When the hype dies down

plus a mini recommendation

Hello, everyone!

What an unexpected few days. I know that more than a few of you recently discovered my newsletter through a post on subreddit /r/chicagofood, when someone asked for recommendations on who to follow on social media.

To my surprise, my name popped up (thank you, u/gigglemode, if you’re reading this), and a bunch of incredibly smart users did some sleuthing to find my Instagram handle, which is @dickholedannis. That info was eventually revealed in the comment section, and I was hit with a massive tidal wave of new followers, some of whom hopped on The Party Cut train. Welcome aboard!

Just to introduce you to the basics of the newsletter — I cover a fun place almost every week, and just so I can keep the expenses down, every other edition is behind a paywall. Otherwise I couldn’t afford to write; food writing is not a wallet-friendly endeavor. And I’m not some internet rando; I’ve been doing this for about 15 years with some cool things under my belt.

You new readers can binge through all the free posts via the website version or through the Substack app. There are now a lot of them, since I just celebrated The Party Cut’s second birthday last week, so browse away!

This week, I revisited a Roman pizza place that originally opened to a bunch of fanfare and a lot of critical praise seven years ago. But the hype has died completely since then, so I wanted to see how things were now.

If you look carefully at the image above, you’ll be able to figure out which spot I’m talking about. Paid readers get a second mini-recommendation today to a completely unrelated spot, also thanks in part to Reddit.