Ebert and the Pot: Sun-Times film critic puts his love for rice cooker — and cooking — on paper, with delicious results

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
September 15, 2010
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I have come to Roger Ebert ‘s home bearing groceries, ready to cook.

We had agreed over e-mail to make Garlic Chicken over Fragrant Rice, one of the 32 recipes in Ebert ‘s new book, “The Pot and How to Use It: The Mystery and Romance of the Rice Cooker” (Andrews McMeel, $14.99). (Yes, the world’s most famous movie critic has written a cookbook.)

But when I arrive and am greeted by his assistant, Carol Iwata — who is responsible for introducing Ebert to the Pot, as he prefers to call his beloved cooking appliance — it is apparent our game plan has shifted.

I hear the not-so-distant sounds of glass clinking and knives hitting cutting boards. In the kitchen, Iwata and Millie, one of Ebert ‘s nurses, already are prepping ingredients. Chunks of yellow peppers have been set out in one bowl, diced chicken in another bowl. It looks like a Food Network set.

Wait — there’s no yellow pepper in this recipe . . .

Ebert makes his way slowly down the stairs, settles into a black reclining chair in the living room and plugs in a laptop that does his speaking as he types.

There is some confusion — on the part of everyone but Ebert — as to how we are going to proceed. Chaz Ebert , his wife, thinks we should cook first, talk later. Ebert thinks the opposite.

But the rice and the chicken have to cook in the Pot, so why not start in the kitchen, Chaz, a lawyer, reasons aloud. (I silently agree.)

So Ebert asks Chaz to get two Pots started — one with rice, one with SooFoo, a blend of grains that Ebert happily discovered this summer.

Wait, there’s no SooFoo in this recipe . . .

Chaz heads to the kitchen to get the Pots started. “I have a timer set,” she announces when she comes back.

“The Pot knows,” her husband says.

Before and after

The Pot knows. This is one of Ebert ‘s truths.

So are these: He can’t speak. He can’t eat. He can’t smell. He can cook.

Ebert , 68, has not been able to speak, eat or smell since 2006. Cancer, and surgeries to try and help matters, were the culprit.

But food and cooking — the love of it, the memories of it, the physicality and process of it — are still very much with him. He cooks for dinner parties and makes rice-cooker oatmeal, his favorite, in the morning for anyone who’s game.

Ebert cooked before the cancer. In The Pot, he describes his dog-eared cookbooks that carried him through his chicken masala and country captain phases. He was — still is — big into wok cooking.

Bookshelves in his kitchen offer more proof. He pulls out James Beard’s Beard on Bread, out of which falls a yellowed paper, a recipe for “Best Bread Machine Bread.” Inside the cover of Craig Claiborne’s Kitchen Primer, a handwritten message dated 12/15/70 reads, “Merry Christmas. My love always, Mother.”

When he and Chaz got married 18 years ago, Iwata, his assistant, gifted them with a three-cup Zojirushi rice cooker — the revelatory Pot. Ebert ‘s insatiable curiosity in the kitchen had met its match.

He mastered the logic (or magic, he would say) of the Pot, and how to use it to cook oatmeal, soup, eggs, chili and more. The Pot was his and Chaz’s third wheel at the Sundance Film Festival.

“As every good cook does, he improvises,” says Chaz. “For dessert, he cooks couscous and adds different fruits.”

In January, in a post on his Sun-Times blog, Ebert answered a reader’s question of whether he missed eating or drinking.

“Not so much really,” he wrote. “Not anymore.” What he missed, he concluded, was the camaraderie at the table.

Backtrack to November 2008, to another blog post. In it, Ebert made a convincing argument for the rice cooker as the only tool certain folks — “You, solitary writer, artist, musician, potter, plumber, builder, hermit. You, parents with kids. You, night watchman” — need to eat reasonably well.

It is not apparent these are the words of a man who is fed via a tube in his stomach. Some 597 words in, he writes, “To be sure, health problems now prevent me from eating.”

