sarcon wrote:Red Hen has not been reliably good for baguettes in a long, long time (JMO, of course). At best, one baguette out of 5 is any good at all. those odds are not good enough for me to buy Red Hen unless it's my only option.

Yeah, I got a baguette from RH last week and the crumb had a decidedly supermarket-like texture and virtually no taste at all.

More than anything, my wish would be some QUALITY donut shops to emerge! I hate Dunkin' Donuts with such a passion, that it isn't even funny. Thank god that a few bakeries and donut shops are still left in the Chicago area, such as Dinkel's, Old Fashioned Donuts(far south side), Bennison's(Evanston), Dunk Donuts(Melrose Park), to name a few examples.

MariaTheresa wrote:I think that if Chicago had more food carts, it would breed more great little restaurants, too. A food cart is a great way to take a first step into the restaurant business. Some vendors would find new customers in neighborhoods where they might never have expected them. What park would not be improved by the presence of hot dog and pretzel vendors? And the entire Chicago winter would benefit from the addition of the scent of roasting chestnuts, peanuts, and candied pecans wafting up from the street corners.

And while I'm not sure that Chicago should follow NYC in subsidizing vegetable carts, it would be great if there were some of those, too!

Yes, removing the city ban on food carts is another thing I'd love to see happen! I can't begin to say how much I dream we had something like NYC's Big Gay Ice Cream Truck.

http://twitter.com/biggayicecream

Agreed. Did not know there was a ban of food carts. Why not, they could set up on the perimeter of Grant Park. GMA weekend had a segment on best food carts. A korean style spicy pork taco place in Seattle took the honors. This format works for a single/few product line done well and also lower overhead and risk.

There is a permanent food cart, of sorts, right at Damen / North / Milwaukee: Underdogg has a little outdoor awning next to Flash Taco which is open into the wee hours on weekends, and appears to have a griddle for giving the steamed dogs a quick sear, along with grilled onions, and sure smells good on a chilly night. Vageuly reminiscent of NYC, as is much at that intersection, good and bad (and really mostly vapid).

dumpstermcnuggets wrote:More than anything, my wish would be some QUALITY donut shops to emerge! I hate Dunkin' Donuts with such a passion, that it isn't even funny. Thank god that a few bakeries and donut shops are still left in the Chicago area, such as Dinkel's, Old Fashioned Donuts(far south side), Bennison's(Evanston), Dunk Donuts(Melrose Park), to name a few examples.

Plus Wheeling Donuts on Dundee in Wheeling, which also addresses the "Chicago needs a LA style donut shop" question too. But yes, it would be nice if, like LA we had good to very good donut places every 5 blocks.

On the food cart question, an extremely good substitute is to check out the vans near Milwaukee and California on Sundays. It makes a very fine post Logan Square Farmer's Market stop, which this Local Family has done already twice. (And I s'pose for the "you know you are an LTHer thread", one could add, "you know you are an LTHer when you get a plate of shrimp escabeche tostadas from some lady sitting in the back of a van."

dumpstermcnuggets wrote:More than anything, my wish would be some QUALITY donut shops to emerge! I hate Dunkin' Donuts with such a passion, that it isn't even funny. Thank god that a few bakeries and donut shops are still left in the Chicago area, such as Dinkel's, Old Fashioned Donuts(far south side), Bennison's(Evanston), Dunk Donuts(Melrose Park), to name a few examples.

I feel your pain, dumpstermcnuggets. Sitting right here in the Northeast, traditional home of the donut, I look out on a landscape of Dunkin Donuts stretching as far as the eye can see. Alas, I never made it to the late, great (according to the Sterns), Butlers and the real whipped cream-filled donut. Tim Horton's would be the only competition here in Hartford, if it weren't for Unicorn Bakery, a Polish establishment in Vernon, which makes terrific packzi. And the Price Chopper, a local discount grocery, makes decent old fashioned donuts.

This is my advice to all who seek a decent donut in Chicago: Ideal Bakery on Milwaukee Ave. for real lard-fried packzi! (search Packzi thread.)

Regarding food carts, don't forget the Puerto Rican carts set up throughout Humboldt Park. How they exist to the exclusion of other carts (setting aside Mexican pirate carts and Jamaican/African lunch trucks) is probably a political mystery. But they are great.

Josephine wrote:Sitting right here in the Northeast, traditional home of the donut, I look out on a landscape of Dunkin Donuts stretching as far as the eye can see.

When I was doing a one-year stint in Cambridge, MA, a few years ago, one of the real tragedies unfolding in the part of the city in which I lived (North Cambridge) was that Verna's Donuts, a local institution and regular haunt of the late Tip O'Neil, was in the process of closing because it could not compete once a Dunkin Donuts opened more or less across the street. Fortunately, the community rallied and it was saved. I made it a more or less regular stop on Fridays, when I would get a box or two to bring in to work. Excellent donuts, and the cast of hardscrabble North Cambridge regulars holding court at one of the few tables was also a hoot.

Verna's Donuts
2344 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge MA 02140
617-354-4110

Interestingly enough, I have learned in trips to visit my in-laws over the past fifteen or so years that St. Louis is a pretty good donut town -- although not LA level, it blows Chicago out of the water in terms of per capita number of good donut shops.

It's been amusing to revisit this thread. When, three years ago, I said Chicago needed an upscale doughnut shop, only a few people knew what I was talking about.

We also seem to have achieved artisanal butcher shops.

But when it comes to classic French we are worse off than before.

LAZ wrote:But when it comes to classic French we are worse off than before.

Especially with the closing of Le Titi de Paris.