On Dec. 31, 2013, Ina Pinkney closed Ina’s, the Chicago restaurant that she opened in 1991. Three years later, she couldn’t be happier.
“I probably have the best life of anyone I’ve ever met,” she said. “If you had asked me the day I locked the restaurant what I’d be doing in March of 2016 I’d say I might be home watching ‘The Price is Right.’ I had no idea.”
Rather than sitting at home, Pinkney has been busy touring the country promoting “Breakfast at Ina’s,” a documentary about the last month of her restaurant’s operations that has screened at film festivals in Chicago, Atlanta, Charlotte and Alaska, and her book “Ina’s Kitchen: Memories and Recipes from the Breakfast Queen.”
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“They pay for my way to get there and my hotel, so I determined that I’d go to every one I could go to,” she said.
The chef discussed and signed copies of her book March 28 at a sold-out event at Max & Benny’s in Northbrook. A combination cookbook and memoir, “Ina’s Kitchen” was initially self-published in hardcover in 2014, but proved so popular that Agate Midway asked to publish it in paperback. The new edition was released in September.
“We had sold over 6,000 [copies] of the self-published book and they were concerned that I had cannibalized the market, but they realized I had only sold it in Chicago,” Pinkney said. “Now it’s everywhere.”
Pinkney gave out recipes throughout her career, never leaving out an ingredient. She wrote the book as a way of ensuring that all her dishes will live on since she has not family to leave them to.
“Most people don’t understand you’ve got to have an exit strategy somewhere in your head,” she said. “When I knew that it was time and that I was going to end it at the end of the year, I did the book in 10 weeks.”
“Ina’s Kitchen” is interspersed with stories about Pinkney’s life, such as a memory of walking the streets of New York with her father, never stopping for red lights but pausing for potato latkes, that leads to her recipe for the dish. The photographer Pinkney worked with asked for her recipes so he could prepare the dishes to photograph, but she insisted on having him come to the restaurant to take the pictures instead.
“I can’t give you the recipe and have someone else make it because then it’s not my food,” she said. “Everything in there came out of my kitchen. He could not get over how beautiful every dish came out. He did 40 shots in two days because [food] was coming out of the kitchen all the time. It was amazing.”
Along with touring, Pinkney also writes the monthly “Breakfast With Ina” column for the baiduhai, where she shares her experience having weekday breakfast around the city. She often dines out with chefs and other food writers so she can try many dishes. Pinkney also goes out regularly with Doug Sohn, whom she met after he announced he’d be closing his iconic Chicago restaurant Hot Doug’s in October 2014.
“When I heard he was getting ready to close I said we have to have breakfast,” she said. “Then the day he was closing I went over there at 7 a.m. I brought 10 boxes of breakfast for his staff because I knew they would never eat the rest of the day. People were living in tents next to the restaurant. It was bizarre. We’ve been friends ever since. We have the same feelings about what we did and when it was right to close.”
Pinkney wanted to help Sohn get through the last days of his already popular restaurant because she’d experienced the same thing herself. While Ina’s Place was regularly full at 8 a.m. on Tuesdays, it had always been a quiet place where diners could have private conversations. People who didn’t constantly want to be interrupted by servers regularly used it for business meetings. Things changed when she announced the closing.
“It was very challenging since the people who were there the last week had never been there but they heard it was closing and wanted to rush in,” she said. “They didn’t know the culture and they had lots of demands. We gave out tickets for the last day only to regulars. I wanted to be able to thank everyone. We turned away 110 people who didn’t have tickets including one of the aldermen. We just wanted the people there who had meaning to us.”
These were people who had come to Ina’s for decades. She’d fed their children and fed them when they had just come from a funeral. She served the very last meal to Marc Malnati, who bought her building. In turn, he gave her the first pizza to come out of his new Lou Malnati’s location.
“At the very end some of my customers had written a parody song and they handed it out to everybody and everybody was singing this song,” Pinkney said. “Everybody thinks it’s the first day of the restaurant’s life that’s important, but I know it’s the last day and this was the best last day ever.”