Chef shift: Bowles to Huron, Duffy to Avenues
Graham Elliot Bowles, the award-winning chef de cuisine at Avenues, will leave the stellar restaurant in April to open Graham Elliot Restaurant in River North’s gallery district sometime this year, perhaps June.
It’s a big loss for Avenues, considering the Peninsula Chicago restaurant received four stars from the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times (plus a Five-Diamond rating from AAA) on Bowles’ watch.
Avenues, however, has a pretty spectacular Plan B in place. Curtis Duffy will join the Peninsula team in March, assuming control of Avenues the following month. Duffy most recently was chef de cuisine at Alinea, and prior to that served as pastry chef at Trio, both times working under Grant Achatz. Duffy also worked in various culinary positions at Charlie Trotter’s from 2000 to 2003.
Graham Elliot will be at 217 W. Huron St., former home to Allen’s and Harvest on Huron before that; Bowles will keep the brick walls but will reconfigure the space to one large dining room, a bar/lounge and a private room, seating 150 overall.
The menu will be whimsically configured into Cold, Hot, Sea, Land and Sweet categories, and the wine list will be organized under the same headings.
Graham Elliot is aiming to open in June. “Possibly in May,” Bowles says.
Coming attraction: Edible
Edible Chicago has been rumbling on the launch pad and is set to fly later this year. Edible is a national network of magazines dedicated to local eats, locally grown food, locally produced food, chefs who use local ingredients, with an emphasis on farmers, sustainable everything, organic everything, that sort of thing. But hyper-laser-directed local. There’s an Edible East End (for eastern Long Island) and an Edible East Bay (for Alameda and Contra Costa counties, outside San Francisco). There are 48 separate Edibles either publishing now or set to go this year, according to Tracey Ryder, co-founder and president of Edible Communities, based in Santa Fe.
Everything about Edible is twee, grassroots and relatively small; the first Edible, published in 2004, was based in microscopic Ojai, Calif. I first ran into Edible in Rhode Island, my home state. They’ve had Edible Rhody for about a year, and what is so unseemly about talking about this is that, well — Edible magazines are really sexy, very attractive for a free, thin publication loaded with pricey eggs. The articles are well-written without being snobbish and the tone is insider and knowing — by foodies for foodies. Think Gourmet for those of us who can’t afford to table hop in Madrid. But the covers — as food porn goes, it’s more Lady Chatterley’s Lover than Debbie Does Dallas, but it is most definitely tantalizing. The covers are a thick recycled paper. And so smooth … never have I wanted to rub a picture of clams on my face like I have with a recent issue of Edible Rhody.
Ann Flood is launching the quarterly from a home office in Oak Park. Her publisher is friend Rebecca J. Liscum. Flood comes from a marketing and consulting background, Liscum from television production. Flood had the idea that Chicago needed its own Edible after reading an article about the magazines in the Seattle Times. She wasn’t alone. Ryder said nearly a dozen other Chicagoans contacted her to start an Edible Chicago. Each Edible is, naturally, self-sustainable; Edible Communities provides some financial assistance but basically each Edible is a local franchise, responsible for gathering its own writers, editors, etc. Until the first issue lands on Chicagoland sidewalks (sometime in July), edible Chicago can be found at www.ediblechicago.com. And make sure to ogle the red peppers on their mock-up cover.
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