Filed Under: james a. felling, Obituaries, wa imports

LSK is collateral damage from choices that City employees make each day—people that have lost the ability to connect their actions with the consequences they cause. In all the many, many meetings I’ve had in City Hall in the past three years, there’s a question no one ever asks. “Is it good for our City?”

You can read her full message here.

Filed Under: closings, logan square kitchen, Politics

So what got you interested in doing this? Why cocktails?

My love (ok, we can call it an obsession) began when I had the Odin's Smoke cocktail by Josh Pearson at Sepia. Up to that point, I had a cocktail here and there, but nothing like that. That cocktail was a revelation to me because it was so complex in flavor yet everything came together in a completely balanced and harmonious way. It was like a smack in the face about how great a cocktail could be. Josh was really accommodating; he answered my questions about what went into the cocktail and even gave me the recipe without batting an eye. I didn't really have any bottles of liquor at home so I thought I would buy all the bottles for that cocktail and then explore other cocktails that use those same ingredients.

$175 later (really wished I had my epiphany with a cheaper cocktail), I was hooked. From there, I made classic cocktails at home and went out to a bunch of places in the city that specialized in hand-crafted cocktails. I even took a Cocktails 101 class with Paul McGee at The Whistler. With all of this exploration, I was struck at how incredibly open and helpful these bartenders were with what they were doing. That's the thing about all the Chicago bartenders I have met over the years: they are incredibly open and are willing to take the time to explain what is in a cocktail or explain a certain technique (provided, of course, that they aren't slammed with orders).

In the cocktail world, there seems to be so much focus on the New York, LA, or Portland cocktail scene, I wanted to start a site that could celebrate the men and women in Chicago who make great cocktails and also profile the places they work at.

I think cocktail making is a great topic to cover because it is great to see how a few ingredients and some ice can be transformed into something sublime. Making a great cocktail takes practice and skill to find the right combination and balance. But, a great thing about cocktails is that anyone can pick up these ingredients from Binnys and make the same cocktails tonight. It is a bit tougher to re-create what is coming out of restaurant kitchens because those kitchens are working with (mostly) ingredients that are completely inaccessible to the common cook and they are cooking on equipment that very few of us can afford at home.

What/when's the next one?

I was anxious to get my first video out with Mike that when I went to schedule my next interview, I realized it was right in the middle of the NRA show so availability was a little tough. However, I have gotten confirmations from Debbi Peek (Balena), Michael Simon (Acadia), Greg Buttera (Barrelhouse Flat), and Josh that they want to do it. If there are any bartenders out there that would like to be profiled, I would love for them to contact me. [Update: he shot with Buttera yesterday.]

What's your background, and how did it lead to this?

I have a culinary background. I went to CHIC (before it became Le Cordon Bleu) and worked under Michael Taus at Zealous for 2.5 years (working all the stations and was eventually made Sous Chef). I have always been drawn to restaurants and cooking so there is definitely an interest in the creative process for making dishes/drinks. However, after spending my time in bars around Chicago (that sounds bad, doesn't it?) I would have definitely pursued cocktail-making as a career. There is something about the whole process that I have just immediately responded to. Alas, hand-crafted cocktails were pretty much non-existent in Chicago in 2000 and I pursued cooking (which I really don't regret at all).

Filed Under: mixologists, blogs, mike ryan, paul leddy, sable, video feed

Filed Under: politics, events, mccormack place, nato, vincent lai

If the recipes are legitimate — which we doubt given their lack of resemblance to Achatz's food, but even Kokonas admits he can't be positive that they didn't give some recipe to somebody six years ago — then there is conceivably a legitimate path for these recipes to have ended up on a site like this. Chefs cooperate with magazines and newspapers all the time; Achatz, for instance, submitted this soup (which we have in fact made; it's excellent) to Food & Wine. Two things separate it from the sweet-potato goo on a cracker, though: Food & Wine's credibility as a source and the fact that it's an obviously professional, good-quality recipe. Nevertheless it could arguably be legitimate for a magazine to allow an advertiser to license content like this and run a "Grant Achatz" recipe on their site.

