‘The Chicago Way: An Oral History of Chicago Dining’ tells the story of the city's restaurant community

As books about Chicago’s restaurant community go, “The Chicago Way: An Oral History of Chicago Dining” by Michael Gebert is a heavyweight — literally.

Close to five years in the making, the book (which is being published Feb. 2 by Evanston’s Agate Publishing) weighs almost 2 pounds. Its 587 pages cover some 60 years of Chicago’s restaurant scene starting in the 1960s with close to 200 interviews from those who lived it, including owners, chefs, line cooks, servers, busboys, regular diners, purveyors, sommeliers, media and real estate developers. Some names you’ll undoubtedly recognize — think Charlie Trotter, Grant Achatz, Rick Bayless, Stephanie Izard, Phil Vettel — while many others you won’t.

For Gebert, each contributor had an important tale to tell in the shaping of Chicago’s dining scene — and, by association, the city itself — into what it is today.

Back in 2019, Doug Seibold, founder of Agate Publishing, approached Gebert about the project. A few years prior, Agate had published “Ensemble: An Oral History of Chicago Theater” and was looking to do a similar in-depth book about the city’s restaurants. Gebert, a James Beard Award-winning journalist and video producer, has deep roots in Chicago’s food community, including as co-founder of food chat site LTHForum and contributor to Chicago Reader, Serious Eats and Chicago magazine among others.

Assignment accepted, Gebert then turned to figuring out its flow. “I had to work out a storyline for the whole thing that made sense, especially since there’s more than one arc,” he said. There are the early French restaurants and chi-chi clubs, followed by Italian American and Mexican American restaurants. Fine dining has its own trajectory with restaurants like Charlie Trotter’s, Trio and Tru. Restaurant groups like Lettuce Entertain You, One Off Hospitality and Boka Restaurant Group played a role in shaping the city’s dining scene. Later, molecular gastronomy became part of Chicago’s culinary vernacular with Moto and Alinea, while a small group of “renegade chefs” like Michael Carlson (Schwa), Iliana Regan, who now goes by Lane (Elizabeth) and Phillip Foss (EL Ideas) led a movement distinctly their own.

Next, Gebert had to determine which restaurants to include. “The focus here is on the restaurants that changed our world,” Gebert writes in the book’s introduction, recognizing that “there are a lot of good restaurants that had a nice run and made people happy, but don’t really have a story to tell.”

The book’s oral history style approach means interviews push the narrative along, a challenge when important folks of prominent restaurants are no longer around to tell their stories. Gebert’s many connections in the restaurant industry from his two decades covering it helped as did connecting the inevitable dots in the closely knit community. Gebert would highlight the many connections throughout the book, such as how a young Charlie Trotter had dinner at Louis Szathmary’s Lincoln Park restaurant The Bakery on prom night, which made him want to become a chef. He would go on to open his eponymous restaurant, where he influenced dozens of chefs. “And when he saw Louis coming out of the kitchen, he said, that’s what I want to do,” Scott Warner, a journalist who was a busboy at The Bakery, is quoted as saying in the book.

“After I spoke to someone, I'd always ask them who else should I talk to, so a lot of people passed me along to the next,” Gebert said. Kevin Hickey (previously at Ritz-Carlton, Four Seasons and now owner of The Duck Inn), for example, helped tell the story of Rush Street, then a seedy section of town, as he worked there as a doorman when he was 16. That connection led to Gibsons.

With COVID in full force when he started, Gebert conducted interviews by phone. Eventually, he was able to interview people in person, a process he found more satisfying. Those early interviews, however, turned out to be important beyond the basic information they offered.

“I had a feeling we would all forget COVID, so I just talked to people about what they were doing during that time,” he said. “I got some really good stuff right at the beginning, so I'd be able to document it four years later.” Chapter 16, titled COVID Coda, is a powerful and poignant read recounting its impact on Chicago’s restaurants.

As Gov. JB Pritzker ordered restaurants to shut down, a group of chefs gathered to discuss what they were going to do and how they were going to advocate for what they needed from lawmakers.

Many chefs had to pivot in order to survive, such as multi-Michelin-starred Alinea, which offered "food in a bag to go," as Achatz recounts in the book.

Chef Erick Williams, owner of Virtue Restaurant, Daisy’s Po-Boy and Tavern and Cantina Rosa in Hyde Park, recalls how his James Beard award-winning restaurant shifted to feeding first responders after three months.

“It just became incredibly exhausting, listening to the news every day about the infection rate surging, the death rate surging, not being able to see loved ones outside of FaceTime and Zoom. ... We wanted to double down on community, because the community had been so supportive of us.”

The other 15 chapters of the book are a mix of detailed stories of significant restaurants, leading chefs, influential hospitality groups, food media folks and Chicago neighborhoods — such as the Gold Coast, Wicker Park and West Loop — where the growth of their restaurant scene is a telling trend all its own. “Early on, I said I don't want to write a book about real estate, but it's inevitable,” Gebert said. “Restaurants and real estate are a huge story together.”

Some restaurants were easier than others to find people to be interviewed. Charlie Trotter, whose restaurant established many fine dining standards that still exist today and whose sometimes feisty demeanor was well known, proved the toughest. “I definitely had the most people turn me down for that one,” Gebert said. At 54 pages, that chapter, however, is one of the book’s longest on a single restaurant.

What’s interesting about “The Chicago Way” is that it offers plenty of little-known anecdotes to chew on, providing an insider’s glimpse into Chicago’s dynamic restaurant scene.

Lettuce Entertain You’s Ramen-San, for example, was born out of a popular staff meal at sister restaurant RPM Italian. New York artist Dan Flavin was a regular at the now-closed Les Nomades, which originally was an exclusive private club with a $1 membership. Comedian Chris Farley, who was found dead of a drug overdose in his apartment in the John Hancock Building on Dec. 18, 1997, came into Marché the night he died. In 1963, Florsheim Shoes heiress Nancy Goldberg opened the Gold Coast’s celebrity-magnate Maxim’s de Paris in a building designed by her architect husband, Bertrand Goldberg, who also designed Marina City. Those oversized martini glasses at Gibsons were the result of an ordering mistake and are meant for dessert. The owners decided to use them anyway.

When it comes to reading his hefty book, Gebert realizes some people might opt to look up the places they’ve been to first — “I mean, my mom did that,” he said — but he hopes folks eventually read it cover to cover. “I tried to tell the stories in a way that they're interesting even if you never heard of the places,” he said.

As with any historic book of this nature, it’s inevitable there are people he missed, Gebert said. “There's a place at the end where I thank all the people who didn't make the book,” he said, jokingly adding he hopes he doesn't get yelled at by anybody left out.

“My ideal reader for the book is 50 years from now, and there’s some kid who has heard of Charlie Trotter and wants to know more about him,” Gebert said. “He discovers my book in the library and reads it and thinks this is so cool. I'll be long gone, but congrats, kid.”