282: Jason Hammel

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. I'm the kind of person who thinks recipes are not there and they're not designed to replicate something perfectly. They're there to invite people into an experience. Recipes are mostly about memory. And so every one of these recipes is stamped with a day, a day, the day it was created.

0:52This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

0:59Jason Hamill is the executive chef and owner of award-winning Lula Cafe in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. Jason grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, and is the product of a tight Italian family. He studied writing at Brown University and then traveled to Italy where an accidental stay in an apartment above a produce market left a lasting impact and led to his life as a chef. On this episode, we hear about the 24-year run of Lula Cafe and how Jason's instinct to write blends with his culinary background for a really unique point of view. We also talk about his debut cookbook, The Lula Cafe Cookbook, which I just love.

1:36I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jason.

1:47Jason Hamill, welcome to This is Taste. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here. Really great to meet you. Avid listener. Oh, thanks, man. I appreciate it. We were just talking about Chandra's episode and Schwa off Mike. Yeah, absolutely. We were just talking about how Schwa is kicking it still and just saw Michael recently and what a great guy he is. Yeah, listener, a couple episodes back, I was talking to Chandra about Schwa and how it echoes the bear in my brain, perhaps. And Jason, we can talk about that television show, but it is open. It is. It is. And doing great stuff still. Really excited.

2:17So let's talk about brunch. tell me about what was the last brunch service you worked? Because your restaurant, Lula, is a real favorite of mine and Chicago and just a legendary place. Just celebrated 24 years. Congrats. Thank you. So what was your last? Just happened on Saturday. Sunday. I work every brunch service, and I typically expedite the busy, busy services. You know, it's a hard expediting, you know, gig, very difficult, probably one of the hardest around. and there are just a few of us who can get through a five-, six-hundred-person brunch. It's 600 covers. It can happen, yes. Because you've got this massive dining room with its airy and beautiful and lots of windows, and then you've got this massive front garden patio area.

3:03I mean, it's over the years. We started very small. In 99, we had just under 1 ,000 square feet, and then we just sort of took over adjacent spaces over the years. So now it's kind of like a labyrinth of rooms, and we have the outdoor. but there is a big line at 9 o 'clock when we open. So we'll do, I think, you know, we'll do like 120 covers in the first hour, just like, you know, flat sat, just crazy. You kind of have to think about swinging before the ball gets thrown in a way, you know what I mean? So you start cooking even before people sit down. You must have like a warm-up lap. Oh, we do.

3:38We just, yeah, we just start cooking before. Start cooking at 6. Before it even happens, yeah. Now you, on Instagram, mentioned the show The Bear. and service and I'd like to get your sense uh about that show um it really does seem to many uh that it is representing not just the food industry but Chicago well what is your take though my take is it's an excellent show I think um I mean first of all I have a lot of friends who are on the show both you know literally that made cameos but also behind the scenes a former pastry chef of mine uh was the you know genius behind the chocolate cake who now has her own place called Loaf Lounge.

4:17And Coco did an amazing job with the food. I think this is my take. I'm not from Chicago, but I've lived there for 30 years. I'm actually from New Haven. I think that those people who tried to find the fault and the betrayal are really being nitpicky. It is an incredibly evocative and like, and real feeling of Chicago to me. And then the food scenes and the restaurant scenes are deep and nuanced in a way that we just haven't seen in food TV before. I think it's brilliantly done. The casting is brilliant. And it brought a lot of thought for me about emotional labor, both on the service and in the front and back of the house.

5:05And what that means, what that does to people who work, who care for others, who want to care for others and struggle to care for themselves. And it has a lot to say about that. And I'm really interested in where they take the, you know, the next season. It left, you know, Carmi in such a, you know, a troubled spot. But it's a troubled spot that so many of us have been in over our lives, like what to choose family over work, you know, career, you know, with the whole all the pressures of the career and what kinds of stress it puts on. Do you recognize those characters? Do you recognize Carmi? Do you recognize them in myself?

