To make a reservation, please call us at 312-226-8144 or email us at reservations@elideas.com

The brainchild of Chef/Owner Phillip Foss, EL Ideas offers contemporary cuisine in a setting unlike any other. Offering only 24 seats, the dining room is situated inside of the kitchen and offers a relaxed setting not generally associated with restaurants serving cutting edge cuisine. Interaction with the chefs and fellow diners is welcome and it is very common for guests to join the chefs in the kitchen to ask questions, take photos, and discuss trends.

EL Ideas’ motto of  ”Question Everything” pertains to the cuisine as much as it does to the environment in which it is served. The cuisine reflects the approach, whims, standards and experience developed by Chef Phillip Foss (Quilted Giraffe, Le Cirque, Lockwood) and Chef Matt Dubois (Castagna, Heathman, Crofton on Wells). Culinary ideas span from redefining known flavors to outside the box flavor pairings and methods of serving. Click here for some samples of our cuisine.

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This might be my personal favorites of the “Uh oh, we need to get another item on the menu stat!” series. Usually this happens when an integral ingredient becomes unavailable.  In this case – as in the previous post – the versatility of cauliflower saved the day. As opposed to the sensuous nature of the ingredient in the below post, in this case the robust characteristics shine. The primary preparation in this dish is prepared in the Sicilian fashion with good quality tomatoes and copious amounts of anchovies, garlic, and onions. Bottarga – cured tuna roe – was sliced thin and tossed with some virgin olive oil and a top quality Spanish anchovy definitely take center stage in the flavor profile. Anise hyssop – which was left over when this course went bye-bye, really helps round out the flavors and bring back some subtlety. Some cauliflower fleurettes tossed in a gremolata and croutons round out the course. I wish all of our ‘oh shit moments’ could yield such great results!

Not all of our ideas work. I had been doing a version of crab with caviar, lychee, and lemongrass which had been getting good reviews from guests. The crab and lychee made good sense to me, but I wanted to see how the caviar would hold up to it without the unctuous crab. In short, it didn’t. Guests were arriving in a little over an hour, and I was forced into scrambling. With 15 courses on the menu, many ingredients were already in use. Cauliflower was an exception was one of the fastest purees I ever made. The components include a quail egg yolk that is slow cooked for three hours (also part of original idea), a cauliflower pudding finished with creme fraiche, supremes of lime, a generous topping of ossetra caviar and finished with a citrus coriander blossom. Textures here are velvety and luxurious with the creamy egg yolk and popping fish eggs, and the citrus coriander blossom nicely accentuates the cauliflower.

Original incarnation with crab, sea urchin, and eggs

This course came to me on a Sunday afternoon while suffering on the couch with a 104 degree fever. Though I had no desire of thinking about food and tried pushing this idea out of my head, I knew that it had legs and would hit the menu. I brought the ham in from Benton’s in Tennessee for the idea of Green Eggs and Ham that I rolled out for St. Patrick’s Day. That dish worked much better in my head than it did on the plate, so we were left with 95% of the ham. This was likely why it was on my mind at all when I was sick.
The thought began with the pairing of the ham with Swiss chard and cocoa nibs. When I was feeling a bit better on Tuesday, I started to expand on the idea and scoured the pantry and fridge. Fontina cheese was left from a fondutta course that never really took off. Ham and cheese? No brainer. The cocoa nibs were toasted and then added to a gastrique made with caramelized sugar and red wine vinegar. The next ingredient that hit the dish was ramon nut which was brought in by our friend and forager, Dave Odd. The nut has a distinct characteristics of chocolate and coffee and added extra complexity. Butternut squash was left in the box from this root beer course and rounded it out. The dish had a semi-short run but was met with much love.

It is with great pleasure to announce that EL Ideas and Chef Phillip Foss will be hosting the cutting edge Ideas in Food for ‘pop up’ workshops and a collaborative dinner at EL Ideas.

Widely considered pioneers in modern gastronomy on account of their refined and inquisitive nature towards cuisine, Chefs/Authors Alex Talbot and Aki Kamozawa are widely acclaimed for their published work and are models for how to share knowledge in the age of internet.

The three day schedule is available below and it is open to both industry and the public (think Mother’s/Father’s Day gift!).
Chef Talbot will be conducting the workshops and the cost for each is $125 per person. The collaborative dinner on Tuesday night will be $165.

Sunday, June 24th:
Ideas in Food, Workshop 1: 12 noon – 3pm
Topic: Sous Vide and Temperature Controlled Cooking

Ideas in Food, Workshop 2: 4 – 7pm
Topics: 1) Egg Cookery 2) Pressure Cooking

Monday, June 25th:
Ideas in Food, Workshop 1: 12 noon – 3pm
Topic: Hydrocolloids

Ideas in Food, Workshop 2: 4-7pm
Topic: Using Transglutaminase

Tuesday, June 26th:
Collaborative dinner at EL Ideas (2419 W. 14th Street, Chicago, 60608
Chef Alex Talbot of Ideas in Food and Chef Phillip Foss of EL Ideas
15 courses (menu tbd)
BYOB
7:30 m- 10:30 pm
$165/person

Space will be limited, so email your request for any or all of the itinerary to reservations@elideas.com.

