Tag: Taste of Chicago

County Fair

County Fair

Boosters say the Taste of Chicago is the world’s largest food festival. The world’s largest!

It’s usually held around the Fourth of July. This year, with the newly-scheduled NASCAR race taking up the festival space over Independence Day weekend, the city moved the Taste of Chicago to less touristy September 9-10.

The quaint idea of having Chicago restaurants give people a “taste” of their signature dishes appealed to the legacy-obsessed Mayor Jane Byrne in 1980. She predicted there’d be about 100,000 people showing up on the two blocks of closed-off Michigan Avenue during the three-day festival.

On the first day of the first “Taste,” my thirteen-year-old son and I waded into the sidewalk crowd at the Ohio Street entrance, heading toward the Michigan Avenue bridge. Our nostrils itched with anticipation as each aroma swirled around us until the crowd thickened to an immovable throng. Signs for hamburgers, Chinese dumplings, deep-dish pizza, and sushi were in sight, but the food was out of reach. We all moved in a slow flow of claustrophobic, sweaty goo, trying to break loose.

“Thanks, Jane,” shouted my son.

And a roaring chant rose from the street like the fumes of the smoldering barbeque ribs: Thanks, Jane! Thanks, Jane! Thanks, Jane!

Chanting turned to laughter by the time we disentangled ourselves over the bridge at Wacker Drive. And really, it was hilarious. A crowd of 250,000 showed up. Jane had blocked off streets for the Taste next to downtown office buildings with only two openings in and out.

The following year, the Taste spread out at the edge of Grant Park. My son and I stuffed ourselves with various restaurant pizzas but avoided Greek, Chinese, and Thai food. Neither of us had elevated taste buds at that point in our lives.

Chicago moved the Taste farther into spacious Grant Park in 2023. The ornate 1927 Buckingham Fountain backdropped every photo. Food tasting required an adventurous spirit and a healthy gut. I ran into Lorraine, staring at the sign over the stand selling deep-fried Oreos, crab rangoon, and fried rice. We strolled past little and big hands clutching funnel cakes, rib tips, and Seoul tacos in dinky paper bowls—a hot Cheeto burger sold for sixteen dollars. The longest lines queued up at Harold’s Chicken and Badou Senegalese Cuisine. We sniffed out Chicago Doghouse to chow down on our favorite hot dog, but my throat clogged with the invisible flying grease of deep-fried Twinkies. I couldn’t do it.

“Try a “Beyond Meat” burger,” Lorraine said.

Nope.

“The More I paint the more I like everything” Artist unknown. Grant Park Rose Garden, Taste of Chicago 2023

Blow-up slides, band stages, and a karaoke contest all spread out among the well-gardened rose bushes and the native hibiscus. Lorraine joined hundreds of line dancers under the “Summer Dance” tent. This was indeed Chicago’s very own county fair.

My son has developed far more sophisticated eating habits in the forty-three years since the first Taste of Chicago. This year, he would have coaxed me into tasting unfamiliar foods or, at the very least, eating a hot dog. As it was, I walked home hungry.

I wish we’d gone together.

Atonement: Bird on the Wire

Atonement: Bird on the Wire

In the late 1970’s I worked at a run-down residential hotel that had been sold and was about to be renovated. The legions of accountants, lawyers, contractors and financial schemers confounded even the notable. I managed to keep them all straight, pass information one to another and generally play the know-it-all role I like.

The lead accountant, Mel, asked if I had any friends who could be temporary helpers on some new events his firm was staffing—the Taste of Chicago, ChicagoFest and Art Chicago Expo.

“Sure,” I said, “How much will they get paid?”

“Free entry, all the food they can eat, a T-shirt and a poster.”

Having just accumulated a whole batch of new friends in Alcoholics Anonymous, I knew plenty of unemployed sober oddballs hungry for food and fun as ticket-takers and money-changers. Next thing I knew, Mel told me I had to meet “the guy” in charge.

“Come to Temple Beth Israel on Yom Kippur.” Mel said.

“What? What’s that?” I said, “Am I allowed? What do I wear?”

“Everyone’s allowed. Day of Atonement. It’s the best time to do business.”

I tried to sneak into a seat in the back and look around for Mel. After lengthy  prayers and singing, there was an intermission. Mel appeared at my side, grabbed me by the elbow and said, “Let’s go.”

All the congregants rose up, walked around, talked and laughed and “did business”. Mel introduced me to “the guy” who headed up one of Chicago’s Big Eight downtown accounting firms.

“How many people you got?” The guy asked me.

“Twenty or so,” I lied.

“Good.” Bring ‘em to Navy Pier on Saturday and get ‘em signed up. We’ll take it from there.”

In the years since, I’ve practiced atonement often — not just once a year, but almost everyday. At a recent book group studying The Jewish Annotated New Testament, I inched into a discussion of Ken Burns’ documentary, The US and the Holocaust.

“Someone told me the trouble with Jews is that they didn’t assimilate.” I said.

“The. trouble. with. Jews?”  One of the Jewish participants admonished.

“Do you hear what you’re saying?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. I then attempted to overcompensate the sin of victim-blaming by blabbering about assimilation, of which I know nothing.

I once asked a musician friend to sing Leonard Cohen’s Bird on the Wire at my funeral.

“No.” He replied.

“Aw, c’mon. Just say yes. I won’t know. I’ll be dead.”

“Better to atone when you’re alive.” He said.

I bowed to my ignorance and he agreed to sing just these words.

Like a bird on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free

Like a worm on a hook

Like a knight from some old-fashioned book

I have saved all my ribbons for thee

If I, if I have been unkind

I hope that you can just let it go by

If I, if I have been untrue

I hope you know it was never to you

God bless Leonard Cohen 1934–2016.

Listen to Bird on the Wire here.