5:38You know, I've struggled with how to care for myself and how to care for others my whole life, you know, the whole career. It's tough. You know, caring for others is what we do. And it's the primary role of a owner or manager is to care for others. The others in this case being the team. Right. Team first, you know, giving, finding them the right resources, finding them the ways to support them in their work so that they can then in turn care for the other people in the room. but caring is not something that's just like innate or natural it's just like you don't have like a well of just you know infinite well especially when you have like you're using fire and very sharp objects there's not a lot of like care and and that's a very hard industry a hundred percent it's stressful i mean look at what i mean the expedite we just talked about expediting like some of the best parts of the bear for me were just looking at the pressure of one person having to organize that whole like chaotic uh environment and that's what happens when I'm working Sunday brunch.

6:35I mean, I'm in front of, you know, 50 tickets and they all have to be organized. You have to call them out and say them in a way that'll engage the team without, you know, without frightening them. You know what I mean? Like, come on, let's go. You know, it's a big responsibility. And one of our funniest moments recently was after that episode, season two came out when, you know, the expediting happens at the last episode. It was super busy, Sunday brunch. I had, you know, again, like 50 tickets and I'm yelling and yelling and my Apple Watch is warning me to like slow my breathing. Oh, my gosh.

7:09That's amazing. To get out into a different, less noisy environment. And I just pick up my red pen. I look over at my front of the house manager. I'm like, hey, cuz, you got this? I got to go. And, you know, we all started laughing. That's a good one. I mean, in the moment, meta and great. And clearly you're living your truth here on the show, our show. So I appreciate you sharing. um also like that spider kid smoke needle drop in the episode so great instagram amazing it's just like the the music in that show just doesn't get enough credit and i feel as a chicagoan you hear a lot of you hear some great things right you do and music from i mean for lula is a yeah it's a central part of uh of our identity my wife leah and i started the restaurant together she's a musician yep she's been in bands and from chicago been in bands for years and the music you know the seen there um in the 90s was i mean it was so important in my life like going out to shows and seeing you know whoever came through but also just the local acts and then the musicians in our neighborhood that come to the restaurant regularly um you know i was just talking to someone about uh bob weston who's in uh is a you know producer and um and uh musician and was in is the bassist in shellac and you know i mean like that guy was just at the bar yesterday on sunday when I was expediting.

8:26Like he's a good friend and he's a creative, you know, a center of music and creativity in Chicago. And there's all sorts of people like that. Tortoise and... Oh, yeah. C and Cake, like shout out to those guys. Yeah, absolutely. That's the Lula crowd. Yeah, I know. And I've been there and I have friends who work at Metro for years and it feels like Lula is an extension of this super unique music industry in Chicago. It's like just the beating heart. It is a beating heart. So 99, so early, I mean, 24 years and, you know, early, like 90s Chicago, you just mentioned this, but I want to get into how was Chicago in the 90s such a formative time for food in America?

9:06I feel like you have a thesis. You've lived it. You know the industry. But I'd like to get your take on how this time, because I really do think a lot of the food culture in our country was informed by the Midwest, specifically Chicago this period. Oh, it's interesting that you say that. I mean, because all of us were looking at California. Yeah. You know, at that time, I think the discovery of the Midwest as a bountiful place is the story of the 90s, early 2000s Chicago food scene. Like recognizing that you didn't have to look to, you know, the specialty vegetables, the California cuisine, the, you know, purple potatoes and, you know, scarlet turnips are getting shipped from somewhere else or the chefs, you know, nothing against Chef's Garden, but like those kinds of places.

9:47and looking just around us and seeing like we literally have some of the best produce and uh in the country and we were just talking before we went on air about michigan fruit yeah i mean there's no like michigan fruit is is you know above uh above you know just up so perfect in so many specific cases like i'm talking about berries blueberries and raspberries but like grapes you don't think about grapes and the grape season in in michigan is just short flash precious but beautiful, like it's really gorgeous, plums, et cetera. So, I mean, us discovering that bounty, not that people weren't growing those things and enjoying them, but recognizing it as a sort of like a local treasure that you could celebrate.

10:31That's the first thing I would say. The second thing is the building of that community. Chicago is unique in that, and chefs seem to be connected very closely and willing to help each other. Yeah. Share resources, recipes, information, et cetera, in a way that, from what I've heard, is not always happening in other cities like it should. So that community, early community, was very tight. And then, you know, people just kind of grew up in it. Once the tree is healthy, you know, it grows. And so that's where I think a lot of the, you know, the outreach and what's happened now comes from. I think of folks like Charlie Trotter.

