Lisa E Freedman, My Journal Through Life, is the Home Base & Blog for LF Media Ink, a Boutique PR/Marketing Company specialized in the Arts, Entertainment & Travel Industries. Enjoy!
Lisa E Freedman, My Journal Through Life, is the Home Base & Blog for LF Media Ink, a Boutique PR/Marketing Company specialized in the Arts, Entertainment & Travel Industries. Enjoy!
A corner of Paris at street level, right inside our own hotel Some of the best meals on a trip happen by sheer convenience, and Pierrot Gourmet, The Peninsula Chicago's own street-level café at the corner of Rush and Superior, was exactly that kind of happy discovery. After a stay built around the hotel's sky lobby and its more formal dining rooms, it was a genuine pleasure to find that the hotel offers an entirely different register of...
Cheezborger! Cheezborger! No fries, cheeps! — the Chicago dive that became an SNL legend Some Chicago stops are about white tablecloths and tasting menus. Others begin with a line you’ve been quoting for decades. For my partner, Paul, Billy Goat Tavern was the latter. Long before we ever planned this Chicago trip, he knew the place through Saturday Night Live — the relentless rhythm of “Cheezborger! Cheezborger! No fries, cheeps! No...
A Chicago deep-dish institution, and a wonderfully uncomplicated stop after a week of serious dining After a week of tasting menus, Michelin-starred dining rooms, carefully planned lunches, and more than a few white tablecloths, our Chicago food tour brought us somewhere wonderfully uncomplicated: to a pan of deep dish pizza at Lou Malnati’s. There was something deeply satisfying about it. We had spent the week discovering Chicago through its...
Chicago's first liquor license, a nickel beer, and 127 years of Loop history After spending several hours wandering through the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago, we were ready for something entirely different. Rather than another contemporary restaurant or chef-driven menu, we walked a few blocks to The Berghoff, where more than a century of Chicago history awaited us. It turned out to be the perfect transition from an afternoon of art...
If Monteverde was the lunch we found through a Netflix episode, Ever was a dinner we organized our week around. Tucked into Fulton Market in the West Loop, Curtis Duffy's tasting-menu restaurant has spent the past several years quietly establishing itself as one of the most refined dining experiences not just in Chicago, but in the country — and a single evening there made the case better than any review could. A...
The West Loop pasta house that earned its spot on our list from a Netflix episode — and earned it all over again at lunch. After a morning aboard the First Lady Architecture Cruise and a leisurely stroll along the Chicago Riverwalk, we weren't looking for just any lunch- we wanted somewhere that would encourage us to slow down and savor the afternoon. Monteverde proved to be exactly that place. A Streaming Cameo, Earned Honestly We found...
A landmark gastropub across from Millennium Park, where Michigan Avenue comes to linger Some restaurants are destinations. Others are the kind of place a city simply runs on. The Gage is both. Tucked into the historic Gage Group buildings at 24 South Michigan Avenue, directly across from Millennium Park, it has spent nearly two decades earning its place as one of the most booked tables in Chicago — and after enjoying our first dinner in...
One of the best-kept secrets of cruising is this: you don’t have to choose between a great vacation and great food. On the Norwegian Star, the two are inseparable. With ten dining venues ranging from a 24-hour neighborhood pub to a tableside Brazilian churrascaria, the ship operates less like a floating resort and more like a well-curated food city. And with NCL’s signature Freestyle Cruising philosophy — no assigned dining times, no...
Inside a 19th-century Victorian house on the banks of the Manatee River, two brothers from Rome are cooking the kind of Italian food that makes you want to cancel your other plans. Not every great restaurant announces itself loudly. Some of the best ones are tucked away — in unexpected towns, on quiet streets, in buildings that have their own stories to tell long before the food arrives. Ragù Cucina Italiana, on 8th Avenue West in Palmetto,...
The Original Wolfie's & Rascal House brings 70 years of deli tradition — pastrami on rye, chicken soup, Broadway ambiance and all — to the heart of the Rosemary District. There are certain dining experiences that go beyond food. Wolfie Cohen's Rascal House in Miami Beach was one of them. For decades, it was a cultural institution — a place where the Bee Gees stopped in, where the Golden Girls were spotted, where Meyer Lansky was a...
