Source: Financial Times
by Julia McInnis,
October 21. 2016.
Chicago is a food city, and so many of my Booth activities revolve around eating. Chicago is known for its steak houses, Ukrainian and Polish cafés, and hot dogs with a dizzying array of toppings. After a year here, I have got my go-to spots for everything from group meetings to networking coffees, and Friday night places to celebrate surviving some of Booth’s more exhausting weeks.
Food and drink have been at the heart of my best group meetings, and the Bongo Room (with two locations in the city) is the perfect place for a long brunch meeting. We usually ditch the laptops, but our notebooks vie for table space with opulent desserts that have been rebranded as breakfast. It is the perfect place for thrashing out projects – if cranberry vanilla pancakes can’t bring people with different ideas together, I am not sure that anything can.
For one-on-one chats I almost always suggest Toni’s Patisserie in the Loop. It is bright, European and has amazing coffee and pastries. And since it is not “trendy” like other coffee spots in the area, it is almost always possible to find a table or counter space. Pro tip: Toni’s offers happy hour on French wines every afternoon and they usually have a good selection of cookies and small cakes still available then.
My ideal Saturday night involves a dancefloor with good music, which Chicago has a lot of, but on Fridays I prefer long dinners and drinks with friends. Sometimes these happen in our apartments, other times at raucous spots like Big Star, where we spend hours ordering small tacos and pitchers of margaritas. The lines at Big Star can be a little tedious, and so we usually grab doughnuts at Stan’s down the street or a cocktail at the Violet Hour while waiting for our table.
Last but not least; where do I go for deep-dish? Pequod’s Pizza. Hands down it is the best in the city. It is not New York pizza, but it is good.
