Cooks With Books
The Berghoff Family Cookbook: From Our Table to Yours, Celebrating a Century of Entertaining, Carlyn Berghoff and Nancy Ross Ryan (Andrews McMeel, $29.99)
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rrr Discreetly located in a town house spitting distance from chef Grant Achatz’s first employer, Charlie Trotter, Alinea is marked only by a valet’s sandwich board at the curb. Inside, a dining room and glass-walled kitchen share the first floor; up a set of glass stairs covered by metal mesh mats are two more small, luxuriously spare dining rooms. The menu has changed since I went there, but the concept remains the same: prix fixe tasting menus of experimental cuisine in 12 ($145) or a daunting 25 ($225) courses; wine pairings add to the bill. Achatz’s initial offerings included bacon mounted on a trapeze and the by-now-notorious PB&J amuse—a peeled grape slathered with peanut butter, wrapped in brioche, and served, with stem, atop a wicked-looking wire contraption. Now the frequently changing menu might include such dishes as Hot Potato, a tiny bowl of chilled potato soup with a pin bearing a chunk of hot potato, Parmesan, butter, and a slice of black truffle; to eat it you slide the pin out so the potato and truffle drop into the soup, then slurp it as you would an oyster. The Alinea experience remains tightly controlled, with specific instructions as to how certain dishes should be eaten. Under less polished conditions this would be annoyingly pretentious, but the soothing rituals of fine dining can take the edge off the edgiest of cuisines. —Martha Bayne
Chicago Diner3411 N. Halsted | 773-935-6696
F 8.6 | S 6.8 | A 7.5 | $$$ (13 reports)Mexican | Lunch, dinner: Tuesday-Saturday | Saturday brunch | Closed Sunday, Monday | Open late: Friday & Saturday till 11 | Reservations not accepted
Step off the elevator and get in line: this original Cajun restaurant, one of the first in town, is hidden in a seventh-floor coffee shop in the Garland Building in the heart of the Loop. Open just 9 AM to 4 PM Monday through Friday and Saturday from 10 AM to 3 PM, it still attracts a steady stream of fans who line up in the corridor and sometimes wait as long as 45 minutes for chef-owner Jimmy Bannos’s lively, authentic food: consistently good jambalaya, gumbo, and po’boys, plus daily etouffees, pastas, and more. Diners can spice up dishes at will with the ubiquitous bottles of hot sauce. For more regular dinner service, check out the restaurant’s spin-off location at 600 N. Michigan (entrance at Rush and Ohio). —Laura Levy Shatkin
The Parthenon Cookbook: Great Mediterranean Recipes From the Heart of Chicago’s Greektown, Camille Stagg (Agate Surrey, $24.95)
