The Very Best Things I Ate & Drank in Chicago in 2024
There are a lot of ways to do a “best of” food list. If you’re part of a big media organization, you can canvass your staff and ask them to submit the best things they ate. That results in a diversity of viewpoints, but also you lose some of the objectivity and consistency of such a list because it’s a compilation of varying tastes and aptitudes.
Another way is to just compile the collective knowledge that exists on the internet from Yelp or Instagram or TikTok or various articles and just create a grouping of dishes that seem like they’re great whether you ate them or not. Honestly, a lot of lists are made this way because they get clicks.
This list is neither of those lists. This is the work of one guy who eats a lot and has thought about food for the last twenty years in such an unnatural way that it makes his friends and family question his priorities and sanity.
Like, did I have to pay $18 bucks to enter the Holland Tunnel, risk missing my flight home from NYC last week, and end up talking a very frisky parking meter officer out of giving me a ticket for sidling my rental Mazda too close to a fire hydrant just because I had to double check if Scarr’s pizza in New York was still good?
Yes, yes, I did. You may like this approach. You may not. But the important thing is this list is all brought to you through one lens and mouth. I should also note, except for the sungold soup from Next which was a “friends and family” meal, I paid for every single one of the dishes listed below with my own money. This means when it wasn’t good, it hurt deeply and maybe took food out my kids’ mouths (JK).
When an item was delicious, you know it absolutely was because no one paid me or comped me nor did any algorithm tell me to say so.
As a bonus, you’ll also gets lots of childish references to cocaine-use because I’ve watched a lot of 1980s movies and am convinced if I had tried it my life would somehow be better. Who else will bring you that? No one.
While I’ve never done blow, by a very conservative estimate, I probably ate and drank over 500 things while dining out this year. These are the absolute best thirty or so items that still live in my brain as absolutely delicious.