Yesterday I had a meeting with Chef D'Andre Carter of beloved Evanston institution Soul & Smoke. I've been planning some pop-ups to try to maintain engagement with our local community while I'm looking for a new location so I paid them a visit and he gave me a tour of the kitchen so I could plan the logistics around producing an Edzo's pop-up there.
Now, barbecue guys always love their gear and chef Carter is no exception. I admired his charcoal broiler cooker box with roll-out cast-iron broiler drawers, something I'd never seen before, and planned to use it to cook the burgers for the planned pop up. Fun! New toys to play with.
Chef D'Andre Carter and wife/partner Heather Bublick have a huge old building that they operate Soul & Smoke out of and they're in the process of a massive build out that will create a whole new beautiful restaurant, event space, indoor-outdoor patio with 20-foot high garage doors, open kitchen, full bar, it's going to be amazing.
I also caught a glimpse of the huge dark red smokers in the new kitchen being built out, hulking in the background with their many tons of double-insulated cast iron fireboxes designed to create perfect constant indirect low and slow heat. Nice.
So as we were chatting in the dining room, and I was asking them about their plans for the space, I admired the smokers. "Those are Bewleys, right?"
"Yeah," Chef replied, visibly shocked. "You know about Bewley? What?!"
Yep. Fellow food nerd here. Instant chef street cred. Part of the job. Knowing the things.
I went down that particular rabbit hole many years ago after a barbecue dinner and pitmaster class at Jared Leonard's now-defunct Barbecue Supply Co. on Western where he schooled us all on why Bewley BBQ pits are the gold standard of smoking meats. Then I sat up all night on the internet googling and clickety clicking until I found other places who used the same smoker, reading about why the thousands of pounds of heavy iron used for Bewely smokers creates the perfect atmosphere for unlocking all the magic that comes out of a large, slow-cooked piece of meat with lots of connective tissue that needs to get broken down so it becomes that amazing, meltingly tender sticky fall-apart barbecue we all go out of our way to enjoy.
So we bonded over that for a minute and I felt like I impressed an accomplished barbecue pitmaster by knowing a little about what he does. That's the kind of thing that feels satisfying to me.
At 55, I've come to appreciate the massive amounts of seemingly useless information I've accumulated in my head. I've always placed a high value on knowing stuff. When I was a kid, it was sports stats. Baseball. I was obsessed. I would pore over box scores in the newspaper every day, making notations, noting trends. I even went so far as to create what I now realize were early rudimentary versions of spreadsheets that I hand-wrote to track the stats of my favorite players and teams.
Once I chose to go to culinary school, food became the focus of my endless quest to know all the things. So when I tasted something new and amazing or a certain chef's cooking really blew me away, I would go down all the rabbit holes to try and learn everything I could about it.
In the primitive-internet 90's, a group of us young ambitious chefs would straggle in to the upstairs cafe in the Borders bookstore on Michigan Avenue nearly every morning to drink our coffee, eat croissants, and read the glossy fifty dollar chef cookbooks we drooled over but couldn't afford to buy on our line cook $8/hr. paychecks.
For a couple hours before our shifts started at Nomi, Tru, or Bistro 110, we would fantasize about eating or working at Gotham Bar and Grill, Stars, or The Inn at Little Washington, excitedly showing each other photos of plates, thinking through ideas about various cuisines or food cultures we wanted to explore, and debating whether "fusion cooking" was sacrilegious cultural appropriation or an inevitable outgrowth of our current global marketplace and modern connected world.
I flipped though hundreds of books and read thousands of recipes, trying to figure out what made cajun cooking different from creole and whether my roux for gumbo should be made with butter or oil. I wanted to know "the right way" to do everything and the deeper I delved, the more it became apparent that there is no one right way to do anything. That just made the quest for knowledge even more appealing to me.
So seeing that look of "oh, ok, this dude knows some stuff" on Chef Carter's face yesterday was one of those satisfying squaring-the-circle moments for me. It felt like my 30+ years of obsessing over this endless quest to know all the things about food and cooking prepared me for that little moment I could've never known I was preparing myself for.
My Aunt Wilma had an expression she'd say when one of us kids was tooting our own horn a little too much, maybe acting conceited or arrogant-- "don't tell everyone how wonderful you are. Just BE wonderful and then let people notice. Because, trust me, they will."
More info about Edzo's pop-ups around Evanston coming soon! Hopefully something toward the end of this month.
.jpg)
Posts