11:06I think of Grant Akats at Alinea. I think about you. I think about intelligentsia starting there in 94. Paul Kahn. Paul Kahn, of course. these names, but when you look at the size of the city, you're punching well above your weight in terms of the size of the city. Let me ask you, was there a moment that you felt Chicago dipped at all in the past 25 years and has come back? Because I feel maybe that's happened. I mean, when you're in the fight, I don't think you see the larger dips in that way. I do think we have a challenge now post-pandemic to really create models that work for us sustainably.

11:50I mean, that's the truth around the country. And I do think that the challenge of the community is to come together and understand what we should do as a unit, as a singular unit in the city to create new opportunities and new models for sustainability and success. So we might be in that dip right now. Interesting. I was thinking the opposite, but that's just my – I live in New York 20 years. So I feel like right now Chicago is hitting a stride unlike I've ever witnessed. I mean creatively. Yeah, on the creative side for sure. We have Kusama and Obelix and those restaurants. I mean those are young and hungry places.

12:26But the city as a whole, like we really need to come together. I mean there's some challenges. We have some farming challenges. We've lost some farms the last couple of years. So we need to see what new support is coming up so that this creativity like Obelix, Kusama, et cetera. Bev Kim and Johnny Clark, their restaurants. My favorite restaurant. Parachute. Parachute is literally my favorite restaurant. That's cool. I love Parachute too. I think it's a great restaurant. It's brilliant. I want to get into more Chicago and some of your favorite restaurants because we use this show as an opportunity to shout out restaurants for our listeners to visit.

13:00But I want to hear a little bit about your history, Jason, about coming to Chicago from the East Coast. How did you get into food? Like, what's your journey there? Oh, man, it's a story. So I wanted to be a writer. I went to school on the East Coast. I wanted to go to graduate school to be a creative writer, to, you know, study fiction and fiction writing. And I got into a program in normal Illinois. at the time my professor in college was like you need to work with this young writer he's got two books out you're really going to you know learn a lot from him and the only downside is you have to go live in normal yeah um and you know i had no idea what the midwest was like i had i really hadn't been west in new york city at that point um and i drove out to normal uh and studied with david foster wallace for two years my gosh i knew you you're you're winding up like a good story to So I studied there and was writing and, you know, quickly realized I had a lot of work to do as a writer.

14:03I finished the program and moved to Chicago, which is, you know, two hours north. In the interim, between schools, I lived in Italy for a little while. And one of the things that I talk about in our cookbook is like what I was exploring then was I'm from an Italian family from the East Coast. I was kind of exploring how that the erosion of that identity, you know, it's been several generations. There are certain things that are like really meaningful and real that are, you know, from the old world, so to speak. But they're eroding. They're sort of, you know, falling apart over the generations.

14:37Just, you know, no one's fault but just time and space. And so I was kind of exploring that, you know, the tension of old world and new in the writing. And so I was like, I'm going to go to Italy, learn Italian and like just see what this is like. So I was there for a while and I and that is where I really realized like how central food was to both like my history and also the writing that I wanted to do. So I literally started writing about food and in so doing studying cookbooks. You know, Elizabeth David is a favorite of mine. And that's where I kind of learned to cook. I didn't have any, you know, hand on experience.

15:14I lived in Italy for a while and then came to normal. So I went from Bologna to normal. Oh, Emilia Romagna, nice place to land in Italy in the 90s. I'm sure it was, I mean, very different. It was cool. And I still brought some of that 90s music. You know, I saw PJ Harvey in a, like, discotheque in a field of wheat out, you know, somewhere in Emilia Romagna in the mid-90s. That was amazing. I still went to shows and stuff. Yeah. But then I, you know, when I moved to Chicago, I got a job as a cook. And the cooking was really just about money. I turned to the guy next to me in graduate school and was like, what do you do for money?

15:53One of my first jobs was at like this off-brand California pizza kitchen. I worked at TGI Fridays, like anywhere normal I could work. Oh, nice. That's a great spot to get reps in at TGI. Oh, my God, yes. Yeah. I mean, yeah, don't knock that. I would never. They had systems and controls that I learned a lot from. Work at TGF Fridays and Starbucks. Work at those two places and learn. It's like your grad school for food. For sure. And you learn a lot about the sort of politics of the line and everything. So that's what I did when I was in graduate school. And then in Chicago, I got a job as a cook.

