Is that the story?

Yeah, you know, it really the change happened earlier this year.

So basically the Alston, it's, you know, like you said, very sceny, very opulent.

All of these things that you expect when you walk into a very opulent steakhouse, you know.

It opened in mid-2025, so it's a little over a year old now.

Michelin-starred chef Jenner Tomaska is leading the kitchen.

And then it was the 50-50 group.

And that's late dining as well.

And I was like, I don't know how that's going to fly.

Yeah.

No, I've talked to a couple other people that thought that, too.

And perhaps that's my fault for framing the story that way.

But no, I mean, they were I mean, that's savvy.

Right.

You know, and the first concept is River North and it's going to be an American brasserie.

These are survival mode situations, right?

Let's start with maybe the barbecue joint.

Yeah, we can do this maybe chronologically-ish.

Okay.

Well, first of all, thanks for having me, Amy.

Always a pleasure.

And yeah, I've written, I mean, in the past couple of weeks, like five restaurant opening stories.

So we've got a lot coming.

And then let's talk about Gibson's because Gibson's has just checked a goal off their list that has been there for a while.

So what is it that's really driving that

disconnect? I think there's a couple different things, right? So first of all, with restaurants, as we've talked about, almost ad nauseum, right? Right.

It is very difficult right now.

It is very expensive to run a restaurant and still make money.

So it's even more difficult to offer deals and still make money, you know? So I don't know, over the past like six, seven years or so, McDonald's did have to raise prices at certain points, you know, like in 2021, we saw restaurants all across the board raising prices as inflation drove up the cost of labor and ingredients after the pandemic.

Right now, we're obviously seeing grocery prices go up, gas prices go up, everything's going up.

And It's almost like they're a victim of their own success in some ways.

And here's how it's playing out in fast food.

But talk to me about this one in particular because it seems like it is going on a bit longer than usual.

Yeah, exactly.

So typically when there's, uh, some sort of food poisoning outbreak, there will be a recall, right? And it'll very quickly be tied to one provider or one brand, et cetera, and then people will just avoid that provider or that brand.

I talked to an expert that said it lasts basically four to six weeks sometimes, and usually it's that single provider or brand that is impacted the most.

What is different here is that, you know, the, the experts are having trouble nailing down exactly where this outbreak is coming from.

First of all, it's the largest cyclosporiasis outbreak on record.

It's continuing to spread.

Tell me about your conversation with them.

In what way?

Yeah, so it was about early last year, I would say, that Dylan Trotter teamed up with the Alinea Group, um, it was their restaurant Next specifically that he teamed up with, to kind of reopen the restaurant, and they did a limited run tasting menu there that paid homage to his dad.

But it was the first time since 2013 when the restaurant closed that life was breathed back into it.

So he had been fixing it up over about five years or so and was kind of finally ready to show it to the public.

So he did that with Next, but then he launched a series of one night only dinners that featured other Trotter alumni.

Um, you know, he was, I think, a teenager when his dad died, so he grew up in that kitchen too, and a lot of these chefs that are now, like, famous and Michelin-starred were, like, line cooks back then when he was a little kid running around the restaurant, so he maintained relationships with them and, and, uh, you know, kind of used that.

So what's happening now is sort of another way to reinvigorate the restaurant.

Uh, is this kind of the next thing coming up from Alinea group, or do they have more things planned?

Um, so tell me about these, uh, these new spots.

Yeah, so as you know, I like to do a new restaurant roundup every quarter just to stay on top of all the restaurant opens we, we might have missed, um, didn't get a chance to write about.

And this was a hard one.

There were a lot.

And some I had to not include because it got so long.

But so we took a look at eight.

Um, you know, this is usually a busy time of year, kind of when spring bleeds into summer.

We're going to Schaumburg for the next one on the list.

I've noticed some of those are on there, too.

Yeah, exactly.

Trino's one of those.

You know, we talked about how the wave of new steakhouses we're seeing kind of have international influence and more cultural influence and, uh, Trino's Latin American.

So, uh, it's, it's really interesting to see kind of these new experimental concepts, um, still making this list that has been around for a very long time.

And in fact, Wine Spectator's CEO put out a statement kind of when they announced this, and he was just saying that, you know, diners are becoming more selective about when, how, and what they drink.

Part of that is people are drinking less, and so they want to make sure when they do drink, they're getting exactly what they want.

Tell me about, what are restaurants seeing from this?

Yeah

... um, when prices go up for a restaurant, they have to compensate for that, right? They can only eat that for so long before they start to lose money and they're like, "All right, what can we do?" The easiest lever to pull is to increase the menu prices, which has been done, you know.

I, I think cocktails, drinks were really the first thing that were targeted in the years immediately following the pandemic when we saw, like, a lot of inflation, a lot of labor costs going up.

