Chicago’s Giardiniera Queen has 47 jars of it in her fridge

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
January 29, 2015

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CHICAGO — Right this minute, there are 47 jars of giardiniera sitting in Meaghan Thomas Olson’s fridge. This explains in part why she, not you, has started a website dedicated to what she calls “the little weirdo in the condiment universe.”

The Humboldt Park resident works for a grocery coupon website. She has no ties to giardiniera companies. She just doesn’t understand why giardiniera is little known outside of Chicago when really, the often-misspelled, sometimes-mispronounced condiment (it’s jar-din-AIR-ah) “deserves to make it to the top shelf of every fridge in America and beyond,” she said.

Eatgiardiniera.com went live three weeks ago, but still is very much a work in progress. Coming soon to the site: giardiniera reviews, a giardiniera recipe exchange, an online giardiniera store and more.

Up now on the site is a still-growing A-to-Z master list of giardiniera brands, with tasting notes and details on where to buy them or have them shipped to you. Because that’s part of the problem: Giardiniera isn’t so easy to get outside of Chicago, and Olson couldn’t find such a list online.

“When I travel, I’m bummed people outside of Chicago don’t know what giardiniera is,” she said. “For years, I’ve been asking myself why aren’t there giardiniera executives spreading the word about this wonderful condiment? There’s no one really standing up for giardiniera. So I guess I will.”

And just what is giardiniera? It’s a medley of chopped vegetables (often but not limited to celery, carrots, cauliflower, olives and peppers) and spices in vinegar-tinged oil. It is also an Italian beef’s best friend.

The website idea has long been simmering. Olson bought the domain name a year ago. She has company. Her friend and fellow giardiniera lover, Dana Roeske, is helping design the logo and writing for the site, while Roeske’s husband, Paul Mateja, has been eating lots of Italian subs. Another couple, Rob Newsome and Kathleen Clickett Newsome, will help plan events and also taste and review.

In the spring, Olson plans to partner with another buddy, Thomas McGee, owner of online spice purveyor Pinch Spice Market, to make their own giardiniera with local produce.

Olson’s ideas for further down the road include running a giardiniera-of-the-month club and organizing giardiniera tasting tours by bus around Chicago and giardiniera road trips to “Wisconsin, Michigan and other relevant states.”

Olson, 32, grew up in Beverly on bland Irish food. Besides being flavorful, giardiniera is infinitely interesting, she said.

“There are stories behind each bottle,” she said.

Word of Olson’s website is spreading more quickly than she anticipated, thanks to her cousin linking to it on Reddit. On Monday, the website had 10,000 visitors, she said.

West Loop Salumi a first of its kind in Chicago for cured meats

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
July 1, 2013

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WEST LOOP — The funk is growing nicely at 1111 W. Randolph St.

Inside the drying chamber at West Loop Salumi, coppa, guanciale and other bundles of cured meat hang from racks, their outsides covered in the healthy kind of mold that’s crucial to the aging process.

Chicago’s first USDA-certified salumeria — the only one in the state approved to use the Old World, nonheat-treated method for dry-curing raw meat — on Thursday began distribution to its wholesale clients and launched its online business. The walk-in retail side should open by early to mid-July.

Charcuterie lovers soon will see the company’s products at Half Acre Beer Co. in North Center and Provenance Food and Wine shops. The salumi selection at the forthcoming CH Distillery, 564 W. Randolph St., and the new Langham Hotel, 330 N. Wabash Ave., and the breakfast sausage at the latter, will come from West Loop Salumi.

For 28-year-old owner Greg Laketek, the business has been a few years in the making.

Laketek’s background is in blast mitigation, not bresaola-making. He studied international business at the University of Kansas and started a consulting firm to advise contractors specializing in bomb-resistant materials.

But Italy, and eating like an Italian, were in his blood. His family is from Italy, so visits there were part of growing up. He even studied abroad while at KU.

Consulting got old quickly, and the desire to work in food grew stronger. Laketek enrolled at Kendall College, taking night classes. Opening a salumeria, he realized while talking with a fellow student at a bar one night, would fill a void in Chicago.

“Nobody does proper salami,” he said.

Finding his grandfather’s butcher’s union card sealed the deal. He died when Laketek was a baby; until he saw the card, Laketek had no idea his grandpa had been a butcher in Chicago.

After graduating from Kendall in 2010, Laketek went back to Italy to train under Massimo Spigaroli, considered Italy’s salumi master.

“He’s the culatello king,” Laketek said. (Culatello is made from the best part of prosciutto — the front muscle — and cured for up to six years.)

Laketek secured the West Randolph space and started salumi production in October 2010, using recipes he’s developed along the way.

Working with him is Jesse Katzman, 30, who has cooked at Avec, the Publican and Blackbird.

Their method for making salumi is how it’s been done in Italy for generations. They start with whole animals (from mostly Midwestern farms), cutting, grinding and mixing the meat with spices and wine, depending on the recipe.

Mass-market cured meats often contain added sugars, which speed up the fermenting process and result in a sour flavor. Not so at West Loop Salumi’s.

“We’ll take four to five days to ferment slowly,” Laketek said. “We don’t use any sugars at all. Drying can take from a few months up to 18 months.”

The finished salumi are shelf-stable for up to a year. On a recent morning, with Kanye West blasting on the speakers, Laketek sliced into finocchiona, or fennel salami — he uses highly prized fennel pollen, “basically the most expensive way of making salami” — revealing a moist, fragrant interior.

Having USDA certification means West Loop Salumi can sell nationally, but maintaining that status requires daily visits from a federal inspector. Laketek and Katzman can process meat only between 6 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. For each new product they make, they first must send the recipe to the USDA for approval, a process than takes about a month, Laketek said.

They have 12 products approved so far, and 3,000 pounds of finished salumi ready for customers.

They plan on making a salami for Half Acre using one of the brewery’s beers, and they might team up to make a Half Acre beer that pairs with West Loop salumi, Laketek said.

Jim Graziano, owner of J.P. Graziano Grocery at 901 W. Randolph St., just down the street from the salumeria, has talked to Katzman and Laketek about collaborating on a salami for his shop, to sell by the pound and stuff into piadina, an Italian flatbread sandwich.

Graziano said the pair had scrapped plans to offer sandwiches, knowing his shop and neighbors Little Goat Diner and Publican Quality Meats, already do a brisk business in them.

“I love to see the forethought and consideration going into that decision of continuing to improve the West Loop and not just throwing something out there to get it on the street,” Graziano said.

The retail part of West Loop Salumi — really, just the 300-square-foot front room of the 1,100-square-foot storefront, unmarked but for its fire engine-red exterior — will be open only on Saturdays and Sundays, the two days Laketek and Katzman aren’t processing meat.

Laketek said he is in the process of getting a cafe license so customers can nosh on charcuterie and wine outside.

In keeping with Old World traditions, Laketek lives in the apartment above the shop. Plans, he said, involve turning his bedroom into another salumi drying chamber.

 

Remembering Charlie Trotter: A food writer’s insights

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
November 11, 2013

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LINCOLN PARK — Mad chef.

That was the nickname my daughters bestowed on Charlie Trotter after seeing his picture next to a story I’d written months ago about him.

In the photo, he’s looking at the camera through his wire-frame glasses, arms folded, a slight furrow in his brow. It’s a look I’d call intense. To a kid, he simply looks mad.

We all get to choose how to remember Charlie Trotter based on snapshots, snap judgments, conversations, time spent working with him or that one unforgettable meal at his restaurant.

He was publicly memorialized Monday at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago at Michigan Avenue and Delaware Place, nearly a week after dying at age 54.

Chefs talk about his tenacity and temper, his vision and seemingly superhuman work ethic, and how excruciating yet rewarding it was to make it through his kitchen, even if that realization didn’t come until much later in their careers. I’m certain his best buddies Emeril Lagasse and Norman Van Aken have yarns to spin of the perfectionist in his off-hours.

Loyal customers — one gentleman I met once was such a frequent diner, he’d been given business cards printed on the restaurant’s stationery — can tell of evenings fueled by the rarest wines, the most pristine ingredients and the attention of a man who made their lives feel richer than they already were on paper.

Teens in Chicago’s underserved neighborhoods such as Garfield Park and Humboldt Park have their own Trotter story to tell of sitting in the nicest dining room they have ever seen, pressed napkins on their laps, quiet as mice.

Others who had never met the guy, or maybe had seen him on the street once, quickly filled the Monday morning quarterback role in the comments section of various news sites the day of his death. Still others have little to say about him, or nothing at all.

Charlie called me a friend. I was always reluctant to call him the same. Your sources and interview subjects are not supposed to be your friends.

But I liked him. I respected him. I found him fascinating, wry and smart. I called him Charlie while others called him “Chef” (though I often used the two interchangeably). I watched him do two rounds of cartwheels under a white tent at his 2010 wedding to his wife, Rochelle, while guests hooted and clapped him on.

I also understood there was a purpose to our relationship that had developed over the years I spent writing about him, and I felt a certain privilege in this, a boundary to keep.

He gave me the scoop, published on Jan. 1, 2012, in the Chicago Sun-Times, that he would close his restaurant in August 2012 after 25 years. Months earlier, he had dropped me hints about big news to come and said he would call when it was time.

“You have my word,” he said.

I was a features reporter at the Sun-Times the first time I ever called him, for a fluffy little story I was writing about chefs and their cookbook collections.

The last time we spoke, in August, it was Charlie who called me. He wanted to tell his side in an incident involving him and a group of high school art students he welcomed into and subsequently kicked out of his now-empty restaurant after asking them to do some cleaning. Not such a warm and fuzzy story, this one. Video of the evening showed him looking rumpled and acting strangely in the glare of a TV camera.

“I’m getting hammered by the media again,” he told me, baffled.

I don’t choose to remember Charlie that way, though unfortunately, the video image is lasting. But it is in the dozen or so years between those two calls where my mind lingers.

In that time, I guess you could say he took a liking to me. He returned my calls and put me on his holiday card mailing list and New Year’s Eve party list. He invited me to events at the restaurant, and kept inviting me even as I kept declining. The times I saw him at events outside of his restaurant, I would say hello and chat briefly with him, noticing that not many people were coming up to him to do the same.

At a dinner celebrating the restaurant’s 19th anniversary in 2006, for which Grant Achatz, Wylie Dufresne and others cooked, Charlie put me and another writer from New York in white chef coats so we could watch and take notes from the kitchen. My name on my jacket was misspelled, but I didn’t bother pointing it out. No need to watch someone get their ass handed to them for that mistake. I remember him spending time with us writers — more than I thought he should have, given all the heavyweights there that night — to make sure we had all we needed.

The 20th anniversary dinner was bigger and brighter — Ferran Adria, Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, Heston Blumenthal, Tetsuya Wakuda and Pierre Herme, all under one roof. Charlie was on fire, moving from room to room as storyteller and host, his culinary dream team grinning behind him.

Charlie was quotable and kept it relatively succinct when speaking in front of a crowd. One-on-one interviews were akin to taming a runaway train, as they twisted and turned, picking up speed.

In recent years, he talked less frequently to the media, especially local journalists — or maybe it was that we called him less. If I needed someone to talk about the small-plates trend or how to make stock, I could call on any number of younger chefs in the city whose names had more buzz.

But Charlie still had plenty to say. He was still jetting around the world for charity events and hosting inner-city kids in his dining room. And every so often, he’d call.

In 2011, he asked me to meet him at the restaurant. We sat in the light-filled foyer at a small round table set with flowers, pastries and tea. Charlie asked how things were going at the paper (not well; there had been layoffs). We talked about the story published that spring in the New York Times under the headline, “Charlie Trotter, A Leader Left Behind.” He felt burned by it, he said. He’d been at this nearly 25 years. Who else could say the same, he wondered.

He joked that he should close the restaurant, move it a block and reopen it. I told him, seriously, to take a stab at Twitter and Facebook.

“What would I say?” he asked.

He also asked me to help write his next book. That kept me on a high for the next few weeks, as we chatted back and forth about the project. He had a clear vision, as always, of how to go about it and insisted I use his agent, but I told him I felt strongly about finding my own agent. From there, the project fizzled. I left the Sun-Times at the end of 2011. The news of his restaurant closing made a big splash and kept him in the spotlight for the next year. Life went on.

The last time we met in person was in March at his home. The restaurant had been shuttered for seven months. I was there to interview his wife, Rochelle, who’d auditioned to be the host of “Check, Please!” the restaurant review show on PBS. She is a force, a talker, bubbly and loud and as quotable as her husband, whom she called “Charles.”

Rochelle and I sat at the kitchen counter as he drifted in, out and finally, back into the room. He couldn’t stand not being in it.

Their banter was charming, and the way they talked over each other was amusing. She ribbed him for giving up his daily run and letting his hair grow too long for her taste. He complained of her dipping into his stash of rare olive oil to use as moisturizer (“This is, like, the most expensive olive oil in the world,” he said).

At one point, his son, Dylan, walked in through the back door, which prompted Charlie to talk to me about him in that embarrassing, third-person way parents tend to do with their kids.

And then he gave me a tour of his house, from the basement to the top floor, where all his books live. He pulled three off the shelves that he wanted me to take home and read: “Siddhartha” by Herman Hesse, “A Confederacy of Dunces” by John Kennedy Toole and “To The Edge: A Man, Death Valley, and the Mystery of Endurance,” by Kirk Johnson.

“I like giving stuff away,” he said.

Charlie gave of himself for decades and I — we all — took. We continue to craft our own versions of him — as mad chef, temperamental genius, lagging leader, whatever fits. He always made good copy, but I remind myself that beyond the story, he was a husband, father, brother and son, too, someone I was close to but never really knew. I will never forget him.

 

Charlie Trotter to close his world-renowned Chicago eatery

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
January 1, 2012

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Charlie Trotter is calling it quits.

The celebrated Chicago chef told the Sun-Times in an exclusive interview that he will close his eponymous restaurant on Armitage in August, after 25 years in business.

Trotter, 52, is calling this a “sabbatical,” though. He plans to travel the world with his wife, Rochelle, and go back to school to study philosophy and political theory. He said he’s been accepted into three graduate programs, two in Chicago and one in California.

And once he completes his master’s degree, he says he will open another restaurant, though he says it’s far too early to say what sort of place it would be.

Trotter considered closing the restaurant before — after 9/11, when he watched from an airplane runway as the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and again five years ago — but the timing never felt right.

Until now.

The decision isn’t a financial one, said Trotter, who owns and will keep the adjoining buildings at 816 W. Armitage that house the 120-seat restaurant and the studio kitchen. Trotter’s To Go, his takeout shop at 1337 W. Fullerton, will remain open.

“We’ve always been profitable, that’s for sure,” he said. “We’ve certainly slowed down like a lot of high-end restaurants, but we’ve always been able to make money. We’ve always been busy.

“I just had to put the flag in the sand and say I’ve got to go for this; otherwise, I never will. If I don’t go for something while I’m in the prime of my life and I have the means to do it, well, why wouldn’t I?”

On Saturday, Trotter hosted his usual New Year’s Eve blowout, a $295 walk-around affair where, if you’re so inclined, you could hang out all night by the caviar station. He announced his plans to guests at the party, and to staff earlier in the day. The restaurant has about 60 full-time employees.

Trotter opened Charlie Trotter’s on Aug. 17, 1987. Fine dining in Chicago had had a strictly French slant until this 27-year-old kid from Winnetka came along. Ever-changing multi-course menus, ingredients sourced from around the world and hyper-attentive service became his hallmarks. Scores of young cooks, now leading some of the hottest kitchens in the city, cut their teeth at Trotter’s. Recent years have seen the elder statesman overshadowed by those proteges, most notably Grant Achatz, whose Alinea restaurant — just a few blocks away — was awarded, for the second time, three Michelin stars to Trotter’s two.

“We’ve been around long enough. We know what we do,” Trotter said of the Michelin rating, no small feat for any restaurant but perceived as a snub by many in the culinary community.

Trotter’s other projects through the years have stumbled. His two Las Vegas restaurants closed in 2010 after two years, and planned restaurants in New York and in Chicago’s Elysian Hotel never saw the light of day.

Unlike many tweet-happy chefs, who have discovered the power of social media to build their brands, or at least some buzz, Trotter has shunned Facebook and Twitter entirely.

“Trotter, a leader left behind,” read the headline of a New York Times article in March.

The leader, however, a James Beard award winner 10 times over, sees it as leaving on top. No regrets.

“This is our chance to say let’s end this on a great note of 25 years,” he said. “A quarter century of running a restaurant — that’s a long time to do one thing.”

The next eight months will be packed. There will be special dinners in Chicago and in other cities — including with Trotter’s close friends, the chefs Alain Ducasse and David Bouley, who also have restaurants turning 25 — leading up to Aug. 31, the final day of service.

Until it closes, the restaurant will be open four days a week as opposed to five, “to make it a little bit more special,” Trotter said — no doubt making a reservation that much more difficult to get.

He will continue his consulting role with Holland America Cruise Line and other projects he didn’t divulge. He also is working on a cookbook, his 16th, to be published in September. But he already is looking forward to devouring a different sort of book.

“When’s the last time I sat on a beach and read The Brothers Karamazov?” Trotter said. “It’s time.”

Staying power: Twenty years ago, fledgling restaurateur Charlie Trotter told his first two hires ‘the sky’s the limit.’ It turns out he was right.

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
August 15, 2007

 

The ad in the paper said something about a new restaurant on Armitage Avenue hiring.

Didn’t matter that the restaurant, in not yet gentrified Lincoln Park, was months away from opening and miles away from Reginald Watkins’ Bronzeville home.

Watkins, a Triton College student, needed the job. He could take the train to the North Side. He had some experience — prep work at a catfish joint on 22nd and Michigan and at a Chili Mac’s near DuSable High School. He’d be fine.

Ubaldo Mazariegos heard about the same restaurant from a friend who worked in the industry.

“He said it was going to be a real nice, exciting place to work,” said Mazariegos, then a busboy at another North Side restaurant.

In the spring of 1987, Watkins made his way up to 816 W. Armitage to ask the 27-year-old chef in charge for a job as a cook.

The restaurant was still under construction. Watkins went to the rear of the building, where the chef had set up a makeshift office.

“I’m Charlie,” the chef said.

The chef was only 27, five years younger than Watkins. But the way he carried himself told Watkins he shouldn’t pretend he could cook, when he couldn’t.

“I can’t cook,” Watkins confessed. “I just want to get in.”

“Reggie, I like your honesty,” the chef said. “Come back here, and I’ll find something for you to do.”

About 90 minutes later, Mazariegos arrived for his interview. The chef told the quiet Guatemalan native he was looking for people with the right attitude. Mazariegos, too, was hired.

In the two weeks before opening, the chef held practice dinners for friends and fellow chefs. Mazariegos, a service assistant, hustled between the back and front of house. Watkins washed dishes. They soaked in the action around them.

Around this time, the chef gave a pep talk to his new staff.

“If you all do your job, I’ll do mine,” Watkins remembers him saying. “The sky’s the limit. And we’re all in here on the ground floor, and we can really take off if we’re willing to work hard.”

“And I heard that,” Watkins says.

And on Aug. 17, 1987, the restaurant, Charlie Trotter’s, opened to the public.

Competing with himself

On Friday, 20 years to the day, Trotter will stand outside his namesake restaurant for the city’s proclamation of Charlie Trotter Day.

“I still feel giddy. Nervous butterflies when I come in in the morning,” Trotter, 47, says. “But good nervous. You want to earn what you do every day.”

The accolades are numerous. Five Mobil stars. Five AAA diamonds. Ten James Beard Foundation awards.

Trotter, the brand, continues its slow and deliberate expansion beyond Armitage Avenue, with a restaurant in Los Cabos, Mexico and new ones planned for swanky hotels on Chicago’s Gold Coast and in Las Vegas. He is consulting, again, for United Airlines. His name is on 14 cookbooks, with two more in the works.

But if there is a peak, Trotter has not yet reached it. That’s the best part, he says.

“In the early days it was much easier to mark big steps of progress. Now, it’s different,” he says. “It’s a little bit like climbing a mountain. … The air is thinner up there. And you expend a lot of energy to get to that level. Before, it was about competing with others, and in the past 10 years it’s been about competing with ourselves, and that’s much more interesting.”

Watkins, 52, and Mazariegos, 45, are the only two employees who have been with Trotter since day one.

They say he is still as exacting a boss as he was 20 years ago, though Watkins adds, “He’s much smoother.”

At the restaurant, they eschew titles. Watkins is the first one there in the morning, the one who gets sauces going and deals with purveyors and every product that comes in the back door. He’s the only one who calls Trotter “Charlie.”

Mazariegos is a dining room manager who trains front-of-house staff in doling out impeccable service, which to Trotter is as essential as the cuisine.

“They’re part of the fabric,” Trotter says. “They’ve become the historians, the folklorians.”

Both Watkins and Mazariegos say they didn’t know then that they were signing on to something special. Even Trotter jokes, “We were just trying to get anybody we could get that would show up for work.”

Now, says Watkins, this is home.

“I don’t think of it as work anymore,” he says. “It stopped being a career and just became a lifestyle. I just get up and do it. If I’m not doing this, I get lost, because the world I used to live in is gone.”

Focusing on quality

In the restaurant’s infancy, Trotter would pick up lint off the dining room carpet and mop the kitchen floor. He would end every night at the sink next to Watkins, washing dishes.

The restaurant opened with an a la carte menu. Patrons could have an appetizer, entree, dessert and glass of wine for $35, tops.

Trotter only served about 50 diners each night to keep his staff focused rather than rushing to meet volume.

“You could see from the very beginning how clean the food was,” Mazariegos said. “He didn’t use that much cream and butter.”

In a matter of months, Trotter forbade smoking in the dining room, changed to a degustation-only format and added a kitchen table, where diners could pay a premium to watch their food being prepared — elements not nearly as commonplace then as they are now.

Still, on paper, the restaurant was losing money. At one point, it was open seven days a week. It took 22 months before they turned a profit, Trotter says.

Anxious as he was as a fledgling restaurateur, Trotter was nurturing with staff.

“Charlie opened my eyes to food in general,” says Watkins, who eventually quit school to work full-time at Trotter’s. “I love the fact that he would take the time out to explain to me what was on the plate, the different temperatures of meat, because in my culture we all ate well-done meat.”

Watkins remembers a young cook named Daniel, whose cockiness rubbed the other cooks the wrong way. They taunted him with the nickname, Sweet Daniel.

“It got so bad, Charlie had to line all of us up and say, ‘Look, treat this guy with respect. We’re not about this. Give him a chance,’ ” Watkins says.

Day One

In the kitchen on Aug. 17, 1987, “it was tense,” Watkins says.

“Charlie was a totally different person. His mood, the way he moved, how he was trying to cook behind the line and expedite at the same time. He’d run over to garde manger, help bring out salads. He’d run back to pastries. He was all over. I think he was more tense than all of us put together.”

Appetizers that night included tomato soup with a basil-avocado sorbet. A simple salad was $3. Roast chicken was served with braised cabbage and a wild rice and garlic flan.

All Trotter remembers of the evening was that it went smoothly, though not perfectly.

At the end of the night, when the guests had gone home, Trotter shook every employee’s hand and thanked them.

“Tomorrow’s another day,” Watkins remembers him saying.

It was a Monday, the start of a week. The start of two decades, though no one — except perhaps the chef himself — knew that.

“We’ve never flailed in the wind, or contemplated what’s the next new thing,” Trotter says. “From the beginning, it was, we’re here for the long run.”

Gardening with a plump taste of history: ‘Tomato Lady’ grows heirlooms prized for flavor

By Janet Rausa Fuller
Chicago Sun-Times
Sunday, August 27, 2006

 

The Tomato Lady wears gray jean shorts, black sandals, a broad white visor and a T-shirt from the Salvation Army. Her underarm hair peeks out from her cutoff sleeves (“Pain in the ass,” she says of shaving).

The sweet sound of jazz — Wynton Marsalis, her favorite — filters from the open windows of her wood-clad Cape Cod in Oak Lawn on this picture-perfect August morning.

Out back in her organic garden, things are less than perfect.

The Tomato Lady planted her tomato seedlings 11/2 months later than she usually does. Her gardening schedule was thrown off by a 30-hour-a-week commitment she made to spend with her wheelchair-bound granddaughter. Then, with the July heat spells, the blossoms fell off the plants.

“I would’ve had tomatoes by now,” she says, standing amid waist-high plants that in better years would be 6 feet tall. “They would’ve been all ripe and ready to go.”

But she’s not complaining. She will still have a bumper crop, only closer to fall.

“You have to look at it philosophically. There’s always next year,” she says.

More varieties than Heinz

The Tomato Lady’s real name is Mary Agnes Nehmzow. People have called her Aggie since fifth grade. Since 1999, when she started growing heirloom tomatoes, friends and chefs have called her the Tomato Lady.

Nehmzow, who is 64, could just as well be called Mother Earth.

She planted her first garden at age 10, when she was living with her divorced father at a relative’s two-flat in Summit. She grew carrots, lettuce and marigolds from seeds she bought at a dime store.

How does her garden grow these days? It’s a 60-by-145-foot operation with a portable greenhouse and cedar trellises she built with her late husband, Cliff. She grows from seeds, and she composts extra plants and trimmings. Her garden sustains itself.

She grows sweet peas, raspberries, blackberries, sage and other herbs, grape vines, crabapple trees. But her signature crop is tomatoes — 110 heirloom varieties this year, she says.

Taste over trendiness

Heirlooms are prized for their full flavors and unique shapes and colors, the polar opposite of hybrid tomatoes bred for uniformity, size and shelf life. Heirlooms are at their peak right now at farmers’ markets and are all the rage with chefs and food lovers. They have poetic names — Emerald Evergreen, Principe Borghese, Tigerella.

But Nehmzow doesn’t grow heirlooms to be trendy or to make money, though she has supplied produce to restaurants such as Timo, Ina’s and Courtright’s in Willow Springs.

“Taste is the big thing, and the diversification of our seed bank. That’s why people should grow ’em,” said Nehmzow, who gives talks at libraries, garden clubs and the like. “If people stop growing these varieties, then the seed companies won’t handle ’em. We could end up with another potato famine.”

“When you meet someone like her, how can you not support her?” said chef John Bubala of Timo, an occasional recipient of her tomatoes and raspberries. “It’s a lost art.”

Nehmzow’s grandparents were “peasant stock” from Croatia and Dalmatia. She remembers the blue-collar Summit neighborhood of her youth as a patchwork of ethnicities — Mexican, Italian, Slovenian, Irish — and gardens.

“They gardened according to their culture,” said Nehmzow, who wants to write a book on Chicago’s ethnic gardens. (She is also at work on an autobiography with the working title Common Sense Ignored).

She and Cliff, a cop, wed in 1962, when she was 20. He became the police chief in Bedford Park. She was a stay-at-home mom of three who sewed her kids’ clothes.

They took cross-country road trips in the family station wagon. Nehmzow volunteered and took classes at Moraine Valley Community College in subjects like geology and environmental science.

It was then, in her 30s, that she realized she was dyslexic. “My eyes used to travel down a page rather than across it,” she said. But it was a minor hurdle. She hunkered down with a pronunciation key and a thick book and, in three months, trained herself to read “like anyone else” — left to right, syllable after syllable.

Tomato talk

In 1985, Cliff was diagnosed with lymphoma. Treatment of the cancer robbed him of his taste buds. That influenced Nehmzow’s switch to organic gardening, which she believes yields more flavorful produce. She began planting heirloom tomatoes in 1999 after a road trip to the Decorah, Iowa, farm of Seed Savers Exchange, an heirloom gardening nonprofit.

Cliff died three years ago, in late July, at home. Until then, she gardened while he watched from the back porch.

Nehmzow has osteoarthritis now but says she feels worse off if she sits still.

On Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sept. 1 and 2, she will be at Osteria Via Stato, 620 N. State, talking to diners about heirloom tomatoes.

She’ll also be in charge of a tomato hunt for kids at Harvest Fest in Kilbourn Park on Sept. 9. By then, she hopes to have enough tomatoes to show off.

If not, as the Tomato Lady says, there’s always next year.

 

Only one day left to get your Scooter’s Frozen Custard fix

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
November 29, 2012
Link to article

LAKEVIEW — Scooter’s Frozen Custard closes Friday for the winter. Don’t say they didn’t warn you.

Bright yellow signs taped to the windows of the Lakeview shop have for the past two weeks counted down the remaining days.

On Facebook and Twitter, Mardi Moore, who with her husband Denny owns the shop, faithfully posts photos and descriptions of the day’s flavors.

Plastered on the walls and cooler inside the store, more signs invite customers to “STOCK UP.” Not that customers need much nudging.

Lexi Fink, 29, stopped in Wednesday with her young cousins and their friends. She had to — she’s going out of town early Friday. “We had to get in one last Scooter’s stop,” said Fink, as she waited for her order, a chocolate-peanut butter-pretzel concrete.

“We have customers who try to be the first ones in [on closing day], and they will stay until we close. They literally come in and camp out,” said Denny Moore. “Some will buy as many as 14 or 15 quarts.”

Chicagoans know the joke about there being only two seasons in Chicago, winter and construction.

It could be argued that there is a third — the closing (and spring re-opening) of the very seasonal, family-run frozen treat shops around town.

Mario’s Italian Lemonade, the famous little stand in Little Italy, is like a sweet summer fling, open only from May to September. Contributors to the food chat site LTHForum.com keep tabs on major developments at Mario’s, such as when peach Italian ice is in.

The Original Rainbow Cone in Beverly runs from March to early November. Last week, it opened for a one-day, pre-Thanksgiving sale.

During its final week, Scooter’s will sell more pints and quarts of its custard, in flavors that include Peppermint Candy and Coffee Buzz, than in any other month of the year, said Denny Moore.

The shop opens around 2 p.m. Friday and will sell out. It’s just a matter of when. Could be 4 p.m., could be 7 p.m.

This is the 10th year in business for the Moores, who left their corporate telecommunications careers to open Scooter’s on the northeast corner of Belmont Avenue and Paulina Street.

On summer evenings, a line routinely snakes out the door and onto the sidewalk on Paulina. Adults, kids, strollers and dogs share space on the benches and planters outside. It’s a happy, sticky place.

That first winter, the Moores stayed open until Dec. 21 and re-opened shortly after New Year’s. It was a blur. They didn’t do that again.

Their break is longer now, and they try to get out of town for a week or so in January. But with wholesale clients that include Ina’s in the West Loop and Jerry’s Sandwich Shop in Wicker Park and Andersonville, and a trade show in Michigan that they attend yearly, their work is never done.

“It’s probably the best custard I’ve ever had,” said Mark Bires, owner of Jerry’s Sandwiches, which uses Scooter’s custard year-round in its desserts. “Their stuff is real clean-tasting, not fatty.”

The Moores know their stuff. Get him going, and Denny Moore will tell you how frozen custard made its way from Coney Island in New York to the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago (the Wisconsin dairy the Moores use is the same dairy that supplied the Fair), and why custard is so much creamier than ice cream (much less air beaten in).

What you really should know: Air is the enemy of any frozen treat. So if you’re lucky to snag a pint at Scooter’s in these precious last days, Denny Moore suggests not removing the lid unless you’re ready to eat it all — and to let it sit at room temperature to soften up a bit.

Otherwise, an unopened pint will keep for three months in the freezer. Which should tide you over until March 1, when Scooter’s re-opens.

Baker Ana Katsenios on Fundraising Push to Open Paper Moon Pastry

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
February 6, 2014
Link to article

LOGAN SQUARE — There are pink marshmallows and hard candies glued to the walls inside the storefront at 3523 W. Fullerton Ave. It’s the work of Ana Katsenios, who wants to make her future bakery look like a gingerbread house.

But the sweets don’t hold up that well. If you look closely, you can see they’re dull, crooked, a little dirty, and so Katsenios has to rip them off and start over.

Moxie and a hot glue gun — this has defined Katsenios’ struggle to get her business off the ground.

“Naively optimistic is something you just have to be,” she said.

The former hotel pastry chef has a name for her bakery: Paper Moon Pastry. She has the skills and the (mostly vegan) goods: chewy cookies as big as salad plates, mini-pot pies, “fauxstess” chocolate cupcakes. For two years, she’s had the lease on the storefront.

Katsenios, 34, just doesn’t have the money she needs — ideally, $25,000 — to finish rehabbing the storefront and officially open the doors. So she’s launched an Indiegogo campaign, which ends on Feb. 23. She’s raised nearly $1,600 so far.

She also recently started hosting weekend pop-up markets selling her treats as well as those of other small vendors — and not just food, but clothing, jewelry and art. The next market is Saturday and Sunday.

“I have operated off of blind faith, but I feel like it’s time to make that push,” she said. “At this point, I think everyone in my family is just like, ‘Oh my God, when are you going to open?’

“I may have to open as a retail boutique, and sell everything pre-packaged. I’ll find a way. It may not be the way I want at first, but no giving up.”

It would hardly be the most unconventional thing she’s done. Last summer, Katsenios sold pastries to late-night barhoppers around the neighborhood, first from a tray strapped around her neck (tattooed hipster meets 1930s cigarette girl), then from a wagon she built herself.

“People called me the Cookie Lady,” she said.

Owning a bakery has always been her goal. Katsenios went to culinary school in Tucson and worked in kitchens there and in the Portland area before moving back to Chicago to bake at Taxim in Wicker Park and the now-closed Bleeding Heart Bakery.

She started her business four years ago out of her apartment. Paper Moon was the name of the family-style restaurant in the northwest suburbs her dad once owned.

As Katsenios picked up wholesale customers, including the Dill Pickle Food Co-op, New Wave Coffee and Cafe Mustache, she moved into a shared commercial kitchen.

In 2012, she found the cozy, 1,000-square-foot space on Fullerton Ave. and began the arduous task of converting the old day spa into a bakery. Her dad built a wall to enclose the kitchen. She ripped out the drop ceiling and light fixtures and installed the sinks herself.

It’s been a piecemeal rehab. Aside from walls to paint, Katsenios still has pastries to bake and no one to help her. She pulls frequent all-nighters and squirrels away equipment when she can.

“That’s why I admire her so much,” said chocolatier and fellow Logan Square resident Katherine Duncan of Katherine Anne Confections, 2745 W. Armitage Ave. “I don’t think people know just how hard it is as a one-woman business. And she’s so creative. The fact that she made a pastry wagon and rode it around the neighborhood — very creative.”

About that wagon: Katsenios was a vendor at the Logan Square Night Market last summer. Thus began the late-night pastry peddling at neighborhood bars where she knew the staff, so that whatever she didn’t sell at the farmers market wouldn’t go to waste.

“People were confused by it at first. They would ask, ‘Are they drug cookies?’ ” Katsenios said.

While the “portable bakery” was fun and quirky enough to bring in decent dough, it cost her some wholesale clients. Katsenios just couldn’t keep up.

“Her brownies and bars are great. People still ask for them, but no way could she meet the demand, or even deliver at a certain time,” said Dana Norden, buyer at the Dill Pickle Co-Op, which sold her pastries for three years until about four months ago.

“She makes an awesome muffin,” said Ralph Darski, co-owner of Cafe Mustache. But she wasn’t “as consistent as we’d like her to be in terms of getting here,” he said.

“That’s exactly right,” Katsenios said. “I was overwhelmed. That’s what this is all about. With the correct resources, I can fix these problems and just focus.”

“I’m hopeful,” Norden responded. “She really is a hustler in the good sense of that word.”

With the pastry wagon grounded for the winter, Katsenios is focused on the Indiegogo fundraiser and the pop-up markets at the storefront.

This weekend’s market is vegan and valentine-themed and will be open from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. both days. Cookbook author and blogger Natalie Slater will sign books and do a cooking demo. There will be vegan truffles from Katherine Anne Confections, gluten-free macarons from Bot Bakery and smoothies from Vert; jewelry from Tarnish; clothes from Lovesick Vintage, and stationery from Katie Holland, among others.

If — or when — Katsenios opens Paper Moon Pastry, she said she’d like to keep this boutique-within-a-bakery format to showcase other people’s stuff as well as her own.

“I feel so connected to the idea of the struggling entrepreneur, the outside-the-box small vendor,” she said. “I want to celebrate that.”

Right now, her struggle doesn’t exactly feel like a party. Still, she said with the slightest shrug, “I undeniably believe I will succeed. I make the best product.”

 

Under Gale Gand’s tutelage, teen chases pastry chef dreams

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
March 12, 2013
Link to article

CHICAGO — The first weekend in March was busy as usual for Jess Dawson.

She had her regular eight-hour shift Saturday in the kitchen at Spiaggia, and a cooking demo Sunday with pastry chef Gale Gand at the International Home and Housewares Show at McCormick Place.

Oh, and homework.

Dawson is a 17-year-old a high school junior with smiley eyes. She also is an aspiring pastry chef, intern to famed pastry chef Gale Gand and camera-toting blogger, with a Facebook friends list that reads like a “who’s who of chefs,” said her mom, Darcy Dawson.

Every Saturday, and some Friday afternoons, Dawson drives from her Libertyville home to Spiaggia, 980 N. Michigan Ave., where she helps make the desserts for the restaurant, its cafe and private dining room.

Since late January, she has been staging (working without pay, in culinary speak) on Sundays at the Little Goat Diner in the West Loop.

Dawson is the youngest person on the payroll at Spiaggia, a fact not lost on her.

“I can’t really describe it, the first time I walked through the doors, to see everyone doing something and being this huge team,” she said.

She brings a youthful jolt of enthusiasm, but that youthfulness isn’t a hindrance, her boss said.

“Sometimes you worry, working with young people, that you’ll have to hold their hand. Not with Jess,” said Spiaggia’s chef di cucina Chris Marchino. “She goes above and beyond, just being excited about being here, and she comes with her own ideas, too.”

Like when Marchino asked the pastry team to rework the dolcini, or little desserts. The next day, “she came with a page of ideas,” Marchino said.

On a recent Saturday morning, in one corner of the Spiaggia kitchen, Dawson made a big batch of applesauce, then moved on to rolling chocolate ganache into truffles and coating them in crushed cocoa nibs. Not very glamorous.

She paused to watch pastry chef Nicole Guini assemble a new dessert, chocolate tart with a walnut-cornmeal crust, candied walnuts and buttermilk gelato. They dug in with spoons, Dawson nodding quietly as Guini remarked on the sorbet’s tanginess.

The day before, Dawson found out she had kidney stones. Tylenol was helping ease the stabbing pain in her sides for this shift, she said with a grin. She worked a full day, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.

“She’d stay 16 hours, if I’d let her,” Marchino said.

An Easy-Bake beginning

Dawson was that kid who cooked at her parents’ knees as a toddler. (She and her twin brother have two younger brothers, and all like to help in the kitchen, Darcy Dawson said.)

The bulb on her Easy-Bake Oven broke, perhaps from overuse, when she was 7.

“I was so upset,” she said. Rather than replace the toy, her mom suggested she switch to the real oven.

The first thing she made was key lime pie with meringue topping.

“I showed her how to do it one time, that’s it,” Darcy Dawson said.

At 13, Dawson got her first taste of rejection. She applied for a job at a Libertyville bakery.

“I called them like five times, and they hung up on me,” she said.

The stars aligned a year later when she saw a sign at the bank for a book signing by Gand. She purposely waited to be last in line so she could introduce herself and ask Gand for advice about getting her foot in the pastry world’s door.

“I said to find yourself a pastry chef to assist, whether it’s doing dishes or schlepping stuff to the car or cutting up a thousand cream puffs,” Gand said.

Dawson’s reply: “Well, do you need someone?”

Pastry mama

Doors keep opening in the three years Dawson has been schlepping for Gand, who she calls her “pastry mama.”

Gand brought her onstage to assist during last year’s National Restaurant Association show, where she met Sarah Grueneberg, Spiaggia’s executive chef.

She has helped at two Housewares shows and numerous dinners, including at New York’s James Beard House, where she met Louisiana chef John Folse — who offered her a full scholarship to his cooking school.

To raise money for a five-week trip to Italy last summer to take cooking classes, Dawson made cookies and sold them at Gand’s events. She held similar pop-up bake sales at her school. She raised $2,000.

Gand is angling to get Jess on as a photo assistant for her forthcoming cookbook.

“I haven’t told the photographer yet that she’s only 17,” Gand said. “I’ve sent her portfolio to him, but I haven’t said, ‘Oh, by the way, she’s a child.'”

Photography, Dawson’s other passion, could very well turn into a career, as it has for her mom.

Dawson’s current self-directed project is baking and then photographing the recipes from Gand’s book, “Chocolate and Vanilla.” She writes about it on her blog, Livin’ in the Kitchen, and posts photos on Gand’s Facebook page.

“We kick it around — is she a photographer who does food, or is she a chef who does photography?” Gand said.

After high school

Dawson doesn’t know that answer yet. She’s still a kid who texts and giggles. She likes to bake barefoot, so much so that Gand has had to remind her to wear shoes in the kitchen.

“She’s got a casualness about her, and that’s the only thing,” Gand said. “I worry people might not take her seriously, because she is so light-hearted.”

Gand and others agree she has talent and drive beyond her years.

“She just sets her mind to something and plows through. That’s her nature,” said Darcy Dawson, who had to set a 9 p.m. end time to Dawson’s weeknight baking, lest she pull an all-nighter (she would) or neglect schoolwork (she doesn’t).

“Any chef would be lucky to have her around,” Marchino said.

Dawson sought and was given permission from the school board for a shorter, four-period schedule for her senior year so she can pursue more culinary work.

She has her sights set on attending the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., after high school, despite Folse’s generous offer.

“Honestly, I’d just like to do a normal thing,” said the not-so-normal teen. “It’s so normal for people to go to college, and I’d like to try it before I decide what to do.”

 

At Cook County Jail, kitchen gives inmates a second chance

By Janet Rausa Fuller
DNAinfo.com Chicago
May 1, 2014
Link to article

LITTLE VILLAGE — A few days a week, 20 inmates at the Cook County Jail escape to the basement of their medium-security home.

There is a kitchen down here. The floors are concrete. The walls are white. Surfaces are stainless steel, dull and spotless. There is nothing in plain sight — no colorful produce, no hunks of meat or bowls of spices — that suggests or invites the kind of happy, sloppy, aromatic cooking that brings people to the table. No distinct smells, good or bad, waft through here.

Still, for three hours at a time, this kitchen is a most welcoming place for the inmates of Division 11.

The men — a few of them just 18 and 19 years old — are students in a pilot culinary program that began in late March. Their goal for the next 90 days is to learn the skills they need to land kitchen jobs when they get out of jail, so they can stay out.

The chef in charge, Bruno Abate, owns Tocco restaurant in trendy Wicker Park, six miles and a world away from the massive jail complex near 31st Street and California Avenue.

Abate, 59, a native of Naples, Italy, is no stranger to this world behind bars. He taught a similar program at the Cook County Boot Camp last year, and before that at the Illinois Youth Center in St. Charles.

He knows his limitations. This is not culinary school. Knowing a brunoise from a baton cut doesn’t matter much here. But, he said, it will be an education.

For the first class, Abate went over kitchen safety and sanitation rules and brought out fragrant bunches of rosemary, thyme, basil and sage. Most of the men hadn’t seen or smelled fresh herbs before.

“I always thought it was fancy stuff for restaurants,” one inmate said.

“In three months, I can’t do miracles,” Abate said. “My mission is to transfer to them the love of food. Not everyone wants to be a chef. But if you have the love of food, you have the love of life.”

Zero tolerance

On a Tuesday morning, the inmates, wearing white chef jackets and hats — leftovers from the boot camp cooking program — stood at a long work table, each facing a ball of pizza dough made the previous day.

Abate wanted them to get a feel for the dough, to stretch it and work it into a circle. It didn’t have to be perfect. It wasn’t perfect. The dough was tearing all over. Abate said they might have used too much yeast or let the dough sit too long out of the cooler. They would make more and try again.

Cooking can be forgiving. But when it comes to discipline, there are no do-overs in the program.

“It’s zero-tolerance. One screw-up, one incident, and they’re out,” said Ben Breit, director of communications for the Cook County Sheriff’s Office.

Each inmate was vetted in a three-week process overseen by Lt. D. Delitz, a 19-year veteran of the jail and the group’s mother hen. She has three boys of her own.

Out of more than 70 inmates interviewed, 24 were chosen. The class is now down to 20 because four were sent to state prison.

None have been charged with a violent crime or have gang affiliations. All are serving at least 90-day sentences. And they all have to be serious about cooking and change, and to explain that in written essays as part of the application process.

Delitz also chose the officers who bring the inmates from their cells down to the kitchen and watch over them during class.

Knives, if and when they are used, are tethered to work tables. The handwritten name tags pinned to their white jackets are removed and collected at the end of class before they return to their cells.

“You should see some of what’s been turned into a weapon. You’d be surprised at the creativity,” Breit said.

Still, said Delitz, “I’m pretty confident in the group we have.”

Participation is a privilege. These men know it.

“I got blessed. I was in the right place at the right time. I’m just taking advantage of everything I can and making it positive,” said Timothy, 29, a father of two girls. It’s his fifth stint behind bars — DUI and driving on a suspended license this time — and his first in a program like this.

Jerry, 31, is trying to get back to where he had been, managing a Papa John’s pizza shop, before drugs landed him in Division 11.

“The people I worked for really want me to come back,” he said. “I’m here to learn more about the food business. It’s a great opportunity for me.”

Abate brings the ingredients for each lesson. He had to call in a favor for a donated stove. The only other stove is in a smaller room separate from the main kitchen, not ideal for his lessons.

In the first few weeks, they’ve made pasta, pizza, focaccia, gnocchi and panzerotti — from scratch, by hand. Once Abate gets permission from the jail, he plans to bring in an iron to teach them how to press their chef jackets.

“Those jackets have to stay clean,” he told them.

Hands-on learning

At 6-foot-5, Abate towers over the group. He is every bit Italian, from his thick accent and tinted glasses to the way he talks with his hands.

He peppers his speech with “garbage” and “bulls—.” As in: American pizza and Popeye’s fried chicken — garbage. Fancy “fusion confusion” cooking — bulls—.

Some of the men joke that they can’t understand him because of his accent. But they listen.

“I’m choosing to learn instead of sitting around doing dead time. If you can’t eat, you can’t live,” said DeAndre, 37, who longs to someday open a casual restaurant, “like a Boston Market.”

Abate gives the men reading homework from a book titled “On Cooking: A Textbook of Culinary Fundamentals.” He bought 14 copies of the book, so some of them have to share.

Delitz, who oversees Division 11’s other work programs, watches every class. She is constantly on the move, peeking over shoulders, offering an encouraging voice or a stern one, depending on the moment.

“Most of the programs are more mental, you know? But this one, you actually get to see the results. And most men … that’s the way they learn,” she said.

Delitz has taken a particular interest in a 19-year-old named Darien, who’s in on robbery charges. She calls him Baby Boy.

“I normally wouldn’t choose such a young one, but there was something about this one,” she said, watching him pat dough into a neat circle with a crimped border.

“See, he wanted us to roll it thin, but I like to be different than everybody else. I did mine with an edge,” Darien said.

There’s a grin lurking just behind his serious eyes. He said his uncle is a chef, so the kitchen is familiar territory.

“I’ve cooked fried chicken, pancakes, mashed potatoes,” he said.

Darien said he might follow in his uncle’s footsteps. But there is something else he said he’ll do first.

“Once I get out, I want to go somewhere else. A different state,” he said, smoothing his floured hands across the dough, which had begun to dry out. “The farther you go, the less people you know. I got in with the wrong people.”

The elusive job

Time drags inside Division 11, but once you’re out, the clock is ticking. Go back to the old neighborhood and fall in with the same crowd, and you’ll likely end up back in jail, or worse.

“It becomes a vicious cycle,” Breit said.

Criminal justice experts say the first few weeks after release are crucial. A 2008 paper by the nonprofit Urban Institute cites research that found the likelihood of violations and re-arrests in that first month to be almost double that of the 15th month.

Employment is critical to staying out of trouble, experts say. But it is no guarantee, and easier said than done. The stain of a criminal record is too deep for many potential employers to look past. Often the interview is over before it even begins.

Within this complicated climate, there has been a growing emphasis on job-training programs and services as a strategy to reduce unemployment as well as recidivism, said Hank Rosen, policy analyst at the nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center.

Programs have diversified to include more unique approaches such as community gardening. These, along with vocational training, work release and prison industries, are now “wildly popular” in prisons and jails, Rosen said.

The corrections field also is “getting smarter at how it structures and delivers rehabilitative services to reduce the likelihood someone will re-offend at release,” he said.

In other words, they aren’t for every inmate. Research has shown that those deemed “high-risk” benefit the most from intensive programs that nurture job readiness as well as behavioral change. Their low-risk peers, on the other hand, might actually be worse off in such settings.

Growing hope

The programs at Cook County Jail read like a Discovery Center catalog: barber school, guitar, parenting. Volunteers like Abate run them at no cost to the county. There are anger management classes and others related to health and well-being, too.

“Every hour they’re doing something. That’s my goal, to keep them continuously busy,” Delitz said.

The jail’s gardening program, run since 1993 with the University of Illinois Cooperative Extension Service, might be its most well known and visible (literally — you can see it from California Avenue). Inmates maintain the garden and can earn master gardener certification. Last summer, they built a home for their newest residents, chickens. The produce goes to some of Chicago’s top restaurants.

The barber program, started in 2012 in partnership with Larry’s Barber College, a leading Chicago school, recently expanded to Division 11. It’s a big deal. Inmates who successfully complete instruction and testing will be licensed to cut hair in Illinois.

Delitz and her staff are constantly refining the jail’s network of services. Her plan is to expand the culinary program from three-hour sessions to eight hours.

She has other ideas: an incentive program, for example, to reward good behavior in Division 11 with food cooked by inmates in the culinary program. Abate wants his students to eventually produce pasta and other foods that could be sold on store shelves.

A push forward

Several weeks ago, a former Division 11 inmate started a new job washing dishes at Tocco, Abate’s restaurant.

“That’s where people have to start,” Abate said. “That’s where they prove to me they want to change their lives.”

Of course, he can’t hire everyone who passes through the class, but he said he will make calls on their behalf. The food service industry is always in need of hard workers and more accepting than others of someone with marks on his record.

Abate doesn’t bother asking his students about the past.

“It’s none of my business to ask,” he said.

They likely don’t know his back story, either — why he spends this time with them every week.

About four years ago, Abate’s daughter befriended a woman whose dad killed her mom. The dad was sentenced to Due Palazzi, a prison near Padua, Italy.

The prison is famous in Italy for its award-winning bakery, Pasticceria Giotto, where inmates bake and sell thousands of loaves of panettone, a sweet bread, and other pastries.

The story stuck with Abate. Around this time, he said he remembers watching a TV program about incarcerated youth, some as young as 14. It was unsettling.

“Something told me, ‘Hey, you need to do something.’ God maybe pushed me,” he said.

Abate doesn’t have a strict lesson plan for his program at Division 11, except to teach them how to cook and appreciate real food, the kind he grew up eating, the kind he believes everyone deserves.

For the pizza dough class, he brought in a wooden pizza peel and had them take turns sliding it under their rolled-out dough. While they worked, he urged them to stay away from processed foods like hot dogs.

“Olive oil,” he announced, holding up a slim bottle he’d brought from the restaurant. “This will save your life forever.”

It just might.