16:26But the interesting thing is on my first day in the city, I moved to Logan Square. And I had heard about this cafe. I was a big cafe. You know cafes were essential to my life big cafe goer. I love to bring a you know book and do some writing in cafes So and the first day I went to Logan Beach Cafe With my girlfriend at the time where's there a beach in Logan Square? I will tell you in just a second. Sorry to spoil and On the very first day I was there with my ex-girlfriend now Leah We looked up at the chalkboard menu and it said Leah's soup and in that moment I was looking at my wife's menu, my wife-to-be, inside of the space that would become Lula.

17:10So the Logan Beach Cafe was the original cafe before Lula was there. My wife, Leah, was a cook there. I eventually started hanging out, and that was my core group of friends. And we eventually took it over, me and Leah Childs. So that was my first day there. And Logan Beach was named because the old men used to sit their sun chairs out on the sidewalk walk outside of a cigar shop that was on the corner there, smoke cigars, do the whole like poly walnuts thing. Oh my gosh. It's like I lived in Carroll Gardens for 17 years and those were like fixtures of our neighborhood. Yeah. That's why it was called Logan Beach.

17:46I love that. Yeah. It was a literal beach in the middle of the city. Before we get to the evolution of Lula, I want to go back and actually ask you about David Foster Wallace. Did you have any food exchanges with your professor, your young professor? Yes. I had two. Great. The first one was that I bought brought a vegetarian barbecue option to his barbecue at his house and uh I got kind of made fun of for it like he he was like oh I already always I always knew you were sensitive it's like what does that mean you're sensitive because you bring a vegetable you know uh skewer to grill on your grill um the other the other was the last time I saw him was at this sort of red sauce joint in normal.

18:29And I ordered the meat option of, I think, ravioli. And he was kind of like, wait, I thought you were a vegetarian. And I was like, David, I've never been a vegetarian. He's like, but I thought you were sensitive. You know, it was this recurring theme. Beautiful dovetail callback. Yes, exactly. I love it. Did you get a sense that he was going to have a career in food writing and write some pretty like legendary? He could have. Yeah, he wasn't a big, I mean, I don't know, maybe he would have grown into that. But from what I knew, he was a pretty simple eater. Yeah. So you take over the Logan Beach.

19:04Logan Beach, we took it over. And you're saying it's a small space. What's your opening menu like then? So, I mean, it was very 90s, you know, espresso eggs. Do you remember that kind of thing? I do. Yeah. I absolutely do. Yeah, absolutely. We had a baked portobello mushroom with goat cheese and pesto. and on the side you can get fruit and the fruit had like kiwi and pineapple and strawberries on the side. Sprouts were hanging out. Sprouts were everywhere. In Kalamazoo in the 90s, I grew up in like a place to eat merches that had like sprouts everywhere. I think like California, as you mentioned, the opening inspired a lot of this 90s cooking.

19:39Absolutely. Yeah, that was what we did. Vegetable sushi, you know. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, we had that. I mean, were you taking joy in the cooking or were you taking joy in the people part of the company? 100 % not the cooking. When we opened up, it was to protect a space that mattered to us. It was about the neighborhood, our friends. I mean, I was in my mid-20s. The cafe meant everything to me. You know, all of the friends that I had there, there were musicians and filmmakers. And I found out, I mean, obviously this is my social network to, you know, to use a contemporary term. It was where I went every day to connect with people.

20:12And that was what we were preserving. As soon as we were, you know, chefs with a restaurant, then we were like, oh, we have to learn how to cook. So then that's when all the cookbooks came in. I bought La Technique. I bought, you know, the Charlie Trotter books were really important to me. And then I, you know, especially vegetables. That was sort of like what opened up my mind to the idea of like seasonality in the Midwest. Yeah. And we, I just went down this huge rabbit hole. You know, I found out where Trotter bought his vegetables. I went to the vegetable market where he would go, and I asked to be let in and just like digging through the same refrigerator that Charlie Trotter did.

