Almost a year ago I was wandering around the halls of the Sofitel Hotel with executive chef Greg Biggers as he took me through Illinois’ first certified aged-cheesemaking restaurant for this Reader story. The gist of it was that Biggers had pushed the hotel to start making its own cheeses, cured meats, jams, and pickles under the name Chestnut Provisions, which required a wide range of city and state certifications—including the only cheese-making certification given to a restaurant in the state, the same kind of certification normally given to giant dairy plants cranking out the American cheese slices and mozzarella sticks. It was an experiment not without its setbacks—the tale of the first attempt at raw milk cheese ended after three days with, “Get it out of the cave and into the garbage!” But on the whole, it was pretty successful, the guests were happy with it, and Biggers had plans for growing it—more kinds of cheese, more meats, and aspirations to sell the products, retail and wholesale, to individuals and other restaurants.
One of Biggers’s goals was to collaborate with other restaurants—other chefs had helped him develop the program by helping educate his staff, and his goal was to be able to supply some of them with what they made. As it happens, when I called his cell phone he was at Balena; he had brought some of his Taleggio to Balena and now Chris Pandel wanted to use it on a Taleggio and mushroom pizza he’s adding to the menu. It’s also close to being ready for Biggers’s most ambitious goal: creating enough of everything to be able to sell it at retail. “I’m starting to roll out a retail Chestnut Provisions basket—something that can be used as a concierge basket or as a gift bag for friends and family by guests of the hotel. Eventually you’ll be able to order by the pound from the website,” which he says is about two weeks away from being ready to go live.
