The lime chess pie nested in a pool of red prickly pear sauce is a picture of culinary beauty. But the artistic touch doesn’t stop there. The simple table settings and the colorful papier-mache creatures hanging from the ceilings all are integral ingredients of the dining experience at Rick Bayless’ River North restaurant.
For chef Bayless, who owns Frontera Grill and Topolobampo with his wife, Deann, food is art and art is the necessary spice of life.
He is not alone. Bayless and other Chicago culinary greats have taken their creativity beyond the kitchen, setting their sights on the world of avid art collecting-sometimes for private consumption, often for public. These chefs often are as knowledgeable about Thonet as tiramisu.
“I often say to people, we have the restaurant only to have a place to hang art, and to foot the bill for it,” jokes Bayless.
The Baylesses’ love of things filled with vitality is reflected in their carefully crafted Mexican dishes and the Mexican folk art that fills their restaurant. On the counters: 1,200 tortillas made by hand daily. On the walls: canvas leopard costumes handmade for ceremonial dancers in the Mexican state of Guerrero.
“I see food and folk art as part of the same aesthetic,” says Rick Bayless. “In fact, in Mexico they have ferias artesanias, or street fairs, that celebrate the folk art and foods of a certain region. That’s why I’ve treated Mexican food as a cultural expression. That’s why I’ve wanted to fill the rooms with things that show what the soul of Mexico is.”
The similarity between a chef’s culinary vision and the art he or she collects is not uncommon. Jean Joho is another example of the chef/collector whose food reflects his taste in art.
Simple but brilliant
Joho’s fare at his four-star Everest has been called simple, his presentation, technically brilliant. Likewise, his private art collection ranges from “outsider” art to folk art to Salvador Dali-all simple, but brilliant.
The same might be said for the victuals and visuals at Wishbone Restaurant and Cafeteria, where pan-fried chicken is an art form.
“The artwork has been a real plus for the restaurant. It has given us an image,” says Joel Nickson, who owns the trendy down-home eatery in West Loop with his brothers, Greg and Guy. He’s talking about the whimsical, wacky chickens expelling eggs, turkeys displaying the American flag on their tailfeathers and other colorful artwork painted by his mother, Lia Nickson, that adorns the restaurant’s walls.
“It kind of goes with the restaurant-playful. Kids like them. Old people like them,” says Nickson, who estimates that he feeds 700 people breakfast on Sunday mornings. The crowd usually includes “a real cross-section of customers, from the mayor and other celebrities to working people, `suits’ from downtown, artists and movie crews.
“I would like to think it is all the food,” he says, “but every article, every review about us mentions the paintings.”
That little extra
Food and art also compete for kudos at the Baylesses’ restaurants.
“We like food that has lots of vitality to it and, in our art, we like the same thing,” says Rick Bayless. “In these pieces (of art), there’s always an extra little fillip that’s like the extra sprinkling of herbs or garnish of cilantro. There’s that kind of element in most of the works we choose to buy.”
The Baylesses got their first taste of the vitality that has colored their culinary creations and art collecting while on a four-year trek through Mexico. Traveling 35,000 miles by bus, they collected recipes for their book, “Authentic Mexico: Regional Cooking From the Heart of Mexico” (William Morrow, $24.95).
Works like the huge fire-breathing, needle-toothed papier-mache dragons that hang from the ceilings, or the folkloric masks or contemporary fine art.
“Some things are not big and bold enough to go in the restaurant and those things go in our home,” Rick Bayless says. These include natural-dyed rugs in intense colors from Oaxaca (a city in southern Mexico), the couple’s collection of things related to the kitchen, such as every major style of olla and cazuela (high-sided pots and flat, open, cooking earthenware), colorful plates from Puebla and their collection of carved wooden animals.
As the restaurants have become more successful, Bayless has been able to indulge his artistic appetite in fine as well as folk art. On the walls of Topolobampo, the more formal restaurant adjacent to Frontera Grill, are some of his favorite things-playful spangled and fabric-scrap collages by Oaxacan artist Rodolfo Morales, and two large, soft dreamy watercolors of food and peasant scenes on amate or bark paper by Filemon Santiago, a former Chicagoan who now lives in Oaxaca.
Bayless first saw Santiago’s work in a show of young Chicago artists at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago “and was captivated.
“He does things that are very spiritual and otherworldly,” he says.
