CheekyChicago

Top Chef winner Stephenie Izard is wandering to a dinner party near you. As a build-up to the January 2010 opening of her new restaurant, The Drunken Goat, in the West Loop, Stephanie has launched a series of “Wandering Goat” parties where she tests out her dishes on lucky guests. The details and locations are kept secret until the last minute, but you can follow Stephanie’s Twitter for the scoop.

I spoke with with Stephanie the day before the second Wandering Goat, and her afternoon’s tasks had included moving about 200 pounds of meat from her Bucktown home to the event’s location, Kitchen Chicago. Sounds like that would stress anyone out, but I guess it’s nothing compared to a Quickfire Challenge and Stephanie didn’t sound the least bit rushed on the phone. We chatted about the new restaurant, her culinary influences, her take on Julie & Julia and her love of the Chicago food scene.

Cheeky: So why don’t we start with what you’re busy with today, which is the Wandering Goat event.

Stephanie Izard: We have the second one tomorrow night and we have 100 people coming. There’s a local kitchen called Kitchen Chicago that let us have the space. They have a big commercial kitchen that’s attached to this beautiful warehouse space. So that’s where we’re having the dinner tomorrow night. Whole Foods and Allen Brothers donated all the food, so we just went to Whole Foods and filled up three giant carts of food and looked like crazy people. And then Allen Brothers delivered 200 pounds of pork belly to my house a few days ago.

Cheeky: I read that you’re experimenting with various ways of curing and smoking meats at the new restaurant. Can you talk about those?

SI: [For tomorrow’s dinner] we did a whole bunch of different rubs. We did a black pepper bacon, a black pepper maple bacon . . . the other one’s pretty classic, just maple and fennel and black peppercorn and garlic. We’re trying all these different kinds of bacon, to see which way we like it the best. That’s the nice way to use these parties, is to just sort of practice things for the restaurant. We’re going to have a sausage program for the restaurant. We’ll always have a few sausages on the menu. So we just started working on those as well, sort of experimenting and finding out how to get it just right.

Cheeky: Can you tell us about the concept for the Drunken Goat?

SI: It’s Spanish-Italian influence, which I always have in my cooking, as well as Asian ingredients. It’s really my style, it’s all about balanced dishes. I’m always concerned with making sure there’s enough acidity, and a little bit of sweetness – I use a lot of fruit in my cooking. So, just a really casual restaurant with my style of cooking.

We’re doing this [Wandering Goat] dinner family style. The last one was all small plates. I like a combination of that, where everything is meant to be shared. We’ll have some little snacks, we’ll have some small plates to share, and then we’ll also serve family-style dishes, like a whole smoked goat leg that you’ll be able to get for, you know, five or six people to share with different accoutrements. We want to encourage family-style dining because I think it’s just more fun, the way everybody interacts with the food.

Cheeky: Where did the name Drunken Goat come from?

SI: My last name is a type of goat that lives in the Pyrenees mountains. Actually, I looked it up again yesterday, because I’ve been talking for the past two years about the name coming from my last name, and I thought I really should look it up [laughs]. It’s actually a half goat/half antelope, very interesting. It could have been the “Drunken Antelope” but it just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Cheeky: I know you’ve traveled a lot this year. Did certain regions have an influence on your cooking?

SI: Yeah, definitely – my whole trip to Southeast Asia. The countries over there are all about the balance in the foods. Everything has got a little bit of sweetness to it, a little bit of spice, things like that. So I get a little influence from that as well. There’s some things like fish sauce and miso and soy – you can’t get that flavor in more Mediterranean-style [foods].

Cheeky: I have one Top Chef question. Now that it’s been a few years, what remains the most valuable thing you took from that experience?

SI: I guess mostly just the friendships and connections I made. I mean, the chefs that I was on the show with – I never would have met them any other way. So now, no matter what city I’m in, there’s probably someone from one of the seasons of Top Chef who lives there. So it’s great, we have our own little family together because nobody can ever really understand all the craziness we went through.

Cheeky: What do you love about being a chef in Chicago?

SI: Almost repeating, the family of chefs here. It’s almost like a big family tree. You can always back-track, like playing the Kevin Bacon game. You meet another cook and you’re like, oh yeah, I worked for that person who worked for that person. Everyone knows each other through the network of chefs and cooks in the city. I think we all are proud of our city. We think it’s the best food city, definitely second to nothing but New York. So I think everybody just really supports the community of chefs and works hard together to make it a great food city.

