Hungrier by the minute: you should pack a snack when you go to Oriole in 2024
Good Times, Oriole, and the only good pizza I’ve yet to find in Chicago
On a late March Tuesday, at the end of a stretch of snow that poured more moisture on the city than we got all winter–combined–neither of us cancels the date.
Which, in a post-COVID world and digital dating where most men don’t even confirm the date 24 hours before, that’s rare. I, personally, think it is good luck to bring something on a first date. I heard it somewhere and I think it’s probably true. Like yes, you bring courage, but something physical, too.
I’ve stopped doing it.
Date after date after date with men (chefs) who let me down and months later come back like an apparition. But, I don’t know, something in me–broken spirit and all (the last man who told me he was just dating me was dating at least seven other women)–felt like I should bake this man his favorite cookie.
So, as the last of the snow pounded my sidewalk, I whipped up a batch of miso chocolate chip cookies and took myself out in the snow with what little hope I have left that love is coming for me (not much). I went to the best first date spot in the city that no one knows about, for reasons that have to do as much with Minneapolis pizza culture as they do with the Eaterfication of food.
It’s Good Times. I didn’t even know about it until a dear chef friend begged me to go.
It has twinkly lights on the wall, like midwest rural dive bars do. It has booths that feel like old school pizza shops, the kind that still live in New York, that used to live here, and don’t. Replaced now with all wood fire with high ceilings and metal or Detroit style pies served in restaurants with plush seating and fancy cocktails.
Minneapolis has, for years, been missing the types of neighborhood pizza shops where there are like seven drinks and five pies, most traditional, where you’re just as comfortable on a first date as you are hauling your kids or waiting in the doorway for takeout.
My order isn’t on the menu though: pickled chiles, banana pepper, hot honey. Sometimes I bring my own pepper flakes (Flatiron, I can’t feel my face). I drag everyone here.
Friend after friend plopped down in a booth and me imploring them, at some point, to go to the bathroom (no spoilers). Can you argue that there is better pizza in Minneapolis? Sure. But most of those other pizzas have dupes. Good Times is just Good Times–you can’t get an approximation in this city, no: you have to head to New York for that. So if you want one more wood-fired pie with burnt bubbles on the crust or the newest restaurant’s take on Detroit style pizza or someone making Brooklyn style pizza (it’s not), go to the heavy hitters. If you want a pizza shop where it’s mostly regulars drinking Topo Chico while the snow falls, that’s Good Times.
Like most Minneapolis snowstorms, restaurants stayed open.
You should venture out into the snow, if you can. By transit or car or foot, the city is so beautifully quiet and so are the restaurants. Open. Still. For you. Normally, at Good Times at 7:00pm, it’s a crapshoot of if I’m going to get one of the few tables or not, but walking in, it was us and a family and a few regulars at the barstools, people popping in and out getting pies to go.
He showed up to a first date with flowers on the table, telling me that he pulled purple ones out of other bouquets to put as much purple in them as he could. He showed up Carhartt and snow boots in a snowstorm. With hope. And a look in his eyes that told me not only was he earnest but that he wanted me in specific. He showed up with a list of questions to ask me, because I told him I get shy on first dates, and one of those questions was: you wake up in the middle of the night, what is your go to snack? It’s Prairie Breeze Cheddar with my spicy red pepper jelly slathered on it. I bite into the cheese, teethmarks all the way around the edge, like a border. I started to tell him I cut it, but I don’t. I bite it. When I admitted that no I don’t cut it, I lied, I bite it, his laugh filled the entire restaurant.
It’s never intentional, but on first dates with chefs, you end up talking about their resume.
Because most chefs, it’s not like oh I worked at Target, it’s like I made this special thing I loved so much and then I had to let it go, for whatever reason. After, because it is a special thing that I love so much, we end up talking about fine dining. He told me a story I’ve heard so many times before. Stories of friends who were so fucking good with tweezers and foam and whatever the fuck and now make weird ass ice cream and burgers in beach towns.
One of the best fermenters in California slings hot sauce. A man who used to open acclaimed restaurants all over the world spends his days thinking about pizza dough. A tweezer chef who had dreams of opening his own fine dining restaurant cans tomatoes and makes weird mustard and bakes bread in a mountain town. One of the chefs in my city who quietly built a fine dining empire while others took the credit makes (very good) comfort food. The man who introduced me to fine dining in Chicago, over a decade ago, works in a middle of the road hotel. A man who won others award after award lives on a farm and makes cheese.
