Tag Archives: banned by yelp

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Ordering a Pizza at the Standard Market Grill in Lincoln Park

IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, PLEASE CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.

“Ordering a Pizza at the Standard Market Grill in Lincoln Park” by Joseph Suglia

On Friday, 21 November 2014 at 5:05 p.m., I ordered a cheese pizza at the Lincoln Park location of the Standard Market Grill.  The clerk who took my order is named Nicolette.  This pizza was “to-go.”

When I arrived home, I opened the cardboard box in which the pizza was contained and discovered to my horror that there was not a single fleck of red on the entire pizza.  I looked more closely at the pizza.  No, there was not a single lineament of tomato puree on the gobbets of cheese that bedecked the pizza disc.  Nor was there any tomato puree on the bready background.  I called the restaurant at 5:27 p.m.; Nicolette answered the telephone.  I explained to her that tomato purée was absent from the pizza that I ordered, and Nicolette insisted that there was tomato sauce on the pizza, “even if there wasn’t enough for [my] liking.”  I insisted, in turn, that there was no tomato sauce on the pizza.

I extracted the web of cheese from the pizza disc.  Not a single trace of tomato purée was uncovered.  There was no red on the underside of the cheese web, either.  I ate a slice–which was all that I could stand, since the pizza was flavorless–and, no, I did not sense the unmistakable taste-datum that had been inscribed into my consciousness, the tangy tomato purée with which the Standard Market Grill has slathered all of the many pizzas that I have ordered in the past.  The sponginess of the bread did not compensate for the untastiness of the pizza-complex.

If Nicolette was correct, and she wasn’t, and there WAS tomato sauce on the pizza, then why was the pizza sauce both invisible and untasteable?  Again, I have ordered many pizzas from the Lincoln Park location in the past, and all of them were blessed with a tomatoey tang.

I wrote the management on this matter and never received a response.  This is the level of customer service that I have come to expect from the Lincoln Park branch of the Standard Market Grill.

444 West Fullerton Parkway is a challenging space for any business to occupy.  In my ten years of living in Lincoln Park, I have seen four businesses at 444 West Fullerton Parkway flounder and founder, fail and flail.  The Standard Market Grill is struggling, and it will not stand.

Joseph Suglia

CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO READ MY MASTERPIECE TABLE 41:

 

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Happy Father’s Day!: Or, Chopo Chicken

IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY!: OR, CHOPO CHICKEN

by Joseph Suglia

Chopo Chicken in Chicago, Illinois: the most insulting eatery I have yet attended.

The dwellers of Lincoln Park were entranced by the parti-colored mural on the residential-street side of this chowtrough for three months before its vernissage.  This makes the experience that I had all the more disheartening.

The place is grungy.  The Styrofoam containers are flecked with filth, even before being loaded with the swill that is hawked here.  Were they taken from the trash and reused?  There are clean Styrofoam containers beneath the counter, if you ask for them.

The Yucca fries are cold and old.  They taste like week-old French fries and are smothered in a bilious goo.

A man in a grime-sodden gown takes out a cleaver and hatchets a whole chicken into quarters.  The chicken is encrusted with an anthracitic substance.  The chicken is, strangely, almost meatless.

It is roadkill chicken.  It looks like a chicken that was killed on the road.  It looks as if the chicken, with Schopenhauerian exertion, strove to cross the road only to end up as faux-Peruvian cuisine at Chopo Chicken.

The portions are cafeteria-size.  I understand well the fundamental principle of business: buy cheap and sell dear.  It is clear that the gangsterish restaurateurs want to spend as little money as possible and charge as much money as possible.  But if they want their restaurant to survive–and nine out ten restaurants go extinct–they have to offer something that people would want to eat or would want to eat again.

Joseph Suglia

CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO READ MY MASTERPIECE TABLE 41:

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The Red Pig Kitchen

IF YOU ARE AT LEAST TWENTY-EIGHT (28) YEARS OF AGE, CLICK THE IMAGE ABOVE TO READ MY NOVEL WATCH OUT: THE FINAL VERSION.

THE RED PIG ASIAN KITCHEN
by Joseph Suglia

I have no idea if porcivore is a word, but it should be.  Porcus is Latin for “pig.”  And therefore a porcivore would be a “pig-eater” such as the person who I now am but once was not.

Uncooked pork is spongy, fatty, pinkish, and revolting.  For these reasons, I resolved to no longer eat pork in the year of grace 2011.  I’m surprised that I hadn’t made my resolution earlier.  Lamb seemed leaner and more toothsome than pork, and I ate a great deal of lamb and deer in 2011 and 2012.  Chicken, too.  I don’t know how anyone could dislike sweet chicken flesh and imagine that its moist tenderness tempts even the hardest-hearted vegan.  For about two years, I abstained from the meat that comes from our porcine cousins.

Now that I am giving my business to the Red Pig Asian Kitchen, I have returned to my porcivorous self.  With one qualification: The pig meat that I devour must be nuked into an unrecognizable whiteness.  I now have no qualms about eating any pig, on the proviso that it is irradiated and immersed in a lagoon of soy sauce.  The shanks of razorbacks and jungle boars will fill my plates and my mouth.  I will even consume a White-Lipped Peccary, if one is placed before me, as long as it is pervasively irradiated.

My favorite restaurant meal is now a plate of red-skinned pork in a forest of fried rice and kimchi, accompanied by a pot of Thai Iced Tea.  This is the meal that awaits me every week at the Red Pig Asian Kitchen.

If I have one criticism of the RPAK, it is that it lacks the Heideggerean Geworfenheit of the ramshackle eateries in Chinatown.  Of course, this is Thai food, not Chinese food, but I’m not sure if that makes a significant difference.  The space in which you eat is more important than the food you ingurgitate–food is only food, after all, pure nutriment.  And this space lacks the sliminess and sleaziness of Old Chinatown’s louche troughs.

Though the restaurant is pig-themed from the outside, there is very little porcine imagery within.  The kitchen is modestly hidden behind a Japanese curtain.  The curtain is brown and covered with egg-shaped robot figures–not androids, but oviforms.  Hanging on one of the walls is a steel apparatus made of nine steel bells.  There are twelve-feet-high glass panels.  Artificial bamboo trees sprouting out of a box.  A silently subtitled LED television screen.  Concaving wooden walls.  Porcelain teaware and glassware neatly placed on shelves near the counter.  Really, the interior is austere and anti-decorative.  It is internationally corporate, if anything.  There is nothing peculiarly Thai about the space.

It is easy to imagine all of the pig pieces that are stocked and stacked in the kitchen reassembling themselves into a red-scaled pig monster.  If Neil Jordan directed The Company of Pigs, he would film it here.

Dr. Joseph Suglia

CLICK THE IMAGE BELOW TO READ MY MASTERPIECE TABLE 41: