‘It would seem reasonable for the cooks at ‘World Burning’ to cut corners during preparation, given that the wood burned to smoke the meat is so laden with an era’s carcinogens (the varnish, the dust) that the taste profiles swing wildly between two meals that read the same on paper. Nevertheless, they go about the work with all the care of a world-class kitchen and deliver food to customers who are willing to forego future health concerns for a taste of something tasteless.
‘World Burning’ is, in some ways, a museum in perpetual decline. Its owners bid on the wood left behind by otherwise disastrous fires and display the wreckage on their walls. Customers order meat by the pound and the wood over which they would like it to be smoked. Steaks over a door from the house of your unfortunate childhood neighbor come cheap. Kebabs cooked with paneling from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory are expensive and increasingly rare. The meal that put ‘World Burning’ on the map, a deep dish pizza cooked in a brick oven with historical scrap from the Chicago fire itself is long extinct, but they’ve kept behind a plank on which they occasionally smoke oysters as a special.
The restaurant has been criticized for its poor taste, both literally and figuratively, but reservations are booked out weeks in advance in spite of poor reviews. ‘World Burning’s’ owners claim the restaurant’s model and the controversy itself reflect a simple lesson in supply and demand. Nobody wanted the wood until they began to burn it.’
-an excerpt, Autumn by the Wayside
