Chef/Restaurateur Paul Kahan (he’s the one in the pic to your left in chef whites, the man to his left is Kahan’s business partner Donnie Madia) is a busy guy. In addition to his tent-pole fine dining establishment Blackbird (opened in 1997 to wild acclaim), he is the executive chef of/partner in Blackbird’s adjacent, sister restaurant, avec, which serves Mediterranean wine cuisine, as well as the swine, shellfish and beer emporium of bliss, The Publican.
When I spoke with Kahan back in November he was bursting with excitement over his newest venture, Big Star, a taqueria and bar located on the grounds that once held venerated ghastly dining establishment The Pontiac Cafe. The intent for Kahan and his partners was to create an environment that fit in with the neighborhood: a hip, cool place for hip, cool people to flock to and drink a litany of good bourbons, whiskeys and tequilas, while noshing on some extraordinary tacos, tostadas and more.
Big Star is a throwback to the great honky-tonks towns such as Bakersfield, CA once were known for. The great dust bowl dive bars that crossed ethnic lines to deliver good drink and good food to be consumed with some great country music.
Kahan grew up around food, working in his family’s delicatessen and smokehouse (which used to be up the road from where The Publican now stands). Later, after abandoning work in computer science, he immersed himself in cooking from the ground up, starting his career at Erwin Drechsler’s Metropolis.
Says Kahan on those early days: “The first job I ever did I de-stringed sugar snap peas. The only way to be successful is to dig in and work your ass off. It takes a great enthusiasm for food.”
And, as his resume attests to, Kahan has indeed worked his ass off. His restaurants are revered here in Chicago as well as across the country. He’s been a James Beard nominee for Outstanding Chef both in 2007 and 2009. He’s won James Beard’s Best Chef of the Midwest in 2004. In 1999 Food & Wine placed him on its Best New Chefs list.
Kahan is also an astute lover of music, both recorded and live. “There was a time when I was seeing five shows a week back in the day before I had four restaurants.” Kahan continues, ” But I still love music and it’s a huge driving force in my life.”
In my interview with him, Kahan and I discuss our love of Uncle Tupelo, the iconic alt-country band he saw perform live 35 times. He recounts one of those times driving to Milwaukee with a buddy of his to see the band perform in the basement of a Mexican cantina. “It was definitely one of the top 25 rock ‘n roll moments in my life.”
The culmination of his love of food and music converges to make Big Star one of the best places to grab a cold glass of $1 Schlitz and $2 Tacos al pastor (spit-roasted pork shoulder) while enjoying some great country & country-tinged music (the staff drop by neighborhood record store Reckless Records to purchase LPs). See Rock ‘n Roll Ghost’s review of Big Star here.
Rock ‘n Roll Ghost: How are things going?
Paul Kahan: Good. We opened this little taqueria and bar on Monday. I’ve been pretty much working around the clock at this point to get things going. It’s a lot busier than we expected right out of the box. It’s an old institution in Chicago that was called The Pontiac Café. We, through my partner Terry (Alexander) ended up with the space. We were either doomed or we were going to take it and turn it into something. It’s real country dusties for lack of any other way to describe what the bar and music is all about. There was this convergence when people migrated from Mexico and from the south and the east to the dust bowls like Bakersfield. We loosely based the idea…we wanted to figure out how whiskey and tequila went together. We were pleasantly surprised to find Merle Haggard and Buck Owens and all these guys that were kind of around for that. We needed some sense of safety to open this taqueria. Ya know, I used to work for Rick Bayless and I know my way around Mexican cooking a little bit. It just seemed like a natural for the neighborhood. Cheap, easy, there’s a huge, loyal following of hipsters in the neighborhood that went to The Pontiac Café. We didn’t want to piss them off. I think that they’ve all been pleasantly surprised. And of course there are clean bathrooms now. (laughter from me) I’m sure the place will get duly beat up in time, but the place is set up for that. We’re right around the corner from the Double Door. We’re right across from our cocktail place, The Violet Hour, our speakeasy.