That said, we can say that when we were at Leo Burnett and a big chunk of the Kellogg's account was just a floor or two away, there was no way in hell that Burnett's hyperzealous legal department would have considered the mere fact of the magazine saying it was okay to use the recipe sufficient for one of their clients to trade on Achatz's name and reputation. For someone of Achatz's stature and celebrity, they would have regarded the use of his recipe as a tacit endorsement of the Keebler product, and insisted on documentation saying he allowed his name to appear in conjunction with their brand. (Nevertheless, it's not unknown for major brands to blur this line; a beer company might run an upcoming concerts ad, say, dropping the names of famous rock acts with whom they have no relationship otherwise.)

But it's a different world now, and brands like Kellogg's work with many more marketing partners of many different experience levels, especially for online work, than they did in our Don Draper–esque youth. Here's what we think really happened: In 2006, some public relations firm for Kellogg's generated this pseudo-news article featuring recipes attributed to celebrated chefs around the country. Perhaps Achatz actually muttered this recipe over the phone; perhaps some lazy copywriter faked it, figuring no one would ever see it when it ran in a few small-town newspapers. Either way, it went with Achatz's name into some database of recipes at Kellogg's. Years later some online marketing firm found it there and put it on the Snackpicks.com site, comparatively innocently — bungling the spelling in one of two cases, but using what they considered to be legitimate recipes from an approved client source. (In our day that wouldn't have been enough due diligence for an ad agency's legal department, but as we say, it's a different, sloppier world now.)

In any case, as long as we're theorizing from the outside, we're going to make a prediction about what will happen next. It will involve Kellogg's, a public apology ... and a donation to the University of Chicago Cancer Center.

Filed Under: legal trouble, grant achatz, kellogg's, snackpicks.com

Filed Under: Chefs, dan marquis, farmers, quay

Filed Under: events, cemitas puebla, smoque

Well, there's the whole Questlove thing. And there's another project we may announce shortly, where we would go into an existing operation and tweak it and have a hand in it.

There's a lot going on at Grahamwich. We're bottling our sodas, and we're looking at a second location in the Loop. We're also changing the menu around. We're going in a healthier direction. The feedback we get is that things are too heavy, too messy for weekday lunch, so we're listening to that.

We're making things lighter, adding some salads, and although we don't say farm to table, that's pretty much what we are, so we're making things healthier. We're not dumbing anything down or making it less creative, we're just focusing on what people want.

Some people are embarrassed when they have to change stuff. I'm not worried about that. You have to constantly evolve. What we were a year ago isn't what we're going to be a year from now.

And how about Lollapalooza?

It's good. I just got the list about two hours ago of everybody who wants to do it. So I'll start whittling it down. There's about 25 or 30 concession spots, and we have about a dozen of them to showcase food in Chicago. I don't have anything to tell you, man, except I'm about to start working on that, and it will be awesome. As always.

All right, let's talk about Graham Elliot some more. What made you pick Andrew Brochu?

The main selling point for Andrew was the beard. The beard screams creativity. It's an amazing beard.

I loved what he did at Pops and at Kith & Kin, and his personality. There's really no more of a story to it than that— we were opening a new restaurant, and we had a chef, Brian Runge [now at Premise] who was leaving to start a family, and we needed somebody.

So I called Grant Achatz, who's always been kind of a sounding board for me, and I brought up Andrew who used to work at Alinea. And he said, I don't think there's anyone else in the city who's the guy for you.

So it's not like he had to interview or cook for us. We just met at Grahamwich and I said, what do you think? You'll make your own schedule, create your menu, hire your team, really do your own thing. And so he came on board.

So were you kind of pushed to take Graham Elliot more upscale by the clientele?

Yeah. We had a lot of people say "I loved your food at Avenues, but this place is too loud." And I felt bad losing that clientele, but I also wanted a more casual, accessible place.

I think Graham Elliot now is in the caliber of the best restaurants in the city. We didn't actively look for a Michelin star or a Forbes 4-star rating, but we are going that direction without worrying about specific markers.

