Chicago area restaurants contribute to Farm Aid week
By Dave Hoekstra, staff reporter
Chicago Sun-Times
14 September 2005
http://www.suntimes.com/output/food/foo-news-farmfood14.html
People follow musical tastes with personal conviction. The emerging good food movement draws on similar passion. A customer recently loaned the documentary “Delicacy of Despair: Behind the Closed Doors of the Foie Gras Industry” to Michael Altenberg, the critically acclaimed chef at Bistro Campagne in Lincoln Square. Altenberg watched the DVD. He immediately eliminated foie gras (fatty liver) from his menu.
“There’s a little tree-hugging involved in the film,” Altenberg said during a conversation on his gorgeous restaurant patio. “I love a good steak. I just don’t believe we should torture the cow, the people producing the cow or the cow’s neighborhood where hormones and antibiotics are sprayed through the air. The production of duck foie gras in this country is miniscule. But when you watch the treatment of these animals in factory farms you are moved. I took foie gras right off my menu.”
Bistro Campagne is one of 20 restaurant locations participating in a Fresh from the Family Farm initiative in conjunction with Farm Aid week in Chicago, which culminates with Sunday’s 20th anniversary Farm Aid concert at the Tweeter Center in Tinley Park. The program runs through Saturday. Food for the initiative must meet at least one of these criteria:
1. Grown locally.
2. Produced by a family farm, using sustainable farming practices.
3. Certified organic. (Raised without chemicals and processed without additives.)
At least half of the net proceeds of menu items will be donated to Farm Aid.
Other Farm Aid restaurants include the Wishbone, Keefer’s and the popular Hot Doug’s hot dog eatery, which is creating a sausage-based cassoulet (bean, duck dish). Adobo Grill in Old Town is serving Alaskan halibut steamed in a corn husk with chile poblano and served with Nicole’s Farm corn-saffron salsa and farmers market sofrito. The Adobo Grill was first to sign up for the Farm Aid initiative.
Bistro Campagne will do a tasting menu of an appetizer, entree, salad, local cheese and dessert (roughly $40 per person, prix fixe). The four-year-old restaurant is in a former teahouse at 4518 N. Lincoln. “Our entire menu is locally based and organic,” Altenberg said. “I won’t know the menu until the actual day, because we will look at what’s available. Luckily, Farm Aid is coming at the end of the harvest. We’ll have good tomatoes and winter squash. But it’s a process of education. Its hard to wean, especially in the Midwest, when you get guys my size—250 pounds—who are in for a steak and you’re serving grass fed organic beef (which he serves at Bistro Campagne). It’s not going to give you the same marbling. People will ask what happened to my foie gras and you know what?
“I have to think more as a chef. I haven’t made pate since [1990] when I worked at Le Francais in Wheeling. We’re going to start producing pate again here. So we’re going to use liver. It’s just not going to be liver the size of a Nerf football. The animal is going to have lived a decent life. And I know the faces of the farmers.”
Altenberg and his 18-person staff draw from more than 30 small family farms in Illinois as well as Home Grown Wisconsin, a co-op of 20 farms in Viroqua, Wis. Face to face contact is important. A farmer is willing to grow an item for a chef’s special request. “We’ve been on the same path as Farm Aid,” said Altenberg, who also was a chef at the now-defunct Tucci Milan. “Family farms are the foundation of what this country was built on and they are struggling—especially this year with the drought. It’s been miserable locally for organic farmers in Wisconsin and Illinois. At this time of year I usually have a two-page list from Kinnikinnick Farm [outside of Rockford]. This year I’m getting lists with four items. It is beyond vegetable farming. The heat and dryness has affected livestock farming. These farmers have been hit hard.”
Doug Sohn is owner of Hot Doug’s, 3324 N. California, and he tries to purchase as much local product as possible. His veggie hot dog consists of mustard (there is no ketchup on an all-beef Chicago hot dog), caramelized onions, relish, tomatoes and pickle. “Some of my product is made specifically for us in Chicago,” said Sohn, sitting aglow in his bright yellow and red diner (get it?). “I get stuff from Wisconsin, Colorado. But I try to keep it local. It all comes down to the raw ingredient. I buy organic when I can. If I start with the best product I can get and make it affordable to run the restaurant, you end up with a good end result.”