Where did the idea for Big Star come from?
We ended up with the location and we wanted to preserve the hipster quality of it. We wanted it to be cheap and fun and very, very recognizable. I believe that Terry and I were throwing around BBQ and uh…he may have said ‘What about tacos?’. Of course there’s lots of taquerias in the neighborhood. And then I thought back to my days working with Rick Bayless and how we tried to do al pastor and it’s really tricky. I sort of thought, well maybe this is the challenge that I want to…really good al pastor is sort of a cult thing. Search any number of websites and there’s millions of people that are commenting about how to make al pastor, how to not make it. There’s a lot of romanticism about it. There’s no written recipes. It’s a style of cooking meat that I believe migrated here from Lebanon, somewhere in the middle east. It’s like a shawarma, but the Mexicans really embraced it.
As for the music, there’s a guy that works for us, Michael Ruble and Michael’s a real Louisville (KY)-centric Bourbon guy and he loves country music. He really was the main driving force. He’s the guy that discovered this Bakersfield link that justified us serving tequila and bourbon and the connection to Mexican cooking. Out there it’s like Cal-Mex. You know at The Publican there was a huge verification on my part when I went to Belgium that the Belgians love swine, you know they love pig, and they obviously love mussels and shellfish, so they whole thing made sense. It was like, okay we can do this. And when Michael came to us and presented these amazing cocktails based on ideas from that part of the country and based on ingredients that made sense within the parameters of what we were doing, it was like, this definitely makes a lot of sense. It’s not like you walk in there and go, ‘Wow. Why are they serving tequila and bourbon?’ It all fits together. And it’s real acceptable and real comfortable.
The music’s sound is great in the room which is key for me. I’m a pretty avid record collector and I love music. A couple of months ago I would have said I love going to rock shows, I’ve been a little busy. But I love live music. There was a time when I was seeing five shows a week back in the day before I had four restaurants. But I still love music and listen to music and it’s a huge driving force in my life.
One of the things we really want is for the place to feel like an old man bar eventually, a place that’s really worn in and wonderful. For me, the biggest criteria for an old man bar, there’s a couple I go in and you look up on the wall and they have these paper cone speakers. And they just have this lighter than air quality to the music. That sounds really effortless and clean and beautiful. So I had a pair of speakers that I’ve always dragged into my backyard when we have parties in the summer. I took the square box and it’s a ten-inch paper cone driver, a horn mid-range and horn tweeter. They’re really durable. They’re loud speakers. They’re not like fine audiophile speakers. In my yard they always sounded so…they had that thin quality, sort of lighter than air and really wonderful. We got six of these big speakers that really sound incredible. And we play records. We’re right near Reckless Records on Milwaukee Avenue. Some of my staff are charged with the task of going in there and going through the country bins and seeing what they can get. Like The Byrds “Sweethearts of the Rodeo”, Tom T. Hall, some Rolling Stones, I think I vetoed something last night. Some Neil Young is about as rock as we’ll get, but not even his rock stuff. Let’s see here, (looks through stacks) Buck Owens, Leonard Cohen – that’s a little borderline, the Waco Brothers, Bo Diddley – I gotta pull that one out of the stacks, that one didn’t work last night, Patsy Cline, Flying Burrito Brothers, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubbs, Lucinda Williams, Loretta Lynn, you know, etc, etc, etc. There’s some Bob Dylan that’ll work and some borderline rock stuff, ya know, sort of country-tinged rock. It sounds great in the room and goes with a $1 glass of Schlitz.
Any Uncle Tupelo in there?