Reader’s recipes

That blog post, to date, has logged 264 comments from readers, some of whom show up as characters of a sort in the cookbook.

Indeed, The Pot is as much his readers’ — it’s mostly their recipes — as it is his, which pleases him.

Robert of Taoyuan City, Taiwan, a frequent commentator on Ebert ‘s blog whose Soy Rice and Chicken is in the book, is a “total Anglophile but has never been there. A Dickens fanatic,” Ebert says. Ina New-Jones, who contributed recipes for beef stew and rice pudding, is Chaz’s niece.

The 111-page book reads much like the blog post that inspired it, which is to say it will make you laugh out loud. It will make you refer to the rice cooker as the Pot. And if, like me, you’ve never cooked anything but rice in the Pot, it will make you want to try cooking something other than rice in it.

Which is exactly the point.

“I love the attitude that ultimately comes through, which is cook at home . . . Be flexible. Don’t be afraid. Do what appeals to you and what’s the worse that can happen?” says Anna Thomas, Ebert ‘s friend and author of several cookbooks, including the classic “Vegetarian Epicure.”

Thomas wrote the introduction to The Pot and developed three soup recipes for it. These are the most involved of any in the book, but Thomas guarantees they’ll work and taste delicious. (She also still argues for caramelizing onions in a pan rather than the Pot.)

“That’s where some of the weakness of the book is,” Thomas says. “It has this wonderful message all throughout about cooking, but the recipes were just sort of whatever blew in.”

The publisher, Andrews McMeel, enlisted professional testers to try the recipes from readers, a spokeswoman says.

Then again, as Ebert writes in the book, “Try to think of the Pot as a recipe-neutral utensil. When somebody gives you a skillet, do you ask if it comes with a cookbook? No. Form follows function.”

At the table

Ebert is standing at his six-burner Gaggenau stove, browning the chicken in a wok. In go the yellow peppers, chopped scallions, a little soy sauce. He’s improvising. Garlic Chicken over Fragrant Rice — what’s that?

He checks the progress of both Pots. “Too much water,” he writes on his ever-present pocket notepad, his voice when his computer isn’t around.

He goes back to the wok where Chaz, to move things along, has added the frozen peas. It’s too soon. Ebert stomps his foot, shakes his head.

“Put corn and peas into the Pot at last minute to keep them crunchy,” he scribbles to me.

He divides the cooked chicken mixture between the two Pots and closes the lids again.

How long until it’s ready?, I ask.

“The Pot knows,” he says.

A bit later, Chaz and I taste. We’d like more minced ginger. “Don’t want a raw piece,” he says. He goes to the fridge and takes out a well-used bottle of sriracha.

In goes a touch, along with several shakes of garam masala, a dousing of sesame oil and 6 spoonfuls of peach salsa. Stir, close the lid, click.

“Just throw it in,” he writes. “It all turns out OK. Could add snow peas, squash, anything. Longer cooking first, then shorter.”

The Pots are done. We transfer the SooFoo and rice, colorful as confetti, to white serving bowls and bring them to a table set with stemware, yellow lilies and orange placements.

We — the Eberts, Iwata, Millie and Sun-Times photographer Rich Hein — sit and dig in. Chaz laughingly suggests everyone try the rice before the SooFoo dish because it’s blander.

Ebert writes down more rice cooker tips for me.

“Can be very cheap to feed a family this way,” he says. “Buy rice in a 10 lb bag, cut meat small and stretch it like the Asians do. Chinese consider meat almost a flavoring. Sesame is last minute for flavor + aroma, not a cooking oil.”

We talk about blogging, and about the merits — or lack thereof — of that other one-pot wonder, the slow cooker (“takes too long,” he says).

Ebert jokes that he is going to post a baby picture photo on Twitter that shows him learning to use a pot of a different kind.

“That baby picture . . .” Chaz murmurs, not catching on at first. But then she does, and she laughs. We all do.

