that the studio needs to lean on as it continues to revamp its approach to storytelling on the small screen.
Agatha All Along may not have had the most satisfying conclusion when it came to its protagonist, but by repackaging much of what worked in WandaVision in a clever way, Marvel added another quality entry to its TV library. And by expanding on the untapped world of witchcraft, using some incredible practical sets and effects to capture it, Agatha All Along became the latest Marvel project to demonstrate that not every MCU project has to look or feel the same in style or substance. Including Billy, the ghost of Agatha, and Jen Kale—who’s flying off into the sunset somewhere—there are now even more witches in a world full of superheroes, as the supernatural continues to find a place in a multiverse that is still (somehow) only scratching the surface of how dynamic and diverse it is in the comics.
Although nostalgia may be in for now, Marvel Studios will need to continue to innovate if it hopes to survive the superhero fatigue that has contributed to its dwindling box office and streaming numbers in recent years, especially as James Gunn’s DCU reboot looms. If Schaeffer and Hahn can turn a minor comic book character like Agatha—and one catchy jingle—into another streaming hit, there are still plenty of narrative avenues Marvel can capitalize on that don’t rely on a mutant or returning star to carry the company.
One bite of Max Glassman’s pierogies is all it takes to taste the difference. In his alter-ego, Pierogi Papi, Glassman saves the city from mundane and limp Polish dumplings. He’ll stuff his with traditional fixings like cheese and potato but also deviate with braised beef or caramelized onion.
He’s popped up across the city, including Moonwalker Cafe in Avondale. The Chicago Reader’s Monday Night Foodball hosted him at an event last year. But after years of wandering, it appears Glassman has found a semi-permanent base of operations in Logan Square at one of the city’s most unique bars, Consignment Lounge.
Mark Pallman and Katie Piepel opened the bar in September 2022 in Avondale at 3520 W. Diversey Avenue and have stuffed the bar with a mishmash of trinkets liberated from estate sales, auctions, and antique malls. Pallman explains everything in the bar is for sale, including vintage sports memorabilia — he recalls a poster featuring members of the 1986 Super Bowl Champion Chicago Bears was a hot item. The poster captured players in the locker room wearing towels. There are also paintings, hats, old glassware, comics, and books: “It’s a smattering of things I like,” Pallman says.
Just like bucia used to make.
At $12 to $14, the cocktails are affordable.
Everything is for sale.
Piepl and Pallman were introduced to Glassman as a patron. The bar had a revolving slate of food vendors and Pierogi Papi blew them away. And so, for the last few weeks, Glassman has been a fixture on Thursdays and Fridays. Milo’s Market is another Consignment Lounge regular, popping up when the schedule permits. Their specialty is “beeria” grilled cheese.
Pallman has a background in advertising and Piepl in real estate. The purchase of Consignment Lounge’s building was. at first, investment property for the couple, who have been married for four years: “I’ve always loved taverns and dive bar cocktails,” he says. They have a small staff of bar veterans. Jana Heili (Machine, The Walk-In) and Mark Bailie (SmallBar, Punch House) developed the drink recipes. KB Woodson (Stop Along, Harding Tap) handles staff relations.
Consignment Lounge’s drinks aren’t as fancy — or expensive — as some cocktail lounges, but they’re well thought out and more than hold their own. Pallman says it’s the customer service that makes the bar special.
These bartenders have experience at some of Chicago’s most popular spots.
Luxury, redefined.
The space also has its share of CRT TVs, which they can hook up to a streaming device to watch movies or even live sports. Some customers are tricked into thinking there’s some sort of nostalgic video filter being applied. No, that’s just an old-school 4:3 aspect ratio.
Hopefully, by spring, Consignment Lounge will unveil an enclosed patio that could hold 30 to 40 people. The bar should grow, Pallman says. After all, the original concept is the evolution of a basement.
Walk through the space below.
Consignment Lounge, 3520 W. Diversey Avenue, open 4 p.m. to midnight on Tuesday through Thursday; 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Friday; noon to 2 a.m. on Saturday; noon to midnight on Sunday. Pierogi Papi onsite at 6 p.m. until sold out on Thursday and Friday nights — check social media to confirm.
Yes, that’s a St. Louis football Cardinals penant.
PlantX’s roller-coaster journey in Chicago will end this weekend as the grocery store turned vegan food hall has announced its closure in Uptown. The vegan company’s XMarket, which opened in summer 2022, just west of the DuSable Lake Shore Drive’s Montrose exit, will shutter permanently on Sunday, November 3, according to the food hall’s owners.
XMarket was touted as the Midwest’s largest all-vegan food hall. The news hit Wednesday afternoon with Chicago vegans rushing to the venue for discounts. Even before cries of inflation driving up food prices during the pandemic, vegans in general have often complained about the cost of meatless and dairy-free goods, whether sold at grocery stores or restaurants. Though the vegan population is growing, and more vegan options are available at restaurants that serve meat, several restaurant owners have worried if they can succeed while depending on a customer base that still is considered niche.
Last year, PlantX, a publicly-traded Vancouver-based company, converted XMarket from a grocer to a bar and food hall with six food stalls, headlined by Chicago’s Kale by Name and location of popular vegan pizzeria Kitchen 17. Another standout was El Hongo Magico, which sold mushroom tacos. In August, XMarket welcomed Impossible Quality Meats, the first restaurant from Impossible Foods. The faux meat company had made a marketing splash earlier this summer with an endorsement deal from competitive hot dog-eating star Joey Chestnut. XMarket continued to sell some groceries — it never sold produce.
The space also housed a vegan sushi counter from the team behind Bloom Plant Based Kitchen, one of the city’s best vegan restaurants. The stall closed months ago, and while Bloom’s chef and owner Rodolfo Cuadros says he wasn’t surprised by XMarket’s closure — he’s been skeptical of the business model since he joined — the sudden closure caught him off guard.
Kale My Name owner Nemanja Golubovic put a positive spin on the closure in an Instagram post, writing that vendors at the market weren’t paying PlantX for rent or other bills, “just [a] small commission from our sales and we kept [the] majority of our money to ourselves.” Kale My Name’s original location in Albany Park remains unaffected.
As is the case at most food halls, the food hall’s owner — not tenants — is responsible for paying shared staff such as busers and dishwashers, Golubovic adds: “That’s why we had [the] opportunity to do very well here, but sadly [the] market couldn’t.”
Elsewhere, rank-and-file workers bemoaned having only five days of notice that their jobs were about to be eliminated.
PlantX Life operates three other XMarkets in Canada. Recently, they consolidated a location in suburban Vancouver at the Locavore Bar and Grill. Sales increased due to the move, according to an MDA shared this summer. That same report showed falling revenue. At $7.3 million in 2024, revenue has fallen 45 percent since 2023. Earlier in the week, the company announced it was expanding its Bloombox Club plant subscription service to Italy.
While most restaurants have struggled after 2020 with pandemic-related challenges like rising costs including inflation, food halls have suffered particularly. This year, Chicago has seen food hall operators like Urbanspace exit the market, and 16” on Center (the owners of Thalia Hall and Empty Bottle) departed from Revival Food Hall in the Loop. Still, XMarket’s challenges seemed to be unique in Uptown, away from a ton of foot traffic and difficult for suburban vegans to find.
XMarket, 804 W. Montrose Avenue, closing Sunday, November 3.
To die, to sleep—to sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub, for in that sleep of death what dreams may come. —William Shakespeare
One, two, Freddy’s coming for you Three, four, better lock your door Five, six, grab your crucifix Seven, eight, gonna stay up late Nine, ten, never sleep again. —Popular nursery rhyme
Freddy Krueger has scared the hell out of us for the past 40 years, and he knows why. It’s not his disfigured face. It’s not the glove he wears that’s outfitted with razor-sharp knives. And it’s not that he is, as one of the vengeful parents who burned him alive affectionately called him, “a filthy child murderer.”
What’s terrifying about Freddy is where we meet him: in our dreams. “You could be a victim in your own nightmare,” says Robert Englund, the man behind the bogeyman since 1984. “It’s a very personal thing, your subconscious being invaded by this predator.”
With A Nightmare on Elm Street, writer-director Wes Craven came for audiences at their most vulnerable. Ever since it hit multiplexes, falling asleep peacefully has been harder. “We’re told as kids when we’re scared, we hide under the covers,” says Thommy Hutson, author of Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy. “But under the covers, in a way, is where Freddy gets you. … Sweet dreams? Those don’t exist in this world.”
At a time when slasher flicks were brainlessly spilling fake blood by the gallon, Craven took a more psychological approach—without sacrificing gore, of course. “Wes knew how to write such realism, and then he has this dream landscape that is just so crazy,” says Heather Langenkamp, who played Nancy Thompson, the teenager with the brains to finally outwit Freddy. “It’s never been repeated in such a seamless and beautiful way.”
The film almost looks homemade at times, but that only adds to its lore and to its status as a VHS-era rite of passage. “Dad had the kids, and he let them rent it at a mom-and-dad video store. He let them bring it home, and then he put steak knives on his fingers and scratched the windows late at night to terrorize them,” Englund says. “Or they saw it on a video that was dog-eared and passed around in a dormitory. You’ve gotta see this movie, man.”
New Line Cinema
Elm Street didn’t just change horror. Since the ’80s, it’s had a place in the pop culture pantheon. “Johnny Carson was doing Freddy Krueger jokes,” Englund says. Kids started dressing up as Freddy for Halloween. Video stores couldn’t keep the movie in stock. And cable TV played it nonstop. It spawned six sequels, a crossover with Friday the 13th, a television series, and a blockbuster reboot. But before becoming America’s collective Nightmare, it was just a creepy-sounding idea that no one wanted. That is, until New Line Cinema—an independent studio best known at the time for producing John Waters films—stepped up to the plate, hoping to turn out a hit on the cheap. Making that happen, though, was, at times, nightmarish. “The real story of Nightmare on Elm Street is actually as scary as the movie,” New Line founder Robert Shaye says. “Almost.”
Part 1: “Wes Was a Very Kind of Diabolical Guy.”
By the early ’80s, Craven was known as a director who made horror movies that were both transgressively violent and shockingly smart, like The Last House on the Left (1972)and The Hills Have Eyes (1977). In the early ’80s, he wrote a script that drew from real life. He had read L.A. Times articles about Southeast Asian immigrants who reportedly died while having distressing dreams. Growing up in Cleveland, he had nightmares himself. His father, a Baptist fundamentalist, was “a scary person”; he was bullied by a kid named Fred. And one fateful night, he had an encounter with a frightening stranger that stuck with him forever.
