“A pirate band,” the cooks at Schwa once called themselves, summing up the romantic view of the rebelliously creative storefront kitchen as one of the last holdouts against modern corporatized life. At the other end of the spectrum, in the halls of a hotel kitchen, the atmosphere is less buccaneer than cruise liner. There may be the star chef at the helm, but behind him or her there’s a large crew pumping out French toast and club sandwiches on carts that roll morning, noon, and night. And above that chef there’s a vast corporate chain of command, giving orders that must be obeyed.
Check out four of our favorite spots for house-made pickles and jams
Biggers decided that if he and his team were to endure an arduous and time-sucking certification process anyway, why not take advantage of it and get the approval to do things in house that restaurants don’t normally get to do? He pitched the hotel on starting what he calls Chestnut Provisions, named for the Gold Coast street the hotel is on, which would produce artisanal cheese, cured meats, and preserves for Café des Architectes—and might help attract patrons of Chicago’s crowded fine-dining scene.
Finding equipment that would meet their scale and pass muster with the inspectors was a constant struggle, and the results are artfully jerry-rigged, like the five-gallon pasteurizer he had custom-made. “Normally these are 100 gallons,” he says of the tabletop Rube Goldberg-style device that warms the milk, paddles it around, and tracks its temperature on a chart recorder. “The inspectors were totally baffled.”
“Right now, it’s on all the menus,” he says. “We do a Chestnut Provisions tasting, which is charcuterie, our cheese, pickles, mustard—the whole thing is stuff we make in-house. I do a baked Brie on the menu with pickled mustard seeds and cherry mostarda. I was going back and forth, do we really want a baked Brie on the menu?” he asks, recognizing that it’s a cliche of 80s entertaining. “But one, people love that stuff, and two, it’s delicious. We’re doing jams and jellies and charcuterie in the banquets, we have a cheese board in the bar—it’s in everything.”
