Best Food Writing 2015 (12 page)

“That's why I'm really proud of what we did here,” he said over his cup of sake. “I'm proud of the big things, but I'm also proud of the little things we routinely did well. Do you know what made me most proud in the meal I served you? The Wagyu beef. It was
perfectly
cooked.”

“The advantage of sous vide,” someone said.

“But it wasn't sous vide!” Dufresne said. “That's the thing. It was
cooked in a pan. And it had no
gray
on it! Do you know how hard that is? Do you know how much work that takes? Turning the beef every seven or eight seconds . . . And so that question you asked me before, about food and music—that's my answer: a perfect piece of Wagyu beef cooked in a pan that comes out without any gray on it. It might not be ‘When the Levee Breaks,' but it's definitely ‘Achilles Last Stand.'”

Someone's in the Kitchen
Someone's in the Kitchen

No Chef in America Cooks Dinner Quite Like Phillip Foss
No Chef in America Cooks Dinner Quite Like Phillip Foss

B
Y
R
YAN
S
UTTON

From Eater

          
As the website
Eater.com
has re-energized long-form food writing, so has its iconoclastic food critic Ryan Sutton, who also blogs for
Bloomberg.com
(
The Price Hike, The Bad Deal
). When he anoints a Chicago chef as the cutting-edge guy to watch, sit up and take notice.

I've never done blow, but many of my ex-girlfriends have, and so when Phillip Foss hands me a mirror, a razor, and a gram of white powder, I know what to do. Sort of.

I'm sitting at a table at EL Ideas, Foss's restaurant in a warehouse-filled corner of Chicago's near south side. Against a backdrop of an empty basketball court, a juvenile detention center, a shuttered animal shelter in a condemned building, a freight train yard, a bar that serves strong drinks to strong train yard workers, and a gas station convenience store whose clerk sits behind bulletproof glass, a tasting-menu-only restaurant with a Michelin star stands out. But this isn't your ordinary tasting-menu-only restaurant. For starters, there's the cocaine course.

“Of course, it's culinary cocaine,” clarifies Akiko Moorman, the restaurant's director of operations. “So it goes in your mouth and not up your nose.”

I pick up the tiny straw that accompanies the dish and use it to orally inhale the powder, which turns out to be a mixture of dehydrated coconut and lime. The taste is clean and clear. It evokes a high-end riff on
Pixy Stix, the powdered sugar candy that my rough-and-tumble friends and I would eat (and occasionally snort) before high school track meets in the mid '90s.

As I use the razor to separate the powder into narrow lines, Moorman nods her head toward an adjacent table, where a pair of diners—a young man with a black mohawk, and a woman who I recognize as a manager at one of Chicago's most heralded restaurants—are making sharp, studied, chopping motions with their razors.

“That's how you know they're experts,” Moorman jokes, explaining that the practice grinds out any lumps in more potent versions of the powder. The cocaine course reveals a lot about people. “We actually just had an incident,” Moorman says. “A guy came here who had been to rehab not too long ago. When the cocaine course came out, he briefly left the restaurant to call his sponsor.”

EL Ideas—the name begs to be pronounced with a Spanish accent, but don't: “EL” refers to Chicago's elevated public transit system—is an atypical restaurant in an atypical location. It's officially in an area called Douglas Park, tucked into an industrial corner that feels miles away from everything, but to consider it a neighborhood restaurant, one must take an expansive view of the word “neighborhood.”

At EL Ideas, sometimes one must also take an expansive view of utensils. Sure, there's a fancy scallop course with arugula puree, and a lamb course with olive sauce, both consumed traditionally, with knives and forks. But then there's that inhaled coconut-lime powder. On some occasions, there's a “Twix Bar”: a chicken liver-topped crouton dipped in chocolate that's eaten with the hands. On other nights, there's a raw milk course served in a baby bottle. “Foss was going through this infantile stage,” Moorman recalls. “I've never seen so many uncomfortable men! Foss told everyone to pinch the nipple, shake it, and suck.”

