Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When he left his native Bangladesh to attend college in 1985–first McGill University in Montreal, then the University of Illinois at Chicago–Islam, now 42, meant to study electrical engineering, not cooking. But he’d always been interested in food; though he never cooked in Bangladesh, his family traveled a lot and dined out widely. At UIC he became obsessed with cooking, hosting dinner parties and preparing meals for friends. Around the same time he realized he didn’t have the drive to be an engineer. “The other students were very talented,” he says. “They studied 24-7. That’s the way I cook, 24-7.”
So Islam dropped out and headed west, living in Missoula, Montana, for a couple years, fly-fishing and trying to figure out a course for his life. “I had to ask myself, ‘What do I want to wake up to in the morning?’” he says. “The answer was, ‘Peeling carrots and onions.’” He helped a friend open up a wine store and deli, then moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he opened a Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurant with another friend.
Persistence paid off: the couple married in 2001 and now have two boys, ages two and four. In 2002 they moved to LA to run the restaurant at the celebrity-ridden Chateau Marmont. Los Angeles Times critic S. Irene Virbila compared Islam’s sensibility there to that of Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, and in fact Waters is also a friend of Islam’s–they met years ago at a benefit.
For more on restaurants, see our blog The Food Chain at chicagoreader.com.
