The Future King of Adriatic Drinking Food

Routine is an opportunity for resignation, or rebirth. 

Overworked, overwhelmed, and overburdened with daily demands as many of us were before the pandemic, we often accepted our fate and slogged through with no change in sight.

In the procedure of pandemic, some of us, left with nothing but time, have begun to question that routine. Some of us will return to it. Some of us will reject it outright. Some already have.

Restaurants and business folk are already inventing or participating in new models, models which may just be a stopgap, or models that may permanently change the way they do business in the future.

I understand why high end pre-fixe dining folks won’t likely keep doing take-out and delivery once the COVID-19 threat is over. However, if one or two of those restaurants opens up an offshoot virtual kitchen or delivery business that didn’t exist before, our home eating lives will be richer for it.

If you’ve lost your business or your job in the last month or two, I am sorry. That’s incredibly awful, scary, and stressful. But also, it’s a good time to reevaluate the sustainability of making a similar choice in the follow-up occupation after the pandemic. If you still have your job, but you realize it’s killing you, whether metaphorically or literally, the routine of self-reflection bestowed upon us by quarantine is a gift to consider reinvention.

Which brings us to today’s interview with chef Joe Flamm. If Flamm had just stayed on a pre-determined path, he likely would have graduated with a degree in accounting, maybe become a lawyer, and opened a bar on Chicago’s southside in his old age.

Instead, Flamm left college, and despite family and friends’ reservations to stay in school, pursued his passion. Eventually he became Spiaggia’s executive chef, cooked for the President of the United States, Barack Obama. Oh, and, yeah, and he was also Top Chef Season 15 winner. Now he’s working on opening up Chicago’s first Adriatic drinking food emporium, inspired by his wife Hillary Delich’s Croation heritage, later this year

Not to be a downer, but I know you’re a big White Sox fan. Longtime Sox broadcaster Ed Farmer died today, any thoughts about that?

That was such a bummer. During the 2005 run, some of those games I could only listen to on the radio in the basement of the kitchen. He was the voice of the Sox. I recently saw some of those old pictures of him as a pitcher. He was jacked.

Speaking of famous people. You’ve gotten to cook for a lot of famous people. Who ranks up top?

Michael Jordan, as you can imagine. Also, I cooked for Obama right after he got elected, that was most star struck I’ve been in my life. That was like holy, man. We got to cook for Jay Z and Beyonce at Table 52 once.

I made a joke earlier this year about your toddler son Luka, aka The Flammbino, being your sous chef at your forthcoming restaurant. I’ve been watching Instagram since then and his saute game looks on point. Maybe this will actually happen?

You never know with how much the pandemic is pushing things back.  He can reach all the burners. I’m always telling him not to touch the buttons and to be safe. But, he’s tall, and I put one of the pans on the burner, and he flipped the burner on at the exact right time, and I thought that was awesome. He nailed it perfectly.

I’m guessing you want to support your kid no matter what he does, but are you cool if he wants to be a chef?

Yeah, I’d be proud of it. Cooking is one of those polarizing professions. I think there are certain jobs where if your parents do it, you either know that’s exactly what I’m gonna do, or I’m gonna run away from it as much as possible. You know, like cops or teachers or chefs’ kids. My mom worked for CPD, and I knew immediately I wasn’t going to do that.

Right, you were inspired by the example of your grandma Mary instead. Tell me about her.

She just turned 91 last week. She’s the mother of 9 children, 24 grandchildren, and 7 great grandchildren, and she immigrated from Italy to the southeast side and South Shore. My mom is Irish and Italian. My dad is Irish and German, but we grew up with the Italian traditions like Feast of the Seven Fishes, ravioli at Thanksgiving. Nobody was a professional chef and no one in the family was trained. Wait, maybe it wasn’t Thanksgiving, maybe it was Pulaski day. I can’t remember, but grandma Mary had to make all the ravioli like 400 or 500. We all got recruited to help her and I fell in love with it.

But, I read you didn’t think you’d actually own a restaurant until you were like 50, right?

I figured I’d go to college and then law school, and then when I’m 50, when I was financially successful, maybe I’d open a bar. Those were the only examples I knew, people who made money in other ways and then bought a restaurant later in life.  Dropping out of college was wildly unpopular. A lot of people said, don’t do this. When I was working at Girl and the Goat, I lived with my buddy Joe who now owns a couple restaurants in Detroit. My friend said, you two are the stupidest guys. I don’t know anyone who works as hard as you two but has less money to show for it. If you did anything else, you’d be rich.

Your high school principal had even a lesser opinion of you right?

