Grub Street Grub Street Chicago

Esquire "freelance correspondent" (don't call him a critic!) John Mariani files his annual "Best New Restaurants" list in November's issue of the magazine, awarding the coveted "Restaurant of the Year" slot to New York's much-lauded ABC Kitchen. Mariani's list skews notably away from his usual fine-dining habits and toward casual, communal eating — a shift he notes in his introduction to the portfolio, saying that in recession-tainted 2010, "people ate out again — and they weren't jonesing to spend money on caviar." (He kind of hedges his picks on a financial basis, too, calling the list's honorees restaurants "that are, for our money right now, the best.") Eater National has the full list of spots, including Chicago's Longman & Eagle, Frances in San Francisco, and Wolfgang Puck's WP24 in L.A. — the proto-celeb-chef's first appearance on this list in some time. Read on for the complete rundown.

It doesn't get a lot better than this. Grant Achtaz just dug up this old photo of him with Thomas Keller, Richard Blais, and pastry chef Stephen Durfee all giving the shaka sign while in Hawaii. He found the photo while gathering information for his memior Life On the Line, which comes out on March 3. If it's filled with photos like this, we'll go ahead and pre-order that copy right now. [@gachatz]

It was the summer of barbecue openings in Chicago. The smell of pork hung high in the air, as it seemed like all one needed as a smoker and a funny restaurant name to open a new joint. It was hard to keep them all straight, and we knew that we’d probably just have to wait a little bit to see how they all stacked up in the end. Luckily, Steve Dolinsky is taking one of the first stabs at defining exactly what happened and which places are worth the visit. He wrote about both Lillie's Q and Chicago Q this week on Vocalo and if he has a thesis it seems to be that this was the summer of “urban barbecue” in Chicago.

Some of the most welcome offal to come out of the trend of head-to-tail cuisine are pork trotters, a.k.a. pigs' feet, and we're now seeing more of this humble pork product pop up on respectable menus in New York, L.A. and San Francisco. More often than not, the meat is braised, deboned, and formed into a crab cake-like portion, browned on both sides, and served with any number of sauces likely to win over even picky eaters — as they were last spring on the menu at the critically adored Frances, with a sauce gribiche. Semi-rustic preparations of trotters have made appearances in New York over the last few years at places like Craft and Baba, and last winter Northern Spy did a trotter cake with mustard greens — a play on collard greens and ham hocks — that caught the attention of the Times and became the lede for their review. ("Slice into it and the pork spills out, outrageously tender. There is nothing to tip off the squeamish that we’ve entered hoof territory.")