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PRINCIPLES OF THE POT

• The simplest rice cooker — one with two settings, Cook and Warm — is just fine. A fancy “fuzzy logic” cooker will do the job, but it’s not necessary to spend that much money.
• Add ingredients in reverse order of cooking time — beans, meat and/or grains first, longer- then shorter-cooking veggies later.
• It is possible to caramelize onions in the Pot, if you’re making soup or stew and the Pot is all you’ve got. Add some oil and chopped onions, cover and turn to Cook. Every few minutes, open and stir. Keep going, clicking the Pot back to Cook if need be, until onions are golden and soft.
• It isn’t possible to cook a souffle or a steak in the Pot.
• To make oatmeal, combine oats and water — Ebert uses a ratio of 2.2 cups water to 1 cup oatmeal — and turn to Cook. If desired, add diced fruit of your choice just before cooking is done.
• To quickly steam veggies, put them in the Pot with a little water (to partially cover) and turn to Cook. Check the progress in 8 to 10 minutes.
• Don’t be afraid to lift the lid to monitor what you’re cooking. It’s the best way to figure out the Pot.

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MISS INA’S DOWN-HOME RICE PUDDING

MAKES 4 TO 6 SERVINGS

• 1½ cups rice (see Note)
• 3 cups water
• 1 cup evaporated milk
• ½ stick unsalted butter
• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• ½ teaspoon grated nutmeg
• ¾ cup brown or granulated sugar
• Pinch salt

Combine all ingredients in the rice cooker. Stir, close lid and flip to “Cook.” The cooker will turn off when done. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350 degrees. Pour cooked rice into a greased baking dish; bake for 15 to 20 minutes.

Note: Use a short or medium grain rice.

Adapted from “The Pot and How to Use It” by Roger Ebert

(Ina New-Jones recipe)

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CORN SOUP (CHIPOTLE CORN CHOWDER)

MAKES 4 SERVINGS

• ½ russet potato, diced
• ½ onion, diced very small
• ½ teaspoon onion powder
• ½ cup water
• 1 pint chicken stock
• 4 ounces heavy cream
• 1 dried chipotle pepper, cut in half
• ½ teaspoon minced garlic
• 1 (15.25-ounce) can corn
• Kosher salt, black and white pepper

Place potato, onion, onion powder and water in rice cooker. Stir, close lid and turn to “Cook.” It just needs to simmer long enough for the potato to cook and most of the water to evaporate, 8 to 10 minutes.

Open lid and add the rest of the ingredients. Stir, close lid and let cook another 15 to 20 minutes, then flip to “Warm.”

Puree soup in batches in a blender; taste and correct seasoning, if necessary. If you like a chunkier texture, reserve a ladleful of the soup before pureeing, then stir it back into soup. Serve with freshly grated Cheddar cheese on top, if desired.

Adapted from “The Pot and How to Use It” by Roger Ebert

(Robby Millsap recipe)

 

Craft beer boom embraced in Chicago’s neighborhoods

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
October 1, 2013
Link to article

 

CHICAGO — Jerry Nelson’s career for 11 years — the one he went to school for, dressed up for, made money at — was in architecture. Brewing beer was his hobby.

Three years ago, the hops won out.

That’s when the former Marine and Rogers Park native decided that what he most wanted to build wasn’t homes, but a brewery. He started looking for a space last fall. In May, he found a 2,500-square-foot room in a warehouse at 1640 W. Hubbard, and Une Annee Brewery was born.

In early September, Nelson poured the first three Une Annee beers — a Belgian IPA, Golden Strong and Saison — at a release party at Fountainhead in Ravenswood.

“I saw the success that [Chicago breweries] Metropolitan and Half Acre have had. Other cities have been booming, craft beerwise, for a while. It was that same feeling, that this can be done in Chicago,” Nelson, 39, said.

These are heady times in Chicago for brewers like Nelson and drinkers of craft beer, who are more than willing to travel for it (Dark Lord Day, anyone?).