Those elements are important to him and attracted him also to the photos of Salvador Lutheroth, a German who lives in Mexico City. “He touches on the transcendent spirituality of Mexican life which I crave and don’t find in our culture.”
No angry abstracts
Joel Nickson was also looking for something different when he began planning the new Wishbone. (He and his two brothers also own the 4-year-old Wishbone Restaurant at Grand Avenue and Wood Street.)
He decided to stay away “from anything overdesigned and slick . . . prints or photographs or paintings by the young, the angry, abstract expressionist,” he says. “We’ve avoided any of that by my mother doing chickens and fried eggs.”
Lia Nickson, a New York portrait artist and sculptor, dished up the chicken sendups specifically for the 1 1/2-year-old restaurant.
“The whole idea was to make Wishbone like a Southern cafeteria. We never wanted to be a linen-type place,” says Joel.
Lia Nickson has influenced more than the restaurant decor.
“My mother’s a good cook, too,” says Joel Nickson, who serves up collard greens and black beans with his corncakes and catfish. “We always had a sit-down dinner at home, which I think is a real important part of Southern cooking.”
At 13, he began filling in for her at home in Durham, N.C. At 15, he got his first restaurant job cleaning chitlins and frying pork chops in a soul food restaurant in Teaneck, N.J.
“After that beginning, I went to the other extreme and started working in New York French restaurants where there was more artistry in the presentation. I had a lot of training in that, but I always wanted my own restaurant where I could do something simple, food that you eat on a daily basis,” he says.
“I feel my mother does the same thing with her painting. You develop the skill part and then you’re able to do the creative part. I kind of feel that way with the kitchen.”
A heightened aesthetic sense
“I think a chef has to have a heightened aesthetic sense, especially when you get into upscale fine dining, in order to get the feeling of what you’re doing,” says Joho, chef/owner of Everest and chef/partner at River North’s The Corner Bakery. “You need the sensibility, or else what you are doing is mass feeding, not fine art.”
In Everest, Joho has created a temple for the tastebuds: Cauliflower topped with Beluga caviar that’s served on chilled silver spoon, roast maine lobster flavored with ginger and gewurztraminer wine and saddle of venison with wild mushrooms. His dishes are created with the same impassioned precision as the contemporary abstract paintings and prints he privately collects.
Most of Joho’s collection is at his North Side apartment-only one painting hangs at the Everest. The lone artwork, at the entrance to the South Loop establishment, is an abstract of a wine bottle by contemporary Chicago painter Gerald J. Kalac.
Kalac won Joho’s private “contest” for a logo for his restaurant’s menu . Joho believes Kalac “represents the feeling of the restaurant, a sophisticated elegance. He understood right away the direction in which I wanted to go.” The original, which Kalac gave to Joho, hangs in the hallway of the chef’s home.
“I like almost everything that is nice and well-made. That is my philosophy,” says Joho as he leads a visitor on a tour of his apartment that’s crammed with wonderful things, from ancient armoires to a collection of decanters.
Trade agreements
Born in the small town of Barr in Alsace, Joho developed a serious interest in art while cooking in Switzerland, where he landed after apprenticing at the Alberge de l’Ill in Alsace, and working in Germany and Italy.
“I met a lot of famous artists in Switzerland,” he says. Often he was able to trade his art for theirs.
He arrived here with one piece of art, a collage by Italo Valente, which hung in a nearly empty apartment for a time. With subsequent trips, Joho brought more of his European collection here.
Today, his collecting menu is eclectic, ranging from Surrealist Dali’s etchings to five or six early works by Illinois folk artist George Cohen, from a box construction with floating angels by Outsider artist Howard Finster titled “Heaven Is More Real than Earth,” to a photograph of a chalice-shaped flower by Chicagoan Paul Elledge and several paintings by Chicago artist Adam Segal.
He has added to it with work by up-and-coming local artists such as Alan Gugel (whom he met a couple of years ago at the annual Wicker Park art walk, Around the Coyote) and Frank Morreale, whose fantasy painting hangs in Joho’s bathroom.
“Art is an expression of life,” says Joho, whose grand passion is paintings. “Almost everything I collect, I know the artist. I get a feeling, when I know the person, what his art is about. That’s what I enjoy.
“I think it is the same with the food; many times you see the chef, I can see what he can create out of his own personality.”
He himself likes “simplicity, straightforward food. It can be modern but not confusing. And flavor, that’s the most important,” says Joho. “You want distinction.”