Wes Craven (writer-director, in 2008): He was a drunk that came down the sidewalk and woke me up when I was sleeping. I went to the window wondering what the hell was there. He just did a mind-fuck on me. He just basically somehow knew I was up there, and he looked right into my eyes. I went back and hid for what I thought was hours. I finally crept back to the window, and he was still there.
Then he started walking almost half-backwards, so that he could keep looking at me, down to the corner and turned, and I suddenly realized, “My god, that’s the direction of the entrance to our apartment building.” I literally ran toward the front door and heard, two stories down, the front door open. I woke up my big brother; he went down with a baseball bat—and nobody was there. Probably the guy heard him coming and ran; he was drunk, having a good time. But the idea of an adult who was frightening and enjoyed terrifying a child was the origin of Freddy.
Robert Shaye (founder, New Line Cinema): Wes was a very kind of diabolical guy. He reacted to a very strict religious life in his peculiar way.
Mimi Craven (Wes Craven’s second wife and a nurse in Nightmare): When I moved in with Wes, he started writing Nightmare on Elm Street. He would go out into the studio, which was back behind our house in Venice, and he would write all day long in a blue bathrobe and a pith helmet. And then he would come in at night, and we would read it and act out the scenes and scare each other. Then he would go and rewrite. So I knew that script like the back of my hand.
Sara Risher (head of production, New Line Cinema): Nobody sent us scripts. We were too low on the totem pole.
Robert Shaye: We were still in a loft on 13th Street and University Place in Manhattan, and we had managed to get a couple of films together.
Risher: [Shaye] came across the Wes Craven script, which he didn’t pass by like everybody in Hollywood.
RobertShaye: I came across the script through a guy named Mark Forstater. He produced Monty Python and the Holy Grail. One summer, he said, “You should go to Los Angeles.” I said, “Well, I don’t know anybody in Los Angeles. What should I do that for?” And he said, “Because this is what independent producers do. You have to go out and meet young directors. I know three or four really interesting young directors, and I can help you get an appointment with all of them.” Tobe Hooper was one of them. Another was Joe Dante. And then this other guy, Wes Craven. But I couldn’t get in touch with Wes Craven. And I finally got him on the phone just before I was leaving. He said, “Well, I’ve got one project that’s really pretty interesting.” I said, “What is it?” And he told me the story of Nightmare on Elm Street.
Risher: He went after it. He knew there was something great there.
RobertShaye: He sent on the script, and I said, “Well, can we maybe make a deal?” And it’s a little blurry for me exactly what happened, but Wes finally said, “I’ll make a deal with this guy. There’s nobody else around.” So we made a deal. I think I paid him 5,000 bucks for an option, and that was the beginning.
Risher: It took a good four or five months of work on the script. There was character work [needed], in my opinion, particularly for the young girl and the women. There was also the fact that we didn’t have the money that particular script needed.
RobertShaye: We were desperate for money. We had a lot of people thinking that we were going to go bankrupt. I said, “We’ll get a budget. We’ll start making the whole thing happen.”
Risher: Our budget was only like a million-four.
RobertShaye: Things progressed, and we thought we had some hustlers trying to help me raise some money.
Thommy Hutson (author, Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy): This truly almost fell apart at the 11th hour.
RobertShaye: When I woke up every day, I had a sinking feeling in my stomach: This is out of hand.
Part 2: “Oh Boy, I Could Work With This.”
Meanwhile, A Nightmare on Elm Street needed a cast. There was barely any room in the budget to pay actors, let alone A-listers, who probably wouldn’t have wanted to be in an independent horror movie anyway. So Craven and the producers went with character actors and newcomers.
Annette Benson (casting director): We saw so, so many people. It was a way to start their careers.
Lin Shaye (a teacher in Nightmare): My brother said, “Put my sister in your movie.” That was that. And of course, it was really the beginning of my career.
(Nancy Thompson): Back then, an agent would get a breakdown: “Girl, 16 years old, high school, wholesome.” And I’m sure a lot of agents sent in the women in their client list. I went into one audition, and it was so low-rent. There wasn’t even any furniture in the room. I thought, “Oh no, this is much worse than I thought.”
Benson: Wes loved her right away.
Risher: She was so vulnerable. She was the girl next door, and she was cunning and clever, and figuring out ways back at Freddy as a young girl could do, setting traps for him. It was so realistic, and you were always on her side.
Benson: Johnny Depp came to me through Ilene Feldman, who was his agent at the time. She said, “Annette, let’s make magic. I’m sending Johnny over to you right now. You’re going to love him.”
Mimi Craven: He comes in, he reads. He sucks. He wasn’t an actor. He was a musician. So he leaves. Annette and I are looking at Wes, and he scratches Johnny’s name off. He said, “Well, he was terrible.” That day, Wes’s daughter and her best friend were in from New York. They were preteen. They were squealing [over him]. They were that high-pitched. Only dogs can hear the thing that young girls do. And Annette looks at Wes.
Benson: Evidently, Wes’s daughter thought he was cute.
Mimi Craven: He hired him [to play Glen Lantz], but that was all Annette.
Benson: I mean, that was his very first acting job.
Amanda Wyss (Tina Gray): I auditioned for the role of Nancy, and I was called back for Tina. I was very disappointed. The funny thing was, my agents at the time did not want me to do it. They said, “It’ll ruin your career. Nobody does horror.”
Jsu Garcia (Rod Lane): The landscape was, Friday the 13th was the shit. Texas Chain Saw Massacre set the tone, Exorcist set the tone. But the next thing was Friday the 13th. They sold that film just on the title. But we were going to make a really quality horror film.
Editor’s note: In Nightmare, Garcia was credited as Nick Corri.
Wyss: The four of us went in and read together.
Langenkamp: Lo and behold, there’s Wes Craven. We totally didn’t expect that he would be there. And Annette Benson said, “OK, start from the top. We’re going to do this scene where we’re at Tina’s house.” When Johnny Depp is doing that funny little thing with the boom box.
Wyss: We all just meshed. And Wes told us in the room we had the part. Which never happens, or rarely.
Langenkamp: It was a dream audition. It never happened again. And it was just a simpler time in Hollywood. They didn’t have to pass it by a big room full of executives. Wes Craven had the sole job of casting his own movie.
At the time, Robert Englund was coming off a supporting role in V, a popular sci-fi miniseries that first aired on NBC in 1983 and quickly built a cult following. The L.A. native, then in his mid-30s, remembers thinking that the part would help him stop being typecast as a Southerner.
New Line Cinema
Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger): It must’ve had something to do with the way Hollywood thought I looked. I mean, I read several times to play John Schneider’s cousin in Dukes of Hazzard. I was just a Hollywood character actor. Nobody knew my name. I sort of thought, “Well, I’m going to be the kind of go-to nerdy science fiction guy.”
Benson: Robert Englund’s agent at the time, Joe Rice, called and said, “You’ve got to see Robert for this part.”
Englund: I’d read the script. It really led you along, and it was kind of hypnotic. And really, every element that was in Wes’s imagination sort of became consistent on the page. But I was anxious to work with Wes—not because of the script, but because I’d spent time hanging out in a bar in Hollywood on La Brea where they had these old black-and-white TV monitors on either side of the bar hanging from the ceiling. And on one side, it was clips from Eraserhead. And on the other side, it was clips from The Hills Have Eyes and The Last House on the Left. So I assigned a kind of David Lynchian quality to Wes. And I was curious to work for him.
Benson: I thought, “Oh my God, they’re looking for a David Warner type.” A really big monster type. And I knew Robert wasn’t the big monster type.
RobertShaye: Usually the villain or the monster in monster films are stuntmen because they’re falling all around. It was Wes who said, “I don’t think I want to cast a stuntman. I’m going to cast a Shakespearean actor.”
Risher: In Robert Englund, he saw the talent that the guy had.
Benson: He was an excellent actor. And my casting was always pretty much a gut feeling. He could do it.
Englund: I expected a kind of goth guy. And I walk in, and, of course, Wes looks like a young Don Quixote in Ralph Lauren. I was tan from surfing, and I had a lot of blond curls. I looked like Billy Katt’s older, uglier brother. And I remember greasing my hair down and putting a little bit of cigarette ash—it’s an old theater trick—under my eyes.
Risher: He knew how to make his voice menacing. And he had a great sense of humor.
Mimi Craven: It was written, but Robert brought Freddy Krueger [to life]. I mean, he gave him dimensions.
Englund: I just tried to play that old game where you don’t blink or you just stare at somebody. You know, the first person that blinks gets socked in the arm. I tried to do that with Wes because I knew it would make my gaze more intense. I think that helped. But Wes, when he was telling me his ideas for the movie, I knew that something special was going on.
Risher: He knew what he wanted. And he visualized what he wanted.
Mimi Craven: Thefreaky moment was during wardrobe for Robert, and I was there for that. He came in with that fucking Christmas sweater on.
Risher: I remember saying, “It looks like Christmas.” And [Wes] said, “No, no, these are iconic colors. These will work.”
Mimi Craven: And you could see everybody had goosebumps. Because Christmas, it’s so happy.
Jim Doyle (mechanical special effects design): Wes and I were meeting every other day. He was rewriting based on what [production designer] Gregg Fonseca and [cinematographer] Jacques Haitkin could do within the budget. We were trying to pull this whole thing together. And he said, “OK, now what do we do about Freddy’s weapon? What is this thing?” I said, “Well, I don’t really know.” He said, “But it looks like it has to be made in a boiler room by a guy with that level of skill. The picture I have in my head is long knives, like fingernails.” What he didn’t want was a lump on the end of the guy’s hand. I was like, “I think I can probably articulate this. If we can get it to work, we can articulate it.” And a couple of days later, I came back in with a sketch, and the sketch was pretty fucking close to what we ended up doing.
Englund: I didn’t realize it was going to have the incredibly seductive, iconic status that it has now in the world of horror, like the bolts in Frankenstein’s neck or the teeth on a vampire.
Risher: He had a long, thin, flexible body, so he wore all those fingernail knives around very easily.
Englund: And Freddy’s a little junkyard dog that when he puts that glove on, it extends his grasp. It’s an extension of his evil.
Risher: I remember looking at the makeup the first time and thinking it was too severe. And Wes said, “Well, he died from a fire. This is what it would look like.”
