April 14, 2006

Section One Letters 3ColumnsHot Type 4What journalists should be asking about Anne Burke’s appointment.

The Straight Dope 5Is pot really bad for you?

Chicago Antisocial 8Here’s an idea for your next party: performance art.

Restaurants SpecialShow Lettuce some love 1The remarkable turnaround of Kendall College 10Where else you can go to culinary school 10A day in the life (and car) of Jerry Kleiner 11The story of Harold’s Chicken Shack 12

Alinea’s custom-made serviceware 14The sea-salt evangelist 15A Chicago chefs’ family tree 20

ReviewsMovies 30The films of Douglas Sirk at the Music Box

Art 34“Shojo Manga! Girl Power!” atColumbia’s C33 Gallery

Theater 36Love Song at Steppenwolf

Books 38George & Martha by Karen Finley

PlusInk Well 39This week’s crossword: Losing It

I t’s hard to believe, but not 20 years ago there were asmany gallons of ink being spilled about Ed Debevic’sas there were this past year about Alinea. Local and

national press fell over themselves trying to explain whatexactly the restaurant was, where precisely its “fake-ness” lay, how to pronounce the name, and where theresurgence of meat loaf fit into new American cuisine.Times have changed: Ed’s creator, wizard restaurateurRich Melman of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, isnot the biggest restaurant story in Chicago anymore.

But he is a crucial part of a bigger story.A handful of names come up over and over when peo-

ple describe Chicago’s current role as the best and mostexperimental restaurant city in the United States—groundbreaking chefs Charlie Trotter and Rick Bayless aswell as the newer chefs engaged in avant-garde cuisine,chief among them Alinea’s Grant Achatz, Avenues’Graham Elliot Bowles, and Homaru Cantu of Moto. ButMelman, whose name is generally excluded from the dis-cussion, deserves major credit for our thriving restaurant

scene, including the current emphasis on the individualchef and culinary experimentation. Believe it or not,there is a connection between the trays of meat loaf at EdDebevic’s and the bacon on a swing at Alinea.

Lettuce began in 1971, when Melman and his (nowdeceased) partner, Jerry Orzoff, opened R.J. Grunts, aLincoln Park hippie/hamburger boite. (It’s still hangingin there, a corporate talisman like that yellowed first dol-lar bill taped behind the bar.) Grunts was the start of acontinued on page 26

By Elizabeth M. Tamny

Let Us Now Praise R.J. GruntsHow Rich Melman and his Lettuce Entertain You empire

set the scene for Chicago’s culinary revolution.

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R.J. Grunts, Ed Debevic’s, Shaw’s Crab House, Osteria Via Stato, Big Bowl, Scoozi!, Ben Pao, Wildfire, and Brasserie Jo

present the results, and Sikorskigrades each offering on a 20-pointscale. “There’s a slight overreduc-tion on the sauce,” she pronouncesof one otherwise perfect specimenof fish. “You repaired it, but youcan taste the sweetness on theedge—that’s the overreduction.”

Another is marred by largechunks of peppercorn, a third ispractically raw, a fourth is miss-ing its crayfish garnish. Sikorskiturns to the quenelles—each apale dumpling of fish afloat on asea of vibrant green broth. Shegrabs one and replates it to showhow presentation can affect per-ception. She takes bits of twoothers in her hands and runs afinger softly over the surface ofeach. One is velvety smooth; theother, she points out, has a bro-ken, mealy grain.

When the grading’s done shelooks around. Despite all the bellsand whistles of the new facility,it’s suddenly clear that cookingstill comes down to knives, heat,and a lot of dirty pans. “Your dishstation looks like shit!” she snaps,gesturing in the direction of thesink. “Look at that! It’s a moun-tain! Who’s on sanitary?”

As the students jump on thepile of dirty dishes, she walksacross the hall and into the cafe-teria, where a lone student fromthe class has been dispatched toserve the sole to his peers.

“How is it?” she asks a table ofstudents, spying the result of thepast six hours of learning half-eaten on a plate.

“A little underseasoned,” onereplies.

“See,” says Sikorski. “They’veall had Fish already, so theyknow.” v

26 CHICAGO READER | APRIL 14, 2006 | SECTION ONE

new kind of restaurant chain:every eatery Melman inventedwould be radically different fromthe ones that came before. Afterhamburgers came a singles joint,then seafood, then Italian. “Ididn’t just want to do prints,”Melman told Crain’s ChicagoBusiness last year. “I wanted todo original artworks.” Even now,instead of putting its energy intoduplication, Lettuce tends to selloff the cloning rights to its cre-ations, as it did with EdDebevic’s, Maggiano’s LittleItaly, and Big Bowl (which thecompany recently bought back).Melman is often credited withinventing the “multiconcept”chain as well as with having amagical ability to know what thepublic wants before it does.Each successful Lettuce restau-rant has packed in the dinersbut also pushed the industryand the city toward new ideas:one of the first salad bars was atGrunts, the first tapas were atCafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!

Currently Lettuce has morethan 60 restaurants under itsownership and management,including such long-term suc-cesses as Shaw’s Crab House,Ambria, Scoozi!, Brasserie Jo,Mon Ami Gabi, Wildfire,Everest, Tru, and, most recently,Osteria Via Stato. It alsoincludes a major consulting armand one division devotedspecifically to copying existingrestaurants (ICON, whichbrought Joe’s Stone Crab toChicago from Miami). BecauseLettuce is privately held, itsannual profits aren’t public, butaccording to the trade publica-tion Nation’s Restaurant News,

the company’s annual sales totalabout $305 million.

There have been, of course,failures, and restaurants thathave run their course. In theearly years they were places withSimpsons-esque names likeLawrence of Oregano, JonathanLivingston Seafood, and theGreat Gritzbe’s Flying FoodShow. But the company is bigenough to easily take risks, rideout the vagaries of the industry,and ultimately shut down any-thing that doesn’t work.

Lettuce dominated the restau-rant news in this town from theearly 1980s until the mid-to-late90s. At worst, the companycame to be seen as running afamily of high-profit “theme”restaurants—a phrase Melmanhates, and to be fair it doesn’tseem quite accurate when youput a Melman restaurant nextto, say, the Rainforest Cafe—cre-ating restaurants for lemmingswho wanted to experience theirethnic or diner food on a pris-tine stage set. John Marianiwrites in America Eats Out thatin the 80s “Chicago was more ofa copycat town . . . led by one ofthe most imaginative restaurantcompanies to appear on theAmerican scene,” and thatencapsulates many people’s feel-ings even today. No matter howsophisticated a restaurant is, the“chain” designation is like the“O” on a book jacket: if youwant to make a lot of money it’sfine, but if you want to be takenseriously, not so much.

As the last decade ended,Chicago was “emerging as a cra-dle of the first truly adultAmerican cooking” thanks torestaurants like Blackbird,

Spring, and Lula, said the NewYork Times, which calledMelman’s restaurants “gotta-have-a-gimmick outlets.” Notlong after that the excesses ofthe new cuisine began to showup here, with chefs like Achatz(still at Trio then) incorporatingmore experimentation into theirmenus. The clearest beacon ofinspiration for the new cookingis Barcelonan chef Ferran Adria,who for almost 20 years hasbeen creating far-out cuisine athis restaurant on the cliffs of theCosta Brava, El Bulli. (Achatz,who has spent a week in thekitchen at El Bulli, says, “Ferranhas changed everything.”) Forhalf the year, Adria and hisbrother Albert work in an off-site studio, turning food insideout, experimenting with materi-als, methods, techniques, prod-ucts, and the bounty of theirlocal market to create innumer-able forays into the “dialoguebetween science and cuisine,” asthe Adrias put it. Typical Adriadishes (the menu changes con-stantly) include noodles madefrom jellied consomme, fruitflesh, and milk skins; foams andgelees; frozen truffles; liquidravioli; “airs” made by solidifyingaerated purees; “caviars” made offoods such as frozen melon liq-uid; deconstructed cocktails thatplay with temperature andsolid/liquid state; and a dishcombining eggplant and crushedFisherman’s Friend cough drops.You don’t have to look far to seeAdria’s influence in the bountyof last year’s news-making dishesfrom Chicago chefs: Achatz’sbutterscotch bacon, PB&J(peanut butter and a singlegrape encased in brioche), and

dehydrated prosciutto rolls;Bowles’s lamp chops with a jusmade from crushed Altoids, foiegras lollipop, and pea soupserved over lavender-infusedmarshmallows; Cantu’s ediblemenus, printed-rice-paper“sushi,” herb-holding tableware,and Caesar salad ice cream.

