Probably 2 weeks after I first moved to Chicago after school, I’m out with some friends from school and we run into some other people we knew. One of them was a girl who I was acquainted with as a friend-of-a-friend, and we hit it off and ended up going to a different bar, drunkenly making out, and then going back to…

Not only racism. It just sounds made up, or at least heavily embellished. Like, who walks around with a fucking noose and bleach in downtown Chicago? Assuming it happened as Smollett said, it had to be a targeted attack. It’s almost impossible that it was just a couple of random dudes. That doesn’t mean it didn’t…

Mmmmmm.... sacrilicious.

I too enjoy Rick Steves, and I think his problem is that he lacks the “cool” factor that Anthony Bourdain did. Watching Rick Steves is like watching your dad go on vacation, where watching Bourdain was like watching what you aspire to be like when you travel.  Steves has a passion for travel, and Bourdain had a…

You can’t just have a Shamrock Shake. You have to have it with a filet-o-fish and fries, which is a traditional Catholic Lenten meal going back to the early Roman origins of the Church.

We used to live by the McDonald’s behind McCormick Place in Chicago, and their ice cream and shake machines literally never worked. It got to the point where we were ordering ice cream or a shake as a joke every time we went through the drive thru. Only one time did we actually get it.

Yeah, that could be true. In my experience, the defining characteristic of goulash is heavy use of paprika, where stroganoff has either no paprika or a small amount.  But I could see where goulash that has sour cream and stroganoff that has paprika could start to be really close.

A lot of German / Austrian restaurants serve goulash as both.  You can get a cup/bowl of goulash as a soup, or you can get spaetzle with goulash dumped over it like a stew.  I think they thicken the stew-goulash a little bit sometimes, but it usually tastes pretty much the same, just thicker.

My wife was always afraid to eat goulash because she hates sour cream, and her Italian mother always told her all goulash has sour cream in it. I told her over and over again that most goulash doesn’t have sour cream. I finally got her to try it, and now she loves it. In fact, we go to German restaurants just so she…

“When has white America ever shown the ability to absorb empathy and compassion? Is there a single example in the quadruple-century-old history of white people in North America that demonstrates this theory works? Has it ever happened? ... America had to fight its bloodiest war with itself to end slavery. It needed…

I have only ever eaten In-n-Out at the restaurant, so that might explain why I think it’s awesome and can’t understand why people give it a “meh” all the time.

See now, the trick is to wear boots that are 4 sizes too big for you, so you can slip the sheep’s feet into the boots along with yours. And then you have to make sure you get them when they’re facing off the edge of a cliff or ravine so they keep trying to back up instead of running away.

“Charisma?”

Oh, no doubt about that, there are many, many Catholics who are super-zealous in their anti-gay and pro-life politics. But by and large, Republican “moral” politics don’t play nearly as well in areas dominated by Catholic populations as they do in areas dominated by Protestant populations. That was my point.

I had a brother and many friends who went to Illinois State (in Normal, the home of Steak-N-Shake), and I visited them frequently. They lovingly referred to Steak-N-Shake as “Scarf-N-Barf” because it was open late.

Checkers has FRIED APPLE PIES.  Not those stupid baked ones that McDonald’s adopted back in the late 80's so they wouldn’t have parents suing them because their impatient kids got their faces melted off by hot apple lava spewing onto their faces.  No, the real deal.  I drive through every Checkers I see, even if I…

I went to Schoop’s once. The lady advised me to get double cheese. I didn’t understand why, and I said I only wanted one slice of cheese because I like to taste the beef. The lady shook her head and made me a double-cheese burger anyway, even though she only charged me for one slice.

I always liked Steak-N-Shake (especially the Frisco melt), but it has weirdly never really been properly respected by a lot of people. This is especially true in the Chicago suburbs, where people seem to regard it as being no different from McDonald’s or Burger King or whatever. I think part of it is that…

Oh man, a Frisco Melt at 2am is indeed a thing of beauty. I mean, it’s pretty good (and #1 on my list) any time, but it’s absolute heaven at 2am.

It’s shocking that someone who specializes in hot takes would find the “wait and see before judging” approach to be gross.