Wondering what will be the next big thing in Chicago dining? Monday Night Foodball already knows.

In late August 2021, the Delta variant of COVID was kicking the pandemic into a terrifying new phase of unknowns. Here in Chicago, the city reinstated an indoor mask mandate for stores, restaurants, gyms and other places where humans gathered in public. Into this dismal scene, local food writer Mike Sula launched a tiny, hopeful project.

The idea was simple: Invite an up-and-coming chef to offer a special menu at a local bar for one night only, pop-up style. Sula, the Chicago Reader’s longtime dining critic, had been nursing the concept since at least the beginning of 2020, and the initial COVID shutdown in March added an urgent twist. As the pandemic grinded through its paralyzing first year, he noticed a trend.

“All these unknown restaurant workers — bartenders, servers, line cooks — that had been furloughed or laid off started cooking out of their apartments or out of shared kitchen and doing preorder deliveries or drop-offs,” Sula said. So he started writing about these interesting, emergent cooking projects for the Reader and, eventually, the two things merged.

On Aug. 23, 2021, chefs Jeanette Tran-Dean and David Hollinger brought their Vietnamese-Guatemalan mashup cuisine to Kedzie Inn, a since-shuttered dive bar in Irving Park, and Monday Night Foodball was born. Monday, March 2, will mark Foodball’s 200th event. Originally offered as a seven-week pop-up series, Monday Night Foodball just kept rolling.

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The economics of a Foodball are meant to boost everyone’s fortunes. Held on Mondays, when traffic can be so slow that restaurants often close anyway, the event brings in new business. Chefs pay for ingredients and labor and, correspondingly, take 100% of food sales. The host venue loans the use of its kitchen and space for free and pockets the rest: All beverage sales, including any special menu of drinks it creates.

Sula, the evening’s impresario, has absorbed the pet project into his day job at the Chicago Reader, which revived its print edition just this month under new ownership. Neither he nor the Reader takes a cut, and Sula chips in event marketing by writing a preview story about the week’s featured chef — which, he said, has become a reliable way to keep readers informed about the latest developments in Chicago’s ever-fermenting dining scene. In his view, it’s a win-win-win.

Four years and counting, the weekly event has served an early preview of at least a few chefs who have taken an innovative concept to the next level: Akahoshi Ramen, the acclaimed brick-and-mortar noodle shop in Logan Square, is probably the splashiest example. Mike Satinover, a celebrity within a deeply nerdy Subreddit community where he goes by “Ramen_Lord,” made his first of two Foodball appearances on Nov. 8, 2021. It was just one stop of many in his single-minded quest to replicate authentic Sapporo-style noodles and broth not only from scratch but with an obsessive attention to technique and repeatability.

But Sula would be the first in line to say that Foodball does not deserve credit for the success of a chef or be counted among the data points that lead to the opening of a restaurant. As he notes, pop-up culinary events were a thing long before he invented his; he cites chef Won Kim’s Kimski, the Korean-Polish counter service joint in Bridgeport, in particular as an important current incubator of rising chefs, and there’s substantial overlap between chefs showing up there and at Sula’s Foodballs.

Thattu, the love child of Margaret Pak and Vinod Kalathil, is one common thread: Before the married couple opened their Keralite restaurant in Avondale, Pak worked as a prep and line cook at Kimski for two years. After being laid off from her white-collar career (banking, then pharmaceuticals marketing) in 2015, Pak decided to chase her dream of cooking for a living. Her vision was arranged loosely around the cuisine of her husband’s native Kerala, the lush region on India’s southwestern coast. Pak initially wanted to make a business out of replicating a bakery cookie she encountered on trips to Kalathil’s hometown — the spicy, crispy masala biscuit.

But then one thing led to another and, by 2019, Pak had earned a James Beard semifinalist nomination for her stall in the West Loop’s Politan Row food hall. She did her first Foodball in early 2022 and her last in early 2023, just months before she and Kalathil opened Thattu as a stand-alone restaurant at 2601 W. Fletcher St. This past October, Thattu took over hosting Foodball, which had lost its bar partner when Frank and Mary’s Tavern changed hands and closed for renovations.

