![]() ![]() “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. The custard is so delicate that the baked quiche has to chill overnight before it can even be sliced. The fat content in the dough is so high that you can’t trim the edges before it’s baked: Without the excess overhang serving as a counterweight, the dough would collapse in on itself. Except at Cellar Door, the ratios are pushed to the brink: less egg in relation to cream and milk in the custard, more butter laminated into the pâte brisée, yielding a crust with puff pastry–like flakiness. The quiche is based on Thomas Keller’s recipe from Bouchon Bakery, which another of Cellar Door’s owners, Ethan Pikas, learned while cooking at a fine-dining restaurant in Phoenix called Binkley’s. “What you’re doing is not terribly engaging-you’re buzzing milk, cream, and eggs.” Also: “You don’t want to taste tons of dairy all the time.” “But no one is going to have a good time making more quiche than that,” he says. “I think we could probably sell more?” says Tony Bezsylko, one of the owners, in the form of a question, as if he’d never thought about it before. Photo by Alex LauĬellar Door bakes four quiches a day (five on weekends), each of which is divided into ten slices. The now legendary quiche, served with a little pile of greens from Three Sisters Garden in Kankakee, Illinois. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |