He’s moved on to processing a whole mess of corn for masa, which will get incorporated into yellow mole and served with charred cucumber, sesame leaf, corn and cucumber water in the first course of an upcoming collaboration dinner with Birria Zaragoza’s Jonathan Zaragoza.Ĭellar Door Provisions has offered BYO, prix-fixe weekend dinner service since February - part of the impetus for remodeling the dining room. “That way, we can watch how the week unfolds and not spend more than we have to,” says Bezsylko.
Pikas, meanwhile, is still at the Green City Farmer’s Market, making the first of two weekly produce runs. Across from her, line cook Chuck Cruz preps tarragon butter for celery soup. Pastry cook Tessa Vierk is folding croissant dough between dashes to the oven to check on black walnut plum tarts. Soon they’ll get coated in breadcrumbs and seeds, fried and piled on bread-thickened romesco sauce for lunch.Ĭardoon croquettes with romesco and seeds The bitter thistles were milk-poached and wrapped in tight bechamel sauce before chilling overnight. Bezsylko discusses a new pig’s tail breakfast dish with chef de cuisine Gabriel Moya while he shapes cardoon croquettes. “Your overly ambitious friend’s house.”īehind the counter, the orderly kitchen hums with activity. “People tell me being here is like eating at your friend’s house,” she says. Like any good GM, she seems to know everyone who walks through the door on a first-name basis. General Manager Emily Sher is at her usual morning post in the back corner, updating the week’s menu online (CDP is closed Mondays and Tuesdays). The breakfast and lunch menus, which will remain for just a week or two, are scrawled on two big mirrors affixed to the wall. The 20-seat room is bright and airy thanks to a much-needed remodel over the winter that traded dark, heavy wood tables for blonde reclaimed slabs dyed with turmeric and custom ash-wood chairs. by the time I arrive, the place by now buzzing with young families divvying up pastries and laptop-wielders sipping coffee. And to (hopefully) eat half my weight in bread and butter. I spent the morning there a few weeks back to understand what goes into the best damn breakfast in the city. It recently, however, found national fame from a story in Bon Appètit, who named ours the “Restaurant City of the Year” and described Cellar Door Provisions as the Sqirl of Chicago, “minus the crowds, national hype, celebrities and lines.”
In the three years since it opened, Cellar Door has flown mostly under the radar. It also means you are not allowed to leave until you’ve had a croissant. That could mean bold, resourceful veggie dishes like mapo turnips and broccoli rabe kimchi (the menu changes, naturally). It’s the kind of bread that makes carb counters question their life choices, and is best enjoyed the same way my grandfather used to eat poppy seed bagels: with a pat of butter slathered upon every bite.īut at this Logan Square eatery co-owned by Ethan Pikas and Tony Bezsylko, it’s necessary to try everything. For a city that only recently began to take bread seriously, this is very good news.Įvery hunk is a good hunk: dark, crackly crust gives way to a chewy interior and a faint tang of sourdough.
The beets, as my date informed me to my embarrassment, actually caused me to raise my shoulders in shock-their funky, awesome tang was enough to give me a start.The first thing to know about Cellar Door Provisions, the little corner cafe with a soul of a bakery, is that the bread and butter are exceptional. It was a perfect, light start to the meal, and the tangy farmer's cheese and spicy mushrooms were memorably good (I could have done without the not-very-flavorful carrots).
There were two kinds of CDP's famous bread, some fermented potato chips, farmers cheese, butter, and pickled beets, mushrooms and carrots. The dinner started with an board filled with snacks not mentioned on the menu. The menu is handwritten on slips of butcher paper, and has very little information on it: all I got was "Sunchoke Chawanmushi, Turnip Veloute, Dumpling in Broth, Ice Cream Float." Not super inspiring if you're a fan of evocative menu prose, but you have to trust them. The price will vary between $38 and $48, it's BYOB, and you'll never know what you're getting until you show up. Dinner at Cellar Door is prix fixe, with one set menu offered on any given night.
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