And Here We Are...

After an epic two weeks I've made it.

Home, sweet home to New York.

To be honest, my body feels like bombed-out London after The Blitz. A Luftwaffe of decadent food, cheap beer, a 15-hour road trip, and little sleep have left me unable to process thoughts more complex than hunger or fatigue. But what I can gather in my shell-shocked state is that I have made the right choice. It was a difficult one to leave so many friends, and a city I called home for six years behind, but it was most certainly time to start the next phase of my life.

But my existential satisfaction is uninteresting compared to the aforementioned hedonistic food fest I've been going through the last couple weeks.

See, a lot of people I know created a bucket list that involved experiencing things you could only do in Chicago, e.g. the Sears/Willis Tower, Millennium Park, a Cubs or Sox game, Second City, Lake Michigan, all that jazz. When it came time for me and Wilson to leave Chicago, we strove to create an epic gastronomic tour of the city that would let us experience the wondrous food culture of Chicago.

Unfortunately, we grossly underestimated our own capacity for gluttony and our ineptitude in terms of packing.

Our ambitious gorging fell short. We didn't come close to going to all the places we had intended to. But we did hit the classics and a few new spots. Now as you know, I don't really do restaurant reviews. I have neither the qualifications, the gumption nor the desire to critique someone else's work like that. But I like to try to understand restaurants and glean a little helpful advice from them.

At the heart of any good restaurant is a soul. A restaurant is a projection of someone's desire to care for and nurture others. How they choose to do so will inevitably present itself in the decor, the food, the atmosphere, the employees, the general "feel" of the place. A soulless chain restaurant, a purely money-making endeavor will also show its true colors, and though they may get by on pure volume and aggressiveness alone, I think they are truly sad and unworthy places.

Now a restaurant can range anywhere from a dive joint, replete with kitschy decor, simple food and loud music to an austere temple of cuisine; quiet as a library with silverware costing a few months' rent, and a holistic sense to the whole event. We didn't really get around to any of the latter, and given the pounding my bank account has taken, I won't be doing so any time soon. And you may think that there is the most to be learned from these so-called "temples" as they garner the most respect and praise in the food world. And that may be true. But I don't think a simple "dive joint" deserves any less attention or that is has any less to offer. After all what truly measures success is how long your doors open, and how excited people are to come through them night after night. The color and the appearance don't matter.

Let me talk briefly about Hot Doug's and Kuma's Corner. From an outsider's view, all you can see is the strange decor (Elvis and obnoxiously bright primary colors, Death Metal and dark wood bars, respectively) and lines of people snaking around the building. A quick glance at their menu will tell you that they focus on one thing each; hot dogs/encased meats and hamburgers. They are far and out of the way from the rest of Chicago civilization, Hot Doug's boasts some limited hours of operation, and the smoke from vaporized beef fat at Kuma's is suffocating. But yet they consistently deliver an exciting and delicious experience at a very fair price-to-quality of product ratio.

What do you learn from that? That despite all obstacles, if you deliver a focused product that continues to excite and entice people, you can succeed. If you stick to a brand, a philosophy, a set of principles that people can come to expect of and appreciate of you, then they will come to you no matter what. That's the way people treat food and drink here in America, and it is a beautiful thing when it works in the right direction.

But what about a more conventional restaurant? Your standard place with waiter service, complex and balanced menu, lunch and dinner operations all centered around a type of regional cuisine. You know, a place you'd take a date to on a Friday night in the hopes of holding hands with her later. A few glasses of wine later I can usually make that move, but I depend on the restaurant to be of some conversational fodder at least, hopefully positive rather than negative (I find my palms sweat less when I'm praising a restaurant rather than criticizing it, and then I can "go all the way" and perhaps clasp hands whilst walking home).

Well it's not so simple. Hot Doug's is always going to be thought of as the paragon of sausage emporiums, and Kuma's will be considered the apogee of hamburgers in Chicago, but a conventional restaurant doesn't have such a clean-cut identity. You're most likely going to be categorized by the type of cuisine you most comfortably fall in to and your price range. It's up to you to define yourself from there.

I am not going to name this next place that we went to, because it is still a very young restaurant and I am fully aware that it takes quite a bit of time to hit stride. I think it is possible for this place to become a solid establishment, or it could stumble. But I will mention a few things.

The atmosphere and decor were fantastic, with some Asian, maybe more specifically Korean influences on the menu. The restaurant was constructed out of a lot of scrap and junk, refurbished and pieced together to give a rough-hewn yet quirky feel to the restaurant. The location is also kind of off the beaten path, it's quite small and is BYOB. It is simple and of modest ambition, which is by no means meant as an insult but rather to highlight the comfort of its casual and simple environment.

