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Mag Mile businesses want people to spend the extra day this year shopping; to this end they’re offering champagne-themed Leap Day specials and samples including champagne kisses at the Hershey’s Store and a free glass of champagne for shoppers at Marlowe on Friday. The Swissotel Chicago is pairing champagne with items on an a la carte menu such as beef tenderloin with vanilla cream sauce, lobster canapes, and chocolate-dipped strawberries; Angela Roman of the John Hancock Center’s Signature Room at the 95th will give a lecture on champagne at 5 PM. For a complete list of special offers, click here.
Saturday at 10 AM, Alliance Francaise hosts a class on how to make pain perdu (aka French toast) in some inventive variations. In addition to flamed caramel-banana pain perdu, there’ll be some with scallops and cilantro. $85. Also at 10 AM, local chef and food writer Louisa Chu, a producer of the PBS show Gourmet’s Diary of a Foodie, gives a talk at Kendall College titled Behind the Scenes of Food Television. Among her topics: what it was like to lead Anthony Bourdain on a tour of wholesale meat markets in Paris, where she drank absinthe before the ban was lifted, and what the food tastes like on Iron Chef America, where she judged an episode that hasn’t aired yet. $3.