A man throwing down some of the best plates of twee food I’ve ever eaten, working at a three starred restaurant somewhere in this country, told me he misses working in a retirement home and thinks he might go back. When I asked him, “But didn’t it crush your soul?” He gestured with his entire body in the restaurant we were in and said, “Kirstie this fucking took my soul.”
This man, on this date in the snowstorm, told me his dream: to run a hot dog truck and live off hot sauce somewhere down south. But look, I’ve had his food, before I knew it was his food, before he left that restaurant, and then by proxy as his legacy lived on in it and then it closed. I’m sure his hot dogs would slap, but it kills a tiny part of me when I see chefs with so much talent dream of that life instead of a life in which all the ideas they put in their notebooks are executed by a team of people who love the food as much as they do.
I get it. I do.
Look, talk shit, whatever–I date chefs because I love food more than anything in my life. I date them because I’ve dated more than one man who is not a chef who gets freaked the fuck out when I take him to the places I love. They’re just totally a fish out of water, sitting at Demi with an open mouth. A boyfriend who I took to Bar La Grassa said, “Rich people make me uncomfortable.” I set down my fork and said, “You literally spend more on beer in a night than we are about to drop on this meal individually.” Then the woman next to us said, sheepishly, “I’m a teacher and it’s my birthday,” and god bless her for that.
But real talk? If you can’t walk into a restaurant and take it down to the studs, take away all the pretense and all the smoke and mirrors, and tell me if you think the food is good with some level of discernment, you’re missing a giant swath of my heart.
So, it’s mostly chefs, and the occasional foodie who can’t cook and makes me want to claw my eyes out. I see these men stand in my kitchen tired and burnt out and tenderhearted and fighting for a dream that feels like, to many of them, is slipping away.
Then my date said it. After telling me his dream. He told me the thing that all my chef friends say, like the call is coming from inside the house.
He told me he’d rather go to Good Times than any fancy place in town because, “Fine dining is d–”
I’ve been to Oriole before, but my name wasn’t the one on the reservation. In a different era, in a different year of my life, in a different time in their evolution (2017–the year it received its stars–and 2019).
When I’m asked if I’ve been there before, I could say, “Kind of!” Instead I say, “No.” I say that for a lot of reasons, but mostly I say it because as I walk in, it feels like a different restaurant. I immediately feel kind of dumb when I step into Oriole every time. After eight years, they haven’t worked out the kinks in the entranceway.
The host goes to bring another man celebrating his birthday back and says something like, “You can stand,” but to both of us. He tells me he’s so sorry, but I can sit back down. He says that just like that, “You can sit back down.” When he comes back, he apologizes to me again that he told me to stand. He opens the giant door a few minutes later and he apologizes a third time. When he seats me, he apologizes a fourth time. Look—I have so many men who owe me four apologies, but it is not that man.
Here’s the thing about interactive menus, which Oriole is (you start at the bar, move to the kitchen, go to your seat)--they’re dinner theater.
I said to a chef once over dinner somewhere else as he took a sip of water and he choked on the water, coughing, smoothed his napkin and said, “Do not say that.” That doesn’t have to be a bad term. I just think that rich people going to dinners like this making fun of people eating enough food to feed an entire family in actual dinner theater aren’t that different. They’re both going for entertainment.
I am not. I am here for the food.
My reservation is at 9:00pm and the first thing that hits my table is a snack at the bar at 9:45pm.
It’s the biggest course of the night. Like a first date, I can often tell in the first moments of food hitting the table if I’m going to like the rest of the meal or not. Amuse courses are as much about first impressions as they are about saying welcome or prepping you for the meal to come.
The man next to me is celebrating his birthday solo. He’s like a kindred spirit to me, talking about fifty year old Japanese whiskey with the bartender and choosing half of the wine and half of the N/A pairing for his night that he’s spending alone. I’ve spent every major holiday except New Year’s Eve (I was a first date for the plot) and my birthday (I threw a party) alone in the last year surrounded by couples. I know what it feels like to desperately want someone to share these moments with and not to have them beside you.
