Today's Reading

The food, like the food at most restaurants, is the creative, technical, and physical work product of not just Johnny, Beverly, and chef de cuisine Tayler, but also of their sous chef and cooks, dishwashing team, and servers. From beyond the restaurant, it contains the labor of farmers, farmhands, producers, delivery people, packers, and too many others to list in full. That's as true for any one dish as it is for the meal.

Take, for example, the meat course—our dish—on which we'll focus for the next seventy-five minutes of Wherewithall time, tracking its preparation amid the kitchen tumult, like the unnamed girl in the red dress, unmissable against the otherwise black-and-white canvas of Schindler's List. Along the way, we'll meet the people who contribute to it, both inside the restaurant and at the farms that provide its defining ingredients.

As they will the other six components of the meal, the kitchen will cook, plate, and serve the meat course ninety-two times tonight. After a current fashion, it's minimally and modestly (note the lowercase letters) summarized on the menu: dry-aged strip loin, tomato, sorrel. That's all most guests likely to dine at a restaurant like Wherewithall in 2021 need to know. They will rightly assume that dry-aged strip loin, tomato, sorrel will arrive on a dinner plate bearing some treatment of the three promised ingredients and augmented by supporting elements. In this case, a portion of the strip loin will be roasted, sliced, and laid atop a spattering of red wine reduction—a winery-produced blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Merlot from Michigan's Wyncroft that's been given a makeover in the Wherewithall kitchen, emerging enriched with butterfat and redolent of onions and herbs. If there's a curveball, it's the scale of the tomato: half a purplish-red baseball of a Brandywine that's been split across its equator, exposing the fruit within, and patiently dehydrated in an oven for hours—not to the point of desiccation, but just enough to concentrate its juices and intensify its tomato-ness. It will be sauced with a ladleful of that red wine reduction, require a knife and fork, and occupy an allotment of real estate commensurate to that of the beef. The sorrel, in starkest contrast, will appear in the form of three or four unadorned leaves per serving, draped over and against the tomato, like those molten clocks in Dali's Persistence of Memory. (In these moments before service commences, the building blocks of our dish are stashed around the kitchen and mostly out of sight: Butchered segments of strip loin of varying sizes are wrapped in plastic, with the number of four-ounce portions each will yield scribbled on the plastic in blue Sharpie. Picked sorrel leaves are gathered in a cube-shaped Lexan* kept, with the lid tightly fastened, in a lowboy refrigerator to prevent their wilting in the kitchen's ambient heat. The components of the red wine sauce are also kept there. Halved, semi-dehydrated tomatoes are gathered on cooling racks over sheet trays in the open kitchen.)

* A Lexan is an extremely durable food container made of polycarbonate resin thermoplastic. Lexans are manufactured in various sizes and are prevalent in professional kitchens.

Yes, dozens of workers across untold months and miles collaborated to bring even such an elemental composition to the plate.

Here, see for yourself...


As darkness and moonlight flood the sky outside, the neon of Chief O'Neill's Irish pub across the street, promising Guinness and free Wi-Fi, catches and shimmies in the puddles on this industrial stretch of North Elston Avenue, a main thoroughfare of the city's working-class Avondale area. (Under a nearby underpass, a weathered Works Progress Administration-style black and white mural depicts a bricklayer, above whom it proclaims Avondale: The Neighborhood That Built Chicago.) Inside Wherewithall, general manager Jessica dims the lights and turns up the volume, and the crowd morphs younger, dressed for a Big Night, their plumage supplanting the early birds' madras and pastels, the likelihood of postprandial coupling palpably elevated. By eight o'clock—the epicenter of Saturday night service—the dining room, for the first time in more than a year, nears capacity, with still more guests waiting in the barroom; the instant a party* signs their credit card slip and decamps, their table is cleared, sanitized (a COVID-era adaptation), reset, and repopulated.

* In restaurant parlance, the occupants of a table collectively constitute a party; each meal served is a cover.

In the open kitchen, visible and audible to the dining room, the cooks are in octopus mode; passing by, you'd do well to isolate a detail or two: A brawny, bearded man and a trim, curly locked, slightly younger cook dancing around each other in the narrow strip of space between the ovens and the pass, the counter on which finished dishes are arrayed for servers to gather them before shuttling them to their respective tables. (Servers announce themselves on arrival here with whispers of "hands," meaning theirs are unencumbered, free to ferry plates or bowls. It recalls peewee football receivers hailing a quarterback: "I'm open! I'm open!")
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