Illinois is home to more than 80 craft breweries, up from 67 in 2012, according to the Brewers Association, a Colorado-based trade group that keeps tabs on the industry.

There are plenty more to come. The association counts some 30 craft breweries in “planning” within the city limits and 62 more statewide. Nationally, breweries are opening at a rate of more than one a day, said Bart Watson, staff economist at the Brewers Association.

Craft beer hasn’t quite taken over the world. It still makes up only 6.5 percent of the American beer market. But the small, mighty cousin to mass-market beer is the life of the party these days.

While overall U.S. beer sales were down 2 percent for the first half of 2013, sales of craft beer in the same period rose 15 percent by dollars and 13 percent by volume, according to the Brewers Association.

“Consumers have figured out that craft beer isn’t necessarily just some big, gnarly, hoppy thing or some massive Imperial Stout,” said Jonathan Cutler, the brewer at Piece Brewery and Pizzeria in Wicker Park, which opened in 2001. “There are so many different variations of certain styles.”

And there is no shortage of ways for Chicago beer geeks to indulge, from big events — the Festival of Wood and Barrel Aged Beer in November (tickets sold out in four minutes) and Beer Under Glass, the kickoff to the 11-day Chicago Craft Beer Week in May — to beer dinners and tastings at neighborhood restaurants and corner taverns.

Coming soon

The highest profile and certainly the largest addition to Chicago’s craft beer scene this year will be Lagunitas Brewing Co., based in Petaluma, Calif. By year’s end, the doors should be open and the tanks running at its $22 million brewing facility in Douglas Park.

The facility will produce 250,000 barrels a year to start and ramp up to 1.7 million barrels, expanding Lagunitas’ reach eastward and making it the second-largest craft brewer in the nation and “the biggest brewery in Illinois since the Chicago Fire,” said Lagunitas founder Tony Magee.

Opening the Chicago facility makes good business sense, but emotion plays a part, said Magee, an Arlington Heights native who started Lagunitas in 1993.

“We want to be close to the people in the markets where we sell beer,” Magee said. “Craft beer is so personal. People take it so personally. We want to share that we-ness.”

On the other end of the size spectrum, but as exciting for local beer fans: cult favorite Pipeworks Brewing plans to open a bottle shop at 1673 N. Western Ave. next year, according to a recent Facebook post.

Much has happened for the Wicker Park brewery in a short amount of time. It got its start through a Kickstarter campaign and began kicking out beers in early 2012. In January, the beer enthusiast website RateBeer.com named Pipeworks the world’s best new brewery.

Chicago is leading the trend of these nanobreweries, said Josh Deth, the owner of Logan Square’s Revolution Brewing, which in its three years has become a household name on the local scene. Deth and others talk of a supportive community, where startups collaborate and fledgling brewers can and often do hop from brewery to brewery, learning the craft.

For formal training, there is the Siebel Institute of Technology, the nation’s oldest brewing school, which this month moved its campus from Clybourn Avenue near the original Goose Island brewpub to the ground floor of Kendall College.

Enrollment at Siebel has been on an uptick for the last five years, with Web-based courses seeing triple the number of students, said vice president Keith Lemcke.

Several hundred students complete the program each year, he said. The majority are home-brewers who like Nelson, himself a Siebel graduate, want to move out of the garage and into the commercial market.

“Many do have opening their own brewery in mind,” Lemcke said.

The rise of craft

Chicago is a beer kind of town. German immigrants made it so in the 19th century with the city’s first commercial brewery. By 1900, there were some 60 breweries churning out more than 100 million gallons of beer annually, satisfying the demand of the burgeoning German and Irish populations, according to the Newberry Library’s Encyclopedia of Chicago.

