The Resy Guide to the New Classic Dishes of Chicago

The dish: Steak burrito

Diana Davila grew up working in her parents’ taqueria, where she and her friends held burrito-rolling contests — who could roll the fastest and make the best version. Making burritos became muscle memory for her.

Fast forward some years later: Now she had her own place, the critically lauded Mi Tocaya Antojeria in Logan Square. She saw other fine-dining restaurants offering a bespoke cheeseburger on the menu. Davila thought: Why not have a truly great steak burrito?

Mi Tocaya’s steak burrito is, no hyperbole, the best damn steak burrito money can buy. Every component is engineered to be a 10 out of 10: skirt steak marinated with housemade sazon, beer and onions, real-deal carne asada-style. Black beans come from a farm in Wisconsin, cooked in local sunflower oil. Top-notch Chihuahua cheese. Banana peppers, avocado, sour cream. All of the above stuffed, wrapped and finished on the griddle to maximalist effect. Davila has created the mic drop of steak burritos.

The dish: Fish-sauce wings

Like Big Jones, HaiSous is celebrated for telling the culinary story of a place — Vietnam — and its people in refined, delicious ways … and yet all people can talk about is the fried chicken. In this case it’s the fish-sauce wings, which have become so wildly popular that HaiSous’ sister restaurant next door, Ca Phe Da, has now devoted its menu to the dish.

There are other versions of appetizer wings where all subtlety is lost; it’s about maximum crunch, maximum sauce, maximum indulgence. What makes Ca Phe Da’s wings so good is, to the extent fried chicken could be, there’s a notion of balance. The recipe comes from someone who thinks long and hard about the experience of eating. Consuming these wings doesn’t feel like a gut bomb, which is why it’s easy to get lost in the moment and mindlessly down a dozen.

Still, every element of Thai and Danielle Dang’s fish-sauce wings are designed to provoke the dopamine-producing centers of your brain. The wings are double-fried to a solid (but not heavy) crisp, then lightly drizzled with an intense sweet-and-umami fish sauce caramel. Everything gets topped with fried garlic and shallots.

The dish: Calamari

The idea that suburban restaurants are a culinary wasteland? An exaggeration. Sure, the appetite for adventurous cooking might be higher in neighborhoods with a younger clientele and disposable income. But that doesn’t mean suburbia — and I’m a suburban dad now — is all boneless chicken-breast joints.

Take Mino’s, the Italian restaurant in Winnetka. On my first visit, my suburban bias kept expectations lower than a similar restaurant in the West Loop. Imagine my delight when the broccoli arrived appropriately charred, the seasoning perfect, the Neapolitan pizzas both chewy and crisp, the pastas on-point. Here was a restaurant I could objectively say was on par with any modern Italian spot along the Chicago River downtown.

Then there’s this to say about the calamari: I’ve eaten countless versions of this dish, from Boston’s North End to Italy’s Ligurian coast. The fried calamari at Mino’s is super. The crisp, lacy fry job is perfect. No need to pad out this paragraph other than say it’s my all-time favorite version.

The dish: Tripe tacos

Some of my best memories with out-of-town friends involve driving an hour through rush hour traffic to a taqueria in Little Village. Their stomachs empty and patience waning, we’d arrive at La Chaparrita, a grocery store/taqueria serving up Mexico City-style tacos. What catches your eye upon entering is the sizzling charola by the window, a raised circular pan where a variety of meats, fats and juices co-mingle. It’s a delicious sound.

We’d order a glass of tepache, a pineapple drink fermented in barrels. Then we’d ask Angelina, the genial woman behind the counter, to bring us one of everything on the taco menu.

More than any Chicago dining experience, friends would bring up La Chaparrita as a lasting memory. The anticipation, the smell, the killer salsas. And of course, the tripa.

While the pastor, suadero and housemade longaniza are all top-of-class, the true standout is the tripe taco. Tripe might seem intimidating to the neophyte, a throwaway cut with offalness lurking. Not here. I convince La Chaparrita’s tripe tacos to skeptics as beef bacon: Beefy as steak, crispy, smoky, with none of the off-putting organy flavors you’d encounter in lesser tripes.

I’d take new-to-Chicago friends to Michelin-starred restaurants with large PR budgets, places that get on shortlists of national awards. Long after those memories fade, you know what dish they’d bring up years later? A $2 taco.

The dish: Fried chicken

In the decade-plus that I’ve been a fan of Paul Fehribach’s cooking, the word I most associate with him is scholarly. His love of historic Southern cookbooks imbues the dishes he presents at Big Jones. A crawfish étouffée isn’t just a crawfish étouffée with no additional context — it is an homage to the recipe found at Café des Amis in Breaux Bridge, La., which itself came from the town’s famed Hebert Hotel in 1940 where crawfish étouffée was purportedly invented.

So when I namechecked Fehribach’s fried chicken as one of the best in the city in a Chicago Tribune story, I felt a tinge of apprehension before hitting publish. What made Big Jones stand out was its respect for culinary scholarship. To reduce it to “the place with the good fried chicken” felt like the broadest of broad strokes. (Fehribach also explained his reticence to include fried chicken in his excellent cookbook: “I felt like it was too expected, too predictable, and would likely crowd out other dishes that might allow us to tell more of the South’s story.”)

Long story short, Chicago is better off with Fehribach going with the fried-chicken flow. It is, quite simply, the finest version in Chicago — my second favorite version nationwide after Willie Mae’s Scotch House in New Orleans. Fehribach cites Edna Lewis as an inspiration. The chicken gets brined, dredged in cornmeal and spices, then fried in leaf lard with a smoked ham hock in the hot oil. The chicken gets spectacularly crunchy; squint hard and you’ll taste warming spices and wood smoke.

The dish: Bacon-wrapped dates

Avec, the progenitor of Chicago’s communal dining scene, will forever be associated with this one dish. It is to Avec what roast chicken is to Zuni Cafe or miso black cod to Nobu. On the menu since the early 2000’s, chef and owner Paul Kahan estimates they’ve served nearly 2 million bacon-wrapped dates (amazingly, all prepared by one prep cook, Jorge Ruiz).

Imagine tasting these together: Fresh chorizo stuffed into Medjool dates, wrapped with bacon. Spice, savory, sweet, smoky balls — sauced in a rich gravy of tomatoes and roasted piquillo peppers.

Automatic order.

And that’s what makes it a new Chicago classic.

The dish: Shrimp and grits

Barbecue, purists will argue, is a precise procedure involving wood, smoke and meat, and any deviation would be an unwelcome appropriation. (“Don’t you dare slather KC Masterpiece on grilled ribs and call it barbecue,” they’d say.) I’m willing they’ll make one exception: New Orleans-style barbecued shrimp.

Neither wood smoke nor fire come anywhere near this dish. Rather, it’s pan-fried or grilled shrimp, shellacked in an exorbitantly rich sauce of Worcestershire sauce, butter and Creole spicing. This is the type of pan sauce which, if any baguette came near, the entire loaf would magically disappear.

It’s surprising that barbecue shrimp hasn’t had the nationwide marketing reach that po’boys and gumbo have enjoyed. But in Chicago, at least, Darnell Reed, chef and owner of Luella’s in Lincoln Square, is changing hearts and minds. His interpretation of barbecue shrimp is every bit as luxuriant as ones I’ve had in the French Quarter, and the creamy grits underneath are a masterclass in Southern cooking. You might as well charge Luella’s shrimp and grits in Delta miles — it’s practically as satisfying as flying down to New Orleans.