In late January 2009, Caterpillar, Peoria’s largest employer, announced it was laying off some 20,000 workers worldwide. That should have been awful timing for Josh Adams, who just a month earlier had opened June, the most ambitious restaurant the city’s ever seen. But Adams—who combines the rigorous local sourcing of Chicago farm-to-table fine-dining temples such as Vie and North Pond with a touch of the advanced techniques most of the world refers to as molecular gastronomy—was booking his 52-seat space weeks in advance, and diners were waiting knee-deep at the bar every night.
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A couple kids were tooling around on BMX bikes in the nearly empty parking lot, and inside only six tables were occupied. But Tuesdays aren’t a big night out in any city, and Adams seemed unconcerned as he and three cooks went about their business in the wide-open kitchen, methodically putting together beautiful but minimally constructed dishes like hiramasa sashimi with green almonds and grape emulsion and a New York strip dry aged for 40 and cooked sous vide in fat from its own trimmings. Things had definitely calmed down since his opening year, he told me later, but he was hardly worried—he likes that things are more relaxed. He described Peoria Heights, where his restaurant is located, as an “old-money” suburb, inhabited by Caterpillar execs and employees of the three major medical facilities in the area. But there’s some stratification. “You can drive a quarter mile and see a $7 million home,” he said. “And then you can see a $50,000 home the other way.”
Stories about Adams tend to position his cooking squarely between the two prevalent culinary trends of the last few years. It’s true he has an enthusiasm for collecting the sort of expensive equipment associated with chefs like Homaro Cantu and Grant Achatz (the water circulators for preparing dishes sous vide take a lot of punishment from the notoriously hard water you get this close to the Illinois River). But he leans harder toward the know-your-farmers-and-foragers end of the spectrum, and his food is hardly overmanipulated. During my dinner, a rangy guy in a trucker cap strode in with a bulging bag of the most perfect golden morels I’d ever seen. The man, an architect by trade, had collected them earlier that day. He kept ten pounds for himself and gave ten pounds to Adams in exchange for a bit of money and a bite to eat.
In high school he thought he wanted to draw comics for a living, and though he did contemplate enrolling in culinary school after graduating, he instead worked in the family business and at a menial job at a lighting company. But Russ Adams was a fan of Charlie Trotter’s business book, Lessons in Excellence, and urged it on his son for inspiration. Then, six years ago, Russ booked the chef’s table at Charlie Trotter’s, where Josh asked so many questions of chef de cuisine Matthias Merges that he offered the kid a one-week stage at the restaurant.
During the build-out of June he continued to stage, putting in a week at New York’s Brasserie 8 1/2, and one at Revolver, a restaurant in Findlay, Ohio, whose concept was similar to the one Adams was developing: small town, small restaurant, big ambitions.
But even now the divide persists. Adams admits there are those in town that won’t darken his door because they feel his restaurant is “arrogant or pretentious, just because we do something that’s out of the ordinary for Peoria.”
Heritage Square, 4450 N. Prospect, Suite S1, Peoria Heights, Illinois, 309-682-5863, junerestaurant.com.