Most of those breweries, however, didn’t make it past the repeal of Prohibition and the rise of canned beer. Today, MillerCoors has its headquarters here. Anheuser-Busch InBev staked its claim with the 2011 acquisition of homegrown brand and craft beer pioneer Goose Island Brewing Co., and its exclusive partnership with the Chicago Cubs.

But craft beer — the stuff that in general terms and by Brewers Association standards is “small, independent and traditional” in production and vibe — is a more recent and distinct phenomenon.

When beer aficionado Randy Mosher moved here from Cincinnati in 1985, “There was no craft beer here at all,” said the noted author and creative consultant to the craft beer industry. The few earliest attempts, by Siebens River North Brewery and Tap and Growler in the West Loop, were “pretty horrible,” he said.

The opening of Goose Island in 1988 changed everything.

“Once they opened, it was like, ‘Hallelujah,’ ” Mosher said. “Those guys are just very good at not making mistakes.”

The steady success of Goose Island was the kindling for other breweries to open and gain an audience — Three Floyds in Munster, Ind., and Two Brothers in west suburban Warrenville, Rock Bottom and Piece in the city, and several years later, Half Acre and Metropolitan.

And then, in just the last few years, the floodgates opened.

“It’s crazy to think about how many people are trying or planning on opening breweries right now,” said Piece’s Cutler, whose 12 years and numerous awards at the Wicker Park brewpub have made him something of an elder statesman among his peers.

He and others say the boom mirrors what has happened in the culinary world, as restaurants multiply and diners gravitate toward all things local, seasonal and small-batch.

“People have really done a full 180 on how they go about spending money, and it’s not exclusive to beer. There’s this attention to locality, whether it’s with beer or bread or a lot of things,” said Gabriel Magliaro, founder of Half Acre.

And as with restaurants, there’s just a lot more beer to go around, from established names like Half Acre to under-the-radar operations such as Spiteful. The result: an incredible diversity, some say more so than in other beer-centric cities.

Mosher is creative director at 5 Rabbit Cerveceria, which makes Latin-style brews. Metropolitan specializes in lagers. Une Annee will focus on Belgian beers. Pipeworks is known for beers that are “kind of all over the place,” Mosher said.

“Say you go to San Diego, which is famous for its India pale ales. You’re out at a bar, and you don’t like IPAs, you’re kind of s— out of luck,” Mosher said. “Chicago is a good city for beer diversity, maybe one of the best. And I think that reflects the general gist of Chicago. Think about the food — you can get everything here.”

The interplay between the restaurant and brewing worlds in Chicago isn’t lost on Jared Rouben, who is working toward a December opening of Moody Tongue Brewing Co. in an old glass factory in Pilsen.

Rouben, 31, is a culinary school graduate, a chef and, most notably, former brewmaster at Goose Island, where he partnered with local chefs to make beers tailored to them and their restaurants. He did more than 50 such collaborations.

“Especially in Chicago, chefs have really embraced beer,” he said.

Rouben calls his style “culinary brewing.” That is, making beer, such as a gingerbread chocolate milk stout that will be Moody Tongue’s first release, using techniques and ingredients from the kitchen.

“In a brewery, you see these giant tanks. Take that tank and imagine you’re in a kitchen. It’s really just a pot,” he said. “Cooking might take three minutes. Baking takes three hours. Brewing takes three months.”

Down the road, Rouben said he envisions setting up a sort of cross-culture training program, where a brewer might swap places with a sous chef to expose each to the other’s craft.

A path to success

Store shelves are crammed with more craft beers than ever, but industry watchers insist Chicago hasn’t yet hit its saturation point.

“No way. Every brewery uses different tanks, different water, so there’s a different flavor profile for every type of beer,” said Justin Maynard, executive director of the nonprofit Illinois Craft Brewers Guild.

Expansion is on a lot of brewers’ minds. Metropolitan has outgrown its current facility in Ravenswood and is on the move to a bigger one, while 5 Rabbit Half Acre is now distributing its beers in Ohio with an eye on Indiana and Kentucky as well. Half Acre is developing a “food concept” in the space just south of its North Center brewery, Magliaro said.

With growth come hiccups and a real concern about not compromising quality or the craft ideals. Even Lagunitas’ Magee knows this.

“Big hasn’t been done cool yet,” Magee said. “For us, I think we can get big, and as long as we don’t lose our way and make decisions based on market research, and do things that are soulful, people will recognize that.”

Magliaro’s advice to the flurry of newcomers: “Figure out your beer, and if you’re going to make mistakes, try to keep them as close to your brewery as possible, because there’s a spotlight on everybody now.”

Making it easier for craft brewers to thrive in Illinois is a priority for the Illinois Craft Brewers Guild. Maynard said a newly formed governmental affairs committee will take up that work in Springfield next year, in hopes of revising what it sees as outdated liquor laws regarding production and distribution.

The guild scored what Maynard called a “minor” win in August with legislation doubling the amount of beer a craft brewer can make annually, from 15,000 to 30,000 barrels. Still, it fell far short of the 200,000-barrel mark the guild and its members were pushing for.

At Une Annee, Jerry Nelson brews in eight-barrel batches. His goal is to get up to 2,000 barrels a year as he adds fermentation tanks. It’s all part of the business plan he labored over before opening Une Annee.

“I wanted to make sure I had a full chance of succeeding. I opened as the only employee and with no debt. Those are two very vital factors,” he said.

Nelson looked for a space that didn’t require a gut rehab and kept to a $100,000 budget to get up and running. He has since hired an employee, Dustin Zimmerman, fresh off a three-month internship at the Nogne O brewery in Norway.

This is Nelson’s life now. He brews on Thursdays — he recently had a 16-hour marathon brewing session — and spends the other days drumming up new business. A distribution agreement with powerhouse Wirtz Beverage, effective Oct. 15, should move things along nicely.

Nelson maintains his architecture license, in case he ever wants to go back to building houses. Except, for now, he doesn’t.

Spiteful Brewing shows its artsy side on its bottles

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
May 17, 2013
Link to article

NORTH CENTER — A brewer and a butcher walked into a bar…

There’s no punch line. This is just how the label on one of Spiteful Brewing‘s new beers came to be. Two guys, talking over beers at a Roscoe Village tavern.

To appreciate the work of some of the Chicago’s undiscovered artists, such as that butcher Dave Gathy, or Web designer Chris Murphy, or bike messenger Taylor Garbin, grab a bottle of Spiteful beer. There’s no better time to do so, with Chicago Craft Beer Week in full swing.

In a city bubbling over with breweries, Spiteful Brewing is one of the smallest and nimblest. In its five-month existence, the so-called nanobrewery has put out 10 distinct beers from a windowless, 400-square-foot room, tucked in a warehouse on a quiet street in North Center.

Spiteful doesn’t have a website. Owners Jason Klein and Brad Shaffer brew and bottle by hand. Shaffer, a former bike messenger, makes some deliveries by bike. And the artists whose work adorns the beers? They’re friends drawing for free — or, rather, free beer.

What’s in the bottle, of course, matters most to Klein and Shaffer, who’ve known each other since childhood. But what’s wrapped around each bottle “defines who we are,” said Shaffer.

The label is “hugely important,” said Klein. “You shop with your eyes. We want people to look at our bottles, study our labels.”

And with so many breweries coming onto the scene, the label or logo better be memorable.

Even before Shaffer started Spiteful, he had a habit of collecting brewery labels and stickers. They’re now plastered all over the coolers in Spiteful’s tiny headquarters.

The 22-ounce bombers in particular — the only size bottle Spiteful brews currently come in — “are every brewery’s blank canvas,” said Klein. Craft beer devotees know well the colorful twistedness of Three Floyds bottles, the elegant, pastoral Two Brothers labels, the iconic fist on Revolution brews.

Spiteful’s labels are irreverent, to say the least. The label of their first beer, G.F.Y. Stout, done by Shaffer’s bike messenger friend Taylor Garbin, shows a bear making a not-so-nice arm gesture.