Pak and Kalathil agree that Foodball is more than just another thing-to-do for foodies. The regular gatherings, which bring together curious customers with chefs and other industry folks on their night off, have become a node in Chicago’s dining ecosystem. “Especially during the pandemic,” Pak said. “That's when we realized how tightly knit the community itself is.”

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On a recent Monday, the Beths — Elizabeth Gartelos Morris and Beth Salentiny — were preparing their evening’s dishes in the kitchen at Thattu. On the menu were yuvarlakia (beef and pork meatballs in broth), lachanopita (crispy filo with spinach) and their velvety gigantes plaki (Greek butter beans in tomato sauce), among other items including gyros two ways and a feta cheesecake topped with cherries.

This is Meze Table’s fourth time making its homestyle Greek cooking and Athenian street food available to the Foodball crowd — which is a nice opportunity for fans since the business does not operate a restaurant. “You get to serve all these new clientele that you normally wouldn’t reach,” said Gartelos Morris, the 49-year-old executive chef of Meze Table. “And it’s an incredible opportunity to try something new out and see if it lands with people.”

The pair met in the late ’90s working at City Soles in Wicker Park and, over time, each migrated into the restaurant industry. They came together as business partners in 2020.

“I’ve always really loved to cook, and I was at home with these tiny little kids,” Gartelos Morris said of a period when she was a stay-at-home mom. “So I started making these tasting plates — my friend called them toddler tapas — basically just whatever I had left over. Like pickles and hot dogs and goldfish crackers and whatever delicious cheese I wanted and whatever beautiful crackers I could get my hands on. And I started noticing the prettier I made them and the more colorful they were, the more things they were eating. I started taking pictures of it [and] putting it on Instagram, and people started going, ‘Hey, can you do that for me?’”

Her husband, a graphic designer, smelled an opportunity. That’s a business, he said. But it wasn’t anything — until Gartelos Morris pulled in Salentiny, at the time managing The Duck Inn, chef Kevin Hickey’s elevated tavern in Bridgeport. Together, the two women created Meze Table, today a thriving catering operation that also sells its dips, salads and frozen, ready-to-eat Greek meals at farmers markets on the South Side.

Now on the verge of opening a brick-and-mortar market in Bridgeport, Meze Table has come a long way since the days when Gartelos Morris first started attracting notice on Facebook and Instagram. Pop-up events like Foodball, the Beths say, helped them develop their recipes while also building a following of customers in Chicago, something that doesn’t always translate from a social media audience.

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That evening, Joyce Famakinwa, a regular Foodballer, ordered the meatballs, the beef-and-lamb gyros, the beans and the cheesecake. Thumbs-up all around, she noted.

She and her friend Folake Dosu have been attending roughly twice a month since the event’s early days at Kedzie Inn. The 30-something Logan Square residents were among the lucky 50 people who got a seat for the Ramen Lord’s Foodball back in 2021. “I’m embarrassed to admit it now, but I wasn't really a big ramen person back then,” Famakinwa said. “So for me, it really was an opportunity to branch out and try something. I thought the food was incredible.”

For Famakinwa and Dosu, the weekly event has evolved from boisterous group outing to something more akin to a relationship ritual. “It’s a way to discover new chefs, but, on a personal level, it’s just a nice way to start the week,” Famakinwa said. “Folake and I talk pretty regularly. We’ve been friends since we were kids. But, you know, maybe if we invite a friend that we haven’t caught up with in a while, that’s an opportunity to kind of just take a beat and have these great conversations and decompress.”

Sula seems content to have Monday Night Foodball bump along until it comes to its natural resting place. Now that dining recommendations come from so many sources — some reliable, others less so — he figures offering a way to meet local chefs, enjoy a tasty bite and connect with people over a shared enthusiasm might be the dish Chicagoans are actually craving right now.

Find the Monday Night Foodball schedule of upcoming events at chicagoreader.com/foodball.