Um, let's just push those, you know, those beverage prices up a little bit.

But then customers kind of started revolting against that, and last summer we saw a, kind of a slew of new restaurants and bars open that got rid of those $20 cocktails.

You know? They did $12 cocktails, even 10 in some cases, and, and that seems to be going well.

We've seen other restaurants do different things too, like playing with the wine pricing, right? Maybe they'll do a carafe.

So it's been fascinating to talk about this shifting consumer behavior over just the last several years, through the course of the pandemic and after, and you were talking about levers that restaurant operators pull and can pull, and it's so interesting how this industry, which operates on pretty surprisingly small margins, continues to come up with levers to pull.

Yes.

Uh, we focus on downtown areas just to kinda keep it near the business hubs.

Um, so River North, Gold Coast, Loop, obviously.

Uh, Fulton Market's a big one.

But with lunch, most restaurants do not roll out lunch offerings right away.

They'll start with dinner, get used to that, add lunch, add brunch, whatever it may be.

So for this we have two options this year.

Right

Yeah.

So we've got, I'll just sort of run down, but we've got The Barn Steakhouse in Highland Park.

Um, it's Amy, from Amy Morton, and she, um, she's the daughter of Morton's Steakhouse founder Arnie Morton.

So she's kind of, you know, from steakhouse dynasty here.

And she opened The Barn Steakhouse in Evanston about 10 years ago, so this is her second location.

Then we look at Carmine's, which, um, Carmine's is one that I've followed closely over the past three to four years.

It's in the Gold Coast there, and, uh, the, it's been closed for three years because the landlord knocked the building down and rebuilt it, and then of, of course, they had to build out the restaurant.

But tell me about these four bars that are on this list.

What's going on? What's the latest?

Roti was bought out of bankruptcy about a year ago.

It was February, I think, February, March 2025 by the parent of Edible Arrangements.

It's a private equity firm based in Atlanta.

I spoke with them just to do an update on where things have gone in the past year, what their plans are for Rhody, et cetera.

This is something that my colleagues covered, too, kind of when Rhody was in the thick of bankruptcy.

But it was one of those post-pandemic bankruptcies where we saw a lot of things.

So it's not quite the same Mediterranean menu that we remember there.

Yeah, and they'll be the main dining room, but also some private dining space there, right?

Yeah, they're very excited about the private dining space.

You know, Dynamic, they have a lot of restaurants throughout the city.

Like I said, they're all kind of different.

They've got the steakhouses, they've got the Greek Mediterranean ones, just varied, right? They also have like Tavern, Italian, the list goes on.

And they have all these different, within those restaurants, event spaces that can give people different vibes depending on what your event is, but they don't have a riverfront one.

They're very excited about that.

yeah

let's really know the customer that I just thought was an interesting way that she kind of unpacked that.

Yeah, that's a really great point, Amy.

And, you know, it's something where just a year ago, right, when I was writing about, okay, you know, she's taking over, what are her challenges? One of the things that everyone was telling me was like, you know, Alta's not keeping up like with the TikTok game, the TikTok shop game, right? Like, yeah, they pay influencers and they do that, but they were losing market share.

There was also this push with Amazon where Amazon had never really carried prestige beauty products in mass before, and that was changing.

So that was pulling some customers from Ulta.

So there was a sort of like, okay, can Ulta do it? Can they make themselves relevant online and You bring up such an interesting point because they're kind of proving that obviously like shopping in store for makeup and beauty products and hair products and everything that they sell, that's not dead.

The younger consumer wants to come in and do that.

how did that land? Because that's such a such a reversal of course.

But also it sounds like there's setting the vibe of the whole thing too that is just kind of restaurant decor that we see in a lot of restaurants and bars.

Exactly.

And I ask everyone this question, right? Like what actually makes it a listening bar? Like at what point is it not just, oh, we're a restaurant slash bar with a turntable or like we play vinyl in here, right? Yeah.

And I talked to Chef Brian Houston, who works at One Off Hospitality, which is Big Star's parent.

But a few years ago, he helped restaurant operator Dave and Morton open one of Chicago's first listening bars, which is called The Listening Room.

It opened in 2021, and it's on Michigan Avenue inside the Exchange, which is sort of like this sprawling atrium-style restaurant right next to the symphony.

He made this really good point.

So as you were speaking to people for this story, did you get the sense that this sort of bar is having a moment right now in Chicago and we might expect to see more of them?

Tell me about it.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for having me, Amy.

Of course.

You know, we've talked about these before.

I like to do these roundups of restaurants that have opened every quarter, if I can.

And we try to capture the ones we haven't written full stories about.

Tell me about that.

Even though they've said that is not the case, but that's perhaps the feeling going around.

Exactly.

Michelin is very clear with these partnerships, as it calls them, with the tourism arms.

If you pay us to come here, it does not guarantee a star.

We're going to use the same criteria.

We've always used nothing about the quality of the stars changes.

But, you know, I talked to some experts about this and it's obviously mixed.

And on one hand, you understand where that's coming from, but the other like, hey, we're they're kind of proving the point that it's not going to sway the judges per se.

But these all put sort of a twist on that while still kind of using that as a foundation, which I think is so interesting.

So let's talk about one of them in particular, Trino.

It opened in the West Loop in August.

Chef Steven Sandoval helms the kitchen there.

Trino is his middle name, but it's also his grandfather's name.

So kind of named after that.

He has family from Mexico, from Galicia in Spain, and he himself has worked in Argentina.

And I wonder if you could talk about that a bit.

So when you think about the food world, both the restaurant piece of that and the packaged food part of that, what are the themes that emerge for you when you think back on 2025?

The biggest theme I think hands down is sort of the cost of goods and how it influences pricing, right? And just operations, the restaurant scene, the packaged food scene in general.

You know, I kind of cover the economics of restaurants.

So this is obviously a big part of what I look at.

But the cost of eating out has risen 30 percent thereabouts since pre-pandemic.

And the number is about the same for the cost of groceries.

Right.

But how have you seen those things manifest, you know, in terms of what's on fast food menus, what consumers are gravitating towards for quick, you know, quick meals, quick fixes?

And so what will this mean for Chicago to lose this international center of learning for the beer industry?

Yeah, it's a pretty big blow, Amy, you know, on several different levels, right? So first of all, as I mentioned, a lot of the founders and head brewers at some of the city's longstanding breweries took classes at the Institute.

If you go back to kind of like the origin of craft beer in Chicago, it points to Goose Island.

They had a deal with the Seibel Institute where a lot of the folks that were in town would come through and learn from them.

And as a result of that, a lot of the folks that worked at Goose Island went to study at Seibel.

and a lot of the breweries that exist nowadays throughout Chicago and throughout Illinois can trace their roots back to Goose Island.

It was one of the first craft breweries, so it's where a lot of folks trained, right? Josh Death is one of them from Revolution, and he took some classes at Seibel.

And as for local brewers that have a partnership with this institution or that really count on sending their employees there to learn, how will that change that relationship?

So tell me what's going on.

Yeah, this is a fun one.

I love doing these types of stories.

So for this one, there's a company called Vertiport Chicago that is doing this.

And it's pretty interesting because some of their clients, I'm told, are folks that are sort of like sick of the steakhouse scene.

They've done the Michelin starred restaurants.

They just want to do something different.

And then for the wineries, the idea, you know, that your other customers are seeing this helicopter land and these people get out and all that, that has to create a little bit of kind of cachet for the wineries of, hey, we've got some big players landing here and enjoying our wines.

Tell me.

Yeah, they're definitely still dealing with all of that stuff.

But we've also seen this year protein have a big moment, right? I mean, it populates every social media feed.

We've seen grocery store shelves filled out with items like protein chips.

Protein cookies.

Protein oatmeal.

Right.

And talk to me about the experts that you talked to for this story because they made some interesting points just kind of about why protein is having a moment and their analysis of what's happening at Protein Bar.

Talk to me about that.

Yeah.

So, you know, we have been dealing with inflation and the rising cost of grocery prices for some time now, really the better part of the past half decade.

It's been a multitude of things that have contributed to prices rising.

The cost of groceries are up about 30% more than they were in 2019, early 2020.

So consumers, they're also concerned with like broader prices.

Thank you so much.

We're facing these economic headwinds that you described.

And then last on your list, you have Pilot Project Wrigleyville, which sounds like a really interesting concept because there's this beer incubator attached

to it.

Yeah, so this is the third location for Pilot Project.

It's its second Chicago location.

original ones in Logan Square on Milwaukee.

And it's a brewery incubator.

It's a very interesting business model.

And let's kind of zoom out here and talk about what's going on with craft beer and sort of what the trend is right now.

And so for a chef, what does this more entrepreneurial track entail? Is that being a private chef in private homes? Is that catering? What does that look

like? Great question.

So I talked to a couple of different folks for the story and we'll start with chef Don Young.

He runs a company called Ducksell.

which is basically a private dining company, essentially.

And in his case, as the same as in Trevor's case, they were kind of forced out of that day-to-day grind, right? In Chef Don's case, it was the pandemic furloughed him.

The restaurant he was at, it was called Woodwind.

You also talked to some chefs that are taking this out of like a pop-up dinner or something like that or private catering in the city and even branching out to areas outside of town.