You have probably surmised by now that I’m a cynical bastard. And yet, within every cynical bastard, there’s still a once idealizing child. A cynic must work hard to stay in touch with this kid. If they don’t, they risk utter despair or worse. There are many ways to tap into the wondering kid, generally through exercises in nostalgia, repetition of juvenile experiences, or repeated exposure to beauty or novelty. If there is an overriding reason why I write about food, it’s because it reliably offers access to all of these things.
Something else that puts me in touch with all these things is Disney World. I know. But it does. Right now, if I could be anywhere in the world, an endless loop around the Haunted Mansion might just be the destination.
I could easily spend 10,000 words arguing about why everything about this idea is gross and wrong. But, also, despite that, I very much buy into the mythology of Disney and its ultimate outcome. I love the idea of a small group or singular visionary (Walt Disney, born in Logan Square!) building a team of the greatest artists and inspiring, funding, and supporting them to do their best collaborative work in the service of achieving something thought to be impossible.
It's why I love what chefs Grant Achatz, Curtis Duffy, Jenner Tomaska, Tim Flores & Genie Kwon, John and Karen Shields, and Noah Sandoval are doing at Alinea, Ever, Esme, Kasama, Smyth and Oriole. It’s why, for so long I’ve been in thrall to Hogsalt and its founder Brendan Sodikoff.
Where most restaurateurs would cede vision to a Pinterest-trend-following knockoff “designer” or freak out about design costs, and be bewitched by architectural or legal restrictions, Sodikoff pushed through to build restaurants and interiors so fastidiously that they went beyond the Vegas trompe l’oeil facsimile or even the Disney delighting standard.
Whatever Hogsalt’s projects were supposed to be, a backyard BBQ, a forties steakhouse, a French brasserie, a subterranean izakaya/ramen bar, they absolutely, evocatively were. You never looked at something Sodikoff did, and said, ah it looks cool, but I know that’s just cardboard or styrofoam under there.
Visiting a Hogsalt restaurant was like entering an immersive play like Tony and Tina’s wedding, except you weren’t an accessory acutely aware that you were experiencing a construction. Rather, you became Tony or Tina. You were immediately the lead and you believed this was not a performance, but your actual life.
This happened not only through Sodikoff’s sharp eye for layering and design and conceptualization, but also because that same gaze was applied to everything including food and service. When you were in the Hogsalt spaces it felt like everything was happening for you rather than to you. Everything felt intentional, and that intention was to deliver the utmost hospitality to your brain, mind, and body.
There’d been cracks in the facade over the last few years, burnt gold-leaf-spackled and undersalted fried chicken and soggy sushi rice at the short-lived Radio Anago. I didn’t love the pizza, or a pallet of PAM cooking spray on display in the dining room at the now defunct Roxie’s. Sodikoff and I argued about the PAM over text once. While I thought it detracted from the décor, removed from that observation all these years later, I think he was right, and I was too pedantic about it feeling like odd visual clutter. Anyone who’s worked in a pizza joint (I did for 9 years) knows that cooking spray is used on everything, and that it’s just sitting around like food safe WD-40 waiting to coat a sheet pan or grease a squeaky oven hinge.
As I beheld my first vision of Hogsalt’s newest spot, Armitage Alehouse, an invocation of “1926 London”, and shuffled through the bar, under languidly-rotating rattan ceiling fans, and past a copper Victoria Arduino espresso machine sculpture and sidled into a leather and tweed banquette next to the hand-carved millwork of a fireplace surround, I exclaimed to my wife, “OMG! This room! It won’t even matter if the food is good.”