Oh, NRA, How I <3 You.

Every year for the last six years, I've gone to the National Restaurant Association show at McCormick Place. It's a surreal world of food gadgets, plates, frozen chicken nuggets and apps that promise (PROMISE) to make you more and more money from your restaurant. It's an odd combination of respected big brands and tiny new ideas trying to find their footing. It's a place of great innovation, filled with techology, and it's also a place where people sell gadgets to make your urinals smell better and animatronic moose heads that spout inspirational sayings.

The potential for comedy, especially if you have my odd sense of humor, is endless.

I always go around looking for my favorite tidbits. It's a way to stay amused while I'm reporting on the real stories (and there are plenty!). Some of these are ridiculous, some are marketing-speak to the max, and some are just funny to anyone outside of the industry.

For example, this gem.  "Tired of French Fries?" Clearly, you've never seen me in the McDonald's drive through at 4 a.m. They might be tired of ME, but i'm never tired of them. Plus, if your seaweed crunch wasn't "from the sea," there would be some vary serious questions I would need to have answered immediately.

Ok, yes. I know what this means - it's the ads stuck to those tiny dispensers of hand sanitizer. But when you call them "Billboards," it gives me a moment of pause. Are people getting out of their cars and letting roadside billboards sterilize their hands with UV rays?

Marketing speak gone mad. This is a giant sign for a fancy non-wax candle. I'm always mystified when someone prints out a fancy sign to advertise their business (presumably for big $$$) without copy editing it. Business idea? I count five errors. Anyone else?

Plus, i love the idea that a fancy candle can "enhance my leisure life style." 

I'm sure this sign made sense to SOMEONE at NRA. That person was not me. It would have been better to just say "What are PorterSIPS? They're Magic and You Should Buy Them." 

"It's public, it's personal, and it's your #1 problem." This vendor may have a skewed perspective - if spilled pee is your restaurant's number one problem, you are either doing incredibly well or your bathroom is some sort of urinary hellhole. 

This isn't a sign, but a product. I love America, the only land where someone could create an entire business AND bring it to a trade show around dressing coffee carafes up in little suits.  The business is called JavaSuits. Of course it is.

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Let me be the first to say that I understand where this product is coming from. But can you imagine a world where a totally blitzed chef and manager, beset with 300 covers and drink orders and burst pipes and drunks, want to get a text message every time one of their staff does or does not wash their hands? 

I also intend to adopt the phrase "moment of non-compliance" into my life.  Boyfriend, I am watching for the very first moment of non-compliance!

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My very, very favorite sign of NRA. Sometimes, you just need a mercy killing.

My Four Favorite Food Apps Right Now

In my previous life at Chicagoist, I often wrote about new and exciting apps for my various I-devices that had something to do with food. 

Here's the thing: I never waited a month to see if they stuck around. I'm pretty militant about clearing dead wood off of my mobile devices, so anything that stands the test of time has to get used at least every few days.

Here are the four food-related apps that have stood my test of time. 

1) Pepperplate

There are a million "recipe box" apps out there, but all the ones I have tried have one thing wrong with them: they tend to be based on one site or publication. Even Epicurous, with its huge database, doesn't include, and I'm frankly too lazy to have eight different recipe box apps and try to remember what is where.

Enter Pepperplate.

I'm totally addicted to this app. It lets you import recipes from almost 40 different food sites (everything from Serious Eats to Food Network) just by pasting in a URL. You manage your recipes on the website and it syncs with your iPad. It also keep the photos, making it easy to get inspired to cook. It has a great "cook now" mode where the font is huge and all distractions are removed.

It's the first app I've used that makes bringing your iPad into the kitchen pleasant. It has a little of the same sensual experience of using a cookbook - though I suggest you try to keep the sauce splatters off of it.

It's free. Just get it.

2) Fridge Pal

Maybe this only happens to me: I go to the grocery store, buy a week's worth of produce for my ambitious schedule of recipes. Mid-week, I find yourself on the couch eating pizza and three weeks later, I find that rotten stalk of lemongrass and hunk of melon sitting in the bottom of the crisper. I moan: "I hate wasting food! Never again!" 

But it happens again. And again.

Especially as we move into farmers market season, that kind of food waste was making my blood boil. I figured, "there must be a technological solution, right?"

There is, and it's called Fridge Pal. It's a refrigerator inventory app that reminds you when food is about to expire and lets you see a neat list of everything that might expire. For example, I can look right now and see that, whoops, I forgot I bought that bag of baby arugula on Saturday and it's about to expire. I know what i'm making for lunch!

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It's a tiny bit clunky to enter everything in when you get home from the market or store, but once you save a list of favorites, it gets faster. Plus, it can scan barcodes! 

It's free unless you want to add more than one refrigerator.

3) Genius Scan

A scanning app? That's not food-related! Unless, like me, you still get food publications on paper. That's why I love this cheap, easy scanning app that takes pictures with your iPad camera, converts them to PDF and emails them to you. If I want that two-page spread by Mark Bittman in the Times Magazine, but I don't want to tear it out and put it in a binder, I just snap a photo and put it in my recipe folder.

