Now we can eat canned dog food

Chicagoans rejoice. Your menu choices have been restored, and foie gras is back on the menu.

The City Council on Wednesday repealed its two-year-old ban on the gourmet dish, drawing dissent from animal rights activists who consider foie gras cruel because the birds are force-fed to make their livers bigger.

But there were no worries in chef Didier Durand's restaurant, Cyrano's Bistrot.

"All of us are so excited," Durand told reporters as he held his pet duck, Nicolai, named after French President Nicolas Sarkozy. "People miss it. They used to go to the suburbs to get foie gras and stopped going to specifically French restaurants."

Durand was one of a coalition of restaurateurs who started Chicago Chefs for Choice, a movement to overturn the ban, which went into effect in August 2006. He said Wednesday that he would begin serving foie gras again as soon as the repeal goes into effect later this month.

"You might disagree with serving foie gras, but you don't do a ban and forbid everybody to have foie gras," Durand said. His restaurant was one of many across the city that held foie gras dinners in the days before the ban took effect.

You know what really puts you in that Paris mood after a really good French meal? A relaxing after-dinner cigarette. Oops, that's still banned.

For our friends in Chicago

I found this recipe on the web:

2 T salad oil
2 lbs. cubed goat meat
1 tsp. salt
1.2 tap. garlic powder
1/4 tsp. oregano
1/8 tsp. ground cumin
1 large onion, chopped
1 T flour
1 10-oz. can Rotel tomatoes and green chiles
1 10-oz can water
Brown meat in hot oil. Add salt, garlic powder, oregano, cumin and onion. Cook until onion is soft. Sprinkle flour over all and allow to brown, stirring constantlly. Add tomatoes and water. Simmer uncovered for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. Most of the liquid will be absorbed. Serves 6.

Serves 6, chokes nine, and wasn't even good for three.

What was the toughest part about the Brewers moving to the National League?
Teaching the Cubs fans how to fight.

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Calatrava screw

WISN's Mark Belling claims his producer thinks the proposed 150 story Calatrava building in Chicago looks like a drill bit. I'm going to hold off on my reaction a bit. But is the building is ever completed, it will be the world's tallest at 150 stories. Blair Kamin in the Chicago Tribune claims the "odds are now better than even money that it will succeed as a work of skyline sculpture and as a building that engages the city around it."

At best, this will be a new Eiffel Tower, a scale-shattering yet superb skyline statement that becomes the new postcard image of Chicago.

At worst, as less persuasive renderings of the tower suggest, it will be a visual cartoon, a supersize, superskinny version of a soft-serve ice cream cone.

Well, that's a more charitable description that the general description of the last drawing, "The Twizzler Tower."

Since then, the restless architect has moved gradually to the present plan, in which the tower rises energetically but nobly, making a 360-degree twist as it moves from the ground to a sharply articulated summit.

In January, he unveiled sketches to the Tribune that gave the tower a newly pointed top and promised a restoration of the tower's whirling upward drive. Then, accommodating complex structural requirements, he settled on the current design, which is somewhat bulkier than the pencil-like January version but remains attractively slender. Gone is another version, also revealed to community groups last month, that had too much twist in its top and revealed Calatrava's tendency to lapse into the visually hyperactive.

One other local critic had a little different description. "...but one glance and you may have the same response I did: It’s disturbingly phallic. Will people rename it the Chicago Dildo?" Meanwhile, the Indignant Citizen takes a look at the finances of the deal and wonders if the artist renderings are all we'll ever see of the Chicago Spire.

Give Kelleher credit; it was nice of him and Calatrava to spend the time with the CAF members and docents discussing the Chicago Spire.

But the reality is all he has are drawings, and even those aren’t in final form yet. He hasn’t sold a single condominium unit and he has no outside investors, other than the bank that financed the land acquisition. Despite this, he insists he will break ground this spring. Don’t hold your breath.

At the CAF forum, Kelleher did not come across as any kind of sleazy developer. He seems like a genuinely nice and charming fellow, and he obviously has a strong desire to see this project completed. After all, as proposed the Chicago Spire would be by far the biggest jewel in his development portfolio, a career capper that would take its place in the Chicago skyline—the world’s best skyline—in between icons like the Sears Tower and the Hancock Center. But Kelleher has one problem he can’t avoid: He doesn’t have the money to build the thing.

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