Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
At first glance Burke’s Bacon Bar looks like a food truck without a truck, serving slider-size sandwiches, most with bacon, from a window. Meats dangle from a high-tech warmer—including, a bit tongue in cheek, cans of Spam, which authentically turns up on a Hawaiian-inspired sandwich called the Big Kahuna Spamwich. But as a media preview earlier this week revealed, Burke’s Bacon Bar’s truest porky excess comes out in forms that can only work for a group—in particular, a group of people who expect to be in a conference room for a very long time.
The sliders—which they call handwiches—number about ten right now, from a list of about 30 different recipes that they’ve worked up. Gresh says they’ll rotate in and out seasonally. They’re $4 each (three for $11; a few cost a little extra) and range from an “Angry Reuben” made with pastrami from Indianapolis’s Smoking Goose to shrimp salad on a lobster-roll bun to a vegetarian one called “Smoked Eggplant Meatball Parmesan” (a robust eggplant aioli is the “meatball”).
- Michael Gebert
- David Burke watches as the birthday “cake” is rolled in.
As Rick Gresh says, and Alfredo Garcia could have said before him, “What do you do with the head? Every pig’s got one.” Stephanie Izard makes pig face; Gresh confits the head in pure pork fat for six hours, then deep-fries it to a crisp exterior, stuffs the snout full of candles, wheels it in ablaze, and slices you up plates of melty jowl and cheek meat, downy white pig fat, and crispy skin, served with guava barbecue sauce and soft white buns.
