Best Food Writing 2015 (13 page)

If really you want to understand Phillip Foss, you have to understand Michael Carlson. The famously mercurial chef, proprietor of Chicago's famous (or perhaps infamous) restaurant Schwa, can arguably be credited more than any other figure for influencing what EL Ideas—not to mention the city's entire laid-back approach to high-minded cooking—has become. If Alinea is the flagship for Chicago's culinary
avant-gardism, Schwa is the restaurant that, in Foss's words, helped “take the stuffiness out of fine dining,” launching a new generation of more affordable, more low-key tasting menu establishments. “We all certainly owe a tip of the cap to Schwa,” Foss says. “They really are the beginning of the genre.”

And if you want to eat at Schwa, you need to learn the rules. First: call often, as the phones are not answered on a terribly regular basis, and Carlson has a history of closing the restaurant entirely—for a night or two occasionally; one time for a whole six months—with no warning. Second: come bearing gifts. “Should I bring a bottle of booze?” I ask Foss before I head to the restaurant. The booze isn't for me; it's a gift for the cooks. “It never hurts,” he replies. “You may find yourself with a little more attention.” And so I show up to Schwa, located in a three-story building so unremarkable I'm half certain I'm really walking into a Knights of Columbus hall, with a bottle of Elijah Craig twelve-year as a welcome gift. The kitchen accepts it graciously.

Now here's the thing: America's best-reviewed and most expensive tasting menus tend to go hand-in-hand with the country's most expensive wine lists. The conventional wisdom is that restaurants want to offer a beverage experience that's as
haute
as its culinary counterpart. You wouldn't want to drink boxed wine with your multi-hundred-dollar dinner even though you might chug it at home in your sweatpants, so you get the multi-hundred-dollar wine pairing.

But that's a generous way of looking at things. The larger truth is that the razor-thin margins that accompany high food and labor costs mean that restaurants often rely on pricey beverage options to turn a profit—selling a dozen tasting menus won't make a restaurant nearly as much money as would selling hundreds of pizzas. Wine, which commands markups often measured in multipliers rather than percentages, helps offset that imbalance. If a tasting-menu restaurant has no liquor license, it means it can't get one. No normal restaurant would turn that revenue stream down.

But Schwa isn't a normal restaurant. A liquor license isn't that hard to obtain in Chicago, yet there's no sign that Carlson has any plans to obtain one. Instead, he lures entry-level diners (and wine buffs attracted by his next-to-nothing corkage fee of $2.50) to an off-the-beaten-track block where a small staff (there are no servers; the cooks run the food to
diners) and low rents allow him to stay in business despite the lack of alcohol (and despite running a reported sixty percent food cost). Whether Carlson actually makes any money is a different question, but the Schwa model paved the way for other affordable(-ish) tasting-menu-only venues with BYO policies to open in other un-frilly neighborhoods. Among them, the Michelin-starred Goosefoot in Lincoln Square, the two-Michelin-starred 42 grams in Uptown, and of course, EL Ideas.

“I always thought we wanted to be like Schwa,” Foss says of his restaurant. “But just with a little more attention to the front of the house, and the service aspect, and not to be
so
punk rock.” He pauses to consider. “Maybe we're a bit more rock-and-roll.”

Maybe. Walking into Schwa feels like stepping into the studio apartment of a bunch of guys who play a lot of
Grand Theft Auto
, eat a lot of Lucky Charms, and smoke a formidable quantity of expertly rolled blunts. The restaurant is staffed by laconic, heavily bearded men dressed in aprons and sweatshirts; they're the cooks, but also the servers, delivering plates of food to the bare-walled dining room at irregular intervals. EL Ideas, by contrast, is a light, bright, dinner party of a restaurant, with a dedicated front-of-house manager helping the courses land on time. The seating plan, like at Schwa, is table-only, which is somewhat retro-revolutionary by modern fine dining standards, where chef's counter seating is increasingly the norm. EL Ideas books in seatings—all guests dine at once—and Foss addresses the room before each course. A teacher, an announcer, a preacher.

Foss's explanations and segues are illuminating, informal, and, when appropriate, concise. As a roomful of diners faces down a one-bite course of dark chicken meat filled with blue cheese mousse, a side of hot sauce, and a shot of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, Foss introduces it by saying “This time of year is all about football. And football is all about cheap beer and wings.”

