Dylan Fultineer of Blackbird
By 10 each morning, Dylan Fultineer has done more in the kitchen than most of us will do all day.
No wonder this sous chef, who usually arrives at Blackbird around 7:30 a.m., has been nicknamed “The General.”
He usually starts the day making stocks and sauces, braising meats and preparing the soup of the day. “I also need to think about what our amuse bouche for dinner will be,” he says, of the complimentary treat given to diners. “Then I might have a forager from Oregon on the phone trying to sell me mushrooms while I try to fix whatever breaks down … . I do the ordering and receiving, the preparing of produce and the butchery.”
Oh, and then there is the little issue of “curing our bacons and pancetta and other meats we serve,” and manning the kitchen during lunch and dinner service at this renowned eatery.
Whew!
The pressure can be daunting, but Fultineer greets it with a zen-like presence and determination.
“When something needs to get done, he’s there,” says Blackbird’s executive chef Paul Kahan. “This work ethic has earned him huge amounts of respect in the front and back of the house. Everyone thinks of him as `the guy.’ He has everyone’s back. He makes everyone’s life easier in the restaurant.”
Chances are he won’t be making life easier at Blackbird much longer, since he’s slated to move up when Kahan opens his third restaurant.
Kahan describes Fultineer’s culinary instincts as “very honest and flavorful and soulful. Customers always love the dishes he’s come up with . . . . A recent one is a roasted breast and braised leg and thigh of guinea hen with cauliflower-marcona almond puree and fennel with a yuzu glaze.”
Although he’s only 27, Fultineer has already spent a decade in professional kitchens and developed a definite philosophy on what works and what doesn’t.
“I think attitude is 90 percent of what matters in a kitchen,” he says. “I’d take someone with a positive attitude over someone with more training any day. In this kind of work, you need to be able to handle stress and act quickly and solve problems. You just can’t have someone who will get really angry if you tell them they’ve done something wrong.”
Growing up in York, Penn., the youngest of three siblings, Fultineer watched as his Pennsylvania Dutch relatives cured their own meats and made their own sauerkraut. Soon he was making his own pastry for apple, cherry and shoofly pies. By high school, he was working in a local steakhouse. He jumped into culinary school after high school and hasn’t stopped cooking since.
Still, he does try to have a life outside the restaurant. He hangs with his girlfriend–who is also “in the business”–or with his brother Jesse, the executive chef at Nine. Their other sibling, older sister Becky Krebbs, also owns a restaurant and a soft pretzel business in York. Strangely enough, no other family members are in the business.
“When I moved to Chicago in fall 1999, Jesse was already here and we shared apartments in Buena Park and Ukrainian Village, where we would throw down some big dinner parties,” he says.
And though they each have their own places now, last fall the brothers co-hosted a big Thanksgiving dinner “with homemade sausages and pates and a 27-pound turkey cooked in duck fat,” along with traditional Pennsylvania treats of pickled red eggs and beets.
Sure, “The General” appreciates discipline and efficiency in the kitchen, but he’s also relieved to find that the era of the scary tyrannical chef is fading.
“In those kinds of environments, you lose that personal level and it just becomes degrading,” he says. “I think a kitchen can be militant in the way it runs, but I think the best chefs teach by example. And in the end, you should have fun.”
Dylan Fultineer, 27
Sous chef at Blackbird
(619 W. Randolph St., 312-715-0708)
Previous positions in Chicago: Line cook at Spruce for two years.
Favorite place to eat when not cooking: Lula Cafe (2537 N. Kedzie Blvd., 773-489-9554); Le Bouchon (1958 N. Damen Ave., 773-862-6600) and Taqueria Moran (2226 N. California Ave., 773-235-2663).
Who’d play him in a movie: Tobey Maguire
— Monica Eng
Tim Edmonds of Butter
When Tim Edmonds and executive chef Ryan Poli create a new dish at Butter, they don’t just send it out to the dining room and cross their fingers.
“Ryan and I run upstairs to the balcony and peek over the edge to see the look on their [customers’] faces when they eat the food,” Edmonds says. “I love to see the reaction people have to something I’ve worked really hard to create. It’s the ultimate perk.”
Edmonds and Poli met when they worked together under Steve Chiappetti at Mango in the mid-’90s and kept in touch as they cooked around the country, sometimes in desolate spots. After leaving Chicago, Edmonds went to a French restaurant in Connecticut while Poli was at a high-profile spot in rural California.
“We were both in the middle of nowhere and I lived over the restaurant, so I would just go upstairs and watch TV everyday after work,” Edmonds says. “We were talking on the phone one night and I would say, `I got screamed at today,’ and Ryan would say, `He doesn’t scream at me he just insults me.’ “
It was just as Edmonds was leaving Connecticut and heading to New York that he got a call from Poli about a new venture called Butter.
