Joiners

Big question: what if food could change the way kids learn?
Paul Kahan, Matthias Merges, and Jason Hammel decided to find out. What began with a group of Chicago chefs taking over classrooms at a CPS magnet school became Pilot Light, a nonprofit using food to make learning more engaging, relevant, and connected to the world outside school. Today, Pilot Light reaches students and teachers across the country, with programs in 28 states and more than 140,000 students reached.
In this special live episode of Joiners, we sit down with Paul, Matthias, and Jason to talk about Pilot Light’s scrappy beginnings, why chefs make surprisingly good educators, the challenge of bringing change into schools, and what it will take to make food education part of every child’s classroom experience.And if this conversation gets you curious about Pilot Light, Tim and Danny will be hosting the organization’s Feed Your Mind Gala on November 6. It’s a great night built around some of Chicago’s best chefs, with food, live auction experiences, and plenty of fundraising for Pilot Light’s work in schools. Tickets are still available at feedyourmindgala.org. We get into a little more of what to expect at the end of the episode.

It’s a little wild that we made it over 200 episodes without Chef Tony Mantuano on the podcast. The longtime chef and true legend behind Spiaggia and a partner in The Purple Pig, Tony has helped shape Chicago dining for more than four decades, mentoring an extraordinary generation of chefs along the way, including a handful of past Joiners guests. We talk about growing up in an Italian-American family in Kenosha, leaving music behind for the kitchen, the formative year Tony and his wife Cathy spent working throughout Italy before opening Spiaggia, and how that restaurant became both a Chicago institution and an incubator for talent. We also get into The Purple Pig’s new Oak Brook chapter, building a culture people want to stay in, the Calabrian restaurant Tony still has in him -- and so much more.

This week on Joiners, we sit down with Chanita Chayaluk, chef and owner of TAAN, a new and exciting Thai restaurant in Humboldt Park.
Chanita came to restaurants by way of a totally different career: she was working in education and mental health when the pandemic prompted a kind of “now or never” moment. She relocated to Bangkok, enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu’s Thai cuisine program, and followed a path that had been there all along -- her mom is a longtime Thai chef who worked at Chicago spots including Sticky Rice and Andy’s Thai Kitchen. Now at TAAN, Chanita is doing things a little differently, pairing Thai dishes and techniques with Midwestern ingredients, seasonal produce, and her own creative point of view.
We talk about learning Thai food beyond the dishes she grew up with, why she bristles at the word “authentic,” cooking with Midwestern ingredients, and why being “Type C” might be a restaurant superpower, and as always, so much more. 

Chef David Choi has always been a hustler. As a teenager in St. Louis, he skipped enough school to rack up hundreds of absences while tracking down celebrities at hotels, getting their autographs, and selling them on eBay. A few years later, he worked four jobs to save up for a BMW,  only to sell it and put the money into a beat-up food truck. That truck became Seoul Taco.
Fifteen years later, David has built Seoul Taco into a beloved Korean-Mexican restaurant brand, helped bring Prince Street Pizza to Chicago, and found an entirely new lane creating food for immersive pop-ups built around the likes of Sonic the Hedgehog, Demon Slayer, and One Piece. Through all of it, he’s remained an operator at heart: obsessed with systems, people, hospitality, and figuring out how to make the next thing work.
We talk about learning Korean cooking alongside his mom and grandmother, the chaos of Seoul Taco’s very first service, what it takes to scale a restaurant without losing its culture, delivery-app economics, taking Prince Street to Asia, cooking for BTS, firing an entire staff after an honest-to-god restaurant Royal Rumble, and so much more!

This week on Joiners, we sit down with Dominique Leach, chef, pitmaster, entrepreneur, and founder of Lexington Betty Smokehouse. Dominique’s story is a wild one: culinary school, Chicago kitchens, legendary mentors, brutal bosses, huge opportunities, hard lessons, and more than a few moments that could have sent her in an entirely different direction. What stands out through all of it is her resilience. She keeps moving, keeps learning, keeps betting on herself, and keeps finding a way forward. We talk about coming up in Chicago’s restaurant world, learning from the people around you, building a business and an identity at the same time, leadership, representation, hospitality, and what it takes to keep going when things get very, very difficult. 