I’m a huge Uncle Tupelo fan. I have many Uncle Tupelo memories. We play some more modern stuff. We play some Jayhawks, we play a little bit of Son Volt and, of course, some Uncle Tupelo. It can get a little bit driving for what we’re doing here. Ya know, that start and stop stuff? It’s definitely alt-country…like March 16 -20 is absolutely perfect. I saw Uncle Tupelo about 35 times. A buddy and me drove to Milwaukee once to see them in a Mexican restaurant. It was actually in the basement, they have a bar. The restaurant was called Gus’s Mexican Cantina. We went there to have some food and we heard them sound checking in the basement so we went down there. They were playing a cover of The Soft Boys song, “I Wanna Destroy You”. And their road manager who has a band in St. Louis, too. They’re a really good band, they have several albums, the name escapes me…
Oh! You mean The Bottle Rockets?
Bottle Rockets, yeah!
Brian Henneman.
Yeah, Brian Henneman. He was playing mandolin. It was definitely one of the top 25 rock ‘n roll moments in my life. It was fucking unbelievable.
I think I saw you at Pitchfork’s festival this year, right?
Yeah, I go every year. My wife and I have kind of a lost weekend. My friend Greg from Goose Island gets us backstage and we just hang out back there. We’ve gone the last three years all three nights. The highlight of all three years was…I’m kind of pissed that they changed the format on Friday this year. But last year or the year before it was Sonic Youth playing Daydream Nation from start to finish. That was so good.
The reviews are really enthusiastic about the new place. Of your restaurants I’ve only visited The Publican so far, which I was head over heels for. I could have stayed there all night. And I’m not a beer drinker, but the beer the server recommended was perfect. What I find interesting about Big Star, not that your other places are pricey, but that Big Star is on the inexpensive side.
I think that this is true of the entire partnership, from Terry (Alexander) to Peter Garfield to my partner Donnie (Madia). I think we want to do real unique stuff that works. Obviously we foresee this place as being a volume place, a packed bar with decent, cheap food. And in the summertime another 100 plus seats outside. Pretty much makes for a lot of cheap beer and tacos. I think that anyone with a good head on their shoulders is going to look at this location and realize, you gotta keep it cheap, it’s gotta be fun, it’s gotta be edgy. We’re just following the rules. For me personally, I like a four-star meal every once in a while, but it seems that, as I get older, I’m a little less patient for that experience. I’m not a super gourmand. I love what we do at Blackbird, it’s very edgy, it’s a fine dining experience forward. But nine times out of ten I’m going to go to a place like The Publican, or Big Star or avec. Actually, ten nights out of ten. It takes a lot for me to…I don’t like getting dressed up. It takes a lot for me to put on a coat and go into a fancy place and sit there for five hours and pay a ton of money. Big Star is where I go to have a shot and a beer and listen to some good music and look at some pretty girls. Of course my wife is the prettiest. I can’t ever forget that. Regardless, that’s what people like and that’s why we decided to do it.
Can you tell me a little bit about your origins? I know that your family had a smokehouse…
My dad had a delicatessen and he had a smokehouse right up the street from The Publican, actually called King Salmon. It was basically Jewish deli food. I spent time as a kid working there and hanging out at the delicatessen. My dad just loved food. As I grew up we went and had sushi. My parents got divorced when I was about 13, so I was thrown in to seeing dad twice a week and we’d go out to dinner. My dad loved food so we’d go out to interesting places and eat interesting food and that increased my love for food. I went away to college and studied math and computer science and lived in a house with a bunch of rock ‘n roll guys, ya know, punk rockers, we had a band room in the basement. I was the cook just because I bought cookbooks and was a member of an organic food co-op. I just started to immerse myself in baking and food. That’s what I really loved. I got out of college, I graduated and felt that I owed myself the duty of trying out what I had studied for five years. I just found out I wanted to be a chef. I decided I didn’t want to go to culinary school, I just wanted to work my ass off. Without sounding arrogant, I’m a fairly intelligent guy and real passionate about food. I just pushed it. You see young cooks that do the same. They’re hungry and want to cook everything and want to learn and move forward – those are the guys that are going to be chefs and not just cooks their entire lives.
Paul Kahan, along with renowned chef Mario Batali, will join together for the eighth blackbird benefit on March 15 at Kahan’s The Publican. For more information on the benefit, check out our news item here.
