CHICAGO—The first restaurant show I ever attended we still wrote guest checks by hand.
You took the order on a paper ticket, you carried it back, and you clipped it to a stainless steel wheel in the kitchen window. The cook spun the wheel. That was the system. That was the technology.
I have come to Chicago for the National Restaurant Association show for almost forty years now. This is somewhere around my thirtieth visit. For a man who has spent his life feeding people, the restaurant show is what Disney World is to a ten year old. Everything that touches a restaurant is under one roof. Food and ranges and walk-in coolers. Decor. Linens. Knives. When I say everything, that’s not hyperbole. I mean everything.
In the early days it took me three full days to walk the floor. Now I’m faster. I know what I’m looking for, I know how to keep moving when somebody tries to pull me toward a booth I have no use for, and the trouble is I have a use for almost everything.
When I first came here, technology barely had a corner. A few vendors stood off to the side with the first point-of-sale computers, big clunky things that would look like museum pieces today. I remember somebody telling me, with real confidence, that the computer was going to be the future of the restaurant business.
He was right, and then some.
Walk the show now and the technology section is nearly as big as the whole show used to be. And this year it is wrapped in something new again. Artificial intelligence is in every other booth. Ordering. Scheduling. Inventory that counts itself. An agent that answers the phone so the host doesn’t have to. There is now, I am fairly certain, a machine somewhere on that floor that can run a restaurant better than I can, and it will do it for years on end without ever once cutting itself on the slicer, hiding in the walk-in, or quitting by text message at 4:55 on a Friday. Forty years ago we clipped a paper ticket to a wheel. Now the wheel thinks.
I stood in front of one of those AI booths a long time this trip, and I will be honest about how it lands on me. Part of me worries. A restaurant is people taking care of people, and I have spent my whole life believing the warmth in a dining room can’t come out of a machine. But a bigger part of me is intrigued. I have always loved this business most when it was changing, and it is changing fast, and I plan to be standing right in the middle of it when it does.
This year I had company.
My son Harrison walked the show with me, it’s his fourth time. I first brought him when he was sixteen, technically too young to be let in, and I will admit we were generous with the math on his age that morning. In my defense, the show was not checking. And a boy that age can do real damage to a table of free samples, so I have always thought of it as my gift to the exhibitors. A father wants his boy to see Disney World. The first time, he humored me. This time he did not. He stopped at booths on his own. He asked questions I didn’t have to feed him. He is not sure he loves that show the way I love it, and that is fine. He is into it more every year, and a man can’t ask for much better than that.
Harrison is in the middle of an eight-year apprenticeship in this business. Four years of college. Two years of culinary school. Then at least two years working for someone other than his old man, which is the most important leg of the journey. He is spending it in Chicago with Boka Restaurant Group. Kevin Boehm and Rob Katz started Boka in 2002 and have built more than forty restaurants since. There is not a finer group for a young chef to learn from, and I sleep better in Mississippi knowing it.
Chicago has always been my second favorite big city in this country, behind New Orleans, and it is not close for third. To me, Chicago is a friendlier, more accessible New York. And it is one of the great restaurant towns in America. I have my usual favorites here. Rick Bayless and his chicken tortilla soup at Frontera Grill. Three soups in my life have made my most-memorable list. Paul Bocuse’s mushroom soup in Lyon. Frank Brigtsen’s shrimp and squash bisque in New Orleans. And the bowl Bayless turns out in Chicago. The last two I start dreaming about two days before I sit down. Two humble craftsmen, both better at the work than almost anyone alive. I am grateful they exist, and grateful I still get to sit at their tables. I went again this trip, the way I always do.
But the meal I will remember from this trip was not at a place I have loved for years. It was at Dove’s Luncheonette, a One Off Hospitality concept run by Donnie Madia and Paul Kahan. The chef at Dove’s is Thomas Hollenshead. He grew up across the street from me in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Thomas went to culinary school, did a stint at Blackberry Farm in Tennessee, and ended up in Chicago. Donnie had the idea to put two Hattiesburg boys in one kitchen for a night. One who left and built a chef’s life a thousand miles up the road. One who stayed home and built his there. So last night we cooked a Sunday Southern supper together at Dove’s, two seatings, both sold out. We brought Mississippi to the Windy City for a few hours. The plates came back clean. Same town, two roads, and one supper to show for it.
I have thought about those two roads all week.
They sell everything at that show. They do not sell that. The technology has come a long way, and I am glad for most of it. But a machine doesn’t know your people. It doesn’t know your town.
Thirty years ago I came to this show with one restaurant and a head full of dreams I had no proof I could pull off. Chicago is where I came to steal them. The restaurants in this city handed me more ideas and inspiration than I could carry home, year after year. And here I am now, hosting a dinner in one of them, with a son working in another. I didn’t see that coming, and I’m not too proud to say it humbles me.
This afternoon I fly back to Hattiesburg, to the area seven generations of my family have called home. Harrison’s road back will come on a later day, after the apprenticeship is done. But it will come. He knows where home is.
We walked the show together this year. He is asking his own questions at the booths now. I am the old guy asking too many. Forty years apart in what we have seen, and side by side on the same floor.
I have watched that show change for thirty-plus years, and it is not done changing. I will keep watching if they let me through the door. But the one thing it cannot do is point a son toward home. Harrison doesn’t need it to. He knows the way.
Grateful. Still hungry.
Onward.
Pork Ribs with Polenta
In the American South we eat shrimp and grits. In Tuscany they eat ribs and polenta. In the small hilltop village of Montefioralle, just above Greve, the village’s only restaurant serves ribs cooked over a wood fire and seasoned only with salt and pepper. Perfect. Simple. Beautiful. That preparation is nice if all one is eating is ribs. This is a typical Italian home-style preparation of ribs. These ribs are baked in a hearty tomato stock and are perfectly matched with polenta.
1 rack Baby back pork ribs, sliced into individual pieces
¼ cup House seasoning blend (recipe xxx)
¼ cup Extra virgin olive oil
2 cups Yellow onion, small diced
1 TB Garlic, minced
¼ cup Tomato paste
2 cups Dry red wine
1 each 28 oz. can whole peeled tomatoes, crushed by hand, with juice
2 tsp Kosher salt
1 tsp Fresh ground black pepper
1 recipe Polenta
Preheat oven to 300.
Season the ribs with the house seasoning blend. Heat the oil in a large roasting pan over high heat. Once hot, sear the rib pieces on each side until browned. Do not overcrowd the pan. Work in small batches if necessary. Once browned, set the ribs aside and lower the heat medium-low. Add the onions and garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until softened, about 4-6 minutes. Add the tomato paste and stir constantly for 5 minutes so as not to scorch.
Deglaze the pan with the wine and reduce by half. Add the tomatoes, salt and pepper and continue cooking for 5 more minutes. Cover and place in the oven for 1 hour.
Serve over polenta.
Polenta
The best polenta I have ever eaten was prepared by Fabio Picchi at Cibreo in Florence. I haven’t been able to get close, but that doesn’t stop me from trying. If I challenged him to a grits-cooking competition, I think I could take him.
2 cups Polenta
6 cups Chicken stock (recipe xxx)
1 TB Kosher salt
1 tsp Fresh ground black pepper
In a 2 quart sauce pot, bring the chicken stock to a boil. Add the polenta or cornmeal and reduce to medium-low heat and stir constantly until it begins to thicken, about 3-4 minutes. Season with salt and pepper, and drizzle with a small amount of extra virgin olive oil. Serve immediately.
(Robert St. John is a chef, restauranteur and published cookbook author who lives in Hattiesburg, Miss.)