Englund: I’m out there in [makeup effects artist] David Miller’s garage, and he’s got an old barber’s chair in there which I spent days in, with a garage door shut, the air-conditioning on. And the first day, the thing that I remember most is not that the glue itched or the fact that it was cold or that David had cheaped out on the makeup brushes and they were a little crusty and sharp. What I remember was he gave me these giant medical books that he checked out of UCLA or some hospital library. And they were all burn victims. And he’s showing me what he’s going to do with the molds and the texturing and the prosthetics. And I couldn’t even look at the book.
But I sat there and watched the makeup evolve over the various sessions. Bob Shaye would come and look at it, and Wes Craven. I could tell they were getting nervous because in David’s little house out in the San Fernando Valley, I think he didn’t have it lit properly. He knew how to blend colors and he knew what it would look like on film, but Bob Shaye and Wes, when they visited us, they didn’t know that. And I couldn’t really tell, either. It looked too white to me. It looked too pink to me, too red. But David knew what he was doing.
I went through that whole process. And the more I did it, the more I was going, “Oh boy, I could work with this.”
Part 3: “Oh Hell, I’m in a Horror Movie.”
Nightmare on Elm Street had its monster. But there still wasn’t enough funding to make the movie. For a while, the production was touch and go. But even when things got hairy, the eternally calm Wes Craven kept things on track.
Risher: We were in preproduction, and I was out in L.A. pregnant with my son. And Bob called and said, “We’ve lost some of the money. The guy who had the home video [rights] backed out, and that’s like a third of our budget.” So he said, “I’m going to stay in New York and try to raise the money.” You can imagine the stress he was under. We had two weeks that we couldn’t pay the crew. He said, “Keep going,” so we kept going.
Robert Shaye: At the end of the day, nobody was coming up with the money. And I got a phone call from the production manager in Los Angeles saying, “I’ve got to warn you that the DP is quitting and the electricians are quitting and we don’t have any crew and they’re leaving in a week.”
Hutson: John Burrows was the production manager. He didn’t get paid for weeks. He actually helped pay the crew so they could keep going.
Risher: Believe it or not, they all stayed. They didn’t leave. I think they trusted that a pregnant woman wouldn’t lie to them.
Hutson: It was a very big deal. It was not like that Hollywood lore of every other movie that almost fell apart before it didn’t.
At the 11th hour, Shaye made a deal with Media Home Entertainment, a home video distribution company founded by producer Joseph Wolf. It wasn’t exactly favorable to New Line.
Robert Shaye (in Never Sleep Again): The tipping point was the devil’s agreement. I made an agreement with Joe, and he agreed to buy the video rights for a certain amount of money. But he made us guarantee that if we didn’t do certain things like buy additional prints and open in a certain number of theaters, that he had the right to take the film away from us and give us nothing for it. And that was the only deal I could make. That finished the financing for us.
Hutson: Everyone in the crew was like, “Listen, we can do this together. We can make this happen.” The crew not only believed in [Shaye], but believed in Wes and believed in themselves and what they were doing.
Mimi Craven: Wes would just show up. He would be like the thing that was standing still while everything revolved around him.
Joseph Whipp (Sergeant Parker): Nice guy.Never angry, never throwing things around. A little self-deprecating. When we were working on Scream, when I got there the first day, he said, “Yeah, I’m finally learning how to do this stuff.”
Lin Shaye: My first impressions of him were rosy cheeks and a guy standing in the corner watching very carefully, covering his mouth with his hand. There was a certain aura about him.
Langenkamp: Because he was so normal looking, I thought there must be something to this guy that he’s not showing. Because he would wear a necktie, he would wear khakis, and then he would often wear a checkered shirt. He just looked so much like a professor, and people made fun of him. I mean, this is Hollywood. Nobody wears a tie.
New Line Cinema
We would do pranks on him—we would all come to work wearing ties, just to pull his leg. He had such a wholesome sense of humor, as well as a very quick wit. I’m sure he had a dirty sense of humor as well, but his jokes were silly sometimes. He put everyone in such a good mood.
Wyss: He had children our age, so he was very facile with communicating to us in a way we understood. And he made us feel comfortable communicating back to him. He was a very preppy, professorial, avuncular kind of guy. Yet he could think of a million ways to kill you.
Langenkamp: I lived in Silver Lake, off of Griffith Park Boulevard, when I was making Nightmare on Elm Street. I couldn’t believe we were shooting so close to home. That’s the only thing I cared about: My commute was five minutes. I’m like, “Yay!” The first scene that we shot was that drive-up scene at John Marshall High. And it’s just so cute to watch it because we’re playing these teenagers that have been great friends forever. And the first day of work, basically, we all have jitters. We were all nervous, just watching Johnny jump over the side of the Cadillac and get out of the car.
Wyss: Heather and I clicked right away. We’d sit on the trailer steps every day and do the crossword puzzle.
Langenkamp: We went to Dodger games after the shoot. People wondered why we’re sitting in the nosebleed section because everyone thinks, “Oh, you must’ve made $1 billion,” but we were paid just SAG scale for that, for five weeks.
Garcia: Mimi Craven was our mother, essentially. She took us in. I loved her. We’re all at her house, they’re taking care of us. I was a starving actor. I was fed.
Mimi Craven: Fifteen years later when I ran into him at the Cannes Film Festival, Johnny still called me “Mom.”
Garcia: I would go over to Johnny’s house with Heather and Amanda and watch movies. Not Blockbuster rentals, but niche kind of film places. You’d pretty much get The Hills Have Eyes. They wouldn’t be in mainstream video rentals. We would sit there and just watch Wes’s old films and go, “Oh, wow, cool.”
Englund: They were being pampered by the glamour makeup crew while I was sitting next to them with a turkey baster full of K-Y Jelly on me.
Wyss: All four of us would be in the makeup trailer every morning, kind of watching Robert get his makeup done. I never had, “Oh, there’s Freddy.” It was always “Oh, there’s Robert becoming Freddy.”
Langenkamp: Robert is an entertainer in, literally, the best sense of the word. He wakes up every morning hoping he can entertain people, not only with his stories but with his experience and all the people that he’s met and all the movies that he’s done. That’s part of who he is. And I don’t think he would have been able to just sit over in the corner and be quiet. I mean, he really thrives off of attention and just helping people feel at ease in this weird world of Hollywood in 1984. He would say, “Oh my God, Heather, Heather, Heather, you have to go see the Red Hot Chili Peppers.”
Englund: The more I could be Robert around them, or the character of Robert telling you the dirty jokes around coffee and doughnuts, the easier it was to say, “Now, Heather, listen to me. I’m going to pretend to pull your hair here. Here’s the trick.” And “Heather, don’t be afraid to really pound on my chest hard.”
Langenkamp: We had so many intense scenes together. I really trusted him. He had knives for fingernails, of course, that he could’ve stabbed me a million times if he wanted to. Even though they were dull blades, they still could’ve done a lot of damage. So I had to trust him a lot.
Englund: At the last second, they tried to change my hat. I had to fight with Wes and Bob about keeping the fedora, which is Wes’s way of seeing Freddy. I had to prove to them how good the fedora looked in silhouette and how I could take it off and reveal my deformed bald head. Even though it’s not my idea, I just knew it was right.
Langenkamp: I didn’t think that was a big deal. I’m like, “Oh, he’s wearing a sweater, he’s wearing a hat,” but I never really had the visual. And I don’t think anybody did until we saw him on the set in his wardrobe and his hat and his makeup, which was really the first day we worked on the school set. When I go down the stairs in the school, that’s my first scene that I have with Robert. And it was terrifying to see him the first time. The smoke, the dungeon-y pipes. It was really, really scary. And I realized at that point, “Oh hell, I’m in a horror movie.”
Part 4: “Later in Life You Look Back and Go, ‘You Know What? I Could Have Died.’”
For a movie with such a low budget, A Nightmare on Elm Street had extremely intricate visual effects. Doyle and his team had their work cut out for them. To stage Freddy’s murder of Tina, the film’s first big set piece, they had to build a rotating set.
Doyle: Wes talked about the structure of the script being like a Shakespeare play, and I could relate to that because I was a theater guy to begin with. Shakespeare would have a tendency to introduce in the first act something that then builds the story for you, but then he drops that and goes into the story. He said, “Because we’ve got to do two things. We’ve got to introduce a character that everybody falls in love with. Then we’re going to kill her, and we’re going to remove her from the story.” And someone else in the story then has to become the lead character, and that would be Nancy.
Wyss: This is how I read the script: Tina dies. I literally skipped right over it, 100 percent. I think I read, “Tina is dragged up on the ceiling,” and I thought, “Oh, that’ll be interesting how they’re going to make somebody else do that.” It’s like the famous quote about shooting Gone With the Wind,and it said, “Atlanta burns.” And everyone was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s fine.” But it took like 30 days to shoot.
Doyle: Wes said, “How about at the end of the first reel, you scared the fuck out of people and you hooked them so badly they can’t leave?” And I said, “What if she was in her bedroom, and the whole bedroom goes Looney Tunes and it goes upside down?” He says, “You could do that?” And I say, “I can do it. I don’t know whether we can afford it.” And so I ended up making a deal with production that I would build the room, and then, at the end of the film, I’d keep it. And that’s what I did. I hired a crew, I built the room, we did all the production work on it, and basically everything up to installing the set was my risk. I was paying people out of my pocket just to get this thing up and running. Hopefully then I would be able to use it for other projects and make some money on it. And it turned out to be a pretty good decision because Tina’s death is one of the all-time top deaths in a film ever.
Wyss: Every single thing in this room was nailed down, shellacked, glued. Nothing moved, whether it was upside down or on the walls. It was just hardened into the room, and the room was manually cranked.
Doyle: I saw the Poltergeist room, and it was this gigantic thing, and it had all these hydraulics and stuff, and I’m going, “If you just balanced that fucking thing, you could just turn it by hand.” Because the people are always going to be in the bottom, you don’t have to worry about their weight. So you just balance the room, and you should be able to turn something even of that scale by hand. And so I got big bearings, surplus, and one of my guys and I sat down and we built a model of it. We did basic calculations on the stiffness and all that. We got it all put together. And because the load capacity of the bearings was so high, once we got the thing put together, I mean, you could turn it with one finger.
Wyss: I was always on the floor, and at each turn of the room, I would go to the next floor. Sometimes it was the side wall, sometimes it was the ceiling. And Jacques Haitkin and Wes, I think they were in airplane seats affixed to the wall. So the camera always had the same point of view. We started out and I get pulled out of bed and I get dragged up the wall, and then the room spun, and then I’m on the ceiling. We had to rehearse that many times. I lost my sense of up and down and was very dizzy.
