Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
When I spoke to him on Saturday, he was introducing three new pastries to his growing repertoire—a Paris-Brest (a dessert shaped like a bicycle wheel, with hazelnut cream filling), a raspberry Jalousie (“basically a Pop Tart”), and a Basque cake. Ory is glad that he came to pastry by way of savory food—”If you start in a specialty, you miss the big picture. What people consider ‘cooking’ is the backbone of everything.”
Bad Wolf is, in a way, his Momofuku Ko—that is, beautifully crafted food with a side of social interaction. It’s emphatically not the coffeehouse to take your laptop to and get some work done; it has a single, common table in the middle of the room, and Ory says he talks to everybody who comes in, at least a little. “The last thing I want is a place where I’m staring at the backs of peoples’ heads with headphones on. People forget how to talk to each other. I’m afraid my generation doesn’t know how to talk. I don’t know what a lot of people would do if they were ever stranded on a desert island. They’d be like, ‘So, you gettin’ a signal on your phone?’”
- Michael Gebert
- Canele (available weekends only)
