Charlie Trotter, a Leader Left Behind?

Charlie Trotter stood in his chef’s whites before an audience of high school students in the Studio Kitchen, the private-dining annex to his eponymous restaurant here. The students, dressed to the nines and seated at a banquet table, were from Providence-St. Mel, an academically rigorous Catholic school in the city’s rough East Garfield Park neighborhood.

They were there as Mr. Trotter’s guests, part of what he calls his excellence program, wherein, three nights a week, 50 weeks a year, youths from disadvantaged backgrounds are treated to an elaborate multicourse tasting menu, a tour of the restaurant and a succession of inspirational speakers, often including the chef himself.

As waiters whirled around the students, removing empty plates and filling Champagne flutes with sparkling organic grape juice from Germany, Mr. Trotter listened approvingly as a commis named James Caputo expounded upon the importance of discipline and teamwork. When he was done, Mr. Trotter thanked him and asked him to hang on for a moment. “Chef, ” Mr. Trotter said, “on a scale of 1 to 10 -- 1 being, oh, I don’t know, a Russian gulag, and 10 being nirvana -- how would you rate what it’s like to work for me?”

“Ten, easily,” Mr. Caputo said.

At this, Mr. Trotter pretended to look affronted. “Ten? That’s all?” he said.

This was obviously shtick, but it was also a sly acknowledgement of his reputation as fearsome autocrat. Though he can be genial and very funny, he has never been able to shake his label as a tyrant of fine dining.
In fact, it’s the main way his name has been coming up of late. Grant Achatz, the chef and an owner of the Chicago restaurant Alinea, devotes an entire chapter to Mr. Trotter’s scariness in his new memoir, “Life, on the Line.”

Otherwise, Mr. Trotter hardly seems to figure in the national food conversation anymore. In the very years when Chicago has gloried in newfound recognition as a major restaurant destination, with the spotlight trained upon alumni of Mr. Trotter’s kitchen like Mr. Achatz, Homaro Cantu (of Moto), Giuseppe Tentori (of Boka), and Graham Elliot (of Graham Elliot), the man who put the city on the fine-dining map has somehow fallen below the radar.

November’s inaugural Michelin guide to Chicago restaurants was telling. Alinea, the standard-bearer of technologically forward cuisine, got three stars, the guide’s highest rating, as did the modernist seafood restaurant L2O. The one-star tier was rife with relative newcomers of gonzo-hipster bent like Longman & Eagle, where the menu features a wild-boar sloppy Joe. In between, at a dutiful but unsexy two stars, was Charlie Trotter’s.

“I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel sad about that,” Mr. Elliot said. “I mean, I wanted to quit every day I worked there, but I’m proud that I got through it, and in some ways I look at Charlie as my father. To see him getting two stars instead of three, and not getting any articles or anything, it makes you feel bad — like seeing your dad lose his job.”

 Read the complete story here.

Blindness Doesn't Keep This Chef Out of the Kitchen

By Dave Newhouse
Oakland Tribune columnist

A sense of taste, a passion for food, and an inherent capacity for creativity are starting points in the kitchen for any reputable chef.

So what does it matter if the chef can't see?

Laura Martinez, 25, has been totally blind since she was 1, the result of retina detachment glaucoma.

"It's like cancer of the eye," she said.

Blindness is no deterrent for Martinez. She has a natural inclination for cuisine that she hopes will vault her one day into the stratosphere of celebrated chefs.

"But in a different way," she said. "I don't want to copy any of their styles. I want to be different and unique."

Martinez, who lives in Chicago, is a graduate of that city's Le Cordon Bleu Culinary College. She's staying at the Oakland Marriott City Center this week, preparing for Saturday's benefit dinner at the California Culinary Academy, where she'll be cooking for the Oakland-based Blind Babies Foundation.

With Martinez is her mother, Josefina, and Laura's assistant, Rachel Colcyn, 25, who helped her through Le Cordon Bleu. Alicia Cavallo, director of sales and marketing at the Marriott City Center, set up this interview.

"I'm not a chef because I'm blind," Martinez said Wednesday. "I have the passion, patience, desire and energy to do it, and not because I can't see."

Born in Mexico, she moved with her family to Quad Cities, Ill., when she was 9. She first wanted to be a surgeon, then a butcher and a psychologist before embracing cooking, which encompasses her first three career paths.

"I started doing a lot of cooking because I moved out (of home) and I had to learn everything from scratch because my mom wasn't there," she said. "And I liked it. Friends tasted my food and said I should go for being a chef. It was a challenge for me, and I thought, 'Why not?' So I did it."

Though sightless, Martinez has never injured herself cooking. She hasn't cut a finger while slicing meat, fish or fruit. She hasn't burned her hand over a stove.

Still she was told a blind person can't be a chef.

"Finding trust, finding opportunity "... it wasn't easy," she said. "It was hard facing it, hard to get into it, convincing people to give me a chance."

She survived Le Cordon Bleu by "showing my confidence, and that I was serious. I wasn't just playing around like most of the students. They show up for a month or two and then they miss a lot."

For Laura, it was the sauce pan or nothing. Charlie Trotter was the first to believe in her. Trotter, a Chicago restaurateur, hired her four months ago.

"He tasted my food," she said, "and he told me, 'You're working for me. I didn't choose you because you were blind. I chose you because of your talent.' "

Now doing "stash" work, or prep cook, she's "impatient" to move ahead, to create new dishes, to own a restaurant in Miami.

How does she function in the kitchen? Her spices are labeled in Braille. She separates different meats or fish by feeling their texture or by using a keen sense of smell. She doesn't consider herself handicapped.

