I still find this “outside looking in” viewpoint of Chicago fascinating – so here’s an article from the Ft. Meyers newspaper about the acceptance and growth of the ”let us eat French” movement in Chicago. LH
 L2O
Chicago has reconnected with French Cooking. And according to one imposing Frenchman, Christophe David: “It’s growing. And it is not finished.”
Which sounds rather threatening.
David, who is executive chef at the elegant, 31/2-star restaurant NoMI, where he was sitting in a patch of late morning sunlight recently, drinking green tea, was one of the earliest arrivals in a mini-battalion of French chefs who’ve been under surveillance by fooderati since arriving in town. If you’ve ever eaten his visually arresting, contemporary update of high-end classical French cuisine, you realize his threat is actually a great promise.
French is back, and that’s a good thing – not just for diners but also for home cooks interested in tackling the cuisine.
“When I first arrived here, I got some jokes about being French,” said Vincent Colombet, who moved to town from Paris in 2004 and opened a catering company to make the French home cooking he missed. He recently expanded into a shop and cafe called Cook au Vin, specializing in French food products, particularly cheeses and sausages, that are hard to find in a single location.
“Now it’s the other way around,” he said. “It’s cool to be French.”
Shops like his make cooking a la mode easier for the rest of us, as does the colorful French kitchen and tabletop shop Genevieve Lethu, which recently opened its first North American store here at 900 N. Michigan Ave.
But according to chef David, “first is the produce; we just add two or three things together that work with the season, and that is it!”
David’s humble point: In French cuisine, ingredients are more important than technique.
And with the Chicago area’s great local farms and changing seasons, he said, cooking like he’s at home is easier here than it is in L.A. or Miami. “In Chicago sometimes the winter is long, but at least you have the winter. When I talk to my friends in France I say, ‘Imagine Paris with a big lake, and it looks like Nice.’ Nobody believes me until they come visit.”
Two of the most recent world-class French chefs to arrive are Christian Delouvrier and Laurent Gras. Seven months ago, Delouvrier opened Brasserie Ruhlmann Steakhouse, where he’s embracing a more casual mode since his decades as executive chef at such New York City shrines to French cooking as Alain Ducasse at the Essex House, Lespinasse, and Les Celebrities, among others.
“There is nothing more beautiful than a rare steak with a beautiful bearnaise sauce, beautiful French fries,” he said, dressed not in chef whites but a worn Izod and jeans, while doing some paperwork in the giant mosaic-tiled, red-velvet stuffed bar of his big-windowed, welcoming Art Deco brasserie.
“I’m just trying to do French cooking the best that I can – the simpler the better,” he said. Delouvrier claims the chef who has the real talent is 43-year-old Laurent Gras, who may be Delouvrier’s polar opposite in sensibility.
Gras arrived in Chicago by way of the Fifth Floor in San Francisco, having trained with a pantheon of France’s great chefs (Alain Ducasse, Guy Savoy, Jacques Maximim); weeks ago, he opened L20 in the former Ambria space.
“I want to be everything but a French restaurant,” said Gras, wearing an all-black uniform with Nehru collar, hair slicked back, sitting Sphinx-like in L2O’s austere, modern, almost windowless dining room one recent afternoon. Instead, for his Chicago restaurant he has channeled his classical French training into L20, a paean to seafood, which he serves in expressionistic combinations.
If you looked at the L2O menu – “gold egg yolk, kampachai, kurobata pork, sake”; “salmon, ginger, parsley, cantaloupe”; “black bass, shellfish bouillon, saffron, Rhode Island mussel” -
you’d never guess the chef was French at all.
And five years ago that might have been considered a big plus; all three chefs say that back then they probably would not have considered coming to Chicago. And if they had, would Chicagoans have shown much enthusiasm for them?
Blame it on the creeping influence of the ridiculous anti-French movement – which seeped into our food: who could forget “freedom fries” and the internationally ridiculed local foie gras ban? – but it seemed as though the age-old love-loathe relationship with the French (love their food, effortless style, accents; loathe the way they intimidate us with their food, effortless style, accents) had temporarily faded into an outright snub.
Dimitri and Keli Fayard, the young husband-and wife-pastry chefs who own Vanille Patisserie (she’s from Kankakee; he grew up in L’isle Arne in France; they met working in the tart station at the much-lauded Payard Patisserie in New York City), find that Chicago has become much more amenable to their Gallic style in just the last two years.
When they first started making and selling the beautifully precise, jewel-like chocolates and bonbons, tarts and entremets (or mousse cakes) back in 2003, “People would walk in and say, ‘Five dollars for a cake, that’s too expensive!’ and walk out,” said Keli. “They weren’t used to what we are doing, and it was very frustrating.”
“Especially when you buy a Starbucks for $4.50, and nobody is complaining about it,” Dimitri added.The Fayards credit their growing fan base to the popularity of the Food Network, which has clearly had an effect on national tastes, but also on Chicagoans’ individual culinary sensibilities. By Emily Nunn http://www.news-press.com.
 You can barely see Jennifer A., but there is a good shot of Shochu!Why am I posting this? Because you would not beleive how many people in Chicago search on Jennifer (and Vince Vaughn). They also want to know every other single place in Chicago that ”the stars” go to eat. Call it a shameless way to gain visibility (and you would be right!). They would certainly want to know where these celebs dine more that the places I haunt! LH  Rocker John Mayer had a concert just outside of Chicago on Friday night at the First Midwest Bank Ampitheatre in Tinley Park, Illinois. Although girlfriend Jennifer Aniston wasn’t spotted at the show, that didn’t mean she wasn’t there!After the show the two lovebirds cooped up in a posh Chicago hotel and weren’t spotted again until Saturday. Trying their best to be elusive, the couple secretly headed to one of Jen’s favorite Windy City restaurants for dinner, Mia Francesca’s in Lincoln Park.The couple dined on a two hour long dinner, that went well past the restaurant’s usual closing time, in a private room upstairs. Check out the picture above that a Boots reader sent us of John and Jen swiftly exiting the restaurant into their chauffeured SUV!“They seemed really happy to be together,” a source told us. “But they weren’t very friendly or receptive to a few fans waiting to say hi!”Mayer and Aniston checked out on Sunday and headed to Colorado where John had a concert that night.Post courtesy of: 
