Chicago is a city famed for its cuisine, and now some of its finest chefs are adding sustainability to their menus. Liz Grossman pulls up a chair
It may be known as the Windy City, but for most of the year Chicago’s weather is plagued with more than just gusts and gales. Sub-zero temperatures, blizzards and a nasty thing the natives like to call ‘lake-effect’ snow definitely overstay their welcome each winter and hang around until early spring. That is when it is time for Chicago chefs such as Frontera Grill and Topolobampo chef-owner Rick Bayless to bring out the big guns in the kitchen. We are not talking about soul-soothing deep-dish pizza or hibernation-friendly porterhouse steaks and potatoes – we are talking tomatoes, 8,000kg to be exact. Organic heirloom.
‘Even in the dead of winter, 45 per cent of what we serve is locally grown,’ says Bayless, chef, host of the TV show Mexico – One Plate at a Time, and cookbook author who has been implementing green practices in his regional Mexican restaurants for more than 20 years. He is able to use locally grown produce year-round by having his farmers freeze what they grow during warm months. When Chicago is blessed with balmy temperatures in late spring and summer, Bayless serves about 85 per cent local produce, taking advantage of resources such as the 10-year-old Green City Market (a farmer’s market in Lincoln Park of which Bayless is a founding member), and urban gardens set up both on the roof of his restaurants and in his own backyard.
‘I love living in the middle of all that growing,’ says Bayless, ‘there’s nothing better for a chef than actually to put stuff in the ground and be in touch with the real rhythm of agriculture. It really makes you understand how difficult it is to be a farmer.’
For the restaurants’ salads, Bayless plucks greens, flowers and herbs from his home garden from April to November, while tomatoes and chillies flourish in organic earth boxes on the roof of his adjoining restaurants. For other fresh produce that appears on his menus as well as some organic meats, Bayless turns to his not-for-profit Frontera Foundation, a five-year-old organisation he founded with wife, Deann, that awards grants to small Chicago-area and Midwest farmers dedicated to sustainable practices. ‘We push farmers to extend the season, become more productive and use more product,’ Bayless says. The chef has also offered no-interest loans to small farmers who are able to build new greenhouses and pay him back in product – from goat meat to spinach.
While Bayless’ restaurants are located in Chicago’s bustling River North area, Chef Bruce Sherman’s North Pond is nestled in the heart of Lincoln Park, just steps from the Green City Market. Set up in front of the Arts and Crafts-style restaurant is a small garden where anise hyssop, fennel, chives, basil, lovage and other herbs grow. The chef has always used local and sustainable products on his seasonal American menu, especially in the summer when fresh produce is readily available.
‘What I do is find seasonal product through sources I can trust and people I know. I have a relationship with the people and the food they’re producing, rather than just a box or a nameless, faceless purveyor,’ he says.
Sherman, who is on the board of the Green City Market and is a part of Chefs Collaborative, a national organisation of chefs focused on sustainability and responsible food sourcing, also strives to use local ingredients on his menu. ‘Because it’s local, it won’t have travelled very far – which means it’s going to be ripened in the field or on the tree,’ he says. ‘It’s not going to taste like a truck.’
You only have to experience the immaculate eight-course vegetable degustation at Chicago’s world-renowned Charlie Trotter’s to understand another famous chef’s passion for produce. ‘I think vegetable or green cuisine is more interesting, there are more textures, more flavours, more colours,’ says Trotter. ‘I never understood the idea of getting a big old piece of meat and then just eating the same thing over and over. I’d rather have a little bit of meat, but then have a purée of fava beans and braised morels and sweet and sour rhubarb essence, and all these things that represent early May, and they can augment that piece of meat or game bird or fish.’
Trotter, who has been a proponent of green practices – from recycling to sourcing organic produce – since the restaurant opened in 1987, also works extensively with local Midwestern farms and purveyors for produce, meat and dairy products.
‘We use a lot of farmers who are willing to rotate crops, or leave certain areas of the farm unplanted for a season or two at a time to re-enrich the soil,’ says Trotter, who was honoured with the 2008 Global Gastronomy Award by the Sweden-based White Guide. The restaurant bible recognised the chef for his commitment to green gastronomy and ecological thinking on the worldwide restaurant scene.
‘It was Alice Waters who put it best. Chefs and restaurateurs have an obligation to support the farmer because they are the ones that are the caretakers of the earth, and this is where we get the food from,’ says Trotter, who has always been inspired by the chef-owner of Berkeley, California’s 39-year-old restaurant Chez Panisse.
Besides focusing on where the food comes from, eco-conscious chefs are also concerned with where the food goes, not to mention oils, cardboard boxes and bottles that accumulate in the kitchen. Sherman originally did not have space for composting, but integrated a recycling and composting programme in 2006. ‘It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it knowing that it’s going to the right place,’ he says.
Bayless has always recycled in his restaurants, starting with the returnable glass soft drink bottles that were in use when he first started out. ‘We go through two tons of waste a week that’s turned into compost,’ says Topolobampo’s chef de cuisine Brian Enyart, ‘and about 140kg of oil a week is being recycled into bio-diesel.’ With premises located in a 100-year-old house on Lincoln Park’s boutique- and café-lined Armitage Avenue, Trotter does not have the space for composting, but he has taken steps to recycle. ‘We’ve been doing that since the day we opened. It’s not been easy, but we separate plastics and glass and we break down cardboard that’s clean,’ he says.
