You Should Take Stock: Our Visit to Marz
Stock is a new food journal, which held its launch Monday at Marz brewery
Stock Magazine Launch Was Visit to Marz
I had the pleasure on Monday (May 9) of attending the launch party of Stock, a new food journal co-created by Ed Marszewski — craft brewery/restaurant/bar owner and the greatest advocate the Chicago community of Bridgeport could have — and Erin Drain, a communications consultant and project manager for businesses, nonprofits and community organizations with lots of experience in the food and beverage industry.
The event was held at Marz Community Brewing (3630 S. Iron St.), which Ed owns.
The publication is lovely and filled with stories and interview Q&A of interest to those of us in the local food community.
There are articles by or about Jonathan Zaragoza, a renowned chef of Mexican food (his Birriera Zaragosa on the city’s West Side catered pre-ordered meals for Monday’s event); Abra Berens, chef at Michigan’s Granor Farm and author of her recently published third cookbook, Pulp, about cooking with fruit; Vera Videnovich, who farms in Michigan and grows crops associated with her family roots in Serbia; and the married couple of Sebastian Vargo and Taylor Hanna, who were onsite selling their Vargo Brothers Ferment products (I bought a jar of sour pickles, which may be one of my basic food groups).
Click below to order a copy.
I was there on Monday in part to repay a big favor that goes back more than a decade. As I’ve mentioned before, the first articles that I wrote after I moved to Chicago and changed careers were about craft beer. Ed was running a craft beer bar (when there weren’t so many) out of his mother’s Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar in Bridgeport, and was starting up a craft beer journal called Mash Tun.
I wrote a couple of stories for Mash Tun, which helped me greatly in establishing my bonafides as a food and beverage writer. I’m pleased to say that Stock has the same mix of eclectic, entertaining, thought-provoking articles that made writing for Mash Tun a special experience.
Since I met Ed, this dynamic human has created Kimski, a Polish-Korean restaurant that reflects his family’s ethnicities; Marz Community Brewing on the South Side and its satellite, Life on Marz Community Club on the North Side (1950 N. Western Ave.); and Public Media Institute, which publishes Stock, runs an alternative radio outlet called Lumpen, and is engaged in Buddy, a store in the downtown Chicago Cultural Center featuring locally made products, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere arts center in Bridgeport
I’d enjoyed Marz beers around town for years, but this was my first visit to the brewery. Their bar has a very lengthy list of Marz beers on tap and in cans or bottles.
One of them carries a name — Bubbly Kriek — which is an amazing local inside joke. Kriek is a cherry-infused sour beer of Belgian origin (Marz’ version is a black Berliner Weiss). But the beer also references Bubbly Creek, the name applied to a section of the South Branch of the Chicago River that was horrendously polluted with offal during the heydays of the city’s stockyards. The stockyards closed more than 50 years ago, and the river is all the better for it.
The bar and brewhouse at Marz Community Brewing.
This neon logo beckons visitors to the canned beer cooler at the Marz brewery.