Englund: They had me there, and they thought they might need a point of view shot between Tina’s legs of what she was seeing that they would intercut with what her boyfriend was seeing, which is just her alone being dragged across the ceiling. Amanda Wyss couldn’t operate the camera, though, because she’s not union. But it just so happened that the first assistant camera was Jacques Haitkin’s wife, Anne. So Anne took her jeans off, got down there in her underwear and got the handheld camera, and we put blood on her legs. And I dragged her around, and they shot between her legs. That shot was so hardcore and so scary and so disorienting that they didn’t use it in the movie. But Wes used that sequence to get the censors to let him use other shots. It was sort of his trade because they didn’t know that he really didn’t care. He pretended like, “This is my favorite shot. If you’re not going to let me have it, you’ve got to let me have these two.”
Wyss: I was literally dragged with high-tension fishing line. I thought, “I can’t do this.” I felt my body heaving even though I was on the floor. And so Wes stopped and stuck his head through a window and was trying to explain to me that I was on the ground, and I just said, “I don’t think so.” I just couldn’t wrap my brain around it. You could have told me I was on Mars.
Langenkamp: That’s so gruesome. In fact, the new Ultra-4K HD DVD actually has eight more seconds to that scene, as if it’s not long enough as it is. That scene, to me, is the grossest horror movie scene of all time.
Doyle: We were trying to figure out how to kill Glen. And I was like, “Well, we’ve got this rotating room sitting here.” Wes was like, “Would it be possible to do something like The Shining?” And I knew, of course, he was talking about the elevator scene. I said, “Yeah, probably.” What we didn’t count on was there was going to be around 500 pounds of blood in the room.
Risher: It was so much blood you wouldn’t have believed it. It was like a river of blood. We could have drowned in it.
Doyle: The room is now sitting there with 500 pounds of blood on the ceiling. It was supposed to run down the wall and across the floor. Well, to unlock the room, we had to tilt it really slightly to pull a pin. And when we did that, we tilted it a bit too far, and the blood got away from us.
Langenkamp: None of the blood went down the walls like Wes had planned. Instead, it all went out the open door. They just put a wind effect to make it seem like there was some churning blood from hell.
Doyle: Now that blood was on the floor. And we’ve got hot electrical on the floor. I remember unplugging everything. We lucked out. It could’ve been really bad.
Mimi Craven: Somebody called. And I answered the phone, and they said, “Hey, just want to let you know he’s OK.” And I went, “All right, start at the beginning, please.” They strapped him in. But then the room kept spinning, and the grips lost the ropes. And Wes is inside this room spinning. They got the shot, thank God.
Doyle: It’s one of those things where later in life you look back and go, “You know what? I could have died.”
Part 5: “We Got Away With Murder.”
Not all of the scares in A Nightmare on Elm Street are so over the top. The film is built on smaller moments of terror, like when Nancy’s taking a bath and Freddy’s glove slowly rises out of the water.
Doyle: We had a second-story set. And one of the reasons it was a second-story set was because I had to have something under the bathtub.
Langenkamp: They built a bathtub on top of an 8-foot tank, basically. It was very, very rudimentary.
Doyle: The water was actually in the tank. And you get in and out of it by going into the bathtub.
Langenkamp: Jim Doyle was in scuba gear all day long in that, just putting his hand up and down, up and down.
Doyle: My assistant Peter Kelly was going to do that. Peter was 6-foot-4 and had really long arms. He had a degree in film, he knew about acting. But it turns out that he was claustrophobic underwater. So he popped in there and he popped right back out again and said, “I can’t do this.” And I was like, “OK, well, I guess I can.”
Langenkamp: It was freezing.
Doyle: We kept the warm water running, and then we were able to keep it at a comfortable temperature. It just took longer than we hoped.
Langenkamp: We’d get it to be probably like 89 degrees, and then I’d be like, “OK, you’ve got to add some hot water.” Then they’d boil water down and pour in some teapots full of water.
Doyle: We spent six or seven hours on it.
Langenkamp: Wes would bang on the tub three times, and then the hand would go up. Then he’d bang on it twice, and the hand would go down. So all day long, just banging on the tub.
Robert Shaye: One of the ideas that I had for the film that Wes deigned to let me include was the sticky stairs. Sometimes, I’d have a dream where I’d be going somewhere and I was caught in cement and I couldn’t move. You feel totally helpless. You’re in the bloody dream, and you’re going to die.
Langenkamp: I think it was oatmeal and maybe cream of mushroom soup. I just remember it being really sticky. That was the one he made us put in there at the last minute. We were just throwing things against the wall. But that was his nightmare.
Charles Bernstein (composer): On my work print on my VHS, I was watching the scene where the phone rings and Heather picks up the phone and [Freddy] says, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.” And then a plastic tongue darts out of the phone. I hit the pause button right here exactly where I’m sitting, and I sat down and I thought, “Charles, what are you doing? Has it come to this?”
Doyle: I called David [Miller] and said, “I’ve got this idea. Could you do this overnight? Because we need to shoot it tomorrow.” So he came up, and he made the phone overnight. I got a reputation for being a little twisted with some of these ideas, just spitballing this stuff. We got away with murder.
New Line Cinema
Langenkamp: Wes was a reader. He read everything. He read newspapers from around the world. He read books. He had been an English teacher. He knew the Bible front and back. He was the most educated man I knew. He’d read that you can have these powers in your sleep to turn away from the nightmare and take it away and give it no power. And then he’d also read about the kid who tries to stay up to prevent his nightmares. It’s all plucked from newspaper headlines. It’s just nobody else has the ability to imagine it that way.
In the climax, Nancy indeed beats Freddy by taking away his power. But that’s not how the movie ends. The coda starts idyllically, with Nancy leaving her house the next morning. Her mother, Marge (Ronee Blakley), says goodbye as Nancy’s friends, who are all alive again, pick her up in a convertible. The car’s top then pops into place, and it’s striped like Freddy’s sweater. Nancy’s trapped. All of a sudden, Freddy grabs her mother and yanks her through the door window as nearby children jumping rope start singing, “One, two, Freddy’s coming for you.”
Mimi Craven: They fought about that.
Robert Shaye: There was a big disagreement.
Risher:Bob wanted a real kooky, crazy, wild ending that could lead to a sequel. And Wes wanted a really beautiful poetic ending of the girls jumping rope, singing, with the kids going away in the car.
RobertShaye: I said, “Listen, you can’t do this in a horror film. There’s got to be some kind of thing that really kind of grabs them at the end.” So at one point, he said, “I can’t argue with you anymore. I’m exhausted.” I said, “Well, let’s shoot both things.”
Englund: We shot it several ways. One I remember: driving the car up and Heather comes out and it’s like a Disney movie. It’s a little brighter than reality. She gets in the car, and I’m there and the convertible top slams shut on the car. And the grips, the little things that lock on a convertible, they look like little Freddy claws.
RobertShaye: We had these little test screenings, not the fancy ones that they had in the real Hollywood, but in our amateur Hollywood. We tested all of the different endings, including the one that Wes wanted. None was particularly outstanding. We said, “Well, what are we going to do?” He said, “Well, let’s use them all. Let’s just finish this.”
Mimi Craven: Wes fought and fought and fought and fought and finally just had to acquiesce.
Langenkamp: The wayI’ve always interpreted the ending is that Nancy’s had this dream. She went into it with a very intense intent, to grab Freddy, bring him out. And so it seems like that’s really successful. She pulls him out of the dream, she sets all the booby traps, she turns her back. He seems to go away, and then she comes out into this beautiful day. And it looks like everything is normal again, but then it is not normal, and the car comes up.
It’s that same dream that’s just still continuing. And we don’t know how it ends. We don’t know how it ends for Nancy. The only thing we know is that she appears in Nightmare on Elm Street 3, so she didn’t die in it. She does continue to live.
Part 6: “A Kind of American Experience.”
Nightmare was released on November 9, 1984. In those days, Academy Award–nominated screenwriter Paul Attanasio was a film critic. “For such a low-budget movie,” he wrote in The Washington Post, “Nightmare on Elm Street is extraordinarily polished.” It went on to gross almost $26 million at the domestic box office and, according to Variety, $57 million worldwide. Before long, New Line earned a new nickname: “The House That Freddy Built.”
Risher: We had, I think, five or six theaters in New York. It did very nicely, and we were very happy, but it wasn’t a huge smash.
Bernstein: I was pretty convinced when I was working on it that it was not a hit. I honestly felt that. The zeitgeist thing did not kick in right away, but something did. There was a two-page ad in Variety, which I still have, which said, “Sleeper: Nightmare on Elm Street.” And it said how much it had made on its first weekend. That was a clue.
Risher: It was our head of distribution who came to us on Monday and said, “Let’s start writing the sequel.”
RobertShaye: As it happens often with really good movies, they become part of the zeitgeist, then they just continue.
Englund: Shortly after that, because I was big on V, I went to New York to sign autographs at a science-fiction convention. It was William Shatner and me. And Bob Shaye came to take me out to lunch, and he said, “Oh, man, I told you it’s big. I told you, Bobby.” He goes, “Look at this line.” And I said, “Bob, no, you’re wrong. These are my fans from V.” He goes, “No, no, no, no. It’s Freddy. They’re here for Freddy.” So we go out to lunch. I’m taking a break, and I have to come back and sign autographs. I walk out the front door of the Roosevelt Hotel, and there, standing in the rain for half a block, are hardcore punk rockers and heavy metal kids in black leather. They’re all there for Freddy.
Wyss: I was filming something. I never got to see it in the theater. The first time I saw it was on VHS. I personally don’t like being scared. I had to fast-forward through some of the scary parts, and I thought, “Wow, this movie came out really scary.”
Bernstein: The homemade intensity of it all, it just felt so like you could do it with papier-mâché and paper clips. But it did make it even more scary.
Risher: Everybody pitched in and gave ideas and helped figure out ways to do the stunts and the effects that were all in camera.
Doyle: Everything was physical. There was one optical effect in the whole film, when Freddy walks through the bars in the jail room.
Mimi Craven: Every dollar is up there. Every single dollar.
Doyle: I was just like, “Wow, this is doing really well. And wow, I didn’t keep any of the merchandising.” Nobody was making masks of Michael Myers, so we’re like, “Yeah, big fucking deal.” The first year after Nightmare came out, it was the most popular Halloween costume.