I mean, not to be cocky, but every accolade that it's possible to receive, I already got at Avenues. I don't have something to prove here. I look at other restaurants and I think, we can do what they do, but they can't do what we do. Is there a way to say that without sounding dickish?

I think you just have to own it.

Well, we'll do what we do, which is going to be totally different from what others do. We're not just going to step out of the box, but go out on the ledge. Not just in terms of food, but everything, we can do that, because we don't have a budget and a food cost to hit. It's more based on our creativity. At Graham Elliot, I mean— it's the opposite of Grahamwich, where we are listening to our customers and making tasty food that they're asking us for. And not just serving giant fat boy food like I would want to eat.

I'm excited and proud to be in this city. We couldn't be in better company than all the restaurants on Randolph. Chicago is the most creative food spot, without a doubt. San Francisco has access to greater product, and New York ranks higher in terms of actual quantity, but Chicago has the best mix of chefs and supporting locals. Other cities couldn't get away with what happens in this city. Look at the Nuge, Chris Nugent, up on Lawrence, or Ada Street. You can open anywhere and people in this city will go to it.

Previously: Why Graham Elliot Bistro Will Be Like the White Stripes

Filed Under: chefs, andrew brochu, graham elliot, graham elliot bowles, grahamwich, lollapalooza

Filed Under: power & money, andrew mason, groupon, mayor emanuel, yolk

Filed Under: events, mourad lahlou, the bristol

Filed Under: beer, 5 rabbit

Glenn Keefer of the River North restaurants Keefer's and Keefer's Kaffe launched the Keeferfuffle with this piece in Crain's. His arguments are that food trucks are free riders who don't contribute taxes like his restaurants do; that they steal customers by parking in front of existing businesses; that they peddle substandard fare; and that the answer is a pilot program which assigns locations, mandates fixed sanitation equipment, and limits the number of trucks.

2: The Comments

Though a few of the comments at Crain's are personal and nasty toward Keefer, some good points are raised as well. Aaron A.: "When people talk about food trucks not having real estate costs, they seem to forget that under current laws, all that food has to be prepared and packaged in a licensed commercial kitchen." John K.: "I'm failing to come up of a single industry where one business owner is given such a wide barrier against a competitor. I fail to see why these sorts of barriers should exist for food trucks when they park." Jonathan T.: "When was the last time you had to take a bath on an entire days worth of business because it was raining? Are there stretches of 4 month periods where you will take a 80% hit in business because its cold outside. Maybe we should make a law requiring everyone who wants to patronize your establishment to wait outside for 10 minutes before coming in to the restaurant? It's only fair since you have the unfair advantage of climate control and a roof!"

3. Dan Rosenthal Backs Keefer

Dan Rosenthal (Trattoria No. 10, Sopraffina) backs Keefer in this Sun-Times piece: “The reason I’ve located where I have is there’s a very dense population close to my locations. Why should somebody be allowed to take advantage of that for less than one-tenth of the expense?... Every dollar I lose in sales to a food truck down the street costs me 50-cents in profit. It doesn’t take a lot of decline in sales for restaurants to go out of business, particularly in this economy." He also thinks that food truck proponents idealize the movement and don't realize that it could easily result in established businesses flooding the streets, not the creative one-offs they associate the movement with.

4. The Internet Talks Back

Nick Kokonas of Alinea/Next, noting the improbability of Keefer's being affected by a sub sandwich truck, tweeted: "Never wanted to do a Ribeye and Opus One Food Truck until just now. But see how silly that sounds? exactly."

Joe Campagna at Chicago Food Snob: "The battle lines seem to be drawn along creative nimble business ideas and old school brick and mortar restaurants. Are these two really going to compete? Is the nomadic truck that's taken New York and LA by storm going to shut down traditional restaurants? Did I miss a headline where Danny Meyer or Wolfgang Puck had to close a restaurant because of a food truck? Did a Ruth Chris actually close?... Do I want a sandwich from a truck or a plate of pasta or French inspired mussels? Is this even the same conversation? If I make my lunch, it usually costs me about $3-4 a day. No one's going to compete against the brown bag, maybe we should ban that option too."

