Esquire

AFTER MY WIFE AND I MOVED TO NEW YORK, I WAS FREQUENTLY ASKED WHAT I missed about Chicago. “Family, friends, and… Italian beef sandwiches,” I would say. It provoked a confused response, usually something like “What’s an Italian beef sandwich—and why the hell do you miss it so much?” You’ll find the answer to the first question on page 13, where Chicagoan and James Beard Award–winning writer Kevin Pang provides an ode to, and a brief history lesson on, the sandwich. “The Italian beef is a messy, texturally one-note, woefully un-photogenic wet mound of a sandwich,” he writes. “And what a beautiful wet mound it is.” Pang’s piece is timed to mark the second season of The Bear, arguably last year’s buzziest TV series, which put Italian beef in the national…

OUR WAITRESS CROUCHED DOWN TO EYE level and said, “Hey, bitches,” then, earnestly, perhaps less joyfully than she might have earlier in her shift: “Are you thirsty bitches?” She said it with a sense of duty. We were at a restaurant called Bacon Bitch, and this is what is done there. Bacon Bitch had come up in a Google search for “brunch nearby” on a Sunday afternoon in Miami Beach, and when I’m presented with an option that sounds like a waking nightmare, I am powerless to pass it up. So we went and ordered the Bloody Marys with the hash brown and the fried egg on top, because we were both thirsty and curious bitches. You can picture the place, so I don’t need to tell you there was a…

IF CHICAGO FOOD IS THE APOLLO 11 MISSION, the Italian beef sandwich is Michael Collins, far less famous than deep-dish pizza and the Chicago hot dog. It’s not typically what out-of-towners order if they have only 24 hours in the city; it’s more of a third-day-in-Chicago kind of thing. It ruins shirts and leaves you with pungent breath. It employs the most flavorless cut of beef. The Italian beef is a messy, texturally one-note, woefully unphotogenic wet mound of a sandwich. And what a beautiful wet mound it is. It brings Chicagoans like me enormous pride that it has achieved pop-cultural notoriety after the FX series The Bear yanked it out of national semi-obscurity. In the months following the show’s premiere in June 2022, sales of Italian beefs spiked nationwide, with some…

GROWING UP, BOOTS RILEY BADLY WANTED TO become a superhero. Like, a real one. Scrawny and nerdy and on the edge of adolescence, he started to hone his craft—swinging nunchucks, throwing stars, sneaking into and out of rooms without detection. “Had I stayed on that track, I probably would’ve become a cop,” he says over Zoom one recent afternoon. Instead, he discovered Prince, fell into music, fronted the rap group the Coup for some two decades, and then, in his late 40s, suddenly emerged as an in-demand movie director. Riley, now 52, is talking from his Oakland home, an early-20th-century Victorian fittingly built by a pioneer of art photography. Riley bought the place four years ago, after the success of Sorry to Bother You, his screenwriting and directing debut. An outrageous…

THE SLEEKEST NEW TELEVISION IS NOT A TV AT ALL. It’s a projector. Instead of a black rectangular void staring you down when you’re not watching Love Is Blind, the projector relinquishes your precious wall space when it’s off. (No white wall? Opt for a retractable screen.) The latest projectors are minimal enough to be stowed in a credenza, or sit discreetly on top, but powerful enough to deliver images worthy of an art-house cinema. And with all the new streamer-exclusive films, home and theater are one and the same these days. Here are three beamers that will improve your movie watching and your interior-design game.…

PROTECTING YOUR EYES IS FINE, BUT SOMETIMES YOU’RE PUTTING ON sunglasses because you want to evoke a certain feeling. Aloof. Unflappable. And, yeah, sexy. Maybe you’re wearing them at night because you know you’re the coolest one in the room (even if you have to squint to see). Maybe you’re wearing them the morning after because they hide a hangover as effciently as they cut the cruel light of day. Whatever the reason, nothing beats a pair of angular, jet-black shades from Celine. They’re the perfect way to tap into the slinky, downtown energy that designer Hedi Slimane has honed during his tenure at the French fashion house. Hell, you could even wear ’em to the beach; they look just as good with a swimsuit and sandals as they do with…