You probably didn't expect Jim Skinner, the CEO of McDonald's, to have anything good to say about the city's new calorie-posting laws, but we were surprised to see the Mayor of McDonaldland openly fulminating to the Chicago Tribune yesterday. Calling the regulations “redundant and flawed,” the burger titan claimed that McDonald's has been offering calorie information for decades. The burden of the new posting rules has been laid on McDonald's by "professional naysayers" and "CAVE people — Citizens Against Virtually Everything," complained Skinner. Judging by the online comments, Chicagoans are with him all the way: Though a few stood up for the regulations (“It would be great to know the nutritional 'value" of what I'm eating. The menu is the BEST place for this information!!!!!”), just as many or more are sympathetic to McDonald's plight (“Isn't everybody just sick to death of these know-it-alls who are just the loudest, pushiest, most demanding bunch of jerks”). Skinner even gets some love: “I used to caddie for CEO Skinner years ago at a country club in St. Charles before he was CEO. Hilarious and generous guy. He'd take down a pack of heaters during the round. He'd drink the McD's coffee. Keep up the good work, Jimmy boy!” Maybe Chicago is just in a libertarian mood after throwing off its foie gras ban.

McDonald's chief: Menu calorie rules are 'flawed' [Chicago Tribune via Health Blog/WSJ]

News that Chicago had overturned the city’s foie gras ban, posted this afternoon on the Times’ Diner’s Journal blog, didn’t take long to reach Ariane Daguin, the founder of D’Artagnan and the nation’s leading proponent of foie gras consumption. Her letter, unabridged, after the jump.

Every couple of years or so, a report circulates that Chicago, forever “the second city” (if that!) to New York, is experiencing a culinary renaissance and is about to shed its reputation as a backwater. (Chicagoans, naturally, deny, even to themselves, that such is the case.) A piece in today's Sun-Times makes the case yet again, and we have to say, it's pretty convincing. Aside from its own chefs, led by the brilliant Grant Achatz (profiled so memorably in this week's New Yorker) now Chicago has New York's Marcus Samuelsson opening a seafood restaurant, Terrance Brennan opening an Artisanal, San Francisco's Laurent Gras bringing his classical French genius, and Govind Armstrong expanding his chic empire from L.A. and Miami. Are the days of Chicago's being a place you start out in and then escape from coming to a close?

Their Kind of Town [Chicago Sun-Times]
Related: Earth to Chicago: You Lost ‘Iron Chef’ Fair and Square