“If you don’t know what GFY means, then… GFY!,” the label reads.

For their God Damn Pigeon Porter, Joelle Tafoya, another bike messenger, drew menacing pigeons against a scraggly, black-and-white skyline.

Dave Gathy, the butcher, has done two labels — a zombie for Malevolence, a Russian imperial stout, and a grinning devil for the Instigator IPA. They’re in the style of the “creepy caricatures” Gathy draws when he’s not cutting meat at Paulina Meat Market in Lakeview, where he and Shaffer first met.

Gathy is working on a third label that he said will involve a fat badger and a bong.

The Spiteful logo — a red face looking, well, spiteful — is the work of Chris Murphy, a Web designer who studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Murphy met Klein and Shaffer three years ago through Murphy’s sister, who is friends with Shaffer’s sister. They bonded over the guys’ home brews and their talk of starting a brewery.

Murphy’s inspiration for the grimacing face came from a generic sign he saw at a CTA Blue Line station of an adult and child figure holding hands.

“Someone had scratched a nasty little face on the kid’s face,” he said. “That was it.”

The logo is on every Spiteful bottle, but it doesn’t take over the entire label like other breweries, which allows the label to “be a completely different experience for each beer,” said Murphy’s wife, Jessica, a human resources specialist who writes the blog girlslikebeertoo.net in her down time.

“I really admire that. It’s different and it supports local artists,” she said.

Look closely at the other labels Chris Murphy has drawn, such as Burning Bridges and Mrs. O’Leary’s Chocolate Milk Stout, and you can make out another angry face in the shape of a flame. It’s a wink to Spiteful’s “do-it-yourself” philosophy, he said.

“These are just guys who are saying f-it and doing what they want to do,” Murphy said.

As Spiteful grows, Klein and Shaffer plan to move to a bigger space inside the North Center warehouse and get their beer into standard 12-ounce bottles.

For now, there’s no need to change their hands-off approach to their friends’ artwork. They tell them the beer’s name and flavor profile, and that’s about it.

“We find when we don’t give direction, we’re much happier with the labels,” Klein said.

What’s been most rewarding, said Murphy and Gathy, is to see their names on the bottles and know that other people are, too.

Besides that, they can drink their paycheck, and it tastes good.

As part of Chicago Craft Beer Week, Spiteful’s Klein and Shaffer will do a tap takeover May 17 at Four Moon Tavern, 1847 W. Roscoe Ave. They’ll be at the New Wave Brewer Showcase, 7-10 p.m. May 22 at Hamburger Mary’s, 5400 N. Clark St., and at Sweet Home Chicago, 8 p.m. May 25 at the Green Lady, 3328 N. Lincoln Ave.

Chicago Craft Beer Week runs through May 26; the full schedule is here.

 

Savoring last days of Paris, at Next

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
June 29, 2011
Link to article

 

We’ll always have Paris 1906.

Well, not all of us. Some of us. Some 6,400 of us.

That’s the number of diners who, by the end of this week, will have eaten the debut menu, inspired by the great French chef August Escoffier, at Next, the convention-busting restaurant from Alinea chef Grant Achatz and partner Nick Kokonas.

The restaurant at 953 W. Fulton serves four menus a year — four radically different menus drawing from various places and eras. Escoffier-era French was first; a tour of Thailand will be next, starting July 8.

You don’t call to reserve a table at Next; you buy tickets on the restaurant’s website, choosing your date and time and paying for the food, drinks and tip upfront.

Of course, if you followed the development of Next over the past year via the Achatz crew’s detailed Facebook postings and YouTube videos; if you’ve read the countless, breathless blog posts documenting the buildout, and the handful of official reviews that don’t feel quite official (Chicago magazine critic Jeff Ruby channeled a dead guy, writing in Escoffier’s voice, and the Chicago Reader’s Mike Sula and Timeout Chicago’s Julia Kramer both owned up to the fact that with the way the ticketing system works, their anonymity was out the window before they walked in the door) — why then, you know all this.

