Quick Bites

We told you it was happening; now it has, and both the Food Chain and The Stew stopped by to take their respective looks at the new Pastoral in the Loop. Food Chain asked owner Greg O'Neill about the popularity of fancy cheese: "People have the sense that 'if I’m going to be bad, I might as well be bad with something good.'" Indeed, my friend, Indeed.

Handlebar owner Josh Deth has been all over the place in the past week, thanks to this article from the Chicago Journal. Deth is asking for money from the Milwaukee/Fullerton TIF District to pay for 15 percent of the project costs to build Revolution Brewery at 2323 N. Milwaukee. More info on the project available at the Revolution Brewing blog.

And, just in time for Halloween, the Sun-Times reports on spooky haunted restaurants. To see the ghost of diners (dinners?) past, visit Red Lion Pub, Ole St. Andrew's Pub, or Lawry's all of which have had some type of unexplainable ghost-like incidents. Two of Jerry Kleiner's restaurants also claim to be haunted, though we aren't sure we're buying it. Kleiner told the Sun-Times "Everybody who walks [into Room 21] feels some sort of mysterious hauntedness, like Al Capone's watching you." Judging from the picture that Time Out ran with it's review of the place, the only thing scary about the restaurant is the amount of botox done to its patron's faces.

Skip anything called Janosik's Rib; it doesn't matter if a Czech restaurant has three menus with varying amounts of English on them (like Operetta, on 653 W Fullerton does.) Avoid any dish whose name (Janosik) is a reference to a folk hero who died while hanging by one rib, says Michael Nagrant at New City. Also, make sure to try the Czech Kung Pao chicken.