Hot Doug’s was popularized in the early 2000s in Roscoe Village, but a fire forced Sohn to relocate to his current location in January of this year. Just like a Farm Aid concert, the menu is a mesh of colorful and diverse offerings. “The Shawon Dunston” (formerly “The Rick Reuschel”) is chicken sausage served in Italian or Santa Fe style, and “The Madonna” is a very hot andouille sausage. Regular customers include the staff of nearby Bloodshot Records and members of the Smashing Pumpkins and Urge Overkill.
“One day a friend of mine had a bad hot dog,” said Sohn, a 43-year-old former cookbook editor. “He wondered how you could make a bad hot dog. I foolishly told him, ’I think you can.’ So a bunch of us from the [suburban Chicago] company went out researching different hot dog stands. Finally, I decided to open my own place.”
Altenberg, 42, is the previous chef-owner of Campagnola, 815 Chicago Ave. Evanston. He began using local organic sustainable farms in Evanston as early as 1993. “I have three children and my oldest child was diagnosed with leukemia,” said Altenberg, who has been a chef since 1980. “The leukemia was not hereditary. It is a cancer of the bloodstream. I started thinking environmentally, ’What could have caused a healthy baby to get sick?’ I thought about food supply. It got me in a mindset that as a restaurateur you do a lot of trend setting as far as food is concerned. How could I not be a voice for the organic food movement? I can’t imagine serving other people what I wouldn’t want to eat myself. My palate is what I get locally and seasonally. And it’s an important foundation of this restaurant.”
There weren’t many organic options when Altenberg began charting his course in 1993. His only option was the farmers market in Evanston. Now he prepares organic beef and biodynamic lamb. “Biodynamics looks at the earth as a living thing,” Altenberg explained. “In organic farming, you do a complete application of an organic pesticide to a field. A biodynamic farmer would treat the individual plant that was sick. They also follow the lunar cycle and do strange, trippy things like planting ram’s horns in the fields. However, it works, I’ve never seen such gorgeous produce in my life. It gives organics a spiritual twist.”
At Adobo Grill, general manager George Ortiz and chef Freddy Sanchez are passionate in pursuit of quality ingredients. “We buy fresh every Wednesday and Saturday from the [Green City] farmers market [near the Chicago Historical Society),” he said during an interview at his Old Town restaurant. “We are there at 7 in the morning, buying fresh corn, all kinds of vegetables. Peaches, apples, raspberries. We make our gazpacho with home-grown tomatoes.” The restaurant’s guacamole is made tableside from scratch with an onion, a touch of garlic, cilantro, salt, fresh lime, tomato and fresh avocado. Diners can wash down the good food with equally good tequila from the more than 100 blue agave offerings at the Adobo Grill/Old Town tequila bar.
Altenberg has become such a key figure in the good food movement that he lectured on the farmer-chef connection at this year’s Eco-Farm conference near Monterey Bay, Calif. “The average age of a farmer in the United States is age 60,” he said. “Which means the children are not going back and farming. If we don’t do something quickly about the state of farming in this country, we’re going to end up as one big factory farm. Even in organics, you’re seeing factory farming. Organics doesn’t necessarily stand for the family farm.”
Altenberg was born and reared in Racine, Wis., where there was a family farm field in his parent’s backyard. His father, Barry, is a psychiatrist, his mother, Rhona Stern, is an art therapist. Altenberg spent summers detasseling corn and picking cabbage. By age 13 he was a prep cook at the Council House, a 16-room private hotel for the Johnson Foundation in Racine. After high school he studied philosophy and Eastern religions at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Farm stands were all over Racine when I grew up,” Altenberg said. “I can remember the names of the different farmers. None of those stands exist today.”
