- Michael Gebert
- Chef Nick Lacasse and owner Scott Worsham at MFK
Big restaurant openings have to have PR that starts working from a mile away. That’s fine, but it would be a much duller scene to cover if things didn’t also pop up out of the blue, unannounced, and take the city by charm alone. I first heard of Mfk on Facebook about a week before it opened, and it seemed like only a couple of weeks later it was everyone’s favorite new find—a tiny, sunny place tucked into a half-downstairs space on an otherwise pretty forgettable Diversey strip by the lakefront, serving up mostly Spanish-style simple dishes. In a world where it seems like every dish comes with tomato jam and pork belly foam and is compressed into a sphere, the most revolutionary thing you can do is just use butter, lemon, and a green herb on a plate of razor clams, like it’s freakin’ 1912 or something.
And in America we kind of have this weird thing where we put food up on a pedestal. It’s like it’s not attainable for everyday mortals. So I started having this idea of something that was a little more European feeling. It could be a neighborhood place that just had really solid, good food, and strip away the pretension and some of the more highfalutin things we seem to attach to food and restaurants in America.
We do some great things in Chicago in the food world. One of them is that we do dark rooms and pork and bourbon very, very well here. That’s pretty much covered in this town, so as much as I like dark rooms that are heavy on pork and bourbon, I thought it would be nice to have something that’s the antithesis of that. So that was kind of the general idea for it.
I think there’s also a thing of, we’ve made dining into such an event. You don’t always want to go to an event.
Worsham: It’s a big world, and everybody can fit under the umbrella, but it’s a weird thing that we’ve come to the point in this country that this feels like a weird thing.
Yeah, Cal Pep is like the Billy Goat of Barcelona. No more ambitious or pretentious than that.