Wyss: That Halloween, I was at my mom’s house in Manhattan Beach, and there were little kids dressed up as Freddy, and I was handing out candy. True story. I would say to the parents of the kids, “I play Tina in the movie.” And every single one of them was like, “Yeah, right.” Nobody believed me.
Mimi Craven: I mean, can you imagine? It’s Wes’s creation. When he first saw Freddy costumes, he was just grinning from ear to ear.
These days,the cast and crew are happy to relive the original Nightmare. Now in their 60s,the four teenage stars are still acting. Englund played Freddy in eight films and continues to work regularly. Doyle is now the director of a company that designs high-tech water installations. Risher is an active producer. Turner Broadcasting bought New Line in 1994, and Shaye stepped down from the company in 2008. Craven went on to direct an Elm Street sequel and several more horror classics. In 2015, he died of brain cancer. His work, especially Nightmare, has influenced countless filmmakers, including Jordan Peele and the Duffer brothers. And 40 years later, the genre he ruled is finally ruling Hollywood.
Doyle: People in general are not confident about their connection with the dreamworld because dreams come out of nowhere. And I think Wes found something that was pretty universal. People don’t trust themselves to be cognizant when they’re asleep.
(writer-director, Fear Street trilogy): That idea is so good. It’s just so clean. What if your dreams became reality? And more specifically, what if they were your nightmares? There was no delineation between waking and sleep.
Robert Shaye: You don’t have any defense in your dreams. And if a scary guy says, “I’m going to kill you,” there’s nothing you can do. You can’t run away.
Janiak: There was just something about Freddy Krueger and his deformities. The fact that it felt vaguely sexual to me in a way I didn’t quite understand. Then there was the whole subtext that—I don’t even know how I knew this—maybe he had done something bad to kids. All of that just made me say, “What is inside this movie for me?”
Hutson: What Wes did so well was keep Freddy in the shadows. He barely speaks. He has an insanely little amount of screen time when you actually add it up, but he’s so omnipresent in that movie. The specter of evil.
Langenkamp: I hear so many great stories about people who just got over their own Freddy Kruegers in their life. I love it. I always ask what their story is, and there’s always one.
Janiak: I grew up in the ’80s, and that was the heyday of slasher films. I would watch them at sleepovers. But Nightmare, I was so scared of. I was so scared to watch it for a very long time, and I didn’t watch it until I was fully in my teens.
Englund: I think that there’s something about that experience in the ’80s, sitting on a couch at home on the weekend with that pizza getting cold and the beer getting warm, with Mom and Dad, or an older brother who was trying to scare you. I think that it became almost a surrogate family memory for an awful lot of the fans, a horror movie that you shared with your family. That really made it a kind of American experience.
Wyss: If you actually took the horror out of it, it’s really sort of a sad thriller. And it’s a movie about latchkey kids, the first generation from divorced parents. And I think there were a lot of real emotional connections to the film at the time. It’s not a traditional chop ’em up kind of thing. His glove slashes, but it’s not naked girls running in the woods. It’s this beautiful story of these kids creating their own family.
Langenkamp: There weren’t that many horror movies that were actually getting big audiences back then.
Englund: For a long time, we were sort of the movies that got the shitty table at the commissary.
Langenkamp: Now, I think every month there’s a pretty decent horror movie that’s making good money.
Wyss: I think that it’s almost a rite of passage now to star in a horror film. And it would’ve been great if that had been our experience, but it wasn’t. Our experience was its own thing.
Mimi Craven: There’s an autograph show in Indianapolis. Everybody was there. They all said, “Mimi, you say something about Wes.” And I said, “OK, here’s the story. I know what scared Wes Craven.” And you could hear a pin drop. I said, “What scared him was if when he died, he was only remembered as the schlockmeister.”
Englund: I remember “slasher movie” was forbidden on our set. We hated that. And they also used to call him a horrormeister. Wes Craven, he hated that. But A Nightmare on Elm Street is not a slasher movie. It takes place in the subconscious.
Langenkamp: He just always loved being smart. He loved being funny. And sometimes you feel like you have to hide your fire under a bushel basket, but he never did. He always was just who he was.
Hutson: After my book was done, I went to Wes’s house and I took him copies, and he sat there and was just paging through it. Then he looks at me, he goes, “Can I just sit here and read this? Are you OK if I read a little?” Then he turns to me and he says, “Will you autograph my copy?” It was a really powerful moment for me as someone who wanted to be in the movie business. What I didn’t do was have him sign my copy. What a dolt, right?
Nicky’s of Beverly is not a vegan restaurant. Since 1997 and across two different locations (three years ago they moved to 105th Street and Western), chef-owner Paul Kostopanagiotou has built a formidable following of carnivorous and plant-based eaters alike. A fast-casual neighborhood spot featuring “elevated street food, the restaurant’s massive menu features everything from salads, smoked brisket, filet mignon sliders, Nashville hot chicken, and even a lobster roll.
There’s also Nicky’s version of the Big Baby, an underrated Chicago classic that originated in the South Side, featuring twin beef patties with cheese and topped with grilled onions. Ketchup, mustard, and pickles slide under the patties.
The veganized Big Baby.
Nicky’s has a quite a comfortable space and occassionally hosts live music.
Nicky’s moved here in 2021.
Kostopanagiotou sees an opportunity to introduce non-meat eaters to the specialty. On Friday, November 1, Nicky’s will enthusiastically participate in World Vegan Day with a vegan version of the Big Baby featuring Beyond Meat patties and Daiya dairy-free cheddar taking center stage.
“We’ve been growing the vegan category at the restaurant for years. I just think vegans are a great customer base, and there was a void in the area for that,” Kostopanagiotou says.
While he’s not a vegan himself (though he and his team do enjoy plant-based dishes), he’s made a point of connecting with plant-based eaters in the community, like the Chicago Southside & South Suburban Vegans. “I know some of the founding members and admins. We lean on them a lot as a partnership, as they have suggestions and recommendations and vegan meetups,” Kostopanagiotou explains.
Through those contacts, he’s discovered a variety of plant-based producers, like Good2Go Veggie and Chunk Foods, as well as institutions that help animals. That’s where he learned about the Tiny Hooves Sanctuary, a woman-led nonprofit animal sanctuary located across state lines in Union Grove, Wisconsin. The institution focuses on providing a safe haven — a “forever sanctuary,” as their website calls it — to “abandoned, abused, neglected, and unwanted farm animals while inspiring positive change through the human and animal bond.” Kostopanagiotou said he listened to his local vegan friends when they told him, ‘’This is a solid group — you should look into donating to them.’” On Friday, Nicky’s of Beverly will donate a portion of proceeds from all vegan menu items to the Tiny Hooves Sanctuary.
The Big Baby is a Chicago classic.
Italian beef, gyros, and salads are also on the menu.
The heat lamps can squeeze a little more out of patio season.
A lot of restaurants will simply throw on a veggie burger, fried cauliflower, or maybe a half-hearted pizza to appease vegan diners who happen to wind up there, but investing in the plant-based portion of his menu is something to which Kostopanagiotou is seriously committed. Nicky’s of Beverly offers close to two dozen vegan items, such as a vegan shrimp po boy, vegan nachos, vegan Buffalo chicken salad, a vegan banh mi, and much more. There’s coconut milk-based peanut butter gelato and even a vegan shake.
Kostopanagiotou points out that he develops the vegan part of the menu side-by-side with everything else to make sure there’s plenty to enjoy for everyone. “It just continuously expands, and is creative,” he says. “I’m very mindful as I expand the normal menu that I can do that for the vegan menu also.”
There’s plenty to experience at Nicky’s of Beverly, whether customers like vegan food or not. They also have a weekday happy hour, live music, and a gelato bar.
Usually comprising a crusty roll, pickled veggies, fresh herbs, hot chiles, pate, and a protein, the banh mi is a traditional dish that invites creativity. Regardless of what’s inside, a great banh mi is always a spicy, tangy, rich masterclass in flavor and texture. With a vast population of Vietnamese restaurants that offer everything from barbecued jackfruit and ginger chicken to savory ham and crispy pork, Chicago is home to many stellar iterations of the dish.
Jimmy Bannos Jr.’s last day at the Purple Pig ended with little fanfare as the chef sold his stake in the Loop restaurant. As of Wednesday, October 23, Bannos Jr. is no longer involved in the restaurant he co-founded 15 years ago.
The Purple Pig will continue without Bannos Jr., who says this was his choice and “it was time to move on,” and that he needs to concentrate on his new Greek restaurant in Northwest Suburban Niles. Father Jimmy Bannos is also involved in Koukla, pegged to open by winter’s end in February or March at 7620 N. Milwaukee Avenue.
“I’m really, really excited about it,” Bannos Jr. says. “Am I going to miss being in the city all the time? Absolutely, but it doesn’t mean I’m not ever going to open up a restaurant in the city again.”
The deal to buy the former Amici Ristorante in Niles was “too good to pass up.” Amici closed in the spring after 37 years. Bannos Jr. says he’s been talking to Brasero and El Che Bar chef John Manion, an open-fire cooking aficionado. They’re using the same folks who make Manion’s grills at Koukla. While the Purple Pig blended food from different Mediterranean countries, Koukla will focus on Greece.
It’s a challenge to separate Bannos Jr. from the Purple Pig. The chef won accolades including the 2014 James Beard Award for Rising Star Chef. The restaurant was a fixture in many “best of” lists in Chicago, including the Eater Chicago 38. Bannos Jr. says he sold his stake to his existing partners and that he hasn’t been at the Purple Pig much over the summer as he’s focused on Niles. So there wasn’t much of a goodbye on his final day. Bannos Jr. says he wishes his old partners nothing but the best.
The past few years have been challenging for Bannos Jr. and a time for growth. After a landlord dispute, the restaurant moved from its original location, which has since transformed into a Chick-fil-A. The new location opened in 2019: “Part of my like soul died,” Bannos Jr. says. “It was so hard to deal with because we really couldn’t do anything.”
The chef candidly talks about frustrations that built up during the pandemic saying he was “angry at the world.” He went through a divorce and was arrested in 2019 for a bizarre altercation involving employees from Mi Tocaya Antojeria which took place at a Chicago Gourmet auxiliary event. Bannos Jr. appeared in court but the charges were thrown out. The pandemic made it oughter while trying to keep the restaurant from closing: “It was the lowest point in my life,” Bannos Jr. says, adding “The Purple Pig was not an easy place to make happen every day.”
