On the northern edge of Illinois, lunchtime is approaching in Wadsworth. Along Illinois Highway 41 is a squat box restaurant resembling a barn house, and inside, Dino Kallianis is sauteing lamb organs for a stew he’s adding as a menu special. Lamb hearts, lungs, liver, spleen, all sizzling in the fry pan. Oh sure, that’ll sell.
When I speak with Kallianis a few hours later, sure enough, he sold out of his lamb organ stew.
“It’s gotten to the point that our clientele trusts us with what we do,” he says.
Chefs who approach food like Kallianis are a rare breed. His holistic philosophy came with him when his family moved to Illinois from Greece when Kallianis was 11. Back in his hometown of Sparta, you milked cows daily, pressed oil from olives, plucked greens from the soil for dinner that night. “I’m a firm believer that being a peasant is noble,” he likes to say.
Food was as much about taste as preventive medicine — he’ll use his farm’s milk thistle in stewed greens because it supports liver health. This isn’t radical thinking. What’s labeled here as “certified organic farming” is just called “farming” where the Kallianis family comes from.
And yet … the very philosophy Dino Kallianis strives to instill is lost in the restaurant’s name, which 27 years into his business, he’s stuck with.
“The dumbest thing I ever did was to name this Captain Porky’s,” Kallianis said. “It sounds cartoonish. I should’ve named it ‘The Peasant Run.'”
Captain Porky’s. Actually, it does an adequate job describing the restaurant. The name conveys the two main proteins served here: seafood and pork. In one glass case are the filleted fish and crabcakes that will go from deep fryer to po’boys, saute pan to warm salads. At the other end of the kitchen is an aquarium pit, the type you’d find in South Side barbecue shacks, where ribs, chicken and beef brisket absorb wafting smoke for hours on end.
Considering Chicago’s tradition of Greek-owned diners, ones fixing griddled burgers and gyros, Kallianis rejects the short-order mentality. He favors Creole-tinged Southern cooking, food requiring half a day to prepare.
Kallianis owes his career to two men who migrated here from Louisiana in the 1920s. One was an elderly chef who taught Kallianis how to cook and speak English. Another was a fisherman who made the finest barbecue sauce Kallianis ever tasted. The two shared with Kallianis the food they grew up eating — jambalaya, crawfish po’boys, alligator tail — and the young Greek cook promised he would one day open a restaurant in their honor.
It happened in 1984. Siblings Dino, George and Renee Kallianis founded Captain Porky’s in Beach Park, a town shoehorned between Zion and Waukegan. There they operated until last year, when they moved to Wadsworth and built a new Captain Porky’s on the site of a former liquor store. (They already owned The Shanty, a sit-down restaurant next door.) The new building uses wood scavenged from 20 local barns and has an entrance path of bricks excavated from Sheridan Road in Waukegan. They considered changing the restaurant name but decided it would not be staying true to their roots.
Now wait a minute.
If this idea of fried seafood and barbecue doesn’t quite sync up with his food-as-preventive-care ethos, you’re on to something. Kallianis knows the restaurant can’t sustain itself on lamb organ stews alone. The core business will never be the seasonal and wholesome dishes he favors.
So they employ a strategy, subtle it may be: You walk into Captain Porky’s, all dark wood beams, nautical artifacts and long tables with bench seating. You see the hot case with smoked meats and cold seafood case (Captain Porky’s also is a fish market). There’s no menu board. Customers invariably ask, as I did, “What do you recommend?” As anyone who has met Dino Kallianis will attest, the man is a conversationalist.
“I’m making beef stroganoff with wild mushrooms I foraged,” he’ll begin his monologue. “I’ve picked 500 pounds of mushrooms in two months …” And before you know it, you’re taking home a pound of salmon marinated in their own olive oil and proper, true baklava made by Kallianis’ mother, Nota.
Kallianis’ touches are imperceptible unless he tells you about them (and he will). The olive oil comes from the family farm, stone-pressed in Greece. He makes his own feta and Parmesan. He insists on smoking with “dry-rotted red oak wood” from trees dead for at least five years, porous and relieved of sap, the wood still upright so as to not absorb ground water. Only then, Kallianis claims, will the wood produce enough heat and clean white smoke conducive for meat smoking.
He slides Greek touches into American techniques: barbecue chicken, the best thing I tasted here, is seasoned with oregano, garlic and lemon. Six hours of smoking produces meat imbued with the sweet and brawny waft of cherry wood and charcoal. He ladles his tomato-based sauce over the chicken — have you ever met a cook who cites pH balance as the decisive factor in barbecue sauce? Kallianis knows it’s done when he can stick a pinkie into the sauce pot, wash it with cold water and have not a trace of grease residue on his finger.
Kallianis’ Old World lifestyle extends beyond the kitchen. He is defiantly proud about not owning a cellphone. He’s never turned on a computer. When he’s not at the restaurant, he divides his time among his three farms in nearby Bristol, Wis., where he tends his sheep and goats.
“It gives him peace of mind to be at his farm,” says his son George, who also works at the restaurant (he shares a name with his uncle). “This might be his way to remember from when he was a little kid. He has a more simplistic view in a complicated world.”
The last thing Kallianis tells me: “I will not come into this modern age. We need to go back to basics. You have to stand for something in this world, even food. I will be milking animals until I die. Innocence is the greatest virtue.”
You wouldn’t know it from a place named Captain Porky’s, but it is, in fact.
Twitter @kevinthepang
Captain Porky’s
Highway 41 and Wadsworth Road (38995 Illinois Highway 41),
Wadsworth; 847-360-7460; captainporky
.com
Open: 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Sunday
Established: 1984
Known for: Fried shrimp, rib tips, gumbo and an unpublished menu Dino Kallianis would rather you sample
