Frontera Grill chef is redefining plant-based dining

When chef Javauneeka Jacobs was still in culinary school, she went door-to-door searching for a gig in a Chicago restaurant. Her first 20 stops offered her only one role: dishwasher.

But the young chef finally landed at the corner of Illinois and Clark streets, which, for nearly 40 years, has been the headquarters of chef Rick Bayless’ ever-growing culinary empire. In a decade, Jacobs has risen from an unpaid stage at Frontera’s little sister, the fast-casual XOCO, to co-chef of Frontera Grill.

Still just 29, the Harvard, Illinois, native is now redefining what vegetable-forward dining looks like at one of Chicago's longest-standing destination restaurants. And her skills are gaining wider recognition: She won the Food Network’s competition show “Chopped” in 2023 and, more recently, a Banchet Award for Chicago’s Rising Chef of the Year.

But even as her star rises, Jacobs insists she has no interest in opening a restaurant of her own. Instead, she is innovating from her post at Frontera and bringing new vegetable dishes to the regional Mexican menu, which has long been heavy on pork, chicken and beef.

“Being at Frontera is very unique because it's been here so long,” Jacobs said. “Once you have that strong understanding of what the flavors are, then you could kind of do your own thing and do a modern twist on it.”

Jacobs’ plant-based cooking aligns with both her own agricultural background and Bayless’ long-standing interest in sustainability. Plus, in an era when beef prices are skyrocketing and even a chef as prominent as Bayless is watching the bottom line, vegetable-forward dining makes good business sense.

On a recent weekday morning, Jacobs takes a seat in Frontera’s River North dining room for a pre-shift meeting with the front-of-house staff. They go through the reservations for lunch service, then each waiter practices selling a menu item, answering the prompt: Which dish should a customer be sure to taste before leaving Frontera?

“For me, the camote,” one server says, referencing the Camote Bravo, one of Jacobs’ creations.

The white Mexican sweet potato is cut hasselback-style — nearly all the way through, creating thin, accordion-like slices. Then, it’s covered with garlic oil and deep-fried for a crunchy exterior, brushed with a morita chile glaze, and finished with spicy Baja crema, grilled knob onion and añejo cheese.

For Jacobs, this dish is the perfect mix of fundamentals and flair. “Those are true Frontera flavors,” she said. But it also calls upon her own creative skills. “So it's like, OK, a little inspiration from that, a little inspiration from here, and how can we really marry the two?”

Here, she seems to have struck the right balance. The Camote Bravo has been widely popular and has remained on offer since November, despite Frontera typically changing its menu monthly.

“I can't tell you how many times I've just had that for dinner, because it's so good,” said Bayless, the Michelin-starred standard-bearer of Chicago’s restaurant world. “I don't know how we'll ever take it off.”

Bayless has spent years encouraging chefs in his kitchen to explore Mexico’s vegetarian cuisine, noting that before the Spaniards' colonization, the local diet revolved almost exclusively around vegetables.

“But when people in the United States think about Mexican food or even going out to eat, they always think about this big hunk of protein in the middle of the plate,” Bayless said. “So I've been pushing chefs, but not too many of my chefs really sparked with it, until Javauneeka came on the scene.”

Jacobs, who is Black, applied a similar sense of curiosity to the creation of the Afro-Mestizo menu she helped develop in 2022 for Black History Month, highlighting the contributions of enslaved West Africans to Mexican cuisine.

“She will tackle anything and everything that comes in her path and do well,” Bayless said. “Now that's the other part of it, she doesn't do it haphazardly.”

Last fall, her work at Frontera earned her a nomination for the Banchet Awards, Chicago’s top local food honor. During a January ceremony Downtown, Jacobs sat front row in a wine-colored velvet dress, seated beside Bayless and her husband, the chef Zach Steen. She was nominated in the “Rising Chef” category alongside Bailey Sullivan of Monteverde, César Murillo of North Pond and Alex Cochran of Cellar Door Provisions.

“I heard my name, and I just had like a flashback of me going to those restaurants, knocking on those doors, having this passion of just cooking and making it in Chicago,” Jacobs said. “And in that moment, I just saw all the years and all the hard work flash before my eyes.”

Jacobs’ interest in plants first took root as a kid growing up near the Wisconsin border. Her family was not farmers, but their backyard butted up to a cornfield, and as a teenager, Jacobs joined Future Farmers of America.

“So I was like, ‘OK, I really love plants, and I really love food,” said Jacobs, who is the youngest of four siblings. “So how can I make this work together?’ And I went to culinary school right away.”

After arriving at XOCO while still enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu, Jacobs left for a while to intern at Walt Disney World, where she worked in Epcot’s production kitchen, feeding 30,000 people “on a slow day.” She learned quickly how to prep in bulk and stay organized — skills she brought back to Frontera for a summertime stint in private events. When things slowed down, she went to Leña Brava and Cruz Blanca — Bayless’ West Loop offshoots — to work in prep.

Eager to get back to Clark Street, Jacobs, who is allergic to shellfish, accepted the only position available: A seafood station at Topolobampo. She worked the job for a year, equipped with a special apron and gloves. She was steadily climbing the kitchen’s ranks when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, halting indoor dining entirely. Suddenly out of work, Bayless brought her on as his culinary assistant.

“I had never done that kind of work, ever,” Jacobs said. “So he taught me how to write recipes, how to test recipes.”

Not only has most of Jacobs’ professional life unfolded within the Bayless universe, it is also how she met Steen, her husband, who is now Bayless’ culinary director. Their 2022 wedding reception was held, where else, inside the Clark Street dining rooms, where the bride and groom cooked all the food, and Bayless flung his tie over his shoulder to work the expo station.

Last October, Jacobs was promoted to co-chef, alongside Richard James, who has worked in Bayless’ kitchens for longer than Jacobs has been alive — a fact that initially gave top brass pause.

“I was really worried when we promoted her into the position that she's in now that there might be some backlash,” Bayless said, noting many of the kitchen’s rank-and-file have been on staff for decades. “But I will tell you, it is the genuineness of her character that just makes everybody putty in her hands.”

With that reputation, Jacobs is increasingly fielding questions about the future and, specifically, if she has plans to open a restaurant of her own. But, for now, Jacobs is a firm “no” on that front.

“I don't see myself having a restaurant of my own. I never did,” she said. But that doesn’t mean Jacobs isn’t dreaming big.

“As someone with big aspirations, I made a list of, ‘OK, I want this by this age. I want to do this by that age.’ And I literally have accomplished everything that was on my list,” Jacobs said. “So I'm actually making a new list right now.”

Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.