How does one cook a four-course dinner for 35 people in a bike shop with no kitchen? To be honest, I don’t really know—but I do know that on Sunday night at Let’s Roast Cycles, chef Won Kim pulled it off admirably. Course after course made its way from the back of the shop, where paper-covered worktables were being used for plating dishes and mixing cocktails, to the front, where diners sat at folding tables tucked between rows of bikes that had been draped with strings of lights.
When I walked into Let’s Roast Cycles that evening, Ternes handed me a champagne glass filled with a refreshingly tart cocktail of gin, cranberry shrub, and sparkling wine and introduced me to Tammy Owins, an attendee he’d been chatting with. Owins, a young retiree, has been going to pop-up and underground dinners in the city for ten years. At one of her first, in a Wicker Park apartment, the food was served cold because there were no cooking facilities. She now typically attends at least one underground dinner a month. She went to X-Marx before it morphed into the Logan Square brick-and-mortar restaurant Fat Rice, and the still extant Sunday Dinner Club, which spawned the restaurant Honey Butter Fried Chicken.
By this point in the evening we’d been there for slightly less than three hours, the event was scheduled to end soon, and the conversation at my table had turned to a sex-positive cafe one couple had visited. In the back, Nevins and Ternes were rinsing dishes in a horse trough that functions as the shop’s bike bathtub. But as Toolan was explaining the last cocktail, Ternes appeared, announcing that while dinner was over, the event wasn’t; he was bringing out a cooler of cheap beer for those who wanted to stay and mingle.