A few minutes later, Foss invites all dozen or so of that night's guests into the kitchen half of the space. We gather around a long silver prep table that runs the length of the cooking area, ready to sample what Foss later describes as a “French onion soup ball”—it's beef stock encased in a crouton, topped with gruyere. Once we're all done slurping it up, Foss keeps the party moving. “Okay guys, that's the end of this course,” he says. “So you can pretty much get the fuck out of the kitchen.”

Up next is a bite-sized square of Miyazaki Wagyu wrapped in matsutake mushroom leather, an edible napkin of sorts, which comes with neither knife nor fork. The result is that you end up eating one of the world's most exalted pieces of beef with your hands, as you would an hors d'oeuvre at a cocktail party.

If you didn't know what was in them, none of these unassuming-looking courses would appear out of place at an Applebee's—or inside a cardboard box in the freezer section of your local supermarket. But when you experience their clarity of flavor—the concentrated poultry punch, the airy assertiveness of the blue cheese, the fattiness of the Wagyu—you know you're at a restaurant where serious things are happening.

Yes, Foss is a product of the Chicago avant-garde movement, and he's an upstanding and popular member of the set-menu BYO scene. But what defines him as a chef, most of all, are not his techniques or his liquor policies, but rather his allegiance to both ennobling and subverting the everyday American dining experience, without deconstructing things to the point where they're unrecognizable. (To underscore this point, the French onion soup ball is presented as a surprise: patrons are handed the bite-sized sphere without explanation, and asked to guess what they're eating. It tasted so purely, exquisitely like the bistro staple that I guessed in about two seconds.)

Foss isn't the only one reimagining the American fast food and casual dining palate through a sophisticated lens: Christina Tosi draws on similar references at the Milk Bar bakery chain, with her cereal milk ice creams, Thanksgiving croissants, and birthday cake truffles, and every other fancy chef has a elevated riff on the creamsicle these days. But no one except Foss is so consistently fusing the nostalgic and the innovative in a high-end sitting—and with such aplomb and accessibility.

Pack that all in with the Big Lebowski guy and the baby bottles and you've got yourself a proper dose of interactive performance art, or as Moorman calls it, “dining-tainment.” In the past, that phrase has evoked hokey theme restaurants geared toward little kids or bad first dates. In the modern era of dinner as theater, however, such frivolities are a more seamless (if not subtle) part of the evening. Think of the card tricks at New York's Eleven Madison Park, or watching smoke come out of a fellow diner's nose after the nitro-lime mousse at The Fat Duck. At EL
Ideas, the playfulness is built into the foundation. I haven't had a more entertaining dinner in years.

The best course I try at EL Ideas is one Foss tells me is inspired by his daughters, who have cottoned on to the classic Wendy's off-menu pairing of dipping french fries in a chocolate Frosty. In his homage, Foss pours liquid nitrogen–chilled vanilla ice cream over a classic potato-leek soup, turning the vichyssoise into a creamy slush for a split second, before the heat of thrice-fried yukon gold nuggets at the bottom of the bowl melts everything back to liquid. The changing textures and flavors paint a culinary sine wave, starting at one place, rising up, and falling back down again. Ferran Adrià would wish he thought of this. But I bet Adrià never wished his beloved El Bulli, in its picturesque stone farmhouse on Spain's beautiful Costa Brava, was situated here, in a rundown part of Chicago.

Wander south of the restaurant, and you'll pass anonymous buildings with faded signs and indistinct names like Midwest Folding Products, Midland Warehouses, and Top of the Line Total Auto Repair. Walk to the northwest and you'll eventually hit the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center. There's little residential housing over here. Pedestrians are rare too, but cars are not—there are plenty driving through, they just don't stop. “We're in a vortex of Chicago,” Foss tells me. “More like a black hole,” Moorman adds, joking that there's no reason to come to the neighborhood “unless your child is in jail.”

Strolling the streets around EL Ideas evokes stories my father used to tell me about working in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick in the 1980s, back when that part of town was an industrial area full of warehouses and the junkies who'd squat in them. Now, thirty-five years later, Bushwick's warehouses have been turned into desirable (and increasingly costly) loft apartments, and the neighborhood is full of young, artsy types. This is thanks in part to the anchoring effect of a single groundbreaking restaurant: in 2009, a place called Roberta's started wooing in residents from Manhattan and other parts of Brooklyn with ambitious, Italian-accented small plates and some of the city's best Neapolitan pizzas, all served in a cool, quirky, stripped-down setting. It turned out to be the type of restaurant you could build a neighborhood around.

