Brett Knobel, owner of Brett’s restaurant, was more than ready at the Taste of Chicago to serve up grilled flank steaks marinated in a tomato, brown sugar and jalapeno pepper sauce and, for dessert, passion fruit or cassis sorbet.
But as most of Monday’s lunch crowd streamed past her booth and headed toward the pizza and rib tents instead, Knobel wondered whether Taste visitors are really ready for her-or, for that matter, any of the other haute cuisine purveyors in the new gourmet pavilion.
“People really don’t want those things that are outre,” said Knobel, whose Sunday brunches feature such eccentricities as poached egg in Creole sauce on a bed of black beans.
“They want things that are familiar,” she added. “The biggest sellers at the Taste are pizza and corn-on-the-cob. That has to tell you something. Some people have even asked me what flank steak is.”
Food preferences reveal a lot about a person or culture, which is why anthropologists pay such close attention to them. But, as in any area of scholarship, their true meaning is often hotly debated.
That was true on Monday as restaurant owners and gourmet lovers tried to extract some significance from the pavilion’s mixed reception. How thousands of visitors to the city’s annual picnic react to the fanciest foods in town could be an anthropologist’s dream.
“There’s a good portion of the public that’s willing to experiment, and I’ve seen a huge change in just the last 10 years,” evidenced by the explosion of interest in television cooking shows and books, and nouvelle cuisine, said Steve Fels, owner of Sage’s in Arlington Heights.
On Monday, his restaurant’s chef demonstrated how to make smoked salmon cheesecake with a scallion puree in the “Celebrity Chef Kitchen” across from the gourmet pavilion.
And Chicago’s no exception, he said. New gourmet styles have been readily adopted-but with the usual Midwestern reserve.
For instance, California cuisine, which first surfaced 15 to 20 years ago and is known for its unusual combinations of foods, never quite caught on here as it did on the two coasts, he said, mainly because “people still want to know what they’re eating.”
An example of the evolving Midwestern palate, he said, can be found in the way his restaurant serves something as simple as filet mignon. “Before we would’ve just served filet mignon,” he said. “But now we serve it with our housemade Worchestershire sauce and the juices from pressed parsley and basil.”
Steve Karpf, owner of Nick’s Fishmarket, also sees a growing sophistication among restaurant patrons. In fact, an unusual item from his restaurant, which occupied a booth next to Brett’s in the gourmet pavilion, sold like crazy Monday, he said.
The dish, the black and blue ahi, a Hawaiian tuna, was served just slightly seared with a hot mustard sauce and grilled red and green peppers on the side.
“We’ve gotten a lot of people who ask what it is,” Karpf said. “But as long as you answer their questions, it’s OK.”
That kind of exchange is what the city hoped for when it decided to open the gourmet pavilion for the first time in the festival’s 15-year history, said Margaret Jones DeNard, spokeswoman for the Mayor’s Office of Special Events. The Taste festival in Grant Park, which had a record opening day of 250,000 visitors Saturday, continues through the 4th of July.
Some of the city’s fine-dining restaurants have shown interest in the festival over the years. However, because of the difficulty in preparing many of their dishes, operating a booth for 11 days just wasn’t practical, she said.
So, this year, the city decided to invite two restaurants at a time to stay for just one to two days.
It gives the restaurants exposure and the public the opportunity to sample delicacies from restaurants they haven’t gone to because of their high prices, she said. That, of course, was the original, but unrealized, dream of Taste of Chicago, which quickly became an orgy of excess, with huge portions of pizza, ribs and tempura, but with little evidence of flank steak or cassis sorbet.
But some of Monday’s visitors said both the gourmet and more conventional dishes were too expensive to risk wasting $3 to $4 worth of tickets on an unfamiliar item.
“I bought corn because I know it’ll be good,” said Kim Burgos, 26, of the Northwest Side. “I would try something new but they want eight tickets (at 50 cents per ticket) for it, and if I don’t like it, I’m out of eight tickets.”
