Food (amazing)

I know, I know. This is supposed to be a blog about movies.

But man does not live by film alone. Sometimes you've just got to eat.

Which is why we found ourselves at SugarToad restaurant in Naperville, Ill. We are in Chicago for my wife's high school reunion and a memorial service for a dear cousin. We couldn't let a trip to Chicago go by without a visit to SugarToad, the newest restaurant run by Jimmy Sneed, who shook up Richmond cuisine with his famous The Frog and the Redneck.

He isn't interested in foodie fads, Jimmy said, he just cooks his own food. If anything, he is cooking it even better than ever. We dined with the always-fun Stacy Sneed (who also works at the hotel that has the restaurant) and with the bright and creative Helen Reed, who designed SugarToad and the Richmond restaurant Carena's, and who just won two awards for designing Gibson's Grill and The National.

First came appetizers, including the familiar crab cakes and sweetbreads (I'm afraid I finished Stacy's off her plate, and I am not ashamed. Sweetbreads -- they're not what you think -- are always great, and these were simply heavenly). For my entree, I had the bison hanger steak, which I had not had since The Frog and Redneck. It is an absolutely gorgeous piece of meat, fork tender, pan-seared and beefier tasting than the beefiest hunk of beef. It was served with a thin drizzle of some sort of shallot-based sauce. I'm guessing that's not the technical name.

For her part, Mary Anne got the sole, which she said was the best sole she's ever had -- and that includes the Dover sole that swam in butter at La Petite France and the extraordinary Dover sole she had just had a couple of weeks earlier at the Palace in Cincinnati. I managed to wrest a small piece from her and she was right. It was amazing.

Desserts: We shared four. A white chocolate mousse did not compare to the others -- creme brulee (good, but not the work of art that that supremely gifted woman used to make at the Frog and the Redneck), tapioca pudding (exactly as good as the version at the Frog) and a bread pudding that was unutterably divine.

I should not find it necessary to ever eat again, although I suppose I will, someday, out of boredom more than hunger.

Incidentally, because the memorial service was just 15 minutes away, we also stayed that night at the Hotel Arista, which houses SugarToad. I don't know how many stars the hotel has -- four? five? six? -- but it deserves them. It drips with luxe. It sparkles with class. It embodies comfort. I just wish I knew why it was standing on the open plains, in the middle of nowhere.

R.I.P., John Dillinger

Stranger, stop and wish me well,
Just say a prayer for my soul in hell.
I was a good fellow, most folks said,
Betrayed by a woman dressed all in red.

I'm in Chicago, where I was saddened to see that the Biograph Theater has gone legit. It now shows plays, not movies

Other Chicago theaters I passed have similarly closed, including the Village and, I'm told, the Water Tower, but the Biograph is the one that hurts the most. It's the one with the history.

On July 22, 1934, Public Enemy No. 1 John Dillinger took in a movie at the Biograph with a Romanian prostitute using the name Anna Sage (her real name was Ana Cumpanas). She had told the FBI she would be there with the bank robber, and that she would wear an orange dress to identify her. When the left the theater, she caught the eye of G-man Melvin Purvis, who lit a cigar as a signal to the other agents. Dillinger saw them and dashed down an alley, where he was shot four times. He died on the spot. Later, the poem above was written on the wall where he died.

The movie Dillinger and Sage watched that day was "Manhattan Melodrama," starring Clark Gable as a charming criminal, William Powell as his best friend, a straight-arrow district attorney, and Myrna Loy as the woman they both love. It's a thoroughly enjoyable flick about great friends separated only by ethical variances, and it features those eternal themes of enduring love, honor, duty and sacrifice. The always smooth Woody Van Dyke directed three actors just beginning the heights of their careers.

We all have to go sometime. I've always taken some comfort in the knowledge that when Dillinger went, he went having seen a good little movie.

Just starting out

New to this, but lots of stuff coming: movie reviews, links, video doodads and stuff so cutting edge and up to date it hasn't even been inventd yet: glee sprockets, snail dust, dwoodles, nanogleeps and gigablorts.