"If you have the desire and creativity, it doesn't matter," she said. "I know people who have everything, and they can't cook at all."

Read the rest of Chef Martinez' story here.

Underground Restaurants Come Out of Hiding

Sunday Dinner, a supper-club, sorta-private-sorta-public dinner party held many times a month (and sometimes even on Sundays) by Kendall College graduates Christine Cikowski and Josh Kulp, like many so-called underground restaurants, began with an air of the illicit.

Cikowski was doing an internship at a tiny restaurant in the Rhone Valley in France when she received a newspaper clip about the underground dining scene in Europe — about one-night-only unlicensed supper clubs, sometimes run by professional chefs, sometimes hopeful amateurs, operating like speakeasies. She made a mental note to test the idea in Chicago.

Read the rest of the story here.

Bad Cop - No Donut!

August 8 - CHICAGO - Over the years, cops have ripped off drug dealers, shaken down drivers and pocketed mob bribes. But Chicago Police Officer Barbara Nevers allegedly aimed lower.

Nevers, 55, was suspended for 15 months and ordered into counseling for allegedly using her gun and badge to demand free coffee and pastries from six Starbucks stores on the North Side between 2001 and 2004.

Employees told the Chicago Police Board that Starbucks had an unofficial policy of giving a free tall cup of drip coffee to cops and firefighters in uniform. But Nevers -- a desk officer for most of her 14-year career because of a neck injury she suffered in the police academy -- would usually come into Starbucks in plain clothes. She regularly flashed her gun, and sometimes her badge, to get free coffee at Starbucks near her home, including stores at 3358 N. Broadway, 2525 1/2 N. Clark, 617 W. Diversey, 1000 W. Diversey, 1700 W. Diversey and 1157 W. Wrightwood, employees said.

"She was vehement about getting the free pastries," testified Cara Carothers, who managed the store at 1700 W. Diversey. "This woman is aggressive." Nevers' attorney Tom Needham told the board "My client took advantage of a custom. She's not the only police officer that's been offered coffee." But a city attorney said it's against police policy for officers to accept such freebies.

Nevers claimed she always put a $2 tip in the jar whenever she got a free cup of joe and denied ever flashing her gun or asking for free pastries for herself. "I said, 'If you have any broken pastries or ones that you toss out, I will take them because I feed the birds,' " Nevers told the board.

In June, five members of the police board found her guilty of retail theft, using her position for official gain, unnecessary display of a weapon, mistreatment of a person and other offenses. They voted for Nevers' 15-month suspension and counseling. Two board members dissented, saying they would have imposed a stricter punishment, records show.

Chicago Lifts Ban On Foie Gras

CHICAGO (AFP) — For nearly two years, foie gras fans in Hogtown slipped into "duckeasies" to indulge in a banned delight.

That all changed Wednesday when Chicago's city council repealed a prohibition on the sale of the fatty duck and goose liver dish.

"It's fabulous!" said chef Didier Durand. "Break out the champagne!"

Durand has been a vocal opponent of the ban on the French delicacy and, like a handful of other renegade restaurateurs, got around the ordinance by serving it for free.

"Yes, I was a duckeasy," he admitted furtively, nervous about potential problems with a pending liquor license.

The word is a play on Chicago's famed 'speakeasies,' which secretly sold spirits during the 1920-1933 Prohibition era when alcohol sales were banned in the United States.

"We also had a club called Turtle Soup where people were handing (us) turtle business cards and that meant they wanted foie gras," Didier told AFP.

The French delicacy, which is made by force-feeding ducks and geese so their livers become enlarged, has been the focus of an intense international campaign against animal cruelty.

Force-feeding birds has been banned in 15 countries, including Germany, Italy, Israel and Britain, according to animal rights activists Farm Sanctuary which runs the nofoiegras.org website.

But Chicago -- which garnered the nickname Hogtown because of its once sprawling slaughter houses -- was the only governmental body in the world to impose a ban on the actual sale of foie gras.

Chicago's ban followed a bill introduced in California in 2004 that bans the sale and production of foie gras by 2012.

While the ban was passed by a vote of 48-to-1 after animal rights activists won over a city council committee, few fines were imposed on the defiant restaurants which continued to serve a dish that has been granted cultural heritage status by the French parliament.

The ban became a cause celebre among those who opposed government intervention in culinary decisions. One hot dog joint even named a wiener after the alderman who sponsored the bill and topped it with foie gras. It was among the few fined.

Mayor Richard Daley has repeatedly called the ban "silly" and said it made Chicago "the laughingstock of the nation" but was, until now, unable to convince council members to repeal the ban.

The Illinois Restaurant Association also failed to have the ban overturned in court.

The repeal passed Wednesday over the shouted objections of the ordinance's original sponsor by a vote of 37 to six after a council member forced it out of committee.

Alderman Joe Moore said he objected to the fact that the repeal was passed without debate and said he continues to support the ban despite the ridicule.

"It's a form of abject cruelty," he told AFP. "I felt and I still feel it is important to speak out against such forms of cruelty. Chicago's ordinance did just that. Unfortunately it was a step back for civilization."

Animal rights activists were equally dismayed.

"To reverse a compassionate and admirable decision under pressure from political bullies and special interests shows a cowardly brand of cynicism unlike any we have seen in our efforts to give voice to the most vulnerable beings in our society - animals raised for food," said Julie Janovsky, director of campaigns for animal rights group Farm Sanctuary.

The ban will be stricken from the municipal code on June 10, city officials said.