gotbeer
Mon, Apr-28-03, 11:50
Lunch with chef-owner Michael Kornick
April 27, 2003
Debra Pickett
link to article (http://www.suntimes.com/output/pickett/cst-nws-lunch27.html)
Michael Kornick's famed Near North Side restaurant, MK, isn't open for lunch. No matter, he says, he wouldn't have wanted to go there anyway. It wouldn't be sporting.
And, besides, his not-quite-jovial tone seems to say, he is more than just a chef-owner with a petty need to promote his few local restaurants. He is a one-man enterprise, an industry powerhouse far bigger than his own kitchens.
Maybe too much bigger.
Kornick arrives at Naha--the sleek River North eatery in the space that used to house Gordon, where Kornick worked as a chef early in his career--armed with a bottle of cranberry juice and a laundry list of special requests, as dictated by the strict diet he has just started.
"It was devised by the woman who was the chief nutritionist at Pritikin," he explains, "and it's specifically designed to detoxify your liver."
It takes him more than an hour to admit that the diet he's making sound a bit like rocket science is actually the popular "Fat Flush" plan, an Atkins-type plan that limits carbohydrate intake and forbids alcohol and caffeine consumption.
I tell Kornick I'm impressed that someone in his line of work can stick to such a rigorous diet plan.
"Don't be," he says. "I've only been on it for about four hours."
So, um, maybe this wasn't the best day for us to have lunch. The longer we sit, the crabbier and--despite the fact that he's doing most of the talking--more bored Kornick seems to be. He yawns five times during our 90-minute conversation, not bothering with an "excuse me" or a "sorry." Still, I can hardly blame him. We're at one of the best restaurants in town, and he's having the blandest meal imaginable.
"OK," he says to our waiter, "here's what I'd like: the 'salad of beautiful greens.' But with just the greens, then topped with some beets, asparagus and any other steamed vegetable except carrots. No dressing at all. No salt, no pepper. Then I'd like the glazed salmon, but cooked without the glaze and any steamed vegetables that don't include carrots or anything starchy."
No pepper? No carrots?
"I'm only allowed one carrot a day," Kornick says. It is the most depressing thing I have ever heard. Worse even than the fact that he, a serious wine collector, isn't supposed to drink, either.
Just as I'm beginning to absorb the full ridiculousness of this situation--a lunch interview with a chef who isn't eating and doesn't feel much like talking--Kornick waves over Michael Nahabedian, who runs the restaurant, along with his cousin, chef-owner Carrie Nahabedian.
"I left something in my car," Kornick tells Nahabedian. "There's a little blue lunch box on the passenger seat."
It's his special salad dressing, a mix of flax seed oil and cider vinegar.
Nahabedian, who used to work for Kornick at the pioneering West Randolph Street spot Vivo, has the Tupperware container fetched immediately and brings it to our table with a deeply patient smile. If Kornick were my date, I'd wait for him to go to the men's room and then apologize on his behalf.
Naha's chefs have gone out of their way to make Kornick's meal look beautiful and appetizing, but there is only so much that can be done. Kornick, who is credited with revolutionizing Chicago cuisine by bringing Asian influences to French and contemporary American food, is having a hard time getting excited about this meal. The fact that we keep talking about food probably isn't helping, either.
There is a signature Michael Kornick culinary style. If you went to Marche or Red Light in their early days, or Gordon, or, more recently, MK and the hipster steakhouse Nine, you know what it is. It often gets described as "contemporary comfort food," which is about as nondescriptive as foodies can get. It's more like "unthreateningly hip cuisine," which is to say that Kornick's menus feature many of the same trendy ingredients that others do, but, on his, there's a parenthetical note to explain that, for example, tatsoy is Japanese spinach.
Kornick does that, he says, with guys like himself in mind. "I don't want to go out, thinking I'm a sophisticated guy, and not know what half the stuff on the menu is."
Still, he is hard-pressed to apply such an easy-to-understand label to his style.
"I kept hoping my cuisine would define itself over time," he says, "but, instead, it gets foggier to me. . . . I've never thought of it as comfort food, but I know why people do.... We don't process food to an unnatural state."
Still, the label annoys him. It evokes images of meatloaf and lumpy potatoes. And that, just to be clear, is not good.
"I don't think of meatloaf that way," he says, "like, 'Ah, Ma Kornick's meat loaf.' At my house it was more like, oh s---, meatloaf tonight."
Michael Kornick likes to talk about food, but not quite as much as you might think he would, being a chef and a dieter. What he really likes to talk about is business: the restaurant industry itself. Though he is still very much a chef--he's well-known among his employees for cooking something at home for Sunday dinner and having it on the menu at one of his restaurants by Tuesday--he thinks of himself more as the "head of a company with 700 employees." His concerns, on most days, are likely to be more managerial than creative. His big challenge is, he says, "building an effective corporate culture."
Kornick, 41, who lives in Evanston with his wife, Lisa, and their two young children, seems determined to be as boring and tightly wound as the businessmen who fill Chicago's upscale eateries for long lunches and expense account dinners. When I ask him what big projects have been occupying his time this year--hoping to get a big food-geek scoop--he says that, mainly, he's been setting himself up as an industry consultant. He's been doing a lot of training classes.
Partly, it's a lifestyle thing. Kornick wants to be home in time to coach his kids' soccer games and to put them to bed at 8. That's not the sort of thing you can do when you're running the dinner service at a trendy restaurant.
But there's also something more going on.
"Paul Kahan," he says, mentioning the uber-hip Blackbird chef, "here's a guy who's very inspired. It works really well because he's got 60 seats. Our restaurant is three times the size of Blackbird."
Michael Kornick isn't the coolest chef in town anymore. He's a corporate entity now.
And, if that's what he's going to be, he's going to do it all the way. Kind of like the diet.