Dave, my brother-in-law, didn’t know any of this. “Grant Achatz” and “Next” rung the faintest of bells.

My sister checks in on Facebook once a year, though by virtue of being my sister — sisters talk, you know — she knew a little more than him. She knew, for instance, that Achatz is the chef who famously fought tongue cancer.

And so, with my husband, the four of us planned for Paris. This would be our anniversary dinner. (We had a double wedding. Another story, another time.)

I’d scored tickets (not sure there’s a better way to put it than that) on April 6, the day they went on sale. After waiting and waiting, and clicking and clicking, and triple-checking by phone with the others that a Saturday in early June would work, the confirmation at last landed in my inbox.

Even before stepping in the door at Next, it already feels like a production. An event. A few diners who’d arrived early like us dawdle outside the barely marked door, all of us dressed up and trying to look cool.

After a few pleasantries in the small entryway, we are shown to our seats in the cool, low-lit room and given slim, folded programs describing how Escoffier might have done all this in 1906 Paris.

The first bite: four warm, Gruyere-filled gougeres, each about the size of a doughnut hole. “When the real ones come out,” Dave cracks, “we’ll take them.” Giggles all around.

The silver tray dotted with anchovy-topped quail eggs and other such dainty hors d’oeuvres quiets us down. We ogle, then attack. The plate of foie gras-filled brioche taste as wondrous as the countless photos of them online would have you believe.

Our server describes the wine poured with the turtle soup as sherry-like, which prompts Dave to reminisce about the time, as a teenager, he stole his mom’s sherry. The whole concept of Next is time travel, Kokonas has said. It’s working.

My sister, who has chosen the non-alcoholic beverage flight, marvels at her concoction of aged sherry vinegar and sparkling apple cider. “I’m going to try this at home with balsamic and apple cider,” she vows.

The rhythm and volume of the room pick up as we work our way through sauce-blanketed sole and a chicken dish that is a study in geometrics — a precisely formed diamond of chicken next to a chicken-stuffed, pork-wrapped cucumber round. The lamb dish, our server tells us, has been dubbed “Tower of Terror” by the staff because one wrong move, and the onion rings perched atop the dish could tumble. Yes, onion rings.

We are invited back to the kitchen to watch the completion of our duck course — possibly the most documented dish in Chicago. Chef de cuisine Dave Beran is a sport (as all the staff are). He must feel like a zoo animal, and yet, he does not let on as he carves our duck in seemingly four strokes, smooshes the carcass into an antique duck press and cranks the thing until the juices come running out.

“That was a life-changing experience,” Dave says as we leave the kitchen and settle back into our seats. “I never want to waste stomach space on crappy food again.”

All this, and a staff that doesn’t miss a beat. They know their stuff, but they don’t flaunt it. They’re funny, too. “This,” one server says, not breaking character, as impossibly round rolls are placed on our bread plates, “is” — pause for effect — “French bread.”

We work through that duck, served with a crusty, rich potato gratin. The delicate salad that follows has shavings of the tiniest radishes I’ve ever seen.

A Sauternes sorbet is pure and tongue-deadening cold, as is the ice cream dome called Bombe Ceylan.

By the end of it, we’re stuffed and, minus my sister, a bit soused, and Dave has a spot of something on his white linen shirt. Out of nowhere, a server comes bearing a Tide pen tucked in a napkin.

Among the mignardises, the beet pates de fruit sparkle like little jewels. We feel guilty leaving any stray sweets, so we don’t. Dave pops a candied almond cluster in his mouth. He’s allergic to almonds but, he says, “I don’t care.”

He survives. He’s fine. We all are.

The inclination, after an evening such as this, would be to say, “Let’s do this again.” But we know — you and me, both — that there won’t be any other evenings like this at Next.