How Two Chicago Restaurants Came Together To Implore Guests to Hunger for Taste Again
“Great food, like all art, enhances and reflects a community’s vitality, growth and solidarity. Yet, history bears witness that great cuisines spring only from healthy local agriculture.”
—Rick Bayless, Proprietor of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo
What is it like to actually taste your food? To be inquisitive about it?
Two Chicago restaurants Proxi and Bar Sótano collaborated for one night on a menu that brought diners back to what a true relationship with food should be:
Food is education, food is community, food is art.
Food is Education
Teach us how to savor again
Great chefs have developed a keen awareness of flavor. Rather, they have access to the best ingredients from quality sources and have learned how to transform them into a well designed representation of place on a plate.
I recently attended a Politico panel titled On the Menu – The Food System of the Future. At this panel was the mastermind behind Bar Sótano’s success, Rick Bayless. He touched on how chefs become intermediaries between farmers and consumers, and implored that the chef/farmer relationship is most important for transmitting the value of good tasting, sustainable food to the customer:
“It was actually the farmers who taught me about sustainability” – Bayless
Having grown up on a farm, my family was part of the 2%; the 2% of people that have the opportunity to work closely with the land, to appreciate sun ripened tomatoes, wild raspberries, farm hunted venison and freshly picked morels.
Since moving to Chicago, daily meals have purely become a means to an end; I’ve forgotten what it’s like to savor great bread, to awe at a carrot, and to thank God for sustainable meat. I’ve also lost touch with where and why good quality food is produced.
Chefs are intermediaries, ambassadors, and storytellers. Good restaurants preserve the value of the food from field to plate and bridge the gap between the producer and consumer.
Through doing so, consumers develop taste, garner appreciation for the food, and slowly learn to honor a healthier more sustainable system.
Last night, the collaborative dishes from Chef Zimmerman and Chef Kumar sparked my fire to do just that.
The dish: The Tuna & Beef Tasajo Tartare: Tasajo is a cut of beef, typically from the Central Valley of Oaxaca. Accompanied with the mild poblano and pepita pesto, chicharrones de queso, graced with radish, spicy jalapenos. The drink: “Grilled Carrot Salad”: Montelobos mezcal, grilled carrot juice, housemade cashew orgeat (orgeat syrup is a sweet syrup made from almonds, sugar, and rose water or orange flower water), ginger, lime.
One need not go on a pilgrimage to some far away place like Italy to learn what it means to truly taste.
Taste education is available right in our back yard.
We must seek out, support, and share in experiencing the people in the industry that have something to say with their food. We can learn learn something along the way. It’s vital for a better future of food.
Food is Community
Put the good back into the community.
Rick Bayless has become a beacon hope for Chicago’s foodshed.
Rick’s work can be considered the epitome of “better-for-the-system” restaurateuring. His restaurants highlight the aspects of what the Italian-based food movement Slow Food champions in their value system; that “Good, Clean, Fair” food is better for you, better for the system, and just TASTES better.
He founded the Frontera Farmer Foundation, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides local, sustainable farms in the region with capital development grants. It started as a no interest loan program to lend to farmers and eventually turned into a nonprofit that has awarded 210 grants to 200 farms for a total of 2.7 million dollars to small farms in the Midwest.
By increasing farmer productivity, they provide the opportunity for farmers to have direct relationships through farmers markets and restaurants to the people who prepare their food. As a result, it enriches lives through bridging the gap between production and consumption.
He also runs the Impact Culinary Training facility at the food and beverage startup incubator here in Chicago, The Hatchery. 50% of sales from the Bar Sotano and Proxi Mashup dinner were donated to this facility to train the next generation of “woke” chefs.
These goings-on are essential for Chicago’s restaurant scene and agricultural food community. The championing of local, sustainable produce, returning the capital back to a responsible industry and fostering the next generation of food teachers is what every Good Food organization should strive for.
The proof is in the taste.
Food is Art
When you taste food like this, you get excited. Giddy. One revels at the vibrancy of the flavors and your imagination is heightened by seeing, smelling, and touching foods that you haven’t had before.
The menu for this event was broken down into three section: Proxi, Sótano, and Mashup. Each restaurant featured a few items from their own distinct international menus and chefs collaborated on three fusion items.
Fusion items included an Indian Samosa Chaat filled with Mexican red chorizo, a South Asian Aguachile with Baja Kanpachi and a Singaporean Chili Crab Chilaquiles.
The beverage program was equally enlightening: I drank a Sotol-based Jalapeno-Cilantro beverage and a “Pozole Rojo” mezcal drink featuring the three flavors of pozole stew (hominy, 3 chili blend, pork), finished with a Mexican oregano tincture.
This dinner represented an aspect of food trends that I touched upon in a recent post titled Fusion Food. Within it I highlight that “there are well executed international offerings across neighborhoods, and now the industry is begging for pop-ups, collaborations, and fusions of talent, ideas and tastes to continue to challenge the market.”
Collaborations like the one between talent at Bar Sótano and Proxi are a perfect way for local chefs with something to say to bring guests in to learn something about their food and their community.
Stay tuned for more news, reviews, and pictures of delicious food.
