Archive for the ‘Chicago’ tag
How to Order a Corned Beef Sandwich at Manny’s Cafeteria and Delicatessen
New Yorkers will try to tell you that they can make a better hot dog than Chicago, as if a gray, rubbery frank served by some guy in a dirty apron on a street corner is better than a Chicago-style garden on a bun. And don’t you dare let them tell you their pizza is better. Folding a cardboard-thin slice in half to drain the grease and make it edible is not a selling point. But they might have us beat in one food category: the deli.
For such a big city full of huge appetites (and huge bellies), the deli lineup in Chicago is surprisingly thin. The classic Jewish delis are either take-out style groceries like Ashkenaz or antiseptic, yuppie facsimiles like Eleven City Diner or Max & Benny’s. But what we lack in good places for lox and schmear, we make up for in one magnificent sandwich: the corned beef at Manny’s.
Manny’s Cafeteria and Delicatessen in the South Loop on Jefferson near Roosevelt doesn’t qualify strictly as a deli. The “cafeteria” part of its name is more apt. They serve everything from short ribs to spaghetti and meatballs, and while you can get smoked fish and chopped liver, it’s not why you go there. Manny’s is best known for its heaping corned beef sandwiches, a pile of sliced meat so huge that the bread is a mere afterthought, something placed on top not out of necessity but mere custom, like a paper umbrella in a tropical drink. Throw in a potato pancake the size of your hand and a couple dill pickle spears, and two adults could split the plate and still leave fully sated.
The Home Team
1.
Carter has three baseball hats that he wears on a regular basis: a crimson Indiana University hat with the Hoosiers’ white pitchfork I crossed with a U logo; a navy blue St. Louis Cardinals road hat; and a Chicago White Sox hat that is so sweat-stained it’s turned from black to brown. Each of them is there for a reason. Debbie and I met when we were in school at Indiana, and I’ve followed the Hoosiers ever since I could sit in front of a TV to watch Bobby Knight menace referees on the basketball court. The Cardinals have been my favorite baseball team my whole life, and the White Sox are my adopted hometown team now that I live in Chicago, mainly because they aren’t the Cubs.
One morning last summer I was helping Carter get dressed for his day camp and I asked him which hat he wanted to wear. He picked the Sox hat again, as he had every day that summer.
National Burger Association
When I was younger, I was a rabid Indiana Pacers fan. I vividly remember watching Game 1 of the 1995 Eastern Conference semifinals against the Knicks on TV with my dad, screaming my head off while Reggie Miller scored 8 points in 11 seconds to win the game. I lived and died by Reggie’s clutch shooting, helped along by the Pacers’ supporting cast of Rik Smits, Mark Jackson, Jalen Rose, the Davis “brothers,” and an aging Chris Mullin. Good but never great, those teams were fun to watch if only because I knew every other fan in the league hated Reggie Miller. No player but Reggie could get away with all the trash-talking, flopping, and manufactured fouls that he did, but it made all those dagger-like 3-pointers that much better. He was my guy.
Found Memories
Winter finally released its grip from Chicago this week, giving me the occassion to peel the fleece lining out of my heavy coat to convert it into a spring jacket. This uncovered a hidden pocket inside the lapel of the outer shell, inside which I found the remains of the ticket stub from a Chicago Cubs game against the Milwaukee Brewers at Wrigley Field on April 29, 2006. It was torn in four places: one, along the perforated line that the ushers rip when you enter the ballpark, and three less exact gashes through the top half that looked like they were caused by absent-minded handling or the trauma of several spin cycles.
Washing Windows
In a former life, before I went back to my old job, before I was a stay-at-home dad, before my old job was just my job, I was a consultant. This involved a lot of travel, the kind of fly out Sunday, fly home Friday travel eagerly tolerated by recent college grads who see it as a sign of prestige, but the kind of travel that slowly grinds you down until all the airports feel the same, no one concourse or food court or rental car counter in Chicago different from another in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
Next
On the corner of Jefferson and Polk, South Loop, Chicago
I’m guessing that I attended the only party for Barack Obama’s inauguration where someone came out of the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. I watched the ceremony at my son Carter’s preschool yesterday. The group of three- and four-year-olds were amazingly patient and sat dutifully through most of the proceedings, but as the ceremony wore on, they started to get restless. During the new President’s acceptance speech, one little boy got up to use the restroom, and then hobbled back into the room to ask for help when he was finished, unconcerned that he was naked from the waist down.