It's not clear if EL Ideas is cut from the same cloth. For all its friendliness and inviting appeal, a tasting menu–only format doesn't create the same kind of vibe as Roberta's expansive fiefdom, which started with pizza but now—behind just one door—includes a hip pizza shop, an outdoor tiki garden, a shipping-container indie radio station, and a high-end chefs' counter tucked away in the very back, where a handful of lucky diners each night get to have one of New York's most acclaimed tasting menus. Nearly four years into EL Ideas' run, there are few new businesses nearby, and no new residential housing. The closest a la carte eateries are a Burger King and a dive called Watering Hole, whose website boasts “Our pizzas aren't frozen!”

But Foss has plans. He says he's toying with the idea of opening a barbecue joint in a shipping container across the street, and a cocktail den in the same building as the restaurant. To his mind, the key to any expansion would be proximity to EL. “I couldn't do something on the north side of Chicago,” he says. This is because he is, to use his phrase, a control freak: “If I don't have control, I wind up not being happy.” He also believes in his neighborhood, placing his faith in a
Field of Dreams
–style determinism. “This place is a little freak of nature,” he explains of the success of EL Ideas. “I call it the Costner project: ‘If you build it, they will come.'”

The real heart of Foss's strategy isn't necessarily what he plans on doing, but how he plans to do it: with his own money. And while the chef is relaxed on the issue of financing, Akiko Moorman is not. “I've been a very strong advocate of getting others to understand that need to start self-funding in this industry,” she says. “Letting outside investors control what the chef does, where the chef cooks, what goes on the menu—really, that's one of the industry's biggest downfalls. And until we have enough successful chefs who are willing to give back and start funding younger chefs with an angel investment group, we are not going to see what this industry can do. We're not going to see artists really flourish, because they'll still have a money man saying ‘I want a TV in the bar, and I want a loaded baked potato on the menu.'”

Moorman walks the talk: a former bookkeeper and line cook, she manages the restaurant's payroll, as well as the entire restaurant's finances. This gives her less of an urgent eye towards profit, and more room to understand how to help the restaurant grow organically. “Most
of the time, investors are money men or real estate guys,” she points out. “At the end of the day, they don't give a shit. They want their money. And that could be the death of a restaurant.”

It's hard to imagine an investor approving of Foss's wacky “Tastes like Teen Spirit” dinner series, during which he collaborated with other local chefs on 1990s inspired dishes (the late Homaro Cantu, of Moto, made a Clintonian Cuban “cigar” sandwich course, served in an ashtray). I also wonder what a backer might think of Foss doing shots of bourbon (poured from a bottle bestowed by a guest) in the kitchen with a crowd of diners, as he does at the end of our dinner service. No one's doing that with Joshua Skenes at Saison, I'd guess. Foss knocks back his drink quickly, Schwa style. And this is when Foss tells me a bit more about his wonderful culinary cocaine.

“We had a state rep in from Illinois recently,” he tells me, a few steps away from the crowd. “And she saw the cocaine back here, where we keep it in a jar, and she just put a little bit in her nose. And I'm like, ‘No, don't do that, don't do that! You put it in your mouth!' And so she goes to put it in her mouth, and she's rubbing the cocaine on her gums.”

He pauses for dramatic effect. “A fucking state representative!” He's thrilled, delighted, a little disbelieving—exactly how I feel after a night spent eating the man's food. Foss turns back to the crowd of adoring diners, says his goodbyes, and heads upstairs to his apartment.

Author's Note:
It's impossible to talk about avant-gardism in Chicago without talking about Homaro Cantu, the Moto chef who pushed boundaries (scientific, culinary, and more) like no one else. On April 13, after I reported, wrote, and filed this story, Cantu committed suicide. It turned out that the '90s dinner on which Foss and Cantu collaborated happened to take place on the same day that Cantu was hit with a lawsuit by one of his investors. I called Foss shortly after I heard the news. “I half expected him not to show up,” Foss recalled of their dinner. But show up he did, and the evening was a wild success. Upon learning of Cantu's death, Foss told me that he had all his cooks come to the front of the house before service, and raise a glass to the chef's memory.