If only it could OCR everything and match up with Pepperplate, my life would be complete. 

4) Seafood Watch

I'm a bit of a nut about sustainable seafood, but it's incredibly difficult to navigate restaurant menus. With meat and produce, you can learn the names of the big local growers and have some sense of what places are serving, but with fish? Best of luck.

The Seafood Watch App is the same as that little wallet card you can get at the Shedd Aquarium, except updated in real time. It will tell you what fish are good to eat ("green") as well as what you should avoid at all costs ("red"). It even has a sushi guide with Japanese names, in case you don't remember exactly what "Ankoh" or "Hotate" mean off the top of your head. 

Ok, yes, it makes me that annoying person who pulls out their phone before ordering the salmon (pro tip: it's usually not sustainable) but it's worth it. Chefs need to know that there's a demand for less popular fish, and orders are the only way that gets through to them.

What apps do you use every day?

 

 

Blast From the (air cooled) Past

A couple of weeks ago, my dear friend Ina Pinkney (Breakfast Queen of Chicago) handed me a blank folder as we sat down to dinner. "I found this and thought of you," she told me. What was inside? A copy of "Chicago Nite Life" Magazine from 1942. 

She knows me so well. 

With the subtitle "Where to go, what to see," this is like a seedy, underground version of Where Chicago magazine - the one that the better hotels put discreetly inside the drawers of the bedside tables instead of right out on the desk. 

As old ephemera often does, this took me down a rabbit hole filled with personality girls, pub tokens and Rush Street nightlife.  Follow along with me!

As you can tell from the cover, this magazine is about Nite Life. And by that, we mean girls, girls, girls, girls, plus this weird homoerotic crop shot where it's made to look like one woman is rubbing the other woman's nipple. Beat that, Michigan Avenue Magazine!

"Food for the epicurean." "Welcome conventioneers." Some things never change. The "Malay Bar," on the other hand? Probably not one of those left in Chicago.

This is the only lounge on this list that isn't long since dead and gone. Ok, well, it kind of is, but something with a similar name opened in the same location last year. It's "air cooled" (which i hope means more than fans) and it's got both a piano-solovox player and a piano stylist, which is really all you need. Plus, the first appearance of the ever-popular "personality girls."  

In case you were wondering, a "piano-solovox" was a piano with an early version of a synthesizer attached, so the player could have many kinds of sounds going at once. 

I can only guess that Chicago's "Great White Way" is the Randolph Street theater district, based on this postcard (if you squint, you can see "old heidelberg" which is now an Argo tea in a distinctive building on Randolph).

Another spot on Ohio, featuring George "The Goon" West and lots of tables for ladies! By which we really mean "Come on in, gents, we promise there's girls!"

"The Funatics" sonds like a good time - they're insane, crazy, punchy and strictly nuts. 

This ad led me down an interesting collectible path. Apparently, clubs used to hand out "tokens" - the gift certificate of the day. If you search, there are thousands of antique pub tokens on ebay for old Chicago bars long since gone. Maybe something new to collect.

Apparently, Chicago's "latin quarter" was about two blocks away from its "Great White Way," a fact that only seems ironic in retrospect. However, i'm sure the alluring and devastating Luba Malina (and her new gowns!) were quite wonderful.

That being said, were any straight men going to these clubs to drool over these women? Ad after ad mentions all the fabulous "new gowns," and I just can't imagine men caring very much. I suppose this could be code for "a new style of lingerie i'm going to strip down to" (kind of like personality girl is a code for .... something), but who knows.

Right here, right now, i'm calling for a revival of the term "Musicale." As we can see from her cone-shaped breasts, the "Scandal of 43" was scandalous indeed! 

I can only assume this was for the church-going, less-interested-in-personality-girls crowd who wanted organ music, "strolling instrumentalists" and the finest liquors and foods. Not specific what the liquors and foods are, but since it's plural, I assume they served a little of everything.

Look ma, more personality girls! Plus, "continuous entertainment" which sounds oddly dirty. 

Between all the ads for strip clubs, bars and organ parlors was this gem for a furrier. Apparently, you need to get your fur tuned up before you head out to the clubs!  PS: I didn't realize silver foxes needed "resilvering." How does that work, exactly?

Just to prove that innovative advertising was alive and well in the 1940s, here's an add for The Admiral, upside down. In case you were worried, they made sure you knew that it "is not an error," they actually want to give you neck cramps and make you drop the magazine.

This magazine has ads for literally hundreds of clubs, cabarets and dancehalls, all gone. Now we have TV, the internet, and Castle. I guess that's enough for us. 

I have no idea what happened to Chicago Nite Life magazine, though it looks like it kept at it until at least 1959. 

If you're interested in learning more about Chicago's crazy awesome club scene - and reminding yourself that Rush Street wasn't always filled with generic restaurants that share one giant kitchen - check out this Tribune piece from the early 90s. It's a good read.