• Michael Gebert
  • Erling Wu-Bower at Nico Osteria

Last week, when Erling Wu-Bower was listed as a James Beard Foundation Award semifinalist for Best Chef, Great Lakes for his work at Nico Osteria, some people expressed surprise that they would shortlist the chef of a restaurant (even a Paul Kahan one) that’s been open less than three months. But remember, Wu-Bower is the guy who spent ten years becoming an overnight success, as the saying goes, at Kahan’s One Off Hospitality group.

Paul and I had been talking about this concept for a long time. Probably four years. The Avec post kind of popped up pretty quick, and it was an absolute joy to be able to work at Avec, probably my favorite restaurant in the city. But this seafood-based concept is really what I consider my home and where I want to be and what I want to do . . . kind of my and Paul’s food baby.

I always wanted to bring a seafood Italian restaurant to Chicago. When you say seafood in Chicago, the first reaction always is, “Are people going to eat it?” The second one is, “How do we get it here?” And certainly we fight those battles every day. [The concept] went through a couple of different iterations, but it never went that far from what it is today at Nico.

I keep talking about reading. The literature that we read is [about] the food revolution that started with Alice Waters and Paul Bertolli, which is an Italian-American food revolution, especially in the San Francisco area. Of course there are non-Italian restaurants like the French Laundry, we’ve all heard of them, but if you go to San Francisco you’re eating house-made pastas and beautiful, simply prepared meats. It’s an Italian tradition out there. And the books that have come out of that, and the exposure of something so influential to cooks all over the country, are Italian. So Paul and I, and kind of the generation of cooks that came up around me, read a lot of Italian cookbooks.

We’re not a hotel restaurant.

Of course, we get that no matter what! I don’t think that’s just the hotel guests. I think one of the things we focus on here—not just with the back of the house but with the front of the house—is education. We strive to teach our cooks, and so in the same way we try to teach our diners. And there are some diners who don’t want to get taught and some cooks who don’t want to get taught, too.