For as long as it lasts.
April 27, 2003
Debra Pickett
link to article (http://www.suntimes.com/output/pickett/cst-nws-lunch27.html)
Michael Kornick's famed Near North Side restaurant, MK, isn't open for lunch. No matter, he says, he wouldn't have wanted to go there anyway. It wouldn't be sporting.
And, besides, his not-quite-jovial tone seems to say, he is more than just a chef-owner with a petty need to promote his few local restaurants. He is a one-man enterprise, an industry powerhouse far bigger than his own kitchens.
Maybe too much bigger.
Kornick arrives at Naha--the sleek River North eatery in the space that used to house Gordon, where Kornick worked as a chef early in his career--armed with a bottle of cranberry juice and a laundry list of special requests, as dictated by the strict diet he has just started.
"It was devised by the woman who was the chief nutritionist at Pritikin," he explains, "and it's specifically designed to detoxify your liver."
It takes him more than an hour to admit that the diet he's making sound a bit like rocket science is actually the popular "Fat Flush" plan, an Atkins-type plan that limits carbohydrate intake and forbids alcohol and caffeine consumption.
I tell Kornick I'm impressed that someone in his line of work can stick to such a rigorous diet plan.
"Don't be," he says. "I've only been on it for about four hours."
So, um, maybe this wasn't the best day for us to have lunch. The longer we sit, the crabbier and--despite the fact that he's doing most of the talking--more bored Kornick seems to be. He yawns five times during our 90-minute conversation, not bothering with an "excuse me" or a "sorry." Still, I can hardly blame him. We're at one of the best restaurants in town, and he's having the blandest meal imaginable.
"OK," he says to our waiter, "here's what I'd like: the 'salad of beautiful greens.' But with just the greens, then topped with some beets, asparagus and any other steamed vegetable except carrots. No dressing at all. No salt, no pepper. Then I'd like the glazed salmon, but cooked without the glaze and any steamed vegetables that don't include carrots or anything starchy."
No pepper? No carrots?
"I'm only allowed one carrot a day," Kornick says. It is the most depressing thing I have ever heard. Worse even than the fact that he, a serious wine collector, isn't supposed to drink, either.
Just as I'm beginning to absorb the full ridiculousness of this situation--a lunch interview with a chef who isn't eating and doesn't feel much like talking--Kornick waves over Michael Nahabedian, who runs the restaurant, along with his cousin, chef-owner Carrie Nahabedian.
"I left something in my car," Kornick tells Nahabedian. "There's a little blue lunch box on the passenger seat."
It's his special salad dressing, a mix of flax seed oil and cider vinegar.
Nahabedian, who used to work for Kornick at the pioneering West Randolph Street spot Vivo, has the Tupperware container fetched immediately and brings it to our table with a deeply patient smile. If Kornick were my date, I'd wait for him to go to the men's room and then apologize on his behalf.
Naha's chefs have gone out of their way to make Kornick's meal look beautiful and appetizing, but there is only so much that can be done. Kornick, who is credited with revolutionizing Chicago cuisine by bringing Asian influences to French and contemporary American food, is having a hard time getting excited about this meal. The fact that we keep talking about food probably isn't helping, either.
There is a signature Michael Kornick culinary style. If you went to Marche or Red Light in their early days, or Gordon, or, more recently, MK and the hipster steakhouse Nine, you know what it is. It often gets described as "contemporary comfort food," which is about as nondescriptive as foodies can get. It's more like "unthreateningly hip cuisine," which is to say that Kornick's menus feature many of the same trendy ingredients that others do, but, on his, there's a parenthetical note to explain that, for example, tatsoy is Japanese spinach.
Kornick does that, he says, with guys like himself in mind. "I don't want to go out, thinking I'm a sophisticated guy, and not know what half the stuff on the menu is."
Still, he is hard-pressed to apply such an easy-to-understand label to his style.
"I kept hoping my cuisine would define itself over time," he says, "but, instead, it gets foggier to me. . . . I've never thought of it as comfort food, but I know why people do.... We don't process food to an unnatural state."
Still, the label annoys him. It evokes images of meatloaf and lumpy potatoes. And that, just to be clear, is not good.
"I don't think of meatloaf that way," he says, "like, 'Ah, Ma Kornick's meat loaf.' At my house it was more like, oh s---, meatloaf tonight."
Michael Kornick likes to talk about food, but not quite as much as you might think he would, being a chef and a dieter. What he really likes to talk about is business: the restaurant industry itself. Though he is still very much a chef--he's well-known among his employees for cooking something at home for Sunday dinner and having it on the menu at one of his restaurants by Tuesday--he thinks of himself more as the "head of a company with 700 employees." His concerns, on most days, are likely to be more managerial than creative. His big challenge is, he says, "building an effective corporate culture."
Kornick, 41, who lives in Evanston with his wife, Lisa, and their two young children, seems determined to be as boring and tightly wound as the businessmen who fill Chicago's upscale eateries for long lunches and expense account dinners. When I ask him what big projects have been occupying his time this year--hoping to get a big food-geek scoop--he says that, mainly, he's been setting himself up as an industry consultant. He's been doing a lot of training classes.
Partly, it's a lifestyle thing. Kornick wants to be home in time to coach his kids' soccer games and to put them to bed at 8. That's not the sort of thing you can do when you're running the dinner service at a trendy restaurant.
But there's also something more going on.
"Paul Kahan," he says, mentioning the uber-hip Blackbird chef, "here's a guy who's very inspired. It works really well because he's got 60 seats. Our restaurant is three times the size of Blackbird."
Michael Kornick isn't the coolest chef in town anymore. He's a corporate entity now.
And, if that's what he's going to be, he's going to do it all the way. Kind of like the diet.
For as long as it lasts.