Everything in the amuse course, I’ve had before, done better, somewhere else.
It’s annoying that that is true, because I cannot judge things anymore like you might find delight in them for the first time, but it does mean I’ll send you to other places if you can get it done better.
It also means sometimes I know your reference. One dish in particular, the avocado (would have been scallop if I wasn’t vegetarian), tastes just like a dish I had at Jeune et Jolie. Except that dish was larger–and that dish was so beautiful, I stopped and looked up at the bartender and said, “Oh my god.” This one feels like a rip of that dish. Whether it is or isn’t, who knows, who cares–what I can tell you is that I immediately think to myself that I wish I was there, in California, at the bar, waiting for beet and white chocolate.
At Oriole, it’s a couple, it’s me, and it’s this guy celebrating his birthday and I am kicking myself that he didn’t somehow find me before to ask me where to go, because I have a singular place I send people celebrating special occasions in Chicago, but that’s an essay for another time.
So, you go to the bar, and then at Oriole they take you to the kitchen. Drinks are poured. Music is playing. Your attention is drawn to all the images on the ceiling, being informed most of them are concert posters.
It’s a moment where I pause and think to myself, “Okay, maybe there’s some soul here.”
Everyone keeps telling me that they hope I like the Beastie Boys (that’s because the Beastie Boys is playing). It’s gotten to a point where I feel like someone said this once to a guests and now everyone does it. I don’t, like the Beastie Boys. I lie. I say, “Yeah, the Beastie Boys are great.” One of my favorite restaurants in the world plays the worst music that absolutely kills the vibe. I love it because you can tell it’s picked by one of the guys working the line, leading me one time at that restaurant to listen to what I am sure is that man’s sex playlist for two hours.
The thing that strikes me about the kitchen? Whoever is running expo is spending more time looking at his phone than the dishes around him with people watching.
Now, I don’t care if you’re on your phone at work, I really do not. When I am in restaurants sometimes, I click in to look at who is viewing my stories. Sometimes I write from my table, which means people who know who I am watch my stories. Or a chef is on a phone texting his wife (nothing hits like a chef who texts you from expo). Or they’re fucking around with each other. I don’t care. But I am also watching dishes go out. I am looking at dishes get sent to tables with a cursory glance while he’s on his phone and that? That tells me something about the restaurant.
I text that out to a few chef friends, that at Oriole the man running expo is sending out plates he’s not looking at, and my phone lights up like I’ve got an Amber Alert–chef after chef texting me, “You’re joking.” The other thing about this? It’s two solo diners and a two person table and we’re left standing here for 10 minutes with no one talking like the kitchen is an exhibit at the zoo and it is so awkward I literally almost start to talk to the guy next to me.
This is the problem with a lot of restaurants that run interactive experiences (dinner theater)--eventually, they stop paying attention to stuff like this and go with the standard timeline of the restaurant.
In this moment, someone should have been like, “Jesus Christ four strangers are standing at a table together not talking,” and moved us to our tables (which were ready at this time). The dish I had in the kitchen? It’s 9:00am in the morning, 11 hours after I had it, and I couldn’t even remember what it was.
This is how I find myself seated at my table at 9:52pm on a 9:00pm reservation with one amuse course in me, one dish that wasn’t memorable, and two weird mocktails (more on that later), hungry.
When I’m sat, I have hope. I do. I mean, look at this flower, it looks like me, and it’s very cute and also you have to have hope if you’re hungrier than when you came in an hour into your tasting menu.
My third dish hits the table. It’s beautiful–it’s a dish I’ve seen before. Milk bread, butter with flowers, caviar with peas situation. I take the bread first because I’m hungry. I think someone looked at my notes that say vegetarian but didn’t see “caviar okay” on the notes. He apologizes to me and then takes the dish from me before I can say, “Oh no, caviar is fine.” I text a bunch of people, “They took my caviar,” with a sad face, Friends across the country, working dinner shift, share with their kitchen that someone took my caviar. The sous at a restaurant in New York told his exec, “God help them.”
It takes like 10 minutes for someone to come by and realize what happened, then 10 more for someone to drop a new (same) dish for me which means I get more tiny milk bread, which makes me praise god a little bit.