Chicago Transit Priority
Photo by swanksalot
This essay also appeared in The Best Creative Nonfiction, Vol. 3, edited by Lee Gutkind
I’ve been a little lazy about getting around town since I bought a hybrid car. When faced with a decision whether to drive or take public transit, too often I opt for the former out of sheer selfishness, rationalizing that since I’m using roughly half the fuel as everyone else, I’m allowed to drive twice as much. But now that gas costs north of $4.00 a gallon, promising only to go higher, that choice is no longer about a squishy, moral obligation to reduce consumption and preserve the planet. It’s starting to get expensive. And since I live in Chicago, a city with an extensive public transit system, I’ve decided to ride the train or the bus whenever possible. I might have been shamed into it because I finally got around to watching An Inconvenient Truth, but I figure that since I already went crazy replacing all the light bulbs in my house with compact fluorescents, it’s the next best thing I can do.
Familiar Rivalry
This piece was originally published at the Lovable Losers Literary Revue.
I’VE LIVED IN CHICAGO FOR NINE YEARS, but I’m a lifelong Cardinals fan. I grew up in southwestern Indiana, just a two-hour drive on I-64 across the flat, oil rig-dotted wastelands of southern Illinois to St. Louis. On summer nights, Jack Buck and Mike Shannon lulled me to sleep with their baritone calls of Cardinals games on the local radio affiliate. My town was split about 70-30, Cardinals to Cubs fans, and my best friend across the street was a Cubbie diehard. We spent muggy July afternoons playing out the rivalry in his backyard: Ozzie Smith and Willie McGee versus Ryne Sandberg and Jody Davis. Grown ups told us that Cardinals and Cubs fans weren’t supposed to like each other, but that was hard to believe. For us, it was more like a matter of taste: Coke versus Pepsi or grape versus orange, just a convenient way to divvy up the teams for pickup games.
When I went to college at Indiana University in Bloomington, I was in the minority for the first time. I met kids from the Chicago suburbs, northwest Indiana, Indianapolis, South Bend, Fort Wayne, and they all liked the Cubs. Cardinal fans popped up here and there, but for the most part, I spent my time with the Cubs diaspora, created by the universal reach of WGN.
Good Samaritans
Spend enough time around a three-year-old, and you get pretty good at answering the question, “Why?” I’ve taken the approach of answering Carter as scientifically and truthfully as possible, partly because the longer the answer, the more likely he is to accept it as fact and not ask me again. But it’s also a good test to see if I really know what I’m talking about. I like to say that the final exams for any kind of engineer, architect, mechanic, or technician should consist of a room of preschoolers, pointing at a machine and saying, “What’s this do? Why?”
Sticking to the Dream
This piece originally appeared at Gapersblock
CHICAGO IS ENJOYING A HIP-HOP REVIVAL. Kanye West took home three awards at last year’s Grammys, and his fire and brimstone performance that night also made him the only rapper since Tupac to imitate Jesus and get away with it. Stony Island native Common is releasing Be, the much anticipated return to the beats and rhymes soul aesthetic of his 1994 classic Resurrection, on May 24th. And the city’s underground veterans like All Natural and Do or Die have recently released new albums to greater exposure, basking in the glow cast by their more famous brethren. It’s a good time to be a rapper from Chicago. So where does a 26-year-old white kid from New Hampshire fit in here?
“The Chicago scene is definitely big enough for us,” says Adam Arnone, otherwise known as Adeem, MC for the hip-hop group Glue. The group has created a buzz on the underground rap circuit with their engaging live performances and a strong debut album, 2003′s Seconds Away. They hope to cash in on this momentum by releasing an EP called Sunset Lodge in late May followed by a full album, Catch as Catch Can, later in the year.