Yeah, I went to an all boys school. We had to wear a shirt and tie everyday. Your hair couldn’t touch your collar. It was a very rule abiding school. The seniors got to eat lunch outside, but for some reason we couldn’t, so a bunch of us staged a protest, standing and screaming on tables. This earned us the privilege to eat lunch with the dean, Jumpin’ Joe Inzinga, everyday. He said we’d all be failures because of how we behaved in a cafeteria. He took me aside and said, “Flamm, when your parents come back in eight years and ask what’s wrong with our son, I’ll say he’s a goddamn moron, that’s why he’s flipping burgers.”

Theoretically, he wasn’t wrong!

He wasn’t.

He just didn’t understand how successful you’d be at it!

He wasn’t entirely out of line. We were being assholes. 

You ever see him again?

No. He retired a few years ago.

You have a few lines from the famous Carl Sandburg poem about Chicago tattooed on your left forearm.

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders.

Tell me about that

I’m a born and raised Chicagoan, which at first didn’t seem novel in any aspect. I mean everyone on the Southside is like second and third generation, some of them living in the same houses they grew up in. But, when I started cooking I realized how many people weren’t from here. I’m proud of who I am and our city and where I’m from.

You grew up in Beverly?

Ashburn, and then Beverly. But I didn’t grow up in Beverly. Hillary my wife is from here, so they know her, but like I said, people from Beverly have been here for multiple generations.  We bought a house here, and now they see me and they’re like, who’s the new kid?

You can’t talk about Beverly without mentioning legendary spots like Top Notch, Vito and Nicks, Rainbow Cone, and of course newer places like Horse Thief Hollow. What else is good on the southside that people should know about?

Southside BBQ spots are much better than they get credit for. I really like the new Carnitas Uruapan on 55th. Open Outcry Brewing is doing a really nice job. They have a beautiful rooftop.

Also speaking of the southside, I think I read you got your start at Joe Daniels Bar and Grill and you did everything, even acted as a de facto bouncer because you were bigger than everyone else?

123rd and Harlem.  1 did EVERYTHING.  I took care of the super VIPs, which means the owner would say, “Listen, Joe, make a pizza, get a six pack of light, and give them to Mr. Borowksi.  Also, take him home. He’s too fucked up to drive tonight.”

What’s harder, opening a restaurant or winning Top Chef?

Ask me in six months!  Probably neither one is as hard as raising a child in their first year.

You spent time working at Glass Hostaria in Rome and Del Pescatore in Mantova, Italy. What was that like?

At Glass Hostaria, chef Cristina Bauerman and her team, they really took me in and we hung out. It was amazing. Italian food and Italian ingredients. One of my favorite things was how they prioritized life. I remember one of the cooks asking if anyone wanted a café. A bunch of people said yes, and so the guy is like Tutto! Café, Andiamo! It’s fifteen minutes before service, but everyone gets up and leaves the restaurant to go smoke cigarettes and drink coffee across the street. I mean, that would never happen in America. It was nuts and awesome. I mean can you imagine everyone at a two star Michelin like Oriole going over to La Colombe just before service and no one is in the restaurant.

After that, when I came back to Spiaggia, if we were locked and loaded for service and everything was set, the team would often go downstairs 30 minutes before and stand on the corner of Michigan and Oak and have an espresso.

At Del Pescatore, well, what’s crazy is Tony [Mantuano] staged there when he was a young cook. It’s a town of 34 people, they own all the land and won’t sell it to anyone else. When I staged I had to stay in another town that was 10 minutes and 10 miles away, there’s nothing in between. It’s a 3 Michelin-star restaurant that’s 100 years old. The chef and owner, Nadia Santini, is about Tony’s age. It’s crazy to think they’ve been on the same journey for 35 years. If the restaurant had under 30 covers one night, they’d roll the pasta to order.

How did those experiences change your approach to cooking?

It really made me focus on the simplicity and quality of the ingredients. You look at someone like Missy Robbins, her food is very focused. She cooks with incredible confidence. Tony cooks that way too.  It’s so technical and hard, but ingredient wise, so simple.  There’s a confidence and maturity I clicked with.

That reminds me, I don’t know if this true, but what I was always struck with about you on Top Chef is all the people you’re competing with are doing molecular gastronomy and crazy techniques and ingredients, but you were always keeping it simple, hammering great flavor and technique. You won Top Chef with a lamb shoulder dish. Did your focus on simplicity and flavor help you win?

100 percent.  I was going to make stuff so delicious that the only way you could beat me was by being more delicious. It sounds dumb, but Stephanie Izard gave me the best advice before I went on the show. She was like, just make sure everything is really, really delicious, and not gross.

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