Reader Recipes features 80 recipes edited by longtime Reader food critic and senior writer Mike Sula and Reader coeditor-in-chief Karen Hawkins.
“The hospitality industry was the first to get clobbered by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s likely to be among the last to recover,” Sula writes in the introduction. “5.9 million industry employees lost their jobs the past two months, according to Restaurant Business, not including those working under the table, such as undocumented workers. Many chefs and bartenders pivoted to carryout and delivery service, mobilized around initiatives such as the Independent Restaurant Coalition, fed first responders and health-care workers. They kept cooking.”
Fifteen percent of the book’s sales will benefit Comp Tab Relief Fund, an alliance between Support Staff and Pilot Light Chefs to help hospitality workers laid-off or furloughed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The Reader lost 90 percent of its advertising when the cultural life force that is Chicago’s bar, restaurant, music, theatre, and cultural scenes closed,” says Reader publisher Tracy Baim. “When we started asking Chicago chefs and bartenders for help with this cookbook, they stepped up fast with 80 recipes that, in total, offer a picture of the breadth of culinary imagination in this town,” adds Sula.
The list of contributions reveals an all-star cast of talent from every corner of the city’s food scene, including Paul Kahan’s seared cabbage, Yolanda Castillo’s Belizean stewed chicken, Rick Bayless’s pork tinga, Bertha Garcia’s salsa verde, Tony Hu’s Special Dry Chili Chicken, Ethan Lim’s mom’s Cambodian Braised Pork Belly, Bellemore Chef Jimmy Papadopoulos’s Fire Bird chicken sandwich, the Eiffel Tower Soufflé from Everest’s legendary Jean Joho and Brian Bruns of Flat & Point sourdough recipe.
“There are also simpler, practical, comforting recipes designed to help one stretch something marvelous when the pantry is getting bare and you can’t go shopping, such as Lula pastry chef Emily Spurlin’s Desperate Times Pie, or the pimiento mac and cheese that Christine Cikowski and Josh Kulp serve at Honey Butter Fried Chicken, or Breakfast Queen Ina Pinkney’s Dense Flourless Bittersweet Chocolate Cake,” Sula says in the book’s introduction. “I bet food writer Dennis Lee’s Spam Bourbon Pate would be aces smeared over Young American Chef Nick Jirasek’s Ooohh Mami Cheese Crackers. Need a stiff drink, but you ran out of eggs? Shake up a vegan whiskey sour with leftover chickpea juice, from Koval Distillery’s Zach Overstreet.”