On the night I'm there, patrons aren't asked to suck anything, but they are asked to lift a small, clear glass bowl to their faces and lick a caviar-topped, solid-state White Russian off of it. Why a glass dish? “So you can see a person licking in front of you,” Foss says. “And who doesn't enjoy that?” Indeed, a roomful of diners ingesting the dish is so collectively suggestive that the performance wouldn't be out of place on Cinemax After Dark. Is it the best way to appreciate good caviar? Not necessarily. But it loosens you up for the cocaine to come.

It's not quite what you'd expect from a forty-five-year-old Milwaukee native who speaks with a proper Midwest accent and a mouthful of curses. Foss is five-foot ten. He's dirty blond. During service he wears a blue button-down whose design has more in common with an auto mechanic's uniform than it does with traditional chefs' whites. His cooking has been exuberantly praised by the Chicago
Tribune
, but you won't find his spot on a national or global best-restaurants list, nor will you read much about it in national publications run by out-of-town food writers or gastronauts. For all its brilliance, EL Ideas is still very much under the radar, still very much undersold.

This may be because Foss is very good at underselling. “I'm not going to kid myself; this will never be a three Michelin-star restaurant, ever,” he tells me before dinner service. Guests are starting to fill up the room; it's warmly lit with lots of exposed brick, roughly divided into dining room and kitchen by a waist-high wall. “We're so far outside the box. We play loud hip-hop. We do not give a fuck.”

Except he very much does give a fuck. He lives with Moorman in the apartment above the restaurant (the two have been a couple since 2012). He produces intelligent, whimsically modernist food that's studied enough to earn EL Ideas one Michelin star, if not yet three. He talks about the expansion of his empire with more circumspection than some policy analysts lend to prognostications of nuclear war. He admits to being very stressed about my presence in the dining room. He hasn't left the country since EL Ideas opened, has barely left the city. Chicago is one of the world's most important food cities, and he's one of Chicago's most important chefs.

More than any other city, Chicago is the heart of America's experimental dining movement. A progressive, inventive philosophy underscores many of its best restaurants, one that isn't found with the same intensity or focus elsewhere.

To be sure, other major cities have their own culinary stories. The tasting menu spots dotting the San Francisco Bay area, from Manresa to Saison to Meadowood, fit into the region's ethos—celebrations of Pacific seafood and odes to vegetables—as befits both a region that is (current drought notwithstanding) the country's largest supplier of agriculture, and a contemporary restaurant lineage that stretches back to Alice Waters' mission to teach diners to value their beets as much as
their beef. In New York, fine dining has long been driven by the city's financial titans, whose risky market behavior doesn't always extend to their eating habits; for the most part, the Big Apple palate remains neo-classical, inoffensive, and indulgent, anchored on restaurants like Le Bernardin, Daniel, Jean-Georges, and Del Posto. Despite the city's recent trend towards lighter, longer, let's-have-a-slice-of-pizza-afterward set menus, New York generally plays to the center, rather than pushing the envelope too hard.

In Chicago, all bets are off. Think: helium-filled taffy balloons at Alinea, edible menus at Moto, ice-encased old-fashioneds that you crack open with a slingshot at Aviary, psychedelic king crab terrariums at Grace, spruce juice-filled test tubes at Elizabeth, and at EL Ideas, spearmint ice cream that's nitro-frozen to such an intensely frozen hardness that it mimics the texture of a candy cane. “I do think Chicago is the food capital of America,” says Moorman. “It has the most interesting food. The most soulful food. The most thoughtful food.”

But it takes more than soul and thought to run an experimental restaurant—Chicago's plentiful and relatively affordable real estate (paired with a good number of affluent, open-minded diners) seals the city's position as the
avant
-avant-garde. “The rent is the biggest factor,” Moorman explains. “Coming here from New York, it's like traveling to a country with a favorable exchange rate. You don't have to put a burger on your menu to be successful here. You don't have to pay back $1.4 million dollars that you borrowed to open your restaurant. There are truly chef-owners here, in a way that nobody in New York can say they are. In New York, they're slaves to their investors.”

Indeed. Foss doesn't rely on a single dime of outside capital at EL Ideas. Thanks to the restaurant's out-of-the-way location, he can afford to be the business's sole owner. He doesn't carry any real debt on the restaurant's equipment; paying off all of any major purchases within the month, from the immersion circulators to the high-tech Pacojet that makes sorbets so clean and stable you can go out for a mid-course smoke and your dessert still won't have melted by the time you come back inside.