But yet though everything felt right, the food was difficult to comprehend. It lacked a true focus, and the flavors were not bold and distinct enough to stand alone. If it is the oft-overused formula of "Asian flavors with French technique" then I am still confused. All I could do was say "not bad" or "pretty good."

I give such detail because I had somewhat high expectations of this restaurant. I had followed their blog about opening, and closely observed a restaurant that was similar to something I hope to achieve. I would need to learn from this effort.

And what I learned is that if even if all the pieces seem to fit on paper, even if everything looks right, even if you market correctly and get everybody's attention and their mouths watering, there may be something missing.

To their credit, there were butts in the seats, and there is likely a bright future in store for them, but how they will shine remains to be seen.

And then there was Lola. As we stopped in Cleveland for the night before finishing the last leg of the road trip, we also stopped to dine at what some people call the finest restaurant in the Great Lakes. The moniker is not off base.

I usually don't rant and rave about decor, but I seriously enjoyed the environment put in place for us by Michael Symon. It was dark, but not foreboding. Rather, the dim gave a sense of comfort, privacy and closeness. Gray slate tones offset by brighter, orange marble of a warm nature. And a very impressive open kitchen. Open kitchens are difficult to work with, not only do you have to get your shit done but you are on display. Good cooks not only have to work clean they have to look it. Usually that's not too difficult, but adding another factor to a crazy dinner rush is not always welcome. And then the food...

I seriously enjoyed the meal. The style and presentation of cuisine was very much something I would like to emulate. Bold, bold flavors, every dish powerfully flavored and different from the next. Pristine chilled lobster, tender and refreshing. Crispy pig's ear with tender, and juicy pork belly. Deep fried bone marrow, a miracle of culinary technique in my opinion. The whole event was fantastic, refined, high-class yet casual. There is a lot to learn from such a restaurant.

I think it is especially important I start to see the bigger picture of restaurants now that I am embarking on helping at my mother's. After all, this is the most important thing to our family. The business has kept us going for 30 years, it put me through school and it is integral that I learn what my mother has learned over all that time.

So I thought the easiest way was to become a diner myself. To eat at my own restaurant, something I haven't done in several years, would be the simplest way to get a feel for what point we're at.

I was more than pleasantly surprised...

Let me preface, I did something bad. I came in with an attitude. I thought a year working in a highly-rated Italian kitchen, studying cooking and restaurants on my own, waiting tables and working the trenches of a sushi restaurant, that I was on pretty solid ground. Not an expert by any means, but I figured I could bring back some tricks for sure. I feared the Chinese kitchen, it was going to be unfamiliar, I thought I would have to refine it with a bit of the French brigade system. I thought there would be a lot of difficult ground to cover with the front-of-house staff. Frankly, I thought I might see something that was going to be riddled with holes.

What a poor attitude for me to have, what serious lack of faith I had, and how silly I feel for thinking it. My mother has not kept herself afloat in this business for decades without reason. She is adaptable and keen to improve herself, with an attention to detail and an ability to control that far outweighs my own.

She had changed much in the past few years I've been away. The restaurant is quite beautiful, the ambient noise problem leashed by new carpeting and heavier tablecloths. She has just purchased some high-end porcelain, beautiful in shape and form. The kitchen is brightly-lit and clean, worked by her talented dim sum chef and her faithful executive chef of 18 years. The front-of-the-house is working better than ever; smiling, serving delicately to ladies first, clearing tables and crumbing proficiently, refilling water glasses gracefully, proffering hot tea and giving succinct yet meaningful menu descriptions. The sushi, something we had never really focused on, just sort of had, was very good. The food had been very good in the past, and now was exceptional. The clientele finally seemed just as at ease as the staff, we are able to support more employees than ever, and the restaurant seems to be running on all cylinders.

How could I have dared to think that I had a lot to offer? What an inexcusable ego for me to have. It's time to start back on the bottom, and I'm more than happy to do it. To be fair, my mother had told me every week on the phone that she wasn't happy with the restaurant, so I had kind of low expectations going in to the whole experience. But I was put at ease to realize that she just has a tenacious ambition and desire to improve. That she possesses a work ethic that I sorely need to emulate.

So I am excited. Here we are back in New York, and I have a team effort ahead of me for the next few months. It may be for longer, may be for shorter. It may be harder than I originally imagined, but at least there is a goal and there is always a restaurant to return to. I need to exorcise my obsessive-compulsive tendencies somewhere...

I miss you all dearly in the Midwest. Wish me luck, but know that I am ready to sink my teeth in.

EP6