Foodtruckfreak: "Have you ever given one child 3 quarters and his sibling 10 pennies? The child with 3 quarters may flip out, screaming until they’re blue in the face and emptied of all the tears they can produce because they see it as a blatant injustice. Keefer is the kid with 3 quarters; he has exponentially more resources and luxuries at his disposal than food trucks do. That’s what paying higher taxes affords you (not the right to public streets and walkways). He has the capacity to serve more customers while providing them with a comfortable and reliable place to eat with table-side service. Yet he still cries foul and is throwing tantrum, all the while both he and his “parents” (good ol’ Chicago politicians) get the stink eye from every onlooker. He truly doesn’t understand the great position that his restaurants are in."

Kuma's response... well, go here and see for yourself.

5. Richard Myrick in Crain's

The editor of Mobile Truck, an online magazine about the food truck biz, responds with many of the same arguments as the rest of the online contingent, but his key point from a national perspective is that "The mobile-food industry has been flourishing across the country for nearly four years and with all of the daily research I conduct, I have yet to find a single restaurant that had to shutter its storefront due to food trucks. Chicago's current legislation has left it as the only city among the 50 most populated cities in the country that doesn't allow food-truck operators to prepare their fare on board their roaming bistros. The laws are so archaic that Chicago food trucks cannot carry a knife to cut food or add condiments to their products."

He also notes that the Keefer pilot program would force at least 20% of existing trucks to shut down to meet its 50-truck cap. "Any legislation that is created to oversee food trucks needs to be concerned about public health and safety, not protecting one business model from another."

6. Our Take

Our sympathies and, we believe, the bulk of the arguments lie with the free market, which is to say the pro-food truck, side of the equation. Dan Rosenthal's idea that 50 cents of your lunch money belongs to him unless someone tricks him out of it is a good argument for increased competition, and much of the Keefer argument is a wolf in sheep's clothing designed to cap the number of food trucks and force them to compete away from the Loop and clout-heavy businesses. Competition is the best disinfectant here.

That said, there are legitimate arguments on their side. Why aren't there 50 Subway trucks hogging all the good spots in the Loop, and who says there might not be at some future point? The idea that food trucks get a free ride on many things restaurants pay expensively for has some validity (though as Crain's commenters pointed out, it's not as free a ride as it looks). But by now it's clear that food trucks are far more often new business incubators, not long-term careers for chefs (as evidenced by the likes of Phillip Foss, Matt Maroni, etc.). And if they're an effective way to launch new businesses, then it's legitimate for the city to help foster future large enterprises by giving them a break when they're small, to collect more revenue later— as happens in many other ways all the time.

But those tax breaks and TIF payouts and special concessions usually benefit the well-connected— as the current state of food truck harassment does. To support the little guy and his food truck even to the modest extent of just letting him be, the city would first have to accept the idea that it's a good thing to foster the growth of... somebody nobody sent.

Filed Under: food trucks, keefer's

Filed Under: video feed, alinea, grant achatz, lamb 86

Filed Under: awards, jeff mauro, rick bayless

See, man, that's what people think and it's not true. I'm in Chicago right now. I have two restaurants within six blocks of each other. Chicago is where I live and raise my family, I'm here 46 weeks out of the year. I'm in my restaurants almost every night. Even if I'm not cooking behind the stove, I'm at one of them nearly every day, I've got a big hand in. I designed the logos, I just recorded some new music for the website. I'm not jetting around like some guy with restaurants in Vegas. Who's cooking when I'm not there is the same people who do it when I am there.

Okay, let's start over. What do you want to talk about?

Mainly I want to talk about Andrew and what's going on at Graham Elliot.

I'm really super happy about him being there. The food's honestly better than it's ever been. We've given it a new direction with the sole intent of making it as good as we can. It has nothing to do with Michelin stars or anything like that, I just want to make sure [when Graham Elliot Bistro opens] that we have two distinct entities.

