Tonight, after months of delay, Nella Pizzeria Napoletana opens with a full bar, antipasti and salads, and pizza from Nella Grassano, the original pizzaiola at Spacca Napoli. Lunch starts Monday. A second location on Taylor Street is in the works for February.

More new places after the jump:

"I think Eastern North Carolina is probably my favorite region, with places like Wilbers, the Pit, and Allen and Son's really sticking out."

FWIW, I can't recommend Honey 1 highly enough, despite some hate in comments. Here's what our critics had to say on Nagrant's other picks: Smoque and Uncle John's.

Update: I've heard that Kansas City actually has the best barbecue so many times that it can't be discounted, but sadly have never been.

For some people, the news from Morton, Illinois, that heavy rains may force a shortage of canned Libby's pie filling is a little more dire than the threat of going pumpkin pieless for the holidays:

"But just a week in Morton can bring in more money than a year of farming. In bad years, farmers in La Soledad lose money. There are no farm subsidies, and there are few other jobs."

What? You didn't know Morton was the pumpkin capital of the world?

Making apple caramel jam with Elizabeth Madden of Rare Bird Preserves from mike sula on Vimeo.

The Daily Beast asked Reader food columnist Mike Sula for his pick for the best Chicago restaurant that's opened since Labor Day.

Despite some previously stated antipathy toward attaching the word best to restaurants, Sula obliged, and his answer may not surprise anyone.

Next Wednesday, it's Rob and Allison Leavitt of Mado, one of the best new restaurants of 2008.

Ravenswood's Me Dee Cafe is an odd little place, a mere six tables squeezed between a wall of Thai snacks, a freezer full of mochi, and walls decorated with squabbling cartoon brats and troubled cows (a herd of bipedal, urinating bovines graces the wall in the loo). The main menu is loaded with inexpensive but decorously presented Ameri-Thai standards with hints of fusiony gimmickry such as a noodle dish tossed with fat disks of Polish sausage, grilled mushrooms with chihuahua cheese, and plates garnished with raspberry and blackberry gumdrops.

But there are number of other things that make Me Dee far more intriguing than just that.

• pork kebab,"middle eastern style"

"The spices come from Poland," said the woman at the counter. "Why? Was it too much?"

I'm genetically predisposed to love the heavy, starchy, porky peasant food of eastern Europe, but let's face it, Polish food isn't exactly known for its doors-of-perception-blowing spice levels. No, I assured her the "European kebab" I lunched on last week, wasn't too spicy, but it wasn't exactly Polish either. The pork, shaved off the rotating spit onto a thick, toasty pita and topped with an abundance of crunchy vegetables, then drizzled with a garlicky mayo-yogurt sauce, was mighty tasty though, and awfully familiar. In the photo it's obscured by the verdure, but it had the elusive juicy-tender and crispy-caramelized duality of a perfectly shaved shawerma, or doner kebab.

• Ed Fisher aka gleam via Flickr
• Pork belly and birria tacos at Big Star

Sprout, the ambitious Lincoln Park restaurant that opened in early October and promptly went through two chefs in its first month, reopened last night, Friday the 13th, under Top Chef alums Dale Levitski and Sara Nguyen. Owner Satko Ibrahimovic—who originally promised all-organic entrees costing as much as $120—is now offering three-course $60 prix fixe meals selected from a list including foie gras, short ribs with truffle, and Bosc pear with chocolate and almond.

• Nathan Sears
• Nathan Sears and friend

My story this week about the ever-entrepreneurial farmer Stan Schutte and his wondrous Wooly Pigs promises that the chefs who've committed to buying them will be preparing special dinners and tasting menus in December and January, which will present Chicagoans with their first opportunities to get a taste of this fatty Austro-Hungarian breed. While the scheduled slaughter is just a little over a month away, they've already nailed down dates and some other details regarding the dinners:

Jennifer Reese, aka the food blogger Tipsy Baker—the daughter and granddaughter of ranchers, who's amassing her own backyard menagerie—weighs in with a refreshingly contrarian review of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book, Eating Animals, "a compelling manifesto swaddled in a muddled and pretentious memoir about one squeamish and idealistic young man's distaste for eating flesh."

• Torta de tamal

About a year and half ago Friend of the Food Chain Peter Engler, the world's foremost authority on the Mother-in-Law sandwich, told GrubStreet (nee MenuPages) about a variant of the legendary tamale on a bun that had so far eluded him:

. . . I've been searching Chicago for a torta de tamal, another specialty of Mexico City, a Mexican MIL if you will. This starchfest, a bolillo stuffed with a tamal, also goes by the name guajolota ("turkey") for obvious reasons. I have a feeling that it's available by request at many places but have not yet seen it listed on a menu.

• Neckbones at St. Restaurant #2

Not long after the great Doggy’s S.S. Soul Eatery closed earlier this year, Friend of the Food Chain @THEPIGMON began wandering the desert again. Doggy's you may recall was the Reader's 2008 pick for best soul food, and one of four stellar but unsung soul food spots he and Peter Engler rounded up last fall. Before long he zeroed in on what he called a possible successor in St. Rest #2 Country Kitchens, a spacious two-steam-table setup on 87th Street that doubles as a Christian ministry run by owner Pastor L. Hopkins.

Take one iconic American foodstuff, available all over Chicago— but rarely done well. Go back to the basics of the preconvenience-food era, and add a contemporary spin with exotic toppings. Watch lines form out the door.

• Eugene Luzcz

I stopped by Lincoln Square's shiny new Gene's Sausage Shop yesterday at a lucky time. Patriarch Eugene Luzcz was hanging the sausage in the front window of the massive double-decker superstore that rose over the footprint of the old Meyer Delicatessen. I've been watching these developments for more than two years now, and I'm relieved that they're finally opening Saturday morning at 9 AM.

• Paulius Nasvytis

In late 1996, just when a treacly pink juice box known as the Cosmopolitan was beginning to be thought of as the apex of sophistication for Manhattan drinkers—and long before Chicago bartenders were brewing their own bitters and squeezing their own juices—a bar opened in a onetime barbershop and speakeasy on the sleepy edge of Cleveland's residential Tremont neighborhood, and set an impossibly high standard for classic cocktails.

I've certainly not drunk in all of the hallowed temples of neoclassical and interpretive mixology that have opened across the country since then, but I've been to enough to know that The Velvet Tango Room has upheld its commitment to bibulous purity like no other.