But hey, actually, I don’t care about mistakes like this–I’m just hungry. The other night, I had a mistake happen on a dish in the restaurant and the kid who made it felt so bad that I kept saying, “I am serious–do not apologize,” to him.
If the food is good, I will shut up about everything else.
One of my favorite meals in 2023 was in a restaurant that enforces a dress code (I saw it happen, someone was turned away) that includes the words no sneakers not even expensive ones, doesn’t allow cell phones but also doesn’t allow books for solo diners, and straight up acts like you are the dumbest person alive when you walk through the doors (I highly recommend going here if you’re the kind of guy who likes when women are mean to you–DM me, I’ll tell you). I’m going back this year. The food was so good that I don’t care.
But the caviar dish? It’s just caviar and milk bread–and everyone is making caviar and milk bread.
Recently, a dear friend who works in fine dining said to me, “The scariest thing about having you in the restaurant isn’t if you’ll like the food–it’s if the people next to you don’t. That’s what makes your food writing different.”
I listen like a moth listens for bats at night. If I sit beside you, I am quietly joining your date, your birthday, your anniversary, your gossip session. I am also joining in on anything you have to say about the service or pacing or food–and one of the things that becomes immediately noticeable is that guests at Oriole talk about Oriole more than most guests talk about the restaurants they’re in.
The table next to me stands up on their way out and the man says, “Finally.” That’s when I pick up my phone and Google in the area I’m in pizza. I do not care if it is good. I’ve been to 15 Chicago pizza places in 6 months and I am so sorry you guys but you do not know how to make pizza here–pub style, deep dish, Connecticut, whatever. I just care that it is open after midnight (supposedly the end of my reservation) and is walking distance (I’m sleepy). This one is open until 12:30am. It fits the bill.
The woman next to me asks for the first, but not the last, time how long until her and her boyfriend get out of the restaurant (how many courses are left translates to: pick up my pace). They were seated before me and all diners who enter at the same time are paced together, so until they’re out, I’m not out. And I’m guessing once they’re out? I have 30 minutes on the clock.
Look. Hey. I love fine dining more than anything in the world and even showing you my fingers in these photos does not do them justice for how small the plates are.
This is literally one soup spoonful full of soup with heart of palm. This is five (I counted–I’ve got nothing better to do) shavings of beet. Put better: this is 1/32 of a beet, this is 1/10 of a heart of palm. It’s $295 on food alone. It’s 10:35pm on a 9:00pm reservation. I would bet money that I haven’t eaten one cup of food if you remove the bread. Scroll up, judge for yourself.
Say what you want about prices or inflation or rising food costs whatever, that is not a meal. Fine dining restaurants with lower price points and equally high labor costs all over the country are figuring out how to give people a full meal.
I look back at my dishes at minibar–a place literally designed to be mini food–and the dishes are bigger, but also the timestamps on my photo show me that I’ve eaten way more food by 90 minutes in at minibar. I have time to kill and nothing to do so I go back through a good amount of meals I’ve eaten in the last 12 months that have small plates.
I’ve never, and I do mean never, been this deep into a tasting menu with this little food.
I’m doing this when a truffle and egg course hits my dish. It’s like ⅛ of an egg. It needs salt in a bad way. Honestly? I’m confused as to how this dish would need any salt, because I feel like residual salt in the air of the kitchen would be enough to salt ⅛ of an egg. Then it’s a teeny tiny potato dish with roe–and a sauce that chefs call out in my Instagram Close Friend stories looks like it’s begging to break. The matcha drink that comes with this dish isn’t fully whisked (funny because the drink is called whisk—also zoom in on the glass) but it’s a relief from the other N/A drinks they have. My drinks taste either vinegar or they’re grainy and there’s no in between and they don’t pair. They’re just drinks.
Next up is three bites of pasta. Then it’s an unsalted morel cooked within an inch of its life served in a maitake dish (always a maitake dish), and half a pearl onion, one tiny bite of citrus. When I get that bite of citrus I look up at the ceiling, because if you made that dish citrus forward and actually salted it, it would have been beautiful.
Like this is what I leave with–hoping for daring, wishing for bold, seeing it in a dish, at the edge, on the cusp, unable to break through.
And that’s savory, folks.
