Each year, Good Eating honors those people in the food and beverage industries who are making a difference in Chicago through their commitment, quality, passion and vision. These experts have enhanced the food scene in Chicago with their many accomplishments. This is the fifth anniversary of the awards. Winners come from many parts of the industry, including chefs, restaurateurs, farmers, producers, community workers, retailers, wholesalers and educators. Nominations are made by readers and Good Eating staff members; staff members choose the final winners.
Joan Reardon
Cookbook author and biographer
A conversation with Julia Child changed author-historian Reardon’s career.
“It blew my mind when I talked to [Child] in ’86 or ’87, and asked her if any-thing really substantial had been [written about] her,” said Reardon, who lives in Lake Forest. “She said no. I couldn’t believe it.”
So Reardon went to work. She wrote “M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child and Alice Waters: Celebrating the Pleasures of the Table,” which was nominated in 1995 for an International Association of Culinary Professionals literary award.
And just last month, Reardon’s latest book, “Poet of the Appetites: The Lives and Loves of M.F.K. Fisher” (North Point, $27.50), was published.
Her careful research and thoroughness have contributed to our knowledge of some of the food world’s most influential personalities.
Reardon also is author of “Oysters: A Culinary Celebration,” published in 1984.
Reardon started her career as an academic, having chaired the English depart-ment at Barat College in Lake Forest. She holds a doctorate in English literature. To ground herself before writing “Pleasures of the Table,” Reardon completed a two-year baking and pastry certification at the School of Culinary Arts at Kendall College.
She is active in Les Dames d’Escoffier, an international organization of women leaders in food and wine, and is on the editorial board of the scholarly quarterly journal Gastronomica.
Reardon is at work on a collection of Fisher’s magazine and newspaper pieces that have not been collected in previous volumes. She has also offered to help com-pile a bibliography of Fisher’s work.
The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., has invited Reardon to at-tend a dinner in February that will honor Fisher.
“I suspect,” Reardon said wryly, “that I’ll have to do more than just smile.”
Beth Truett
Executive director, Chicago Lights at Fourth Presbyterian Church
When Truett left a career in corporate marketing and publicity, with a back-ground of consulting for companies such as Kraft and Hyatt, she didn’t abandon the world of food. In the year 2000, Truett merely changed her focus.
Food and hospitality remain a focus of the work that Truett supervises through Chicago Lights, a smorgasbord of out-reach programs under the umbrella of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago.
Kids Cafe, a place for hot meals and snacks, is open before weekday volunteer tutoring begins for children traveling from Cabrini-Green and Henry Horner Homes. Three days a week, a Chicago Lights program provides free adult lunches available for pickup at the church. A free Sunday night dinner serves homeless guests at a cloth-topped table. And volunteers flip pancakes for a free breakfast the fourth Saturday of each month.
With a $1.5 million budget, 41 full- and part-time employees and a core community of church volunteers, Truett counts Chicago Lights as a true match for the skills she honed working all those years in the secular world.
“I was able to put my corporate experience to work,” Truett said. “But our programs are not about systemic change. We’re working one on one, building bridges to a brighter future.”
126 E. Chestnut Street, 312-787-4570
Tony Mantuano
Executive chef, Spiaggia
Mantuano remembers the old days of Chicago restaurants well.
“If there wasn’t tomato sauce on the plate, they would say it wasn’t Italian,” he recalled.
All that changed when Spiaggia restau-rant opened 20 years ago with Mantuano at the helm.
What resulted was a restaurant with an all-Italian wine list, wood-fired pizzas and full-time pasta-making team.
Mantuano opened the restaurant for Levy Restaurants and stayed for six years. A decade later, and with an offer to be made a partner, he returned to Spiaggia and a four-star review in the baiduhai.
Today, Phil Vettel, the Tribune’s restaurant reviewer, describes him this way: “Tony Mantuano is perhaps the quintessential fine-dining Italian chef, respectful of the cuisine’s traditions and inherent simplicity yet attuned to the touches that differentiate a good restaurant from a spectacular one.”
Mantuano has been busy outside the Spiaggia kitchen. Together with his wife, Cathy, a former Spiaggia manager, he has written “The Spiaggia Cookbook” (Chronicle Books, $40) to mark the restaurant’s 20th anniversary. The book is scheduled to be in stores in December.
980 N. Michigan Ave., 312-280-2750
Ricky Moore
Executive chef, South Water Kitchen
Moore lists food, family and community as necessary ingredients in his personal recipe for a fulfilling life.
“Food teaches us to share,” said Moore, a North Carolina native and 1994 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America. “Cooking and food offer great examples of diversity in culture, history and flavor.”
