My Pitch to Block Club Chicago: Dinner-At-The-Grotto Underground Dining Series

Lessons from one of my earliest pitches

I was scrolling through Instagram a few days ago when I came across an announcement from one of the Chicago accounts I follow, Funeral Potatoes. After many years of searching for a brick-and-mortar, the virtual restaurant was setting up shop in Moonflower bar. Chefs Eve Studnicka and Alexis Rice-Thomas launched the virtual restaurant during the pandemic and have become local darlings in the city, for all the right reasons. The Chicago Tribune profiled them in 2022, Eater Chicago lauded them as one of the most welcome surprises of 2021 and Chicago Magazine named them as one of the hottest city restaurants that same year too. James Beard award-winning writer (and friendly acquaintance) Mike Sula often features them in his weekly chef pop-up series for the Chicago Reader.

I’ve never tried their food but trust that they deserve all the accolades they’ve received—and that’s because back in 2019 I wrote about Studnicka’s underground dining series for Block Club Chicago. Before she teamed up with Rice-Thomas, Studnicka ran a monthly, family-style, pay-what-you-can dinner called Dinner-at-the-Grotto from her Logan Square apartment. She often teamed up with local chefs. I’m almost sure that Rice-Thomas was a co-host of the first time I attended because I followed them both on socials immediately after I left.

When I got home, I searched for any write-up on the series in local publications and came up with nothing, which surprised me. It was the kind of quirky, grassroots event that made you feel like you were in on a secret even though Dinner-at-the-Grotto was about as inclusive as you could get. I knew it would make a great story. It celebrated Midwestern cuisine, it had an explicit queer-friendly and slightly political approach to underground dining clubs at a time when underground dining series usually cultivated an air of elitism and exclusivity. Most importantly, the food was fantastic.

I pitched it to more established local publications before sending my idea to Block Club Chicago, which had only been around for a year but was quickly embraced by the city because of its non-profit, journalist-led newsroom. I was so proud to get this piece published. I still am. I listened to my gut when it said there was something special at Dinner-at-the-Grotto, even though none of the staffed food journalists in the city had written about Studnicka then (or any that I could find, at least). More than the byline, the experience showed me that I knew my shit—even if my writing portfolio didn’t quite demonstrate that yet.

I planned on sharing something else this week since this is such an old pitch. However, Funeral Potatoes’ IG post prompted me to look at how I pitched back when I had fewer bylines and less confidence. I gained some good insights from that exercise, which I’ll share after the pitch.

I am sharing my pitch under the same conditions I always do:

1. Don’t ever tell me if you find a typo, EVER. It clearly wasn’t bad enough for the jury/committee/reader/editor, etc. to reject me and it will only serve to haunt me until my dying days.

2. Do not plagiarize my silly little sentences. It’s not cool and I’ll know you’ll have done it. Especially if you copy+paste it with the typos I do NOT want brought to my attention.