20:53And then once the market opened, it was like meeting Paul Kahn, where do you get your pork from? And I would just buy things and have no idea how to make them, and then I figured it out through reading. And all this work was being done within those walls? 100%. You weren't ever externing. No. You weren't learning. That's cool. No, it was all self-taught. Super cool. I mean, we were slow. We were mostly selling coffee drinks. People were smoking and listening to music. And Leah and I would make like four orders of like a lamb shank dish. And then we'd hang out and we'd be drinking wine. It was like$14.

21:27Yeah, it was probably like$8. Yeah, right. And then someone would be like, hey, order a fire lamb shank. And I'd make the one that I made that night. Were you aware of what was happening in Madison at the time? Up at like Latoile and at that scene? Soon after I discovered, you know, the sort of burgeoning farmer table movement and learned about the farms. The farms really connected me to Madison, especially some of those shooting star farms. Some of the ones from Wisconsin were really important to me. Now, let me ask you, you're definitively Gen X, like definitively Gen X. And did you ever have a moment where you were like thinking about the sellout moment and like fighting it as like an operator needing to make money but not making too much money?

22:12Because I feel our listeners might not actually connect with Gen X because it was a moment of like sellout is like cancer is like the thing you don't want to do. I mean no one ever offered. Okay. I guess that's an easy way. I had never had a real big sellout moment. I mean, I could, we're so busy, I could just decide to buy everything from Cisco for two years and make a bunch of money and cash it in. No, I feel like the success that we've had has in part been about the origin, the fact that we didn't have to like take out a big loan. We just sort of entered into this space. It was super scrappy.

22:55I mean, we had nothing. thing. We had like a tiny little sink, no hood, home refrigerator. You know, it was really scrappy, thrifted plates. We went to a bowling alley that was going out of business and bought their chairs. You know, it was under, I mean, the whole thing was under$10 ,000 of expense to get it open and running the first, you know, the first year. And when you have no debt and you put in a lot of sweat equity, meaning like, you know, 17 hours a day for your first, you know, 10 years, um, you can make something of a space. And that's what happened with Lula. And you grew to 600 covers on a Sunday.

23:31Uh-huh, yeah. So business is pretty good now? I mean, we're great. We're super busy. We've always been, I mean, it's a miracle to me to go there every Saturday and Sunday and see this line forming. And I always try to be like, okay, don't take this for granted. I love that. And especially the pandemic really made me realize, like, don't take this for granted. Yeah, you're making it always certainly hit. Yeah, and also just the idea of like, well maybe it won't come back you know this is the thing that chefs and owners always worry about like maybe you'll lose this thing maybe you won't be popular anymore maybe there's something else will open up that's or maybe you just lose your you know you lose your um whatever good karma has come your way um and the realization that that could happen i mean from an outside force like a real thing that happened and we closed for so long now when i see those people lining up like i'm you know even more grateful for them every every day and it's not just brunch i feel like we're focusing on such a small part.

24:24Oh, yeah, we're super busy at dinner. Dinner, and we've been really void of food talk on this conversation, so I want to get your sense of what is on your brunch menu, because when I was there, I just remember the pastry case and just what you were serving was so excellent. I've been blessed to have great pastry chefs. I mean, amazing. Kim Janis is our pastry chef now. I mean, she's doing you know, she loves it. She's from New York, by the way, and we do a lot of Italian-ish kinds of things. Um, she's always got a financier on the menu, both like we did a pistachio one recently and there's a, there's a chocolate one now.

25:01I mean, she's doing this like blueberry marigold sticky bun. Those things are really, um, fun and creative. We like to do things that are accessible and, um, inviting, but still kind of nothing you would, you know, curious, nothing you would make at home or you might see somewhere else. It's like, Jason, you just articulated like the special sauce for a successful restaurant is familiarity and accessibility, but obviously high-minded and high-end cooking quality. The plating, the service, I think your service is excellent, just like really engaging. What about on the non-pastry side? What are you doing right now?

25:35Okay, so now it's in full tomato season. You know, it was late this year, and I mean, outside right now, it's like in the 90s. So the hot weather is really making a great crop right now. And plums are out at the same time. So what I like to do is like, you know, bring together ingredients that sort of are happening at the same time. Tomato and plum is a great example of that. And then bring in outside flavors again. You know, maybe like, you know, a chili or for the beer chili or a hazelnut or, you know, a salty cheese like ricotta salada or something like that. And so those are the kinds of dishes that we're working on now.