Tim McEnery had an idea: a restaurant built around wine, a wine club built around community, and a company where people would be treated well. At the time, none of that existed. He didn’t have much money, he didn’t have much experience, and plenty of people told him, pretty reasonably, that it probably wasn’t going to work. Twenty-one years later, Cooper’s Hawk has grown from one restaurant in Orland Park into a company with thousands of employees, locations across the country, and a wine club that has become a genuine community for an enormous number of people. And yet, what’s maybe most impressive about Tim is that he doesn’t seem particularly interested in behaving like someone who has figured it all out. He still talks like a student --  he talks about the people he learned from, the mistakes he made, the things he had to teach himself, and the people he eventually realized were far better at their jobs than he could ever be. And now, apparently because building Cooper’s Hawk wasn’t enough of an education, he’s learning pizza. We explore: having a vision, doing the unglamorous work required to make it real, learning how to let other people carry it with you, remaining curious despite success, and so much more. 
 

This week’s guest arrived in Chicago during a brutal winter storm. Jose Sosa was sixteen, newly arrived from Mexico, spoke very little English, and needed a job. An uncle helped him get in the door as a dishwasher, and from there Jose built a remarkable career: eighteen years with Gibson’s Restaurant Group, including opening Gibson’s Italia; a stint opening UMMO with Carlos Gaytán; and now The Greggory, where he’s chef and partner alongside longtime colleagues Gregg Horan and Bill Veremis. We couldn’t help ourselves and spend a healthy amount of time talking steak technique, diving into tempering, cast-iron cooking, dry aging, beef tallow, and the art of getting an even cook on a bone-in steak. Along the way, we hear about coming in hours early for free just to learn knife skills, the brunch service that got so crushed Greg had to start running trays himself, and the prep cook Jose sent home on day one for refusing to stop massacring a pile of beets, and so much more! 

Devon Quinn had a biology degree and a standing offer to train mine-hunting dolphins for the Navy in San Diego. He turned it down (the water was too cold, the gig was unpaid) and ended up in a kitchen instead. Today he's Chief Culinary Officer of The Paramount Group and the chef behind Michelin-recognized eden. He walks us through the whole arc: training under Jean-Michel Diot, Dale Levitski, and Andrew Zimmerman, running the dining programs at the Art Institute of Chicago alongside Tony Mantuano, and co-founding Paramount Events in 2011. We talk the grit of catering (dragging 3,000 pounds of food over a barb wire fence in a downpour, laying plywood so guests could climb a muddy hill to dinner), the pandemic reset that took his operation from 500 people down to 19 and forced him to rebuild, the biology obsession that has him hunting for land to grow obscure ingredients -- and so much more. 

This week, Tim and Danny sit down with Katie Renshaw, founder of Bar Bambi and 2019 U.S. World Class Bartender of the Year. Katie traces her unlikely path from software development into Chicago’s cocktail world, the bars and mentors that shaped her, the intensity of competition bartending, and the leap from working behind the bar to opening one of her own. They get into the long, unglamorous process of building Bar Bambi and the care, ambition, and point of view behind what Katie ultimately created: a bar where deeply technical, flavor-first cocktails, a genuinely serious food program, and warm, unpretentious hospitality all feel of a piece. She talks about assembling the right team, the realities of ownership, and the obsessive work behind seemingly effortless drinks, from force carbonation and clarification to centrifuges and multi-day prep.
Also: drinking on the job in the old days, 14-hour Moneygun shifts, blood clarification, Speed Rack training software, and so much more!

Call him crazy, but Chef Darnell Reed is a hospitality aficionado who believes the customer who walks in five minutes before closing deserves the same care as anyone else. Chef Reed started cooking professionally at 16 and spent nearly two decades working his way through Chicago’s hotel kitchens, eventually becoming executive chef at the Conrad. He joins us to talk about leaving that world to open Luella’s Southern Kitchen, the acclaimed restaurant inspired by the food and hospitality of his great-grandmother. We discuss the mentors who shaped him, the discipline he carried from hotels into restaurant ownership, Luella’s evolution from a tiny Lincoln Square dinner spot into an Albany Park brunch destination, and his belief that the last guest through the door deserves the same welcome as the first. Plus: getting strong-armed into culinary school by a high school teacher, making chicken and waffles for Reggie Miller, learning the secret to his great-grandmother’s cornbread, the best way to clean a cast-iron skillet -- and so much more!