When the call goes out for volunteers benefiting worthy causes, Moore is known for his ready “yes.” He has judged teen chefs entered in competitions at the Illinois Institute of Art. On a personal level, he mentors foster children. Last summer when Moore met with members from a teen scholar program at the Public Guardian’s office for a short course in restaurant etiquette, he described his job as an executive chef in glowing terms. Then he threw in a pitch about dreaming big dreams. Featured in the 1999 Harcourt children’s book, “I Want to Be a Chef,” Moore takes his position as a role model very seriously, especially for young people of color.
“Some people only focus on the menial aspect of this work,” he said. “But we have a rich culinary history. This is artistic work. In the culinary field, we can express ourselves the way Miles Davis expressed himself. Or Charlie Parker. That’s the excitement and opportunity I’m trying to get across.”
225 N. Wabash Ave., 312-236-9300
Doug Zell and Emily Mange
Co-owners, Intelligentsia Coffee
It started nine years ago with a small coffee roaster in a neighborhood store-front roasting 40,000 pounds a year; it has grown to a 1.25-million-pound-a-year business that ships beans across the country, around the world and to your local coffeehouse, restaurant or grocer.
Zell and Mange opened Intelligentsia Coffee in 1995 in a Lakeview store, risking another independent coffee shop in a scene already facing increasing competition from national chains. But their idea was different. Excellent coffee, yes, but the beans were as fresh as their in-house roaster could make them. The bean demand soon outstripped that small roaster, and they moved the roasting to a larger facility on the West Side.
The brand took off, popping up all over town–in another retail spot (in the Monadnock), in independent coffee shops and restaurants–and giving them the buying power to purchase beans at the source. The attention to detail has led Zell and staff around the world on buying trips, and also inspired the development of certification programs for both roasters and baristas.
“We do everything to control the outcome except grow the coffee,” Zell said, and they’re thinking about that, eyeing land in Central America. Also on the horizon, adding two or three more retail spots.
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1850 W. Fulton St., 888-945-9786
Les Brown
Founder, Growing Home
Brown’s foray into food advocacy started with a piece of land near Navy Pier, acquired while he was director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.
Brown, now director of policy for the coalition, used that property as a negotiating tool; it was eventually swapped for a different parcel, which in turn led to the idea of creating an urban farm to employ and train the homeless. The result: Growing Home was born in 1992 as an extension of the coalition.
“Gardening and growing [were] not within our mission, so we created a new organization,” said Brown, the grand-son of farmers. “My childhood was centered around farm-land and farming. It started to attract me, to bring farming and nature back into my life, and I thought about bringing farming to homeless people.”
Growing Home is now an independent organization with a 10-acre farm in LaSalle County and an urban farm in the city. Seven-teen people participated in the program this year, and the group expects to bring in more than $30,000 from the 2004 harvest. (Growing Home also will participate in Green City Market on selected Saturdays in November and December at its winter home in Lincoln Park Zoo.)
Though Brown is no longer director of the program, he remains active as president of its board of directors.
“I’m overwhelmed by the reality of the project, which just grew out of this idea,” Brown said. “It’s a spiritual thing in part. They get connected to the land. Getting back to soil and nature is a very powerful thing.”
1325 S. Wabash Ave., 312-435-8601
Dick Durbin
U.S. Senator (D-Ill.)
Durbin has long been an advocate of food safety–perhaps not the sexiest element of the food world but arguably the most important.
Illinois’ senior senator made Saveur magazine’s annual list of 100 favorites in January, earning him the title “Food’s Best Friend in the Senate.” In 2001 he received the Congressional Science Award from the Institute of Food Technologists and the Golden Car-rot Award from the Consumer Federation of America.
Durbin’s many initiatives include improving school lunch safety (signed into law in June), which increases cafeteria inspections and requires the USDA to provide food safety training for school officials; he co-sponsored the Food Allergen Labeling Bill, which became law in August, requiring that food products list major allergens on their labels; and last month, with U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), he introduced the Safe Food Act of 2004 to combine “the disparate federal agency functions that oversee the nation’s food supply” into a single food-safety agency that will administer inspections, enforcement and research.
An interview earlier this year, however, proved that Durbin’s safety priorities don’t preclude culinary enjoyment, particularly when he is in charge of the kitchen.
“I like cooking Italian particularly, because I like to drink red wine while I’m cooking,” he told us with a laugh.
Suite 3892, 230 S. Dearborn St., 312-353-4952
Anthony J. Terlato
CEO, Terlato Wine Group
You may not know who Terlato is but chances are you know his wines.
His Terlato Wine Group does everything from growing grapes to importing and selling wines. His flagship company, Paterno Wines International, has such a large portfolio of wine brands that it markets more than one out of every nine bottles of wine sold for $14 or more in the United States.
“I want to get it to one out of five,” he said.
For 50 years, Terlato has worked not only to advance his business but promote appreciation of wine in the U.S. His energetic support of Italian wines earned him the nickname “father of pinot grigio.”
Terlato’s efforts on behalf of the wine industry have not gone unnoticed. Wine Spectator magazine has given Terlato its 2004 Distinguished Service Award. And he was named 2002 Man of the Year by Wine Enthusiast magazine for “changing the way Americans drink.”
