It’s hard to know whether the world is actually going to hell or whether your attitudes are just a reflection of aging. I just saw $7.29 a gallon gas on the corner of Diversey and Western here in Chicago. No doubt that’s a relative spike to just last month, but I’ve been around long enough to remember when it was 25% of that. Then again, since fossil fuels are dissipating from our planet and eviscerating our ozone which will ultimately lead to Miami and other coastal cities turning in to Venice, Italy, it’s probably not expensive enough.
I swear this isn’t an email fundraising plea from Greenpeace, but the other thing about high gas prices is they often translate to high oil prices which benefit Saudi Arabian billionaires. This may seem fine if you’re cool with beheadings, suppression of journalists, and the delegitimization of women and LGBTQIA folk, by which I mean, you live in certain parts of Texas.
While we’ve had our eyes on China and North Korea, the true global threat is potentially the oil wealth of the Middle East. This power is concentrated in a few unelected families who are not beholden to shareholders or public sentiment. Many of these wealthy oil leaders have been educated in Western universities. They know how to influence the algorithms, and if they can’t, they understand how to manipulate the world by buying up and hiding behind legitimate enterprises we love like pro sports, Twitter, and Lyft. The Saudis already own America in some part, or at least somewhere between 120 and 180 billion of our debt obligations.
I know this is a food newsletter, and you’re probably all like “Mike, why you got to be so sad!” But, listen, I’m a pro. I can tie this all in a neat bow. Two years ago the Saudis invested four hundred million dollars in Cloudkitchen, a network of ghost kitchens meant to produce cheap food with low overhead at scale, threatening the fabric of mom and pop restaurants. If this sounds a little Uber-esque, that’s because it is. The leader of Cloudkitchen is former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
I have sampled a few ghost kitchens including the burger from Youtube sensation Mr. Beast. So far they have been grodier than the urinals in old punk rock bars.
There is a way to fight the apparition of the ghost kitchens, and that’s by eating at Chicago’s very best independent mom and pop restaurants. But from where?
As promised last week, I am compiling a list of the “essential essentials”, the restaurants and/or dishes I return to again and again and again, not because a PR person pitched me, not because they made a hot list, and especially not because a Saudi prince offered me money. It’s because these restaurants or dishes truly represent the top 5% of deliciousness available in the market.
Without further ado….