When he walked into the vacated Amici space, Bannos Jr. says it felt similar to when he entered the original Purple Pig space for the first time. His imagination began to run wild with ideas. He now holds a much brighter outlook in life while working with his father on their new restaurant. Kevin Stack, who has worked with Bannos Jr. for 13 years, is coming over to Niles as chef and partner. Stack’s fiance, Audrey Witte, who also worked at the Purple Pig, will be general manager.
Bannos Jr. comes from a family of restaurant owners. His father, Jimmy Bannos, is known for Heaven on Seven. His son notes how father hasn’t gotten the hang of retirement, figuring out some means of staying in the restaurant industry, whether it’s a gumbo drop in Logan Square or something else.
The family will have more news on their new restaurant in the coming weeks.
Koukla, 7620 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Niles, planned for a February or March opening
Earlier this week, Fry the Coop owner Joe Fontana, took to Instagram to show customers how an upcoming Raising Cane’s could harm his business at 2404 N. Lincoln Avenue, just down the street from the busy Halsted, Lincoln, and Fullerton intersection.
“No hate to Raising Cane’s, buuuut we wish they weren’t opening right across the street,” Fry The Coop’s Instagram post reads.
The post brought out legions of fans to praise local chicken shops like Parson’s Chicken & Fish and Red Light Chicken. They also lauded Fry the Coop’s heat levels as the chain specializes in Nashville hot chicken fried in beef tallow.
Three weeks ago, Raising Cane’s plastered its coming soon signs outside the former home of DePaul’s White Elephant. The thrift store closed in 2012 after 93 years of operation, and the new restaurant at 2376 N. Lincoln Avenue could open in February or March. Raising Cane’s arrived in Chicago with a Rogers Park location that opened in 2018.
Fontana founded Fry the Coop in 2017 when he opened in suburban Oak Lawn. He opened in Lincoln Park in October 2023, joining a number of affordable restaurants geared at students at DePaul and nearby Lincoln Park High School. That includes Ghareeb Narwaz and Chipotle. When Fontana hears stories about high school students with short lunch periods sprinting to Fry the Coop, coming into the restaurants out of breath and sweating, so they can grab lunch and make it back to class in time, he’s happy.
But he says “it’s a bummer” that he’ll lose chicken tender business to Raising Cane’s, a national chain that can afford to undercut Fry the Coop’s pricing. A three-piece tender with fries at Raising Cane’s costs about $11, depending on location. At Fry the Coop, a similar combo costs $15. That’s a big difference for students, Fontana says.
Though Fontana is a big fan of rising tides — he notes neighborhood additions, like Parson’s Chicken & Fish, bring more foot traffic and customers to the area — sometimes there’s only room for so many chicken tender slingers. Raising Cane’s is aggressive in opening stores near college campuses. The original debuted near Louisana State University and the Rogers Park location is near Loyola University. Building that brand awareness at a young age is critical, Fontana notes. It even extends to high school students, he adds. Some schools allow advertisements inside their buildings, which helps deep-pocketed companies, like Raising Cane’s — the same company that paid actor Chevy Chase to reenact his Christmas Vacation movie role in the suburbs. There are more than 800 Raising Cane stores across 41 states.
There are eight Fry the Coops around Chicago. A ninth is set to open on October 29 at 274 S. Weber Road in Bolingbrook, near the McDonald’s spin-off, CosMc’s. Fontana has plans to open more, but the Villa Park native knows that the opportunities aren’t as robust as the competition’s. For example, Chick-fil-A just opened a location at Terminal 5 at O’Hare.
“I don’t think we have anybody really pounding on our door,” Fontana says.
Welcome to the Plywood Report, a periodic listing of upcoming restaurants and bars around Chicago of note. We’ll update this semi-regularly, but feel free to email Eater Chicago at chicago@eater.com if a project, permit, or storefront has caught your eye. We’ll do our best to investigate.
October 24
ANDERSONVILLE: Construction continues on a mystery project at 1476 W. Berwyn Avenue under the name Gran Lago. What’s compelling about the project are the names behind the venue, the same duo — Nick Lessins and Lydia Esparza — behind Great Lake Pizza. Great Lake Pizza was a beloved spot at a different address in Andersonville, a restaurant that debuted in 2008. In those five years, Great Lake earned national recognition as one of the best pizzerias in the country. Ownership isn’t tipping their hand about when the new project will open or what they’ll exactly serve, but for months the folks of Reddit have speculated about a possible Great Lake comeback.
HUMBOLDT PARK: Suncatcher Brewing, which has been in the works for months at 2849 W. Chicago Avenue, within the triangle of Grand, Chicago, and California, has applied for a liquor license. Ownership has been tightlipped on details. The brewery’s website mentions a beer garden and was touting a fall debut.
OLD TOWN: Something is brewing at the former Wells on Wells, a shuttered bar at 1617 N. Wells Street. A liquor license has been issued under the name Moon Star Kitchen & Bar. Kevin Vaughn, an outspoken member of the Illinois Restaurant Association and the name behind Vaughan Hospitality Group — they own five bars, including Corcoran’s next door in Old Town, Emerald Loop, and a pair of Vaughn’s Pubs — is listed on the liquor license. Vaughn didn’t respond to an email about his plans.
RIVER NORTH: The team Flight Club, the dart bar that arrived in Chicago in 2018, is opening another concept. It’s called Electric Shuffle, and the concept centers around shuffleboard. They’ve applied for a liquor license at 448 N. LaSalle. A rep isn’t ready to share details, but look for an update in November.
UKRAINIAN VILLAGE: As restaurants and bars, like Fifty/50 and Takito Kitchen, close along Division Street near Damen Avenue, a California-based hot dog chain plans on opening its second location. Dog Haus Biergarten has a Lincoln Park location near DePaul and a pair of ghost kitchens. They’re renovating the former Whadda Jerk space at 2015 W. Division Street. The chain is known for hot dogs with fancy toppings served on King’s Hawaiian rolls.
1477 W Balmoral Avenue, Chicago, IL 60640 773 334 9270
Richard Sandoval’s career began in the ‘90s in New York, as the Mexico City-born chef opened a pair of French restaurants. Later, he opened Maya, a contemporary Mexican restaurant on the Upper East Side. Esteemed New York Times critic Ruth Reichl awarded the restaurant two stars.
Sandoval’s star was bright and he opened restaurants all over America and the world. In Chicago, he opened a downtown food hall, Latinicity. He also partnered with several hotels, including the Conrad Chicago where he opened the rooftop restaurant Noyane and Baptiste & Bottle. Those restaurants all closed during the pandemic.
Earlier this year, the celebrity chef returned to the Chicago market with Casa Chi, a Mag Mile restaurant that explores Nikkei cuisine. Now, this month, he opened another restaurant, Toro, a pan-Latin restaurant inside the Fairmont Chicago hotel near Millenium Park — technically it’s located in the Loop.
The new restaurant is inside the Fairmont.
Look for seafood and beef with flavors from Central and South Americas.
The first Toro opened in 2014 in Scottsdale, Arizona, and there are similarities with other locations. For example, the Chicago menu shares items with Sandoval’s Houston restaurant, Toro Toro, which opened in November 2021. Smoked guacamole and swordfish dip are two appetizers from both restaurants. There are also sweet corn empanadas and short rib tacos. Picanha, a cut of beef with a thick fat cap that’s popular in Brazil, has been appearing on more menus stateside lately. Chicago diners will find American-raised wagyu versions of the cut at Toro. While absent from the Chicago restaurant’s name, the Houston location is labeled as a steakhouse. With the Picanha, a 52-ounce prime tomahawk ribeye for $220, for five more cuts of beef, Toro Chicago could also be considered a steakhouse. There are various raw bar items including ceviche made with Peruvian red snapper, bison tiradito, and a few sushi rolls including a vegan oyster mushroom selection.
The cocktails also have a pan-Latin influence, and a press release touts the Flaming Coffee, a drink carted tableside via cart and mixed with rum, tequila, or bourbon and served with a flambéed cinnamon and sugar rim.
Walk through the space below and check out some of the seafood dishes below.
Toro Chicago, inside the Fairmont Chicago, 200 N. Columbus Drive, open 6 a.m. to midnight on Sunday through Thursday; 6 a.m. to 2 a.m. on Saturday. Reservations via OpenTable.
Kuma’s Corner’s seven-year run in Fulton Market is coming to an end. The burger restaurant will close on Friday, November 1, confirms owner Ron Cain. The original announcement came earlier in October via WGN-TV.
Cain says workers were informed of the pending closure at 852 W. Fulton Market on Monday, October 1. After the shutter, three Kuma’s locations would remain: the original in Avondale, a suburban restaurant in Schaumburg, and another in Indianapolis.
The chain debuted 19 years ago at 2900 W. Belmont Avenue. The restaurant was a pioneer, open in Avondale before venues like Honey Butter Fried Chicken, Parachute, Beer Temple, and Dmen Tap arrived. Kuma’s quickly gained credibility for loud music, often showcasing bands on independent labels. As the hype increased, folks not into that music scene began infiltrating the restaurant and Kuma’s turned down the volume. Ron Cain, Mike’s brother, bought the business and the restaurant added locations in Lakeview, Schaumburg, and Vernon Hills. Kuma’s also poured beer from local craft breweries, which appealed to suburban dads.
When Kuma’s opened in Fulton Market, it was a departure from the independent vibe of the original. The restaurant wanted to compete in an area crowded with restaurants along Fulton Market and near Randolph Restaurant Row. The bar that once detested bros and ballcaps was now inviting them inside to watch the game and even advertising on sports radio.
However, COVID arrived in 2020, and the pandemic crushed restaurants. Inflation remains, even after a vaccine. Ron Cain blamed inflation for the Fulton Market closure, saying economic forces made operating the restaurant unsustainable. The local craft beer scene has also imploded in recent years, with breweries closing at a record clip.
Additionally, the parent company behind Kuma’s in June filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. At the time, Ron Cain said he expected the company to emerge from the filing as a health entity. In September, Ron Cain’s attorneys submitted a plan to pay off $3.4 million in debt (which includes a $2.5 million claim from Mike Cain), according to court documents. Chapter 11 offers protection, so parties who file don’t pay the full amount of what’s owed. Instead, they pay a portion or a fair pro-rata share. The next court hearing is scheduled for Wednesday, November 20.
