Pikas doesn’t dabble he drills down, writing detailed recipes in painfully neat handwriting on small pieces of notebook paper, then tweaking and rewriting them until he reaches something that approximates perfection.
CELLAR DOOR PROVISIONS HOW TO
“It was a one-and-a-half-year endeavor of my figuring out how to make croissants,” Pikas says.
Most people open restaurants so they can serve dishes they already know how to make. On more than one occasion, I’ve seen more people shaping loaves of bread and laminating croissants than eating in the actual restaurant.Ī perfectly swirly oolong-plum laminated brioche Photo by Alex Lau In lieu of fancy, shiny equipment, there are jars of various shapes and sizes lining shelves set up wherever there’s space. And a “chef " is not something you would be able to easily identify in the open kitchen, which has often looked to me a bit like some kind of Oberlin College food co-op. The place has never received a formal, starred review from a critic. “After four dinners, we decided to open a neighborhood spot,” Bezsylko says, “with no real plan. The two had begun collaborating on “Bread Nights” at Bezsylko’s house: pop-up dinners built around the sought-after loaves. Pikas grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, but the only experience he’d had at a local restaurant was doing a stage (the restaurant equivalent of an internship) at Alinea. Unable to find good bread in Chicago, he studied the Tartine Bread book and began baking his own, two loaves at a time, then somehow 30 loaves a week, which he sold to friends out of his house in Humboldt Park. The Cellar Door crew had none of this context.īezsylko had moved to Chicago in 2010 from Berkeley, where he was working on his dissertation in philosophy and riding his bike to Tartine Bakery three times a week. Chicago’s food scene is informed by who worked for whom: You come up under, say, Paul Kahan, or Mindy Segal, or Rick Bayless. None of the articles written about the opening indicated who the chef was.
It goes back to 2013, when Pikas and Bezsylko signed a lease on a corner space in Logan Square, had a friend build two long wooden tables for the dining room, brought on two more cooks (Justin Behlke and Alex Truong), handwrote the menu on a roll of butcher-block paper, and, in February 2014, opened Cellar Door Provisions. How is it possible that some of the most original cooking happening anywhere in this country is at a restaurant that has never touted its chef as any kind of public figure, and in fact, for a long time, didn’t really have a head chef in the traditional sense at all?
It’s also weird because the hype surrounding a new restaurant opening pretty much always revolves around who the chef is. This might not seem that weird-plenty of people go out to eat without caring who the chef is-except that as a food writer, it’s been my job for the past decade to know this type of information. Cellar Door Provisions has been my favorite restaurant in my hometown of Chicago for years, but until recently I could not have told you who the chef was. “I can’t see any pleasure in having a quiche factory.” Part 2: The Chef “The more of something you make, the worse it gets,” Bezsylko says. And the quiche matters so much that no compromises will ever be made to sacrifice its quality. It matters that the food makes you feel good and healthy-not just as a diner but also as a cook. It tells you that it also matters whether the cooks enjoy working on something. But it also tells you that there’s more to Cellar Door than creating the best possible version of something. The quiche tells you what uncommonly, absurdly, perfectionist-ly good cooking is going on at Cellar Door Provisions. But I think the quiche-both in its greatness and in its limitations-makes the clearest introduction to the very particular mentality of this restaurant. I have a lot of thoughts about Cellar Door: about why it’s my favorite restaurant in Chicago, about why it’s significant that it’s in Chicago, about how it rejects and rethinks so many deeply ingrained aspects of restaurant culture.
0 kommentar(er)