The last savory dish hit my table at 11:49pm, 2 hours and 49 minutes after I walked in. It’s almost midnight.
I’m not getting out of here in time for that pizza, so I am going to the place I know will have the only good pizza I’ve ever had in Chicago, a place I love with all my heart, a place that knows how to fucking party, imported, as many good things are, from Brooklyn.
If you remove the bread and it’s three cups of food by the end, I’d be shocked.
Shocked.
Dessert is a tiny amount of shaved ice that you can get anywhere else. A meringue that looks (and tastes) like drywall. Half (half!) a canelé, which like literally I went to a restaurant in Philadelphia and they gave me extra canelés because they had them. A couple other tiny treats.
I just… guys, hey, you, actually you at Oriole: do you think this is enough? Not portions, but soul?
Do you think someone celebrating their birthday should come here? Do you, really? Do you still believe in this place? Do you believe in the extravagance of fine dining and what it means for your industry? Do you believe in the power of a meal to make you feel something or build a memory? Do you think your food actually stands up next to the giants of your industry? Do you think it displays the best parts about fine dining, or does it display the worst parts of it? Do you like the food you’re putting out? Are you proud of it? Not the concept or the execution or the talent in your kitchen (and I know there’s talent in your kitchen), but the experience?
Imagine, for a moment, this is your first fine dining experience. You’re just an average middle class guy asking a woman to marry him in your restaurant.
Do you think he’s seeing the best of fine dining on the night he asks her to marry him? Do you think, yeah, that’s us, bring her here, we’ll make it the best night of your life? Do you think that? But not just do you think that, can you actually do that–make it the best night of someone’s life?
Maybe you don’t care. Maybe that’s not what you’re here for. But that’s what your guests are here for. Most of them are not like me, not like you. Most of them are spending damn near half their rent on food and wine trying to make a memory and eat food they can’t afford to eat every week. I used to pinch pennies to eat at one place like this a year.
If that’s the case, a girl putting money she can’t afford to lose into an envelope to eat your food, would you, personally, send her here? I wouldn’t.
Before they let me out into the wild, they comp my drinks. Why? Not like most people comp my drinks (I’m a regular or they know I’m writing a book about fine dining–you don’t have to do this, by the way, the comping of my drinks, I’m never, ever here asking for anything other than for you to blow my fucking mind). They comp it because of the teeny, tiny (so, so small it doesn’t even matter) mix up on the caviar. They are so apologetic over the error on my caviar dish that they give me my drinks for free.
This place has done what so many other restaurants do now: they have confused hospitality for customer service.
Hospitality is when I went to J.P.’s after not being there for months and only going a few times and one of the guys says, “Yooooo welcome back to Chicago.” Hospitality is my favorite bar in my city (Martina) dropping me N/A Vermouth as soon as I arrive. Hospitality is when my friends were talking about how jealous they were of my diet coke that someone brought them diet coke for the road when we cashed out. Hospitality is when a man wouldn’t stop bothering me and a bartender went to the back to ask if he could move one of us to a table, telling that man there was a special spot just for him, and letting me enjoy my dinner in peace. And hospitality is looking around you, listening to what is happening on the floor, and someone in the service staff saying, sheepishly and a little scared of what it might do to their job, “Everyone says the pacing is too slow and portions are too small. Like everyone, I’m so sorry, but almost everyone says this.”
If I can hear it, so can you.
But–hey, it was 12:30am when I got out of there, 3 hours past my bedtime. I’m tired, I’m hangry, I’m flirting with a man in my phone after he got done with his shift after testing out a new pizza dough and feeling alive because of it.
It feels like the start of something, and I’m in a cab jetting for a pizza place I know will be good: Paulie Gee’s.
As I waited for my cab (I take cabs, not Ubers, most of the time, it’s a long story), someone else came out of the restaurant. “I’m hungry,” she says loudly into the night. I, too, exclaimed upon leaving, a loud, “Thank god.” She turns to the man she loves and says, “Can we order Papa John’s?”
Look. Hey. Oriole. I know you have accolades. I know you have stars. I have read review after review saying your food is beautiful–I have. But I, personally, think it is referential and boring. I think it is uninspired. I think it is not enough. I want–I need–more, not just food–if you gave me teeny portions and the food was amazing, this would be a different piece, minibar left me going out for pizza too and I will send you to minibar. I don’t need more food, I need some goddamn soul.