The Netflix adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 runaway hit apocalyptic novel, Leave the World Behind, concludes relatably. The movie—directed by Sam Esmail and starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali—sees tween girl Rose desperate to find out what happens in the finale of Friends as the world literally burns around her. Even though there’s a major telecommunications breakdown, Teslas are going haywire, and wildlife is gathering as if in anticipation of Armageddon, Rose must find out what becomes of Rachel, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Phoebe, and Joey. Do Rachel and Ross finally get back together? (Yes, even though Ross is a gaslighting softboy.) Do Chandler and Monica have a baby? (They have two, in fact.) What becomes of the iconic purple-walled loft? (Monica and Chandler give it up and move to the suburbs, thus signaling their descent into middle-aged uniformity.) More than just a reference to Gen Z’s pandemic-era obsession with bingeing a show that started 30 years ago this year, it’s indicative of our growing obsession with certainty in a world that’s anything but.
Depending on your algorithm, a cursory glance around YouTube will likely engender an assortment of ending explainers, or videos by pop culture commentators and influencers unpacking the endings of all manner of movies and TV shows. They range from necessary explainers—Mulholland Drive, anything by M. Night Shyamalan—to rote ones. (I don’t think we need ending explainers to understand Hit Man’sbasic happily ever after or that Hooper and Brody kill the big bad great white in Jaws, but they exist.) Don’t just take my word for it: According to Google Trends, searches for “ending explained” have doubled in the past five years. And it’s not just visual mediums: Many culture sites have sections dedicated to analyzing outcomes, and it seems like that’s all some publish. Have we lost the ability to think for ourselves, and do we need all possible meanings—however simple or abstract—tied up in a neat little bow? Are our attention spans so shot that we can’t spend a few hours not checking our phones in a movie theater? Or do we need a third party to interpret art for us when everything else about modern society is so fraught?
“Our brains are hardwired to seek patterns and relish that gratifying ‘aha’ moment when all the pieces finally click into coherence,” clinical psychologist Daniel Glazer tells The Ringer. Suddenly, Rose’s yearning to finish the final episode of Friends before, you know, the final episode of humanity makes a lot more sense.
Digital natives like those in Rose’s generation get a bad rap for possessing the attention spans of goldfish, but her dedication to finishing an 86.5-hour sitcom instead of YouTubing an ending explainer is indicative of anything but. For evidence that internet denizens still have attention spans, look to the case of Late Night With the Devil, the breakout horror hit from this year that inspired its share of ending-explained videos and articles. “People have made the effort. People have seen this more than once. They’ve done their research,” Colin Cairnes, who directed Late Night With the Devil alongside his brother, Cameron, says about ending-explained YouTubers. When content creators are creating 30-minute-plus videos that get over a million views, like thisThe Menu ending explainer by FoundFlixthat has 2 million, it’s clear that viewers aren’t just seeking them out because their attention spans were too short to finish the movie!
When it came to Leave the World Behind’s ending, Esmail—who is well aware of the negative feedback related to it—deliberately set it up to stretch viewers’ minds and getpeopletalking. “I wanted you to go to a coffee shop and have a two-hour debate about what it meant and how it felt and how it all connected or didn’t connect at the end,” he says. “Those are the kinds of conversations I lived for as a moviegoer, and that really only happened when movies didn’t tie everything up in a bow.”
Esmail is no stranger to ambiguity, as perhaps his best-known project, Mr. Robot, ended with its audience questioning everything they thought they knew about the show. He says those are his favorite kinds of stories—ones that worm their way into your brain and keep you thinking days, weeks, sometimes years afterward. Remember when you immediately needed to go back and rewatch The Sixth Sense after (25-year-old spoiler incoming) finding out that Bruce Willis’s character was a ghost himself? Or the shellshock you got when Emerald Fennell Psycho-ed her main character during the climactic confrontation of Promising Young Woman? Or Psycho, for that matter?
“Those movies where everything was answered, it was very straightforward, and everything was explained, you leave the theater, and even if it was a good movie and you enjoyed yourself, I found that I stopped thinking about it pretty quickly after,” Esmail says. What’s even the point?
Speaking to The Ringer from his home in Melbourne, Colin says there’s a fine line between crafting a conclusion that will keep the conversation going and honoring the fictional world of the movie, especially for the vast majority of films that don’t have the support of media conglomerates behind them.
“If you’re operating within that low-budget indie world like Late Night With the Devil is, the onus is on us as filmmakers to do something different and try to surprise and take risks with the way we set up the story, the way we resolve it, the way we end these movies,” he says.
And anyway, Late Night With the Devil’s outcome is pretty definite: It’s revealed that late night talk show host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) literally sold his soul to the devil in exchange for career success, and he kills an apparently possessed girl on live TV. Though Colin does jest that, because of an earlier hypnotism scene, it could have all been a hallucination.
YouTuber Daniel Whidden, who writes, narrates, and produces his own channel, Think Story, where he has more than 700,000 subscribers, believes the acceleration of these videos speaks to the way we consume media now. In contrast to the proverbial watercooler conversation in eras past, because of the plethora of streaming options we have now, everyone’s watching something different.
“Now with dozens of platforms, [like] Netflix, Disney, Amazon, etc., and the ‘binge’ model of consuming media, it makes it difficult to discuss these shows. Suzie from accounting could be on Episode 2 of Squid Game, while Tom in marketing could have binged the whole thing in a day—or he might not even have Netflix at all!” Whidden tells The Ringer. “Thus, they have no one to talk to about their favorite shows and seek out alternate communities and channels.”
It speaks to Esmail’s contention that he wants filmgoers to continue to wax lyrical about what they’ve just seen, a notion that Colin echoes. “As filmmakers we’ve got to wear it as a badge of honor that people have deemed it worthy as a topic of debate,” he says. “That’s what we’re in it for, to elicit a response, hopefully a positive one, but if it leads to division over what it all means, that’s kinda cool too.” It’s just that now, because of the rise of streaming, Netflix-only releases like Leave the World Behind, and the prevalence of VOD, those conversations are happening online.
“You can have that experience [of talking about a movie while] walking out of the film … and then it jumps online for people who haven’t seen it in a theater and have seen it on Shudder or Netflix or whatever it might be,” says Colin. “We set out to make a film that would spark conversation, so whether that happens in a cinema lobby or on YouTube or Reddit, that’s all good.”
In that way, ending explainers are a way to extend community.
“In previous eras, the ability to convene and collaboratively revel in [a] narrative climax was largely constrained by immediate social circles and physical proximity,” offers Glazer, pointing to the aforementioned watercooler theory and the decline of appointment viewing. Sure, the majority of your office or friend group probably watched Baby Reindeer, but you might have binged all seven roughly 30-minute episodes the day it came out, your bestie could be saving it until the weekend, and your work spouse might be waiting to watch it with their actual spouse. On Reddit or the YouTube comment section, you can immediately revel in your IDTA (IsDonnytheasshole?) conspiracy theories. “Suddenly, the diverse insights, theories, and analyses surrounding a pop culture plot point radiate from a global array of voices and life experiences,” Glazer continues.
And there are diverse subcultures within those communities, says Whidden, who also posts ending explainers for shows like Bridgerton, which, as you can imagine, draws a very different crowd than “an over-the-top gore movie. This is because of the wide array of content I create. Instead of fostering one giant community, I have a series of smaller communities.”
One subgroup that has felt seen not only by one of this year’s most buzzed-about films, Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, but also by the explainers created about it is the trans community. The ’90s-set genre film follows two teenagers, Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), as they bond over their favorite TV show, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer–coded The Pink Opaque. Owen is berated by his father for liking a “girl’s show,” and his identification with one of the female stars of The Pink Opaque can be read as a trans allegory by those who care to see it. For those who don’t, Schoenbrun isn’t interested in their interpretation.
“As a trans filmmaker, I’m not really that interested in the legibility of the work to a non-trans audience because I think a lot of other people are going to think about that for me,” Schoenbrun tells The Ringer. And they have, in copious ending-explained clips on YouTube and TikTok. Even publications like Time, USA Today,and Vanity Fairhave weighed in on the deliberately (pink) opaque subtext of I Saw the TV Glow, raising questions about the state of culture criticism when writers are asked to rehash conclusions rather than tackling what leads up to them. (Schoenbrun, for their part, doesn’t see much distinction between the two forms.)
“When I end a movie, I’m looking for something that can continue to linger and poke at and ask the questions that the movie is trying to ask,” says Schoenbrun, who also directed the 2018 documentary A Self-Induced Hallucination and 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the latter of which shares thematic similarities with I Saw the TV Glow. “I prefer, in my own art, making things that are ambiguous. Not just for the sake of ambiguity, but because the work is talking about complicated things that I’m trying to reckon with.”
Like Esmail and the Cairnes brothers, Schoenbrun ultimately sees ending explainers as a good thing, enjoying the ones made about their own work.
“If somebody really is racked emotionally by my movie and reads an ending explainer post, to me that’s a nice thing,” they say. “I don’t think that’s the be-all, end-all of how we process art right now. It’s part of how we process art right now. Hopefully they’re at the beginning of that process. That sort of long-term engagement with art as we and as times changed is something that no one internet post could ever stop.”
The term “be-all, end-all” also comes up in my conversation with Esmail, who is the most tentative of all the people I spoke to about ending explainers. He admits he’s of “two minds” about them: If he’d come of age during the internet and online fan culture, he says he might have been creating that content as an extension of his own interest in filmmaking. However, “the part of the ending explainer culture, or I should say online fandom culture, that I don’t appreciate,” he says, is the part that doesn’t allow for dissent.
People with different opinions will get piled on or troll just for the hell of it. And as we’ve seen in the case of the newer Star Wars movies and diverse Marvel casts, minority creatives—and, one can assume, the minority content creators who cover these movies—in many cases experience harassment and are forced offline. (For his money, Whidden, who is a white man, hasn’t observed much of this in the comments of his videos. “I try to be courteous and respectful and tend to ignore the odd toxic comment,” he says.)
Esmail also believes that there’s less willingness to sit with the questions—and the uneasiness—that cryptic endings provoke than there was, say, 50 years ago. “If you go back to the ’70s, a lot of movies ended in an abstract, abrupt way, and I just happened to be a fan of that—it haunts you and lingers months and years after you’ve seen it.
“There’s something in the culture now where films need to be a little more self-contained,” he continues. “That saddens me because there is a joy to not being told all the answers and having to sit with your thoughts and feelings about it. And even getting frustrated with it!” As viewers certainly did with the abrupt ending of Leave the World Behind.
“We as a culture need easy answers now because the world has gotten incredibly complicated. We don’t want to turn to movies that just offer us more questions and ambiguity. Especially a movie like mine, where I’m directly commenting on the world we’re living in now,” he says.
