The Chicago Way: An Oral History of Chicago Dining

A serious history of Chicago restaurants has been conspicuously absent from the shelf, which makes this the first book of its kind. By the reckoning of author Michael Gebert, Chicago muscled its way onto the list of America's great dining cities in the 1960s, alongside New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans. (Los Angeles apparently didn't quite make the cut).

Gebert, a James Beard Award-winning food writer and editor of the Chicago dining site Fooditor, has spent decades reporting on the people who built this scene, and the book draws on that network. The starting point is Chef Louis Szathmary, the Hungarian immigrant whose Lincoln Park restaurant The Bakery made him the city's first celebrity chef. Gebert's account of The Bakery moves between busboys, diners, executive chefs, neighboring restaurateurs, and critics. Similar voices appear in chapters organized by cuisine (French, steakhouses, Italian, Mexican), by neighborhood, and by restaurant groups, including Richard Melman's Lettuce Entertain You.

The contributors are the reason to read it. Rick and Deann Bayless, Grant Achatz, Carrie Nahabedian, Rick Tramonto, Gale Gand, Kevin Boehm, Mindy Segal, Curtis Duffy, Paul Kahan, Stephanie Izard, Joe Flamm. Alongside them, the busboys and line cooks and neighbors whose names rarely appear in this kind of account. The density of voices is itself the argument for Chicago's significance.

Like most oral histories, this one is impressionistic rather than systematic. Readers looking for a definitive, footnoted history of the city's dining will want to wait for someone else's book. Readers who want to hear the people who were there, in their own words, finally have one.

Hardcover.