ethnic restaurants

in some kind of order, what would be the top cuisines in the city?

WAY too general a question. The easy answer - all of them.

nr706 wrote:WAY too general a question.

Maybe, but people around here love to play this game. I'll throw out what seem the likeliest answers, though I don't claim to have eaten widely enough to make any sort of authoritative declaration.

Mexican
Thai
Avant-garde

Yes, but is Avant Garde really an ethnic cuisine?

Thai and Mexican are obvious and probably completely correct answers.

You can perhaps make an argument that Chicago's Chinese food is of a relatively high level, but I'm not sure it compares to NYC/SF/Vancouver. I'll let the others duke it out on that one.

This only applies if you're talking about what cuisines are better in chicago than in other cities.

If you're just looking for a list of cuisines which are at a high level in Chicago, the choices grow dramatically.

You have to include Italian .
Based on another discussion(Exploring Elston..), I would add Middle-Eastern to the list

Aaron Deacon wrote:Maybe, but people around here love to play this game. I'll throw out what seem the likeliest answers, though I don't claim to have eaten widely enough to make any sort of authoritative declaration.

Mexican
Thai
Avant-garde

I agree with those (especially upscale Mexican) but for an out-of-towner, you can't overlook deep-dish pizza (e.g. the original Pizzeria Uno), Italian beef (e.g. Gene & Jude's - although there are many other excellent examples), and hot dogs (e.g. SuperDawg).

Aaron Deacon wrote:

nr706 wrote:WAY too general a question.

Maybe, but people around here love to play this game. I'll throw out what seem the likeliest answers, though I don't claim to have eaten widely enough to make any sort of authoritative declaration.

Mexican
Thai
Avant-garde

I agree with Aaron, essentially, in calling Avante-garde a catagory. It is better to think of these as food genres (or whatever) than purely as "ethnic" (not the least to avoid the droll semantics debates). It also allows for breakdowns for American regions and even things like Issan vs. Thai.

I did a listing once on Chowhound of all the ethnic cuisines I could think of in Chicago. Perhaps I use a summoning charm to find it. One of the beauties of this whole foodie enterprise is the incredible increase in knowledge. I am sure the list as I did a few years ago is woefully incomplete compared to what we know now.

But of course this also reminds me of my attempted but failed idea of a scanvanger-hunt. Essentially, the idea was to go out and find all of the catagories, and especially find those not necessarily documented on LTH.

I am (of course) still interested in launching that enterprise, but without signficant players, I see no reason to do it.

Rob

Vital Information wrote:I did a listing once on Chowhound of all the ethnic cuisines I could think of in Chicago. Perhaps I use a summoning charm to find it.
Rob

Summoning charm at your service.

Most recent LTH update of VI's list of ethnic cuisines in Chicago

And here's the original Chowhound post:

http://www.chowhound.com/midwest/boards ... /7304.html

gleam wrote:Yes, but is Avant Garde really an ethnic cuisine?

Ahh, but the original question didn't call for the top ethnic cusines, just the top cuisines, though the thread was titled ethnic. Confusing.

I would put into the list Steak/American. While steak can be had anywhere, it's invariable that when I run into folks from "elsewhere" that they say whenever they come to Chicago they just have to get a steak because (in their opinion) they can't get good steaks like that where they live.

And is Italian Beef a "cuisine"? Because it's certainly unique to Chicago and something I will sorely miss when I'm finally able to retire and move to some place where the closest you come to snow is watching it on TV.

Ann, Amata, thanks both for the links.

I moved Aaron's thread (which slipped my mind, ) to the "useful stuff" board to make it easier to find going forward. I will try to make and keep an unpdated listing based on the info in that thread.

Rob

nr706 wrote:I agree with those (especially upscale Mexican) but for an out-of-towner, you can't overlook deep-dish pizza (e.g. the original Pizzeria Uno), Italian beef (e.g. Gene & Jude's - although there are many other excellent examples), and hot dogs (e.g. SuperDawg).

Just so no one tries to order an IB at Gen & Judes their menu only consists of hot dogs, cornroll tamales, fries, and drinks. I do feel that these are some amazing hot dogs, though. Jonnie's is the place for IB not too far from G&J's on North Ave.

Flip

I think the initial response to the question of "way too general" is apropos. We seem to be rapidly approaching "all of them" without even having ventured south down Cottage Grove west on Devon or up Milwaukee Avenues . . .

Tough question. I would include Korean and Vietnamese and although I don't know from personal experience, I would venture to guess Polish (since we have the highest Polish population in the country, in fact, I'm not sure if this is accurate but I've heard that we have the highest Polish population outside of Warsaw).

Although I think Chicago is one of the best food cities out there and has great restaurants serving almost any ethnic cuisine, I have to admit we probably don't have as many quality options as other cities when it comes to certain cuisines. Japanese, French, German and English come to mind. But don't get me wrong, this is not to say that there aren't outstanding French, Japanese, etc. restaurants in Chicago. I just think that we do even better in other areas. Actually, now that I am thinking about this it's pretty amazing that the list of what we don't have (as much of) is shorter than the list of what we do.

HIKARI

I included Korean with the understanding that L.A. blows us out of the water, but I still think Chicago does a pretty good job of representing itself in this category.

Actually, I think the original question is rather like an ink blot test - here is a very vague shape - what do you see in it?

The only way to narrow it would be for the original poster to identify what his purpose is for the information he hopes to get - then one could figure out how to reply.

Having said that, the listings and information here are very good. Thanks