David Schneider, owner of the new Wicker Park restaurant Taxim, knows it won’t be easy to change entrenched ideas about what a Greek restaurant should be in this town. “I’ve had people actually get in here and say, ‘You need more blue and white. This place doesn’t feel Greek enough,’” he says. “Likewise, there’s an orthodoxy about how to make a dish.”
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But Schneider knows that this fundamental shift in Greek cuisine can’t be hung on just one chef. Tselementes’s rise coincided with Greek and Turkish nationalist movements that climaxed with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1923 and the mass expulsion of a million and half Greeks from Asia Minor. Since then a kind of collective denial of eastern Mediterranean Greek cuisine has persisted in Greece and abroad, while Frenchified Greek cuisine, aided and abetted by the tourist trade, has been exported all over the world.
Schneider, whose mother came to the U.S. from Greece in the 60s, divided every summer of his childhood between his grandparents’ small rural property outside Athens and his grandfather’s native village on Evia Island, where he was immersed in the farm-to-table aesthetic. “People have their small plots of land,” he says, “and every time you visit somebody—especially from the older generation—they’ll pick you something and they’ll make it for you.”
But adapting his catering operation for a restaurant kitchen line was beyond his experience, so through Christine Kim he recruited Jan Rickerl, a former sous chef at Green Zebra, to help out. The pair developed a small but remarkable opening menu that incorporates a wide array of regional ingredients and techniques into its hot and cold mezedakia and larger bountiful plates.
