“Bring on the Changes”
“ It’s no pretending, no denying/ When you really feel the need/ Going to hang on and be strong/ Turn the tables, make the change.” “Change,” Incognito
While the beginning of this past month was indeed quiet and cold, the second half of February was sporadically warmer, and definitely not quiet.
With the coming of January, my last job had suddenly started cutting shifts—bartenders had been immune in the past, but this was not the case this year.
Luckily, the hiring of a feckless general manager there had started me off looking for a new situation, so when the offer to be a part of the opening team for a brand new French restaurant came in, I was more than ready to jump at it.
And suddenly, I was not an underemployed Head Bartender, but rather the Lead Sommelier for one of the most highly anticipated Chicago restaurant openings of winter 2024.
2.
Even if all the moving parts are secured, the real logistics of opening an enormous restaurant in just two weeks are staggering. This was certainly not my first opening, but the intensity of the pace was novel. I would venture to describe it as a seemingly endless montage with no tape cuts, and little time for anything but pushing forward.
On my one day off before the week leading up to opening, Super Bowl Sunday, we made a taco dip, and I spent the remainder of the day furiously learning a new menu, after having worked twenty-four hours on the two previous days between my former and now current positions.
But then the next day, permits secured, the breakneck pace required to open an enormous restaurant in less than a week commenced. The very notion of montage implies more footage than can be digested in one part of a visual narrative, but real life occurs in real time—it was sixty five hours of real time in this case.
The beginning of the week held out menu tastings, extensive cleanup after the construction workers, the unpacking of everything needed to outfit a four hundred seat restaurant, and multiple mock services.
My particular task, in conjunction with my wine colleagues, was the assembly of a physical cellar for some two hundred wines, starting from shelf assembly, and then the receipt of some two hundred and fifty cases, and then the breakneck dispersal and organization of their contents, which despite the hours logged, proceeded apace right into the actual moment of opening.
My next day off, the day after our official opening, I almost fell asleep eating toast. S. had to find the packing tape for me, which I’d been looking for the entire time he was at the grocery store that day, which was hidden in plain sight in the middle of the top junk drawer in the kitchen.
3.
Chicago treats a new restaurant opening, even one in the doldrums of February, as a city wide call to action. Chicago has undoubtedly become a consequential restaurant city in the twenty years I’ve been living here, rather than just the metropolitan area attached to “Le Francais” it once was, but the endless allure of the new is the blessing and curse of our particular restaurant scene. Everyone wants to be in on an opening, but the openings continue apace, and building something enduring is a marathon after the initial sprint.
I’ve been enjoying the visits of many former colleagues and regulars, and it’s nice to be back in a real restaurant—hotel restaurants have their own unique, weird vibe, but an autonomous restaurant is a more familiar space for me.
We visited a friend over the weekend who compared opening a restaurant to “building a plane while flying it.” I have never heard a more apt comparison.
4.
It was an oddly nostalgic day yesterday. We took the 151 South to pick up my new prescription glasses in Old Town, visited the aforementioned friend who gave me my first post-quarantine job, and also arranged for my Somm training way back in 2008, then managed to walk by both hotels I worked at in the last two years, and then we finally, quite accidentally, walked by the large function area behind Fourth Presbyterian, where Charlie Trotter’s memorial reception was.
It’s odd to think I arrived here with no purpose beyond living with two friends starting grad school, and ended up both witnessing and participating in the seismic sea change in Chicago cuisine and dining over the last two decades.
It is interesting to be part of the return of the large scale Brasserie to Chicago, especially a half block away from the late, iconic “Brasserie Jo.”
We dined at the Boston location of “Brasserie Jo frequently in the nineties, and I received a copy of “Lessons in Service” as a gift from my mother a year or so prior to my move here, but little did I imagine I would become the Maitre d’ of Jean Joho’s flagship restaurant, or work with, and still be friends with, after twenty years here, folks quoted in that singular treatise on the new Chicago style of dining and service ushered in by Charlie Trotter.
So much has changed since then, and in the meantime I’ve run bar and wine programs at many of the most popular Chicago destinations of their time, as well as worked as part of the service team at many other restaurants that have come and gone.
As longevity has dwindled, the long runs that restaurants like Charlie Trotter’s, Everest or Spiaggia enjoyed, spanning decades, and producing the talent that would go on to open the restaurants of tomorrow, is no longer the norm, but I do take pride in the subsequent successes of my colleagues from Table-Fifty Two in recent years, and we didn’t even last a decade.
A colleague was looking back at a picture of the last team I led at that restaurant few years after it was taken—it was on the day of a book release for Chef, and we were a strong and cohesive group at the time, who had produced a very successful event together, and she wondered how we all could have dispersed so fast in so short a time.
My response at the time was, “the only constant is change.” This is certainly true in general, and definitely true of Chicago restaurants in the last fifteen years.
Some places aren’t meant to last, and have an incandescent moment, but I do hope folks begin building restaurants that can last in this city, not just restaurant groups chasing the new, but actual restaurants that you can return to again and again, like the first Lettuce restaurant in Lincoln Park, RJ Grunts, where there is not a breath of innovation that has happened in decades, beyond a small expansion of the cocktail program, but a feeling of blessed familiarity—it is a warm and comfortable place to visit for brunch or after the zoo, and the experience always hits.
Since it’s heyday in the eighties and nineties and up until the mid 2000’s, Everest had only five Maitre d’s. My predecessor left of his own accord, the previous three died on the job, and I was the last.
Customs change, and after the boom of interest in Sommeliers, there are few purely wine-driven jobs left out there, as smaller restaurants in particular need a Sommelier who can also run the business, and while I have had an aptitude for that, not everyone does.
Mixology does seem to still be enjoying its moment, but I learned the hard way you can get your bar featured in “Whiskey Advocate” one month, and the next month be scrambling to eke out enough shifts to pay your rent.
So I am grateful for a chance to get back to my wine work, but curious what shape a successful Chicago restaurant will need to take to make it over the long run. Hopefully we might figure that out where I am now, and in the meantime, I am quite happy to focus on pouring wine and building relationships in a brand new space.