“I think because of what’s going on in the world, it’s important to do and provoke those kinds of questions.”
From a psychological point of view, Glazer sees ending explainers as tempering that anxiety. “For those of us conditioned to having a world’s worth of information constantly at our fingertips, simply sitting suspended in ambiguity for an extended stretch can start to feel uniquely unsettling,” he says. “I’m certainly not suggesting we necessarily want the easy way out every time. But our collective patience for persisting in uncertainty has undoubtedly been whittled away by our era’s blistering pace. Comprehensive explanations and answers provide ballast—hanging in interminable limbo just doesn’t feel emotionally stabilizing.”
While Rose might not be able to watch an ending explainer about the series finale of Friends, she does ultimately get her wish. The much-maligned climax of Leave the World Behind sees Rose stumbling on an apocalypse bunker stocked full of canned goods, bottled water, and a physical home media library with—you guessed it—the box set of Friends. Instead of looking for her family to alert them of this safe haven, Rose immediately pulls the last season from the shelf and slots in the disc on which “The Last One” exists in perpetuity, however long that might be. Leave the World Behind’s parting shot is Rose’s wide grin filling the screen as she is lulled into contentment by the signature dulcet guitar strains of the Rembrandts’ “I’ll Be There for You.” In that ending, Rose is anything but inquisitive, but Esmail’s intention was to leave us questioning—or at least seeking comfort in the communities that continue this discourse, wherever that might be—at the watercooler, the theater lobby, the coffee shop, the bar, or the comments section.
Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can read her previously published work on her website and through her Substack, The Scarlett Woman. Follow her on X at @ScarlettEHarris.
Fall is a tough time for Chicago restaurants and September was a particularly slow month. These challenging conditions have led to a rash of restaurants closing around town, a mix of new concepts and community staples. Below, Eater is cataloging both temporary and permanent restaurant closures in Chicago. If you know of a restaurant, bar, or another closed food establishment, please email chicago@eater.com. We will continue to update this post.
The Loop: Cafe by The River, the riverside coffee shop inside the Bank of America Tower backed by celebrity chef José Andrés has closed. An Instagram post describes it as a temporary gesture — perhaps it could be a seasonal move as Chicago nears winter. Bank of America has begun mandating more workers to be in the office over the last year, which should have been a boost for the cafe’s business, but who can really understand the habits of Loop workers after the pandemic? Both Bar Mar and Bazaar Meat, which are also in the tower, remain unaffected.
The Loop: A lack of downtown workers has also impacted another after-work icon. Tradition Gastropub and Kitchen, 160 N. Franklin Street, closed in September. It was known for burgers, flatbreads, and happy hour specials.
Uptown: Anna Maria Pasteria, a Uptown staple for 35 years at 4400 N. Clark Street, has closed. Owner Anna Maria Picciolini announced she’s retiring in a note posted online. She thanked her customers and workers: “ Your unwavering support, your loyalty, and your love for our food have meant the world to me. It has been an honor to serve you and be a part of your lives.” Block Club Chicago has more details.
October 17
Lincoln Square: 016 Restaurant, a rare spot for Serbian specialties, closed in early October. The pandemic hurt the acclaimed restaurant at 5077 N. Lincoln Avenue: “We gave our best in the last almost 6 years but we hit a point where it is just not possible to keep it going under present problems and circumstances,” a Facebook post reads.
Lincoln Square: Dimo’s Cafe, which opened in April in Lincoln Square has closed. The cafe was meant to be an expansion of the Dimo’s brand, showing customers they could do more than pizza. But the location at 4647 N. Lincoln Avenue was too tough. Block Club Chicago caught up with the owners.
North Center: Sticky Rice, a pillar of the North Center and Lincoln Square Thai community, closed on Sunday, October 20. The restaurant opened 20 years ago at 4018 N. Lincoln Avenue.
River North: After seven months, Gemini Grill has closed in River North. A rep for owner Ballyhoo Hospitality says Wednesday, October 16 was the final day of service at 748 N. State Street. Ballyhoo’s French restaurant on the second floor, Petit Pomeroy, will remain open. Ballyhoo will keep the Gemini space and has plans for a new restaurant that should open sometime next year. Gemini Grill is a spinoff of Lincoln Park’s Gemini, which excels at offering something for everyone. River North presents a bigger challenge, with restaurant owners trying to figure out customer patterns closer to downtown which offers plenty of competition. Workers at Gemini Grill were offered jobs at the restaurant upstairs, and at Ballyhoo’s upcoming Highland Park restaurant, a second location of DeNucci’s in Highland Park. As a replacement restaurant should open soon, Ballyhoo hopes to hire some of its old workers to staff the new concept.
Glencoe: Honey Butter Fried Chicken is closing its Glencoe restaurant, 10 months after opening on the North Shore. An emailed newsletter announced the shutter at 668 Vernon Avenue in Glencoe on Thursday morning. While ownership writes the opening was a success, they couldn’t sustain it. Rising costs, exasperated by the pandemic and shifting customer habits were too much to overcome: “It became clear over the following months that despite our best efforts and intentions, HBFC just wasn’t a great fit for the location.” The original location in Avondale remains in strong shape, according to ownership.
That pre-#MeToo shenanigans are alive and well inside of Snappers in Clinton will be an immediate showstopper for most. To them, it’s a bit like watching old episodes of “Cheers” here in this bar that time forgot, while also not acknowledging that “Cheers” was a great show. The men who frequent Snappers, bless them, still catcall the female bartenders from time to time, and those bartenders, in ways attributed mostly to Dolly Parton movies from the 1980s, reply, “Oh, you hush” or “Come on now,” with a smile. This is not so much an endorsement as it is something to ponder, and canceling the entire affair would mean missing out on what locals call, “Good, basic grassroots food.” That is, when it comes to food, the very highest of praise around Central Illinois, and when it comes right down to it, the food at Snappers is bar food that wears its heart on its sleeve, while also being so much more. The burgers, especially, are as incredibly well-crafted as they are hefty, and more power to anyone who can finish an entire one in a single sitting. Should you be brave enough to try, there might be some hootin’ and hollerin’ from the locals as they watch you struggle, and that’s when the realization hits. Snappers, it turns out, is part of the cultural fabric that makes up Clinton. Anyone who lives there will be quick to admit that they are a bit old-fashioned, which may not be to everyone’s liking, but at the same time, Snappers patrons aren’t ones to judge and will always accept those merely passing through Clinton without needing to tell them they’re accepted. That should just go without saying. There are reasons why the country is so divided, anyone at Snappers will tell you, but none of those reasons has anything to do with pulling up for a meal and a beer and simply saying hi to folks, with or without the catcalls.
West Town’s new pizzeria replacing Parson’s Chicken & Fish is here at long last. Dicey’s Pizza & Tavern has kept busy over the last week inside the former Parson’s at 2109 W. Chicago Avenue. Parson’s owners did a light remodel, matching the decor to the original Dicey’s that opened in 2022 in Nashville.
Dicey’s specializes in Chicago thin-crust pizza, commonly known as tavern style. Though the pizzeria debuted in Tennessee, owners Land & Sea Dept. are a Chicago company known for Parson’s, Cherry Circle Room, Lonesome Rose, and other local restaurants and bars. Dicey’s pizza is razor-thin without the puffs customers can find on the edge of some Chicago crusts. Dicey’s uses cup-and-char pepperoni cups which start on one of its specialty pies, Peppy Boy (pepperoni, hot honey, mozzarella, parmesan, oregano, spicy tomato sauce). There’s also a classic sausage and giardiniera. For now, it’s dine-in and pick-up only.
Dicey’s takes over the former Parson’s space.
The vegan Earth Crisis (left), Pep Boy (center), and sausage and giardiniera.
The crust is very thin and crunchy.
Tater tots, chicken wings, and salads are also on the menu.
A vegan pizza without cheese is called Earth Crisis, a nod to the hardcore band from Syracuse, New York that’s famously straight edge and vegan. The pizza comes piled with tomato sauce, eggplant, roasted onions, chili flakes, basil, lemon, and olive oil. Dicey’s decor strays from Chicago tradition with motorcycles and skeletons (vaguely reminiscent of Twisted Spoke). It’s more of an edgy feel versus red and white tablecloths, and that makes the inclusion of a somewhat obscure hardcore band fit with the environment. Land & Sea co-owner Cody Hudson says the company’s art director, Drew Ryan, would wear Earth Crisis shirts at the office, and when it came to figuring out names for pizzas, the idea presented itself. Ryan also helped organize a hardcore show on the patio at Dicey’s in Nashville, which led to a collaboration with Nashville vegan bakery Guerilla Biscuits.
But West Town, full of families, might not be the scene for hardcore. Don’t sweat it. Dicey’s has high chairs, even ones that are tall enough for high-top tables. Three pinball machines from Logan Arcade on the first floor, and a trio of vintage arcade cabinets on the second-floor ledge that houses an additional bar and more seats ideal for a large group. There are only two TVs in the space, which means this isn’t a sports bar. The old fireplace, a holdover from the old Old Oak Tap days, remains on the first floor.
On the beverage side, there’s a mix of local beer and natural wines. There’s also frozen cocktails — they’re still using the machines left over from Parson’s. Some wine bottles are also available to go in a cooler in the back of the restaurant. The restaurant is also near All Together Now, one of the best wine stores in town, so that’s an option for carryout.
Other standouts are juicy Buffalo wings, tater tots, and salads. A sign near the bathrooms declares that “you can win friends with salads,” a poke at the old Simpsons gag, and perhaps a sign of confidence in Dicey’s salad game.
Dicey’s certainly talks a good game — they snagged space in an Esquire story last year about tavern pizza. But Chicago, no matter what Jerry Reinsdorf may say, is no Nashville. There’s more competition here. See if Dicey’s can walk the walk in the photos below.
Dicey’s Pizza & Tavern, 2019 W. Chicago Avenue, (773) 697-3346, open 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 4 p.m. to midnight on Friday; 11 a.m. to midnight on Saturday; and 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Sunday, order pickup via Toast
The patio remain instact.
Dicey’s is family friendly until the sun sets.
The space has done through a light remodel.
Folks will recognize the fireplace from the Old Oak Tavern days.
The cooler behind is for to-go drinks and stocked with bottles and cans of wine.
The all-season room as three pinball machines from Logan Arcade.
In the background, the stairs to the second-floor landing can be seen.
“WWF Superstars,” “Battletoads,” and “Super Mario Bros.” can be played.
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