So what is the distinction?

I guess I'd say that one is focusing on the artistry of cooking, and the other is on the craft. GEB is similar to what Graham Elliot was when it opened— only three ingredients per plate, really stripped down. It's focused on technique and craft, where Graham Elliot is more artistic. More focused on every little thing.

GEB is like The White Stripes. You know, you've done all the fancy stuff, now you just want to put together a real simple band and play rock and roll. You want to let everyone know that you do know how to cook— it's searing, roasting, grilling.

So Andrew is the first guy working for me to have the title of executive chef. And Jacob is going to have the same title at GEB. It's important as a leader to let people do their thing, it's a good opportunity for them.

Jacob...

Jacob Saben. He's been at Graham Elliot since the opening. He worked at Herb Farm in Washington state, and then he worked at Spring for a while. He's a classical musician. Everyone in the food world has some kind of music connection, don't they?

Yeah, you almost want to draw an analogy between chefs and rock stars or something. So what's GEB going to be like?

It's like walking back in time. It's pretty cute. Everything will have just three ingredients, real simple tasty stuff. Like there might be a salad with green, white and purple asparagus, and then we'll top it with a fried egg. Or we might do a roasted chicken thigh with potatoes and sauteed greens. Or a pea soup with hamhock and pea tendrils.

There's also going to be a section of the menu called Classics or Reissues that will have some of the favorite things from Graham Elliot, like the Caesar or the risotto.

It's not small plates. It's not sharing. The prices will be low— $6 to $12 for appetizers, $16 to $20 for entrees. Nothing over twenty dollars.

(I hate small plates, by the way. I'm a big guy and I need a certain amount of food or I'm not going to be happy. Don't give me some little plate for four people where you can't even get a whole bite, and then at the end of the night you've just had a bunch of little tastes of stuff. I want my own plate. Like I went to a place that's famous for small plates, and I said to the people I was going with, you have to understand, I'm going to order a bunch of stuff, and it's mine.)

Anyway, to show you the difference, we just spent a fortune on all these fancy new plates for Graham Elliot. And at GEB it will be a tin can holding your silverware with $2 hospital plates.

That's how we got the whole church and rock and roll theme with the candles and all. We had a design for some banquettes and we loved them and they said, it'll be $15,000 each. And we said, no way. So we went on Craigslist and got some church pews for practically nothing, and that's our theme. There won't be any seats at the bar, and there will be a kind of metal screen, like a confessional screen, between the bar and the dining room. And of course the candles [faux religious candles with rock and roll heroes, of which there will be about 200]. There's no place that looks like it.

When will it open?

After NATO! We don't want anybody throwing bricks at it. [He subsequently tweeted June 1.]

It's a neighborhood joint, it'll be open lunch and dinner seven days a week, and brunch on Sundays. It's about 60 seats. It's not some huge Randolph Street thing.

And we'll have an outdoor patio— it's this really cool space in between the buildings that Nellcôte and Brendan Sodikoff's new place—

Yeah, we've seen it. It's like a little side street in Paris or somewhere where all the cafes spill out into the street.

It's really cool. There's nowhere in the city like that.

You know, we weren't looking for another place in the city. We were actually looking for a location for the burger place, which I don't think is ever going to happen now, because who needs another burger. And we found this lease and location.

It's kind of a great way to work— okay, you've got this lease, you've got X amount of time before you have to open, what are you going to do in the space? If Graham Elliot is trying to be one of the best restaurants in town, then let's have something be the opposite. Let's do a simple place that will be reviewed solely on the food.

We were thinking of calling it— well, we were looking at different names. It's not a homage to me and my ego, I'm past that. But we were going to call it Primary— the whole idea of working with just three colors. The problem is, then you search the name and there's some restaurant in Florida or somewhere called Primary that's a piece of crap, and you don't want to have them have your same name. So it's just easier to call it Graham Elliot Bistro.

Tomorrow: Graham Elliot, Grahamwich, and Lollapalooza

Filed Under: chefs, graham elliot, graham elliot bowles