Pizza Report: Gino's East, Chicago

This is another thing I've been planning to do for a while, along with my Beers of the Month.  I've always been passionate about trying styles of the greatest food ever created: the pizza.

Not so much a distinct food as a medium for endless culinary creativity, pizza is the result of the confluence of seventeenth century events that brought the North American tomato to Italy. The oldest pizzeria in the world, in Naples, dates to the eighteenth century, but the food didn't find its way to America until the twentieth.

Chicago style pizza is a thick, heavy concoction that originated at Pizzeria Uno and is often called "Deep Dish." The original idea behind making the pie so filling was to allow Americans unfamiliar with the food to accept it as a meal: Uno's bakers were of the opinion that New York style pizza wasn't substantial enough to pass muster in a restaurant setting. (I disagree, but then again I can eat far more slices of thinner crusted pizza than I can of Chicago style pies.)

Gino's East has a number of locations. We went to the one on Lincoln in North Chicago with our friends, Padmini and Apurva.  The pies are thick, but oddly it isn't not the crust that feels thick.  Rather, it's the toppings and the cheese, which melt together in a glorious goo beneath the sauce.  Yes, you read that right: Gino's is one of those contrarian pizzerias that dares to put the sauce above the cheese.  Personally I prefer the traditional layering with the cheese on top, but I still enjoyed the pizza at Gino's very much.  I was a bit surprised that the crust lacked the buttery fried texture I've come to associate with deep dish (led by my many experiences at the Pizza Hut and Uno frachises).  Instead it was flaky, a bit like the crust on a blueberry pie, yet with a more savory, pizzalike flavor.  The thickness of the crust was only apparent at the edges of the pie.

I'm still a thin crust man, but I recommend it.

posted on 2008-07-12 13:26:00 :: permanent link

Beer of the Month (June): Bell's Unfiltered American Wheat

It's not really green, though the local river is

Another month to cram into the wee days of July is June, a span during which Andrea and I visited our friends Padmini and Apurva in the great city of Chicago.  While there I tried a number of local beers, including Unfiltered American Wheat from Bell's Brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  (The last two times I've visited their website I received a serious-sounding error of Severity "Notice" hinting that there may be an undefined offset of 9 in the file include/detect.php on line 449.  The site otherwise worked fine, but sadly included no information about this beer.)

This beer was yeasty and delicious, though it doesn't ring enough of a bell (not intended, honestly) for me to descibe it in depth.  Still, I remember enjoying it an awful lot at the Handle Bar on North Ave shortly before we took the El into the Loop to tour the city.

Don't let the photo scare you: the color of the beer here is influenced by the bright green umbrella over our table, and it's really the color of a typical unfiltered hefeweizen.

posted on 2008-07-02 18:30:00 :: permanent link

Beer of the Month (May): Redhoook Sunrye

Yes, it's July.  And what better time to introduce May's Beer of the Month?  This time around it's Redhook's Sunrye (I'd link to it directly, but their site is all Flash).

Sunrye is a beer made with a variety of malts that includes rye, so it has a pleasant citrus flavor. I got mine at The Burren in Somerville, Massachusetts, and they decided to enhance the flavor by adding a slice of orange.

I'm used to lemon in a wheat-based beer, but orange adds a very special touch. This is a stellar summer beer, with unique malt flavors, orange or no.

posted on 2008-07-02 18:15:00 :: permanent link

Site downtime, and the reason for it

Until last week I hosted this site at Onsmart, which was slightly better than the typical web host in its feature set (in particular, they offered SSH access).  It worked well for a couple years.  But in February they sent me an e-mail that said this:

Dear OnSmart Network Customer,

Due to the difficulty in web hosting industry, we decided to close our business in March, 2008. In order to help our customers to transfer out to other web hosting provider. We have open a temporary help desk at http://help.onsmart.net/center/contact to keep track each transfer issue.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Jacky
OnSmart Network

Five days later I received an e-mail from another helpful fellow offering a replacement service, so it looks like Onsmart kindly sent my e-mail address along to other companies. Thanks, Jacky!

The whole business was odd.  I was peeved because my most recent payment covered 12 months to November, 2008, but from Jacky's message it looked like they were cancelling my service in a matter of weeks.  (You'll note that the e-mail contains no mention of the company going out of business.  They're simply tired of giving their customers what we've paid them for.)

I got a couple phone numbers by searching very deeply on the Web.  This included a toll-free number that routed me to the service's new owners. They explained that the old owners were unreachable, but that they would be happy to sign me up for a new plan if I would pay them a new payment.  I told them exactly what I thought about this.

Still, March passed and my site remained online.  So did April.  I started to think the service cancellation applied only to new and renewing customers, and that my site would remain online until the contractual end of service in November.  But this past Friday my site went down.  From where I stand it looks like the original management owes me about $45.

I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau of New York, where Onsmart was based, but that led to the expected result of endless silence from the Bureau. Yesterday I managed to contact the new management of Onsmart via e-mail and politely asked for the old management's contact information.  They stressed that they had no access to the old management's billing or servers, and that they'd frankly had trouble contacting them.

Old Management is non responsive. We have tried to contact them on several occasions without any response. For this inconvience, we can offer you free hosting at OnSmart for whatever package you purchase.

I discovered with further prodding that this meant a mere two months of service, so I instead moved to Hostmonster.  I mean, really.  Either these people contrived a fake ownership tranfer as a scam to make people pay them twice in a single year, or else they really did buy Onsmart and then found themselves unable to find the people and assets they'd paid for.  Either way, why stick around?

posted on 2008-05-06 17:00:00 :: permanent link