Serious Eats Chicago Launches Monday

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Nov 9, 2011 10:10PM

Chicago's food media scene, already packed like sardines, gets even more tighter with the Monday launch of Serious Eats Chicago.

Former Grub Street Chicago editor Nick Kindelsperger makes a lateral jump to Serious Eats Chicago, He's also bringing his Paupered Chef cohort Blake Royer and Daniel Zemans, who's eaten more Chicago pizza for SE's Slice blog than any three local food writers and possibly Pat Bruno in recent years.

Also joining the SE Chicago team are Dennis Lee and former Chicagoist weekender Anna Deem. (HI, Anna!) SE's Ed Levine is high on the staff Kindelsperger has organized. IN an email launching the announcement, he wrote:

"Nick is so knowledgeable and passionate about food in Chicago, and when you combine that with his longtime involvement in Serious Eats and his considerable skills as a writer and editor, he seemed like the right person for the job."

But will Serious Eats be able to carve out a niche among a city already at critical mass with food blogs and restaurant coverage? We think so. So does Kindelsperger's successor at Grub Street Chicago, Mike Gebert. Gebert wrote.

The lower, neighborhood-jointy end got a big boost of attention in LTHForum's heyday of influence in the mid-2000s, and suddenly everybody was talking Katy's Noodles and Old-Fashioned Donuts. But the highish end (or whatever you want to call gastropubs and up) has been so active and vibrant in the last few years (not a bad thing, of course) that it's crowded the low end back out of the media spotlight, with the rare exception such as Lao Hunan. It will be good to have a major and active site dedicated to focusing attention on that side of the city again; welcome and good luck.

We concur.