Ed Zotti

Saturday

Ed Zotti

The challenge of dining al fresco in Chicago

The food and drink editor was taken with my idea for a piece on the challenges of outdoor dining in the big city, specifically Chicago, the big city where I live. “Do you know when you might be able to file?” she asked. “Ma’am,” I replied, “this morning it was 23 degrees Fahrenheit. One of the challenges of outdoor dining in Chicago is avoiding frostbite. How far can you push it out?” The number of outdoor diners in Chicago killed by shrapnel is remarkably low I would have preferred the Fourth of July. She gave me till the end of April. Fine, I said. Even in Chicago, two straight months of inhospitable weather would be unusual, setting aside that 43-day stretch when the mercury never got above freezing. (No joke. December 28, 1976 to February 8, 1977. Look it up.

Bowles
Ed Zotti

Nellie Bowles critiques progressivism and the media that covers it

One of many fascinating things to be learned from Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, by former New York Times correspondent Nellie Bowles, is the process by which someone gets canceled. I was of course familiar with the concept of cancel culture and figured it meant blackballing the wicked, but I’d never gotten a clear idea of how the thing was actually done. On the evidence of Bowles’s book, it means going on Twitter (OK, X) and posting derogatory tweets (X-pressions, whatever) about the offending party contemporaneously with others doing the same thing.

Canada
Ed Zotti

How Canada will conquer the US

It’s difficult to get people to take the idea of Canadian world domination seriously — and I admit the notion snuck up on me too. My first inkling came last year, when I found out Toronto was on track to overtake Chicago as the city with the second-largest number of skyscrapers in North America, New York being the first. But then came the news about Kansas City Southern, at which point I realized: Canada is on the march. You’ve probably never heard of Kansas City Southern. I hadn’t either, and my knowledge of railroads — that’s what KCS is — is well above average. Here are two of the three things you need to know about it: 1) The KCS originates in Kansas City and heads south. You might have figured that out for yourself, I suppose, but railroad names can be deceptive.

Thursday

Ed Zotti

My thoughts on Malört

It was January in Chicago and the forecast was for heavy snow followed by bitter cold — high time, I thought, for a shot of malört, the most undrinkable beverage on earth. Or so I’d always heard — and therein lies a tale I didn’t expect to tell. Chances are you’ve never heard of malört, formally known as Jeppson’s Malört, Carl Jeppson being the Swedish immigrant who invented the liqueur a century ago. However, it’s legendary in Chicago, where it’s commonly described as a rite of passage. That tells you a lot right there. Lest there be any doubt, readers are invited to search for #malortface on X, formerly known as Twitter, or Instagram or Flickr.

Malört

Thursday

Ed Zotti

The Long Room, a reliable Chicago bar with all the essentials

I was sipping a beer on the patio behind Ten Cat Tavern with my friend Charlie, debating which was the better Chicago bar: the Long Room up the street, or the Ten Cat. The Long Room was a neighborhood bar that had once been a dive bar. Ten Cat, according to Yelp, is a dive bar now. This requires explanation. For old-school relics like me, calling a tavern a dive bar has not, historically, been a compliment. When we moved into the neighborhood thirty years ago, the Long Room was Blue Bird Liquors, a Chicago dive bar in the traditional mold — a combination packaged-goods store and neighborhood shot-and-a-beer joint. Blue Bird Liquors didn’t have the wall of TVs obligatory in modern bars. Considering how dark it was, I’m not 100 percent sure it had electricity.

long room

Thursday

Ed Zotti

Chicago is coming apart

There are two ways to think about Chicago. The depressing one is to follow the news. These days it’s pretty bad. In mid-May, two people were killed and seven wounded when a gunman fired into a crowd outside a McDonald’s restaurant on the Near North Side. I know the McDonald’s well. I went to high school nearby, and my three children attended the elementary school across the street. Once scruffy, the area is now affluent. Overlooking the murder site is a seventy-five-story tower where condos sell for up to $6.1 million. The building’s developer described the shootings as “isolated to [that] location.” If only. In fact, it was the tenth mass shooting in the city this year, CBS News Chicago reported.

chicago

Tuesday

Ed Zotti

Lori Lightfoot’s inner Republican

It’s not known when Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot experienced the first stirrings of her secret GOP gland, but knowledgeable conjecture puts it perhaps two nanoseconds after taking the oath of office in 2019. It’s then that Lightfoot, buoyant after having been swept into office with 74 percent of the vote, surely had an alarming thought: ‘OMG, I’m mayor. What do I do now?’ All Democratic politicians aspiring to executive office have a secret Republican gland, although it’s vestigial till they sit behind an executive desk. When it’s dormant they can sign up for any damn fool notion. During her mayoral campaign, Lightfoot had cheerfully endorsed both an elected school board and an elected police board.

lightfoot

Tuesday

Ed Zotti

The city that never dies

Peggy Noonan, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, offers a bleak take on the pandemic’s impact on American society, or at any rate the subset that lives in New York. New York vies with London as one of the most prodigious aggregations of talent on the planet, and has survived a previous pandemic, multiple financial crises and a terrorist assault. Noonan’s argument — and she’s far from the only one to make it — is that NYC is headed over a cliff because corporate managers have awakened to the advantages of the Zoom call. I can understand how such dark notions arise. Given the breadth and scale of the present catastrophe, it’s not unreasonable to think the world has changed irreversibly for the worse. But I don’t think it has, at least not due to coronavirus.

new york

Monday

Ed Zotti

Who killed Chicago?

‘I wonder if you might do a “notebook” on living in Chicago at the moment,’ my London-based editor inquired via email. ‘The latest crime figures are quite shocking.’ I asked which shocking crime figures he had in mind. We have quite a selection. More than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2020 and a few dozen short of 800 were murdered — an increase of more than 50 percent on 2019’s tally. For the past few years almost as many people have been slain in Chicago as in New York and Los Angeles combined, although those cities taken together have four times the population. Then again, perhaps my editor was thinking of carjackings, up 283 percent in January compared to a year ago.

chicago

Monday

Ed Zotti

Fresh food, fresher air

One takes the chance, in writing about al fresco dining during winter, of getting pigeonholed as that guy who always goes on about how cold it is in Chicago. But if I’m to write about food and drink at this time of year, there’s no attractive alternative, unless you want to hear about my puttering in the kitchen making spaghetti, and how exciting is that? With indoor restaurant dining forbidden due to the pandemic, the remaining choice is the outdoors — the ideal setting, in this challenging time, for the intrepid individual to demonstrate boldness without being a complete idiot about it, always a fine line. The question is, how?

outdoor dining

Thursday

Ed Zotti

Chicago Notebook | 7 February 2019

From our UK edition

One of the few pleasures of advancing age is that, no matter how awful some looming catastrophe may be, you can always remember a time that was worse. On hearing the polar vortex was headed for Chicago last week, my wife and I smugly reminisced about having survived the coldest night in the city’s history — 20 January 1985 — when the mercury fell to -27ºF, or -33ºC. (Temperature scales are a nuisance in accounts of this sort — more on that below.) Spurning the temptation to huddle beneath blankets, we went out for deep-dish pizza, thinking we’d have the joint to ourselves. On the contrary, it was packed. We had to stand in line, mercifully in the unheated vestibule rather than the sidewalk. We had a blast.