All of this enables Foss to take risks he couldn't elsewhere. But the other advantage of being experimental in Chicago is that the city is used to it. “You have a dinership that is forgiving and incredibly adventurous,”
Moorman says. The proof is on the books: Nearly four years after opening, tables at EL Ideas are still mostly all booked up two months out.

Foss seems surprised by his own success: “It was never meant to be sustainable on its own,” he says of the restaurant. “I was always just expecting this place to be a stipend, financially, to the food truck.” He ran that food truck, a mobile protein purveyor called MeatyBalls, from 2010 to 2011, regularly attracting lines two dozen deep. But his career didn't necessarily point to a career selling
Saturday Night Live
–inspired lamb-and-pork “Schweddy balls” out of a service window on wheels.

After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in 1991, Foss accrued a serious lineup of fine dining merit badges on his resume, including stints at New York's Quilted Giraffe and Oceana in the early 1990s, a five-year tenure at Le Cirque that same decade, as well as some time at seminal Chicago-modernist restaurant Tru in 2000. But then things get muddy: Foss, rather than staging at Ivy League restaurants like Noma or Mugaritz, spent many of his pre–EL Ideas years at hotel restaurants that weren't exactly known as incubators of promising gastronomic talent. He put in two years at the Four Seasons in Maui. He logged ten months at The King David in Jerusalem (Foss, a non-observant Jew, speaks Hebrew). He bounced around Brazil (“best time of my life”) and Bermuda (where he unhappily cooked old-school French fare).

“I thought my dreams of being a respectable chef who would ever have a nice restaurant were drifting,” he says of that period. He came back to Chicago in 2008 to run the show at Lockwood, the fine-dining restaurant inside the Palmer House Hilton, where he pulled in critical raves but was fired two years later after making a lighthearted pot joke on Twitter. Now, he makes cocaine jokes on your plate.

The story Foss tells is that EL Ideas happened by accident. The building that now houses the restaurant was being used as a commissary for his meatball truck; the twist that transformed it into a sit-down dining room was the result of, of all things, a health department inspection. During a routine check, Foss recalls, the inspector said, “I'm not really sure what type of license to give you, but you have a dining space over here, and so I'll give you a restaurant license.” That was all it took. Says Foss: “That was the epiphany. And two months later we were open.”

At first, Foss ran EL Ideas and MeatyBalls simultaneously. The early
days were rocky. A week after EL Ideas opened, Foss and his wife separated. (His two daughters, six and eight years old, stay with him on Sundays and Mondays.) Six months later, the restaurant was on the verge of closing, an outcome Foss averted by taking on a zero-interest loan from an angel investor (which he has since paid back in full). Shortly after that investment, Foss found out an office manager had siphoned off around $30,000 in funds to pay for her wedding.

So he closed the food truck and focused all his energy on EL. The extortion “turned out to be quite a blessing in disguise,” Foss says. Running two businesses at once was taking its toll: “I was getting up at four a.m., I wasn't coming home until after midnight.” Shutting the lights off on the meatball business “gave me my sanity and energy back.”

With nothing else competing for his culinary attention, Foss was able to double down on those elevated ideas that give his restaurant its name. Given all the culinary boundary-pushing that happens in this corner of Douglas Park, you'd be forgiven for thinking that Foss is positioning himself to become the next Grant Achatz or Heston Blumenthal. But then you watch a staffer dressed up as the Dude from
The Big Lebowski
stroll through the dining room, the entertainment portion of the White Russian caviar course. Foss explains that the preparation was inspired by a regular who took advantage of the restaurant's BYO policy to mix up the namesake cocktail for himself during dinner service.

Nope, EL Ideas is definitely not the Fat Duck. And Foss is not Blumenthal. Nor is he Achatz. Nor—his suggestive coconut-lime intermezzo notwithstanding—is he your standard coke-addled cook, despite the drug's ubiquity in the hospitality industry. (“I never understood chefs who do cocaine,” he says. “It numbs your mouth. You can't taste anything.”) And while the easy answer would be to say he's his own man, offering his own wacky take on the avant-garde, Foss's brilliant-slacker approach to fine dining is in fact the product of a thread that started in Chicago's restaurant community back in 2005.