San Sebastian Sardine / White Eggplant / Zucchini / Tomatoes / Piperade

One from the vault that was on the menu during the summer shortly after we opened. A couple of others from shortly after we opened I just ran across on the hard drive that will be posted soon.

April 8, 2012
Riding the train on the way to Milwaukee mid afternoon. The girls are with their mother and it is the rarest day off without any responsibilities. I have yet to put a bite in my stomach. Too frequently this happens. I’ve been on and off and have recently gotten back into cigarette smoking. They give me this raw feeling I’m clinging to right now. Like I am out on a fragile tree limb and the wind is blowing. Like Captain Dan hanging off the mast on the Bubba Gump shrimping boat daring God to come and get him. Raw bones protruding at the seams and clawing their way through my pores. A hungry man who’s disillusioned.

With all of the unpredictability and stress of the restaurant business, it has been far more honest, true, and predictable to me than so many of the human relationships I have had. But the kitchen cannot give me a hug or kiss. It is more like a temple or salvation. It is a give and take relationship and I can’t imagine where I would be without it right now. Hell, I’m not even so sure where I am at with it. I have felt this way before during my most lonely times and the easiest way to come out of the funk has been to dive into the deep end of whatever kitchen I am in. I hope this is one of those phases.

In an interview with a journalist working on a documentary shortly after we opened, I was asked whether the need to receive accolades and to be a Michelin starred chef was akin to being a drug addict. He wanted to know if I felt the amount of sacrifice and vision that is necessary to achieve these goals were worth the strains that can cause on oneself and relationships. It would have been easy to accept the comparison. Yes, there is something to be said for the amount of commitment it takes to be a successful chef. This industry in general can be very hard on relationships. And yes, there are many chefs – myself included – who have turned to alcohol and/or drugs to ‘get a better grip’ on this stress. So although I can’t really say because I don’t have any Michelin stars to begin with, the simple pursuit of perfection and desire for one’s work to be well received could be equated to continuously shooting heroine. So one can recapture the fantasy of that initial trip to heaven. For a chef, that trip to heaven is a feeling from within, but it most certainly comes from the outside. To be told from others that what you are doing is special. I cook and create for myself first to be sure, but it doesn’t make a difference if it isn’t understood, desired, and most importantly enjoyed by our guests. I understood where he was going with the point, but I reluctantly disagreed. I told him that for myself, being a chef was more like a religious commitment.

I have been able to step out of the culinary world for a considerable amount of time and never felt like I was going through withdrawals. I needed to step back and discover myself as an individual. Luckily as a result of a solid background, cooking for me has been like jumping back on a bike. With as much bouncing around as I’ve done, there are times when I ask myself whether or not I even have a right to be in the position I currently am in the first place. I have picked up and put down my trade at will. True, I would always find work in kitchens when I traveled, but the vast majority of the many I’ve worked in (post New York) were more out of the necessity of making ends meet than pursuing a shot of heroine. Yes, heroine is more punk rock, sexy, and Bourdain-esque than the purity of religion, but isn’t religion the heroine of the masses anyhow? I may be trying to convince myself here. But of course I deserve to be where I am. I’ve paid the cost to be the boss.

In my eyes, a relationship with food is the easiest form of expression in terms of spirituality. When my focus is solely on the creative aspects in the kitchen, I am the Pope and the food is my Scripture. I consider it holy to enter the being of an ingredient and understand it from the inside out. To give life to an inanimate or downright dead ingredient or animal and raise it to a higher plateau before the process of decomposition or digestion returns it to the dust from which it came. What do any of us know (me included) about God beyond what we’ve been taught as kids? Why should I look any further? When I bite into a scrap of fennel that is lying on my cutting board, I taste a miracle of flavor, water, and freshness that no scripture is going to be able to describe. When I think about doing justice to that ingredient – like a person in prayer – I let go of myself and listen to what the fennel is telling me it wants to be. It forces me to step outside of myself, use my senses, trust my instincts, and use my past experiences. I put that ingredient on a pedestal and take treating it properly with great magnitude. When something goes wrong I curse the world and have even been known to throw childish tantrums. So how to prepare the fennel? Perhaps caramelized? Perhaps black pepper crusted? It would not be unusual at all for the fennel to sit around my station for a couple of hours while I’m getting in touch with how best to handle it. We have fennel branches in the kitchen… can those make an appearance? Squab? A note of gaminess would play well off the sweetness of the fennel and spice of the black pepper. Olives: Just let them be olives. The salinity will be nice. What else? Note of bitterness perhaps? With time, patience, and honest reflection it’ll all come together. Or perhaps the dish will never be what I wanted it to be and it will come off the menu. But that won’t change the integrity or spiritual experience that went into it. Life to me is about being experimental and taking chances. Religious people are far from perfect as well. My respect and love for food opens up questions, reflections, and introspections. I own a restaurant and it is my pulpit. It is not holy. But when I look at all the beauty and ickyness of the world in general, I wonder about the holiness of the The Holy One him/herself.