Edmonds’ culinary education up to that point had been a blend of East and West, with stints at Mediterranean and French restaurants as well as two years at Shanghai Terrace in the Peninsula Chicago hotel. There, despite being half-Vietnamese, he had to start his culinary education from scratch. Not only was he unable to communicate with the cooks around him–all Cantonese speakers–but this lefty had to learn his wok skills on stations set up for right-handed cooks, strengthening new culinary muscles in more ways than one.
Like most chefs, Edmonds’ hands and arms are etched with nicks and burns. His workday starts early and ends late. And he’s on his clogs nearly all day. To those who might be considering the field, he warns that the job means, “hours and hours of physical work so you have to love food or it’s just not worth it.”
But a playful kitchen makes the work a lot easier. Poli says Edmonds has a “weird sense of humor,” and it sounds like the staff is no different.
“We call him Yoda and have a joke that he is really 4,000 years old. And when anything goes wrong, the joke is that `Tim did that.'”
TIM EDMONDS, 33
Sous chef at Butter
(130 S. Green St., 312-666-9813)
Previous positions in Chicago: Line cook at Mango
Favorite place to eat when not cooking: Avec (615 W. Randolph St., 312-377-2002) and Pho Xe Lua (1021 W. Argyle St., 773-275-7512)
Who’d play him in a movie: Christopher Walken or Keanu Reeves
— Monica Eng
Jan Rickerl of Scylla
While dining recently at one of Mario Batali’s restaurants in New York, Jan Rickerl attracted a lot of double takes and sidelong glances. That’s because this redheaded chef can look molto Mario.
But the comparison stops there. He does not wear shorts to work at Scylla–at least not the day we visited. His clogs are black, not orange, and his relaxed personality is nothing like a hyper TV chef.
Which is one reason why Rickerl’s boss, Stephanie Izard, finds him such a good fit.
“We are both really laid back in our style,” she says. “We want things to get done, but we are not screamers. It is nice to have someone who is on the same level in the kitchen.”
This is especially true in a tiny space like Scylla’s, where even the least offensive personality trait can grow like a giant ball of yeasty dough, threatening to take over the kitchen. Rickerl has long loved cooking, but he didn’t dive into it professionally until after finishing college at St. Cloud State in Minnesota, where he majored in photography then watched most of his classmates get jobs in photo labs, “which I did not want to do,” he says.
Soon after returning home to South Dakota, he applied for the culinary program at Chicago’s Kendall College. Before starting, though, he spent four months in Kunming, China, where his mother was doing education research for her job while Rickerl worked in a hotel restaurant.
“It was a state-run hotel so they had a lot of parties for the Party,” he explained. “My knife skills were not that good, and it wasn’t an official job, so I mostly watched and chopped garlic, but I learned a lot.”
Although he has not returned to China, the Asian influence has stuck and Rickerl “would love to spend more time in China or Korea and be able to work in the kitchens knowing what I know now,” he says. After culinary school, Rickerl worked at Gordon, Campagnola (“where I mostly made pasta in the basement for six months”) and two years at Spring.
Like other sous chefs, Rickerl is responsible for ordering and receiving, starting soups and stocks and braising and roasting meats.
But he also fills in on the line,whether it means cooking at the hot appetizer, grill or saute stations.
On weekends, he serves as the expediter, who times the courses so that they come out of the kitchen at the right moment before sending them to the dining room with runners. It requires a knowledge of how long it takes for, say, a table of four to eat six appetizers versus, say, a table of four to split two appetizers.
It seems like a lot more work and stress than Batali faces on TV.
“That’s because the Food Network and pseudo-reality shows have sort of glamorized the industry,” Rickerl says. “Most people don’t realize that it’s about long hours for usually crappy pay in, most often, a miserable environment. And most people don’t stay.
“I remember, during orientation at culinary school, they told us that by the time we graduated only half of us would be here. And then, in three years only a third who graduated would still be doing it.”
So why did he survive the odds?
“I like this because I’ve always been a night owl,” he explains, one early afternoon, just starting his workday. “I’ve never liked getting up early and there are not many jobs where you’re in a position of management and responsibility but where you can wake up at 11 a.m.”
JAN RICKERL, 31
Sous chef at Scylla
(1952 N. Damen Ave., 773-227-2995)
Previous positions in Chicago: Spring, Campagnola, Gordon
Favorite place to eat when not cooking: San Soo Gab San (5247 N. Western Ave., 773-334-1589)
Who’d play him in a movie: A toned down Chris Elliot with red hair.
— Monica Eng
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meng@tribune.com