All that jazz might seemworlds away from the huge a lacarte menus of simple, familiardishes you’ll find at a midlevelLettuce joint, but Melman’sempire includes longtime chef-driven destinations (Everest,Ambria) and even experimentalmenus (Tru). And the rosters atplaces like Alinea, Avenues, andMoto owe as much to Melman asthey do to Trotter: Lettuce hasprovided a means of keepingculinary talent in town—withthe company’s general profes-sional opportunities, certainly,but also with corporate jobs thatprovide income during theinevitable transition periods inchefs’ careers. Melman has beenable to offer midlevel employ-ment solutions in the all-or-nothing restaurant world to tal-ented chefs who need a breakfrom its harsh demands or aren’tquite ready to dive into launch-ing their own place. Mary EllenDiaz, for instance, worked as acorporate Lettuce chef afterburning out at North Pond Cafe;Gabriel Viti served two years asa Lettuce chef before steppinginto the head chef position atCarlos’ and eventually openinghis own restaurant.

Even more important has beenMelman’s influence on the aver-age Chicago restaurant-goer. Thenewly knowledgeable and adven-

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turous diner is, according toCharlie Trotter, the biggest dif-ference between being a restau-rateur now and when he firstbegan. “People were intimidatedback then,” he told me last year.“Now. . . they’re more savvy andunderstand things, which isgreat for all of us who are tryingto cook and push the envelope.”

Lettuce restaurants haveplayed a role in bringing dinersout and encouraging them to trynew things, but they’ve alsoprepped us, with their rich the-ater and painstaking attentionto detail, for the excesses of thenew cuisine.

Every one of Melman’s restau-rants is sewn from whole cloth.Each is a carefully designed din-ing experience, modeled at thesmallest level to re-create the feelof a French bistro or 1950s dineror what have you; there are heavylayers of varnish on the wood-

work at Shaw’s, just like at aBaltimore crab house. All the setdirection and mood setting hasled critics to call Melman theSteven Spielberg or AndrewLloyd Webber of dining; descrip-tions of the Lettuce dining experi-ence often include the word the-ater. But Melman has said overand over that his main inspira-tion comes from the kitchen. “Idon’t say to myself, ever, ‘I wantto do a place that looks like azoo,’ and plan it all out, and thenat the end say, ‘Well, what kindof food can we serve?’” he told apublic radio reporter in 1996.“It’s the other way around. I startwith the food.”

Achatz and Bowles say similarthings when they’re accused ofexperimenting with their foodjust for shock value. And onsome level, the micromanagedworld of the new cuisine—likeAlinea’s appetizer with the hotpotato suspended above a spe-

cially designed bowl on a pin thatyou slide out to drop it into thecold potato soup below—isn’tunlike the carefully designed setof a Lettuce restaurant. The sassywaitress at Ed Debevic’s, too upin your business, isn’t that differ-ent from the server at Moto,required to tightly direct howyou should sip, chew, or slurpeach course to best effect. Thedifference, of course, is that atthe haute restaurants the specialeffects are mostly gastronomical.The food itself is theater.

At Moto every dish isexplained to you in detail by alab-coated waiter; at Vong’s ThaiKitchen, another Lettuce hold-ing, you don’t really want toknow how your food was made.You want to sink into the diningexperience without thinkingabout it. The Lettuce world isfun but safe. You know you’ll bewell looked after, and that thefood won’t be terrible; in fact,

chances are it will be good and itmight even be great. The experi-ence will probably cost a littlemore than you wanted, but it’llfeel special.

The new cuisine is challeng-ing, but it’s also fun in some ofthe same ways that Melman din-ing is fun. It doesn’t take itselfnearly as seriously as the mediadoes—how could it, when thefood explodes and gushes andvaporizes and elicits squeals?Melman’s restaurants havehelped diners expect and enjoyfun while dining. When I askedthe Adrias to sum up the varioustenets they use to define theirrole in the new cuisine, they saidthat their cuisine turns on twomajor axes: investigation andplayfulness. “The latter meansunderstanding that gastronomyis part of life and, as in life itself,one shouldn’t lose the spirit ofplayfulness, irony, pleasure, andpursuit of happiness,” they wrote

in an e-mail. Rephrased with aless philosophical bent, thiscould be on the wall in a Lettucekitchen next to rules about slip-resistant shoes.

Melman is now only chairmanof Lettuce, having relinquishedthe positions of CEO and presi-dent to his protege, KevinBrown, in recent years. Melmanis a “free radical,” according toBrown, able to explore new ideasmore unencumbered in an era inwhich you could argue thatLettuce has started to lap itselfin the exploitation of nostalgia:it recently purchased the MagicPan, the chain of crepe restau-rants from the 70s. Melman hasoften said that he doesn’t like“thinking big.” He makes hisprogress by “taking a small step,making sure the ground is firm,and then taking the next smallstep,” he told Crain’s in 1993.It’ll be interesting to see wherehe goes from here. v

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CLOSED EASTER SUNDAY