Cheeky: Who are some of your favorite Chicago restaurants and chefs?

SI: I love Mindy Segal, I mean not just for desserts but her chef Mark Steuer [at Hot Chocolate] is awesome too. Obviously Michael Carlson from Schwa. He’s an old friend of mine. Kahan from Avec. And, of course,Blackbird – I just went there a couple nights ago and had the best meal I’ve had there in a long time. [Blackbird chef] Mike Sheerin’s a cool guy, and very talented.

Cheeky: Is there any advice you would have for female chefs who are trying to break into the industry?

SI: You know, I think it’s just don’t be intimidated by all the guys in the kitchen. It’s not such a physically demanding job, but it is a little bit. So just don’t be scared off by that. Basically, just don’t be intimidated. In my first job I had about 8 guys in the kitchen and me. It makes you feel a little bit, you know, just not part of the group at first. But just work hard and prove yourself, and then the guys will accept you and bring you on. I think guys really have a lot of respect for a bad-ass female chef. They know that it can take a little extra effort getting up in the game.

Cheeky: There’s a lot of talk about female chefs and cooking these days because of Julie & Julia. I don’t know if you’ve had time to see it.

SI: I did, I actually taught a cooking class – it was a like a Twitter class, where I taught a class based on the movie and then people could Twitter in questions while I was cooking. I went to Le Cordon Bleu school, and Julia Child, of course, went to Le Cordon Bleu, so we did a little promotion for it and I got to go to the premiere of the movie. It was a big to-do, everybody was all dressed up, and I was in my jeans. I had no idea.

Cheeky: I’m sure you see Julia Child as a predecessor, so how was it to see her in the movie?

SI: It’s just really cool to see. Of course, I grew up watching Julia Child, but I didn’t really know exactly how she got started. I knew that she had started a little later because she was in the FBI or whatever, but I didn’t realize she hadn’t started cooking until she was about my age, like in her thirties. And she just started cooking because she loved French food so much. And you know she went into culinary school and she was the only woman in the class and they all sort of laughed at her. But again, she just proved herself as a bad-ass and they were all like, “Alright!”

Cheeky: When did you start cooking?

SI: My mom cooked all the time, stuff from around the world. But my first memory of myself cooking was when we went to Epcot Center. You know, you could walk around and eat in all the different countries. In “France”, we had these crepes filled with cheese and mushrooms and ham. I just absolutely loved them. So when we got back to Connecticut, I knew how to use cookbooks, so I figured out how to make crepes but otherwise I pretty much just recreated the dish. And my parents were like “What?!”

Cheeky: Wow, and how old were you?

SI: I was eight.

Cheeky: Amazing.

SI: So I think, from that point on, I was always helping my mom in the kitchen. And it was a lot of fun. Every Sunday we’d all get together, and we’d go through recipes and we’d write a menu for the week and get the grocery list together. So it was a nice thing that my sister and my mom and I did together.

Cheeky: So many women today are so rushed and don’t cook that much anymore. What’s the most anti-chef thing you’ll ever do if you’re just in a rush or in a pinch?

SI: Yeah, I do eat a frozen dinner sometimes. Especially at the restaurant, I’d just get too busy to eat. I had a freezer full of Lean Cuisines and my pastry chef, Jessie, would just grab one and go, “Eat!” You sort of just forget to eat, or you just get too busy. But, yes, sometimes I eat frozen dinners, it’s embarrassing. Sometimes you just don’t have the time, or I might get off work and I’m just feeling kind of lazy. But I’ve been getting better. I live right near Olivia’s Market in Bucktown, so I have no excuse but to go and get something nice and simple to make.

Cheeky: We like to ask, what’s the cheekiest thing you did this week? We define “cheeky” as “definitively bold; impudent or saucy.”

SI: I was just looking at synonyms of “saucy” because there was a slight possibility we had to change the name of the restaurant, so I was looking up other words to describe me.

What is the cheekiest thing I did this week? I guess just getting 200 pounds of pork delivered to my house. What’s funny is it got delivered and we realized there’s no way that we can store this all. So we went to the Best Buy over on Elston, walked in, five minutes later I was walking out with a new refrigerator. I said, “I need a refrigerator right now.” They said, “Well, we can have it delivered next Tuesday. . . ” I was like, “That’s not gonna work.”

Cheeky: You gotta do what you gotta do.

SI: Yeah, so now I have a little restaurant set up in my condo. I don’t have a lot of furniture yet because I just moved in, but there’s a bunch of restaurant equipment!