Last week, my colleague Phil Vettel and I unveiled our 10 favorite dishes  we ate in Chicago restaurants in 2014. Narrowing the list down to five each was yeoman's work, and we were pained to leave out a number of worthy contenders.

So here, now, are my favorite dishes of the past year that just didn't make the cut.

* Tofu from Sumi Robata Bar
* Crispy tripe tacos from La Chaparrita
* Roast chicken from Chicken Shop
* Schmaltz smashed potatoes from Honey Butter Fried Chicken
* Arancini from Forno Rosso
* Carbonara wings from Gabutto Burger
* Omelette from Au Cheval
* Tonkotsu ramen from Wasabi
* Miyazaki beef "tom yum" from Grace
* Pork ribs from Green Street Smoked Meats
* Dirty rice from Analogue
* Boudin noir from Parachute  

What's your favorite dish from 2014? Let us know at ctc-dining@tribune.com and we may publish it in the Tribune.

kpang@tribpub.com
Twitter @pang

Tony Hu, aka " Mayor of Chinatown ," is taking another stab at River North after his Lao 18 went belly up a year ago. Hu’s new venture, his seventh named Lao Sze Chuan, sits on the top floor of The Shops at North Bridge on Michigan Avenue.

We’ll save the full-fledged review for a later day, but for now, I want to mention this location’s signature dish: Peking duck. Hu has boasted the duck as “the best you’ve ever tasted,” roasted in an imported oven that cost "tens of thousands of dollars" to bring over and construct.

I sampled it over the weekend and found three problems:

1. The duck was way underseasoned. Before the chef hand carves the duck tableside, you’re presented a plate of duck skin, about five pieces the size of postage stamps. The server informs you, “this is the best part of the duck,” and instructs you to dip it in the plate of granulated sugar. The texture was there — the subdermal fat exhibited the slightest cushiony yield before your teeth hits the brittle skin. The...

A few years ago, the Peking duck dinner at Chinatown’s BBQ King House was the deal of the decade, feeding four at a cool $28.88. At this price, a whole duck was sliced, pulled and hacked three ways — crispy skin sandwiched between steamed buns, its meat stir-fried, the bones left to fortify a soup. Now that’s resourcefulness, ensuring none of the bird goes to waste. Plus it costs less than one seared duck breast entree from a downtown restaurant three miles up the road.

What got me about this deal was, inexplicably, the bonus salt-and-pepper shrimp. Just plopped down incongruously in the middle of your three-course duck dinner, as if the chef cooked an extra plate by accident and decided, “Ah, you keep it.”

That to me captures the cognitive dissonance that’s Chinatown, which for cultural reasons, has always served as this Cheap Eater’s spiritual home. The area surrounding Wentworth and Archer might as well operate in its own time-space continuum, where the trends of the...

Prime rib sandwich : On my way to Eataly for lunch one day, I ran into a colleague who didn't even bother saying hello, but went straight to: "You're getting the prime rib sandwich, right?" I replied no. He demanded I head straight to the rotisserie off the second-floor escalator. "That sandwich ... it's (expletive) great." My colleague is right: The prime rib sandwich at Eataly is all that, tasty enough to justify the $14.80 price tag. It's rib-eye steak, beef fat and juices intact, shaved warm and piled into a crusty and chewy house-baked baguette. A porcini mushroom dry rub intensifies the umaminess and that grilled steak taste, and it's finished with olive oil, cracked pepper and sea salt. That's it. It might be one of the most delicious sandwiches in town. Eataly, 43 E. Ohio St., 312-521-8700

—Kevin Pang

For reasons that confound this Cantonese gentile, my attraction to Jewish delicatessens has only grown more intense with age. It was sparked by a visit years ago, after a New York guidebook listed Katz's as a must-stop. To the sneers of tourist-scoffing locals, I took the F train to the Lower East Side and walked east along Houston Street. To walk inside Katz's is to walk back 75 years. When that first hunk of warm pastrami made contact with my tongue, gelatinous melted beef marbling washing over it, my head tipped back, and out came a noise halfway between wet gargle and feral cat.

Chicago has no guidebook-worthy Jewish delis — ones like Katz's, 2nd Avenue or Carnegie Deli in New York, where it's as much about spectacle as food. Those are the places where you take photos of sandwich meat stacked a foot high, using your head for scale, or noisily impersonate Meg Ryan in "When Harry Met Sally."

What Chicago has are Jewish delis with the kitsch toned down, where locals will always...

Four major trends and stories topped the year in chain restaurants:

1. Bread has gotten fancier. Wendy's had enough confidence in its pretzel bun to move its pretzel bacon cheeseburger to its permanent menu in August. Now Wendy's is hoping to replicate its pretzel success with brioche buns. Pizza Hut also added a pretzel crust to its menu in November, one of 10 new flavors.

2. Sriracha, the southeast Asian garlic hot sauce, is the new chipotle. The past year saw chain restaurants from Pizza Hut to White Castle incorporate Sriracha into its menu (Subway briefly brought in the sauce in late 2013).

3. Aiming its sights at McDonald's, Taco Bell launched a full breakfast menu. The campaign has already proved successful — same store sales increased 2 percent between first and second quarter of 2014 on the strength of items like its A.M. Crunchwrap and Waffle Taco, according to Ad Age.

4. The minimum wage debate ramped up in 2014, with fast food workers becoming the face of the issue. In...