Because it’s basically the only channel I get, I watch a lot of WTTW, Chicago’s public television station. For a few weeks this fall, the station devoted itself fairly exclusively to Ken Burns’s The War, and I now have post-traumatic stress disorder from reliving all of the bloodiest battles of WWII. My doorbell rings and I crawl under my coffee table, blindly lobbing fruit like grenades.
I’m slowly getting over Guadalcanal with a little help from WTTW’s newest release, an ambitious and remarkably successful documentary called Foods of Chicago: A Delicious History (watch a clip here). The show ultimately traces immigration history in Chicago through examining the culinary tracks it has left, from Italian Beef sandwiches to Polish pierogies to pidgin creations like the Chicago-style hot dog, which pinches its accoutrements from about a half-dozen countries. Your host on this expedition is Geoffrey Baer, who smartly lets the food take center stage. Polite, genial, and business-casual, Baer is like a human bottle of San Pellegrino, which is exactly what you need to make it through this obstacle course of red sauce, chiles, encased meats, deep fryers, and candy.
The roster of restaurants and food purveyors covered on the show is a useful cheat-sheet for Chicago visitors interested in the traditional, old-fashioned, and often ethnically inflected. The places I’ve been to, despite their variety, have all offered me some wonderful, surprising, idiosyncratic good times. A rain delay at a Sox game this summer sent me into Schaller’s Pump, a Sox bar on the South Side that will make you think that you and Doc took the Delorian back to 1970. Once, after a movie, I ambled into Margie’s Candies, an 80-year-old ice cream parlor that serves up heaping sundaes in plastic scallop shells the size of punch bowls. This isn’t the slice of Chicago that gets frequently reviewed, and some of the restaurants on the list (Gibson’s steak house, for example) are more about lore or atmosphere than spectacular food. But if you’re going to relive history, it might as well be at Gibson’s with a 24-ounce porterhouse and a crystal clean Martini; sure beats Iwo Jima (thanks again, Ken Burns).
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