The chef dreams of owning a plot of land one day where he can compost and grow fresh produce in the style of chef Gordon Sinclair: ‘He tried to grow as much as he could for his restaurant, Gordon, at least in the summer months – tomatoes and zucchini and strawberries and different things, and he was into composting. That’s a dream I have in the next couple of years – to obtain some plot of land where we can do similar things,’ says Trotter.
While Chicago’s established culinary bigwigs strive to push their green credentials as far as possible within space and building restraints, it is the newer restaurants that have the luxury of opening in green spaces that are Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-certified or have room for earth boxes, gardens and composting piles. In 2007, chef Michael Altenberg opened the Midwest’s first certified organic pizza restaurant, Crust, in Wicker
Park. The restaurant, filled with furniture made from recyclable materials, has fresh herbs in earth-filled boxes on the patio, organic Rain vodka cocktails and wood-fired flatbread pizzas topped with vegetables, meats and cheeses. This year, restaurateur Dion Antic opened a bite-sized rock ‘n’ roll-themed hot-dog joint not far from Crust, dubbed Rockstar Dogs. The vegetable oil from its fryers powers up bio-diesel Mercedes Benz delivery vans, and recyclable drink cans replace cups, straws and lids. And chefs such as Randy Zweiban, who is known for his Nuevo Latino restaurant Nacional 27, will open a new, 390sq m restaurant in September 2008 in a LEED-certified building in the Fulton River District. The restaurant, Province, will feature 5m windows, as well as motion detectors in the bathrooms. Zweiban will serve filtered water and is considering banning bottled beer at the bar. His upscale American café with Spanish and South American influences will feature tables, linens and chairs made from recycled materials and triple-pane glass to keep temperatures regulated.
‘I’m learning that a lot of these things five years from now will become codes for buildings in the city,’ says Zweiban, who also plans to source meat and produce from local farmers as much as possible, including sustainable seafood such as hybrid striped bass raised in pools and organic product. ‘If it makes sense,’ adds Zweiban. ‘We may get something from a farm that has sustainable practices, but it doesn’t have to be deemed organic.’
Bayless also has a new restaurant in the works, slated for spring 2009. The LEED-certified space will feature energy-efficient exhaust hoods in the kitchen, solar panels and furniture made from recycled materials, but the chef is still on the hunt for energy-efficient lighting that ‘glows like the hearth in a welcoming home’. Details are not finalised, but Trotter is also opening a 2009 restaurant at the Elysian Hotel in the Gold Coast with partner David Pisor, Alice Waters’ nephew.
‘[He’s] steeped in a whole mindset of green and alternative and natural innovations,’ says Trotter. ‘I took a lot of inspiration from Alice Waters when I first began cooking in the early 80s. [I was] reading about what she was trying to do with local farmers and how she was trying to support organics as much as possible. So from the day we opened this place that was music to my ears and our mantra. That’s how we approached it even though this is fine dining and most of our clients have no idea that this is what we try to support or elevate or celebrate.’
Whether their steadfast diners realise it or not, these and other Chicago chefs and restaurateurs continue to heighten their eco-consciousness – despite weather, location, building and city permit-restrictions – and to infuse a bit more green into a meat-and-potatoes town.
WHERE TO EAT
Charlie Trotter’s
816 West Armitage Avenue Tel: (+1) 77 3248 6228 www.charlietrotters.com Ever-changing prix fixé tasting menus celebrate the bounty of the seasons, while almost 2,000 wines are available from around the world.
Frontera Grill and Topolobampo
445 North Clark Street
Tel: (+1) 31 2661 1434 www.fronterakitchens.com These adjacent restaurants (Frontera is the more casual of the two) feature regional Mexican cuisine in a bright, festive setting. Everything on the menu is mouth-watering.
North Pond
2610 North Cannon Drive Tel: (+1) 77 3477 5845 www.northpondrestaurant.com Hidden in the heart of Lincoln Park with a view of the Chicago skyline, this is a place to which local foodies flock for grass-fed beef, game dishes and the soft-boiled farm egg with morels, fava beans and crisp potato nest.
Crust
2056 West Division Street
Tel: (+1) 77 3235 5511 www.crustchicago.com ‘Eat Real’ is the tag line of this organic Wicker Park pizza place. Wood-fired flatbreads include the ‘shroom’ with goat’s cheese, béchamel and cremini mushrooms and the ‘flammkuchen’ with bacon, onions, caraway seeds and aged Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Rockstar Dogs
801 North Ashland Avenue Tel: (+1) 31 2421 2364 www.rockstar-dogs.com This bite-sized hot-dog restaurant features Chicago-style red hots named after rock stars, like the Sting (a veggie dog) and the Kiss dog – masked in chilli cheese.
Province
161 North Jefferson
Street Slated to open in 2009, this upscale
American café will feature influences from Spain and
South America such as spice-rubbed, grilled ahi tuna tacos.
Comments are closed.