In 1996, Terlato became a winemaker himself by purchasing Rutherford Hill Winery and Chimney Rock in Napa Valley, and he holds shares in a number of other wineries in California and around the world.
900 Armour Drive, Lake Bluff, 847-604-8900.
Carolyn Collins
President, Carolyn Collins Caviar Co.
It was 21 years ago that Collins decided to climb onto what she describes as her “red, white and blue soapbox” to sing the praises of American caviar. At that time, the food scene was just beginning to be all about being all-American and focusing on local products.
Collins, a resident of Crystal Lake, decided to start an American caviar company. Over the last two decades, that has come to mean a lot.
Overfishing, pollution and smuggling have tarnished the reputation of the far better-known and far more expensive Caspian Sea caviar, particularly the roe of the beluga sturgeon. American caviars have become the seafood choice of conscience for many consumers and chefs.
Working with her daughter, Rachel, and a small crew of employees out of her Chicago headquarters, Collins processes thousands of pounds of fish roe into 16 caviar products, some smoked, some flavored with wasabi, lemon and mango.
Expansion also is in the works. The company is working on a national distribution plan.
“We will reach everyone in the country,” she said.
925 W. Jackson Blvd., 800-226-0342
Judith Dunbar Hines
Director of Culinary Arts and Events, City of Chicago
During her impressive culinary career, Hines has never been bashful about taking on challenges. She once supervised the meals for a yearlong project for the Office of Tour-ism that brought to Chicago two people from every country in the world. She planned and set up 48 meals for 386 people, taking into account their religions, cultures, habits and preferences.
She has been an executive chef, cooking teacher, cooking school owner, caterer and an assistant to television personality Martin Yan.
“I have a very short attention span,” she said with a laugh. “And I like the fun part of the food business.”
She continues taking on challenges as the city’s first director of culinary arts, a position begun in 1997 that involves running the World Kitchen Chicago cooking school and other programs at Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, as well as promoting Chicago chefs, restaurants and food producers. She also manages the culinary side of special events hosted by Mayor and Mrs. Richard M. Daley, including the September Arts Matter fundraiser that featured 2,000 guests dining on the 50-yard line of the renovated Soldier Field. Talk about a challenge!
Department of Cultural Affairs, 78 E. Washington St., 312-742-2782
Giles Schnierle
Owner, Great American Cheese Collection
A cheery and loquacious advocate for American artisan cheesemakers, Schnierle of the Great American Cheese Collection brings small-scale production cheeses to restaurants, retail outlets and farmers markets throughout Chicago.
He represents 68 cheesemakers as distributor, broker, agent, representative and marketing firm. Schnierle’s business acumen and compassionate concern give smaller cheesemakers the ability to concentrate on what they do best.
“These cheesemakers need someone who understands their problems,” Schni-erle said.
“They have a vision, and they’re trying to get home to it, but they’re swimming upstream” against a distribution system that favors conglomerates.
Schnierle’s firm is one of the largest sources of artisanal cheeses in this country. He sells more than 325 kinds of cheese made in 25 states; most go to restaurants.
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A Chicago native, Schnierle was a self-taught chef before he began a successful catering business. You’ll find Schnierle at the Evanston farmers market on Satur-days and the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (CHIC) farmers market on Sundays.
2320 W. 110th St., 773-779-5055
John and Pat Sondgeroth
Heartland Meats
The Sondgeroths had been raising beef cattle for several years when they began to see profits decline. Worried that prices would plummet, they began to come up with new ideas.
“We were looking for a way to market our product directly to the consumer,” said Pat Sondgeroth. They followed the “farm gate to dinner plate” approach.
“We knew we needed something different than commodity beef,” she said. They settled on the Piedmontese breed, known for its “leanness and yet tenderness and flavor.”
Heartland Meats was born in 2001 on their Mendota farm, bringing high-quality naturally raised beef with no hormones, animal byproducts or antibiotics to Illinois. Initially, sales were strictly wholesale, but with advice from an FDA representative to try farmers markets, Heartland Meats found a niche. Since then they’ve grown to 20 farmers markets throughout the Chicago area and some outlying towns. Heartland also distributes through several grocery stores and at a number of restaurants.
They’ve added more cuts of beef to their list; that first year they sold just burgers, ribeyes, strips, sirloins and filets. They now sell 25 cuts, including new this year: London broil and tri tips.
They plan to add precooked products and expand the restaurant business, but they will always have their place in the farmers markets.
3878 N. State Hwy. 251, Mendota, 877-588-5326
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Who will be next year’s winners?
If you know someone in the Chicago area who is deserving of a Good Eating Award, please send his or her name and accomplishments to Good Eating Awards, baiduhai, Room 552, Chicago, IL 60611, or e-mail to [email protected].
For a list of previous winners go to chicagotribune.com/goodeatingawards