I had planned to do a story about Ukrainian Village’s the Winchester for a while—mainly about how, in a city of places that say they’re “neighborhood” restaurants (but don’t open until dinner), the Winchester really aims to be an all-day neighborhood hangout, available before sunset and doing quality food at night that makes it a competitor to places that have the luxury of focusing on dinner alone. It’s a tough thing to pull off—you can get typed as a breakfast/brunch place and then people have a hard time thinking of you as a serious dinner spot (that’s been the case with Logan Square’s Jam, which has made several attempts to launch dinner).
By then wanting to be closer to home, he came to Chicago and staged at a number of fine-dining restaurants here, finally working for Koren Grieveson at Avec. “I wanted some place that was serious and would use the techniques I had learned,” he says. Avec both was and wasn’t that place for him—”I would come up with a dish and give it to Koren, and she would break it down while she was eating it. Destroy it, basically. She would ask me how I did this, did that, and she would say, ‘Too much work. We’re not doing that.'”
“I knew I wanted my first restaurant to be an all-day kind of place,” Bastien says. “It’s my favorite kind of restaurant. I’ve lived in Logan Square for most of the last seven years, and it’s one of my favorite things to do, walk to Lula by myself and read a book—that’s just extremely comforting to me.”
Nobody would would wish for the disaster that happened in May, and Pappas looks pained at the thought of the endless insurance paperwork he’s still working on (he wants me to mention that he highly recommends hiring a public adjuster to work on your behalf with the insurance companies). “It’s very difficult to watch as you’ve built something and all your bank accounts go down to zero, but we’re still paying all our bills on time,” he says. But at the same time, they both recognize that the fire also presented them with their first opportunity to step back and look at the business.
I ask Bastien what this new way of approaching work means in terms of the menu. “We’re trying do more with seasonality now—it matters more to us now. We can do more fresh pasta. More three-day preparations where it brines for this long, then you hang it, then you smoke it and it has to cool down, and then you cut it. Just a bit more technique—it’s not something you’re going to see on the plate necessarily. But it will be there on the fork. Just a bit more love.”