I am just a cook and we are just a restaurant. Only a place where high ideals are strived for. Some nights we hit it on all cylinders. Once in a while we don’t. Life is not about perfection, but the pursuit of it. Do I really believe that? A hundred things can go right and I take it in stride. One thing goes wrong and it will torture me. We hope it is received from an elevated plateau in regards to the way our emotions are translated onto the plate and palate and into this experience we call life. There is just not much about my life outside of the restaurant and love for my daughters that is very pretty right now. Though I think that squab/fennel/olive dish will hit the menu soon. I expect that to be beautiful. And I need to quit smoking… once again.

This course made a brief appearance on our menu. And although it was very enthusiastically received, I never really sunk my teeth into it (metaphorically speaking). The idea was born out of asking whether snails are from the water or the land. From there I formulated the idea of creating the dish as a setting. A still life picture with ingredients representing the water, sand, and earth. The beauty of snails is that their intense flavor lends  well to other robust flavors, and there are several ingredients represented with a forward flavor profile. To represent the water, we utilized a black garlic puree. No, water is not really this dark, but we told our guests they needed to use their imaginations a bit since there is not much edible that is the color blue. Besides, inland lakes and rivers certainly appear murky at best. In any case, once you get past this, the rest is conceivable. Royal trumpet mushrooms represented the earth, dehydrated olives the dirt, and nasturtium, leaves the grass. We made a puree of the mushroom stems to represent sand and placed the Burgundian snails that had been sauteed with butter, garlic, shallot, and parsley on this. In the end, we determined that the snails must come from the water since we get them from our seafood supplier… and they know about these things since they deal directly with God.

Photo by Jordan Lill

This photo was taken back in January by one of our diners and I just stumbled across it while looking for something to post.

Black sea bass was very gently poached in a beurre fondue seasoned with sherry vinegar. Salsify enters in three variations: cream, braised with pearl onions and sherry vinegar, and as the crispy curl over the top. Beyond that, a Hollandaise seasoned with sherry vinegar, tangy red ribbon sorrel, and the ridiculously good BLiS double solera Elixir finish the presentation. Clean flavors and a dish that was very well received by our guests.

A couple of other notes before getting into this post:

•  The last couple of dishes I’ve posted have been of items currently on the menu. That is going to come to an end as I have come to the belief that one of the fun aspects of dining with us is the sense of adventure it requires. By posting dishes that are currently on the menu, we are killing a small element of the many surprises.
• Along those lines, we are now featuring 2 categories of “Current Menu” on the sidebar. One is the generic offering with little description behind the idea meant to entice the intellect, and the second is a password protected version that contains in depth thoughts, ingredient lists, and inspirations behind our offerings. Once a guest dines with us, they are given the password and are able to unlock the page.

This is our second variation where we don’t provide silverware for our guests and instruct them to lick the plate. This was the idea of our dining room maestro Bill and has been a really fun concept that has helped unlock the door that has led to a more adventurous overall experience for us as a group and has deepened our creative juices.

Originally we offered silverware with the course, but once the fish we had been using on the course became unavailable and we stripped it down to the essential elements, the dish not only took on more simplistic goodness, I soon saw it would be easy enough to eat without utensils. There are a few courses that entice oohs, ahhs, and chuckles from the dining room, and this always elicits a unique reaction. Guests feel uncomfortable at first, but in essence it breaks down people’s inhibitions, lightens the mood in the room, and opens up a flood gate to the depth of enjoyment and okays it for guests to lick their plate for any future course. Guests will frequently talk about the desire to lick a plate, so why shouldn’t they if they want? I also make it a point to offer ‘brownie points’ from us if the guest looks the person across from them in the eye lovingly while licking away. From the kitchen, it’s always enjoyable watching our beautiful and surprised audience pick up their plates and bring them to their mouths. I love it when humility spills all over the table and is left there to be jumped up and down in like a kid playing in a puddle.

Components include the smoked char roe and katsuobushi (cured, smoked, and fermented bonito). To play off the smokiness of both of these ingredients, we cooked down some tapioca pearls in cream and seasoned them up lightly with coconut milk. Additionally we have radishes marinated in a yuzu ponzu, shiso, borage blossoms, and a soy pudding (left out of the pic for some befuddling reason).