Like here’s my advice you did not ask for: Make the type of food found in a restaurant that has the Beastie Boys blasting and concert posters on the ceiling.
Don’t make the type of food that sends more than one diner out in the street for pizza after eating mushroom in mushroom sauce with more mushroom, like oh my god, I’ve seen this all before. Make the type of food worthy of the right to party.
Food critics are looking for different things than the average person, so are chefs when they eat, so am I (I want to be crushed but food I’ve never had before and can’t get anywhere else)–but I keep my ear to the ground like my life depends on it, because my whole MO is to only send people to restaurants that are excellent in a way that I trust they will have a meal that is worthy of the price point, the time, and my reputation.
My MO is to find the places where fine dining is not just, well, there for the eating, but alive and pulsing.
If I’m getting pizza? If someone else is getting pizza? If everyone I could hear is saying the meal dragged (I’ve had 3 hour meals that didn’t drag, for the record) and wasn’t enough food when I’m just a random girl sitting in your restaurant on a Saturday night trying to feel something? I don’t care what lists you’re on–if someone tells me they have a reservation at your restaurant, I’m going to gently suggest they move it somewhere else.
So to you, the reader, my recommendation is: skip it.
But if you go? Bring an entire purse of snacks and a tiny shaker of salt and don’t bring a book even though you could get through the entirety of it in your time here, instead, sit down and listen.
I think so often about what it means that when I leave restaurants hungry (which is rarely) and then venture into the night, someone is celebrating their birthday in the slice shop I end up in.
So at this one I slid into their 10 person table and said kind of shyly, “I’m a food writer and I’m wondering why you’re celebrating your birthday here.” His response, so simple, so young, so drunk is, “This is where the party staaaarts.” Then he does some sort of howl I can no longer relate to and I say, like the sober old lady I am, “That’s cool.”
The woman celebrating her birthday at the fine dining restaurant I just left? She kept asking how many courses were left like she was itching to get out of there. It’s 1:00am and this guy is ready to rock.
If that’s what fine dining is, then yeah, let’s throw a rager in a pizza shop instead. But it isn’t. Fine dining is actually so, so much more. These restaurants though? Side by side? Only one of them contains any delight. It’s partly because for $20 you can get cheese pizza slathered in hot honey and Topo Chico with all your friends, but it’s also because only one of these places has any soul.
When people say fine dining is dead they don’t mean it. They mean: where’d the soul go?
I can show you. But it’s not at Oriole which recycles dish after dish from every early 2010s fine dining menu and executes them the same way you might execute cleaning a window.
It’s somewhere in Seattle that served me a fancy corn dog (Cook Weaver). Or it’s when Mads Refslund (Ilis) took an entire tin of caviar, dumped it on a sweet potato, and said, “Hope you like caviar!” Or it’s tangling your legs together under a table in Philly while dish after dish hits your table with heat (Kalaya).
It’s restaurants in the first year of their first star (Albi). It’s a chef self-funding a tiny spot with a rag tag team of friends. It’s a new chef coming in and being allowed to flip a table over, shaking everything up. It’s a restaurant that changes their menu almost every day (Mint Mark). Or it’s sometimes the same thing done year after year like no one is tired of it (Bar La Grassa).
It’s not at Oriole where it feels like everyone is tired of it and where I am literally tired and where both tables on either side of me are asking when the hell they’re getting out of there. Which—speaking of. It’s my time to leave this slice shop. Though, hey, thanks Paulie Gee’s, it was the best bite of my night.
The birthday boy just asked me if I want his number and he’s definitely like 22 and I’m betting my chips on another man, who spent four hours listening to me bitch about being starving telling him if we ever do this he needs to pack Hot Cheetos and instead of being aghast, he said he’d ask for a cup of water and whip out some instant noodles. And that?
That’s two people who love food so much they know when a restaurant’s soul is beyond saving.
PS: If you think there’s better pizza in Chicago, please tell me. I know somewhere, off the beaten path, there’s pizza the tourists haven’t found and ruined yet–I’m 15 in and I know it exists, just like I know fine dining with soul exists in Chicago (I’ve found it). But the pizza? I just haven’t found it yet.