Chicago has a way of leaving its mark
on food. Deep-dish or “Chicago-style”
pizza was invented here, as was the “Chicago dog,” known for having nearly
every topping and condiment except
ketchup. America was introduced to the
gyro here, too.
It takes a determined individual to
make his own mark on Chicago’s dining
scene, but Columbus native Cary Taylor
is on his way. Since opening his own
restaurant, The Southern, in Chicago’s
Bucktown neighborhood, Cary has introduced
the Windy City to a wide variety of
Southern cooking, from the Low
Country style of the Carolinas to Cajun
dishes from the Louisiana bayou and just
about everything in between.
It’s been a learning experience for
Cary as well as for his adopted city, he
says. “I’ve learned so much more about
home since I’ve been in Chicago,” he says
with a laugh. “I think I took Southern
cooking for granted when I actually lived
in Columbus —I just wanted to play football
and baseball and have a good time. I
thought I’d be something else [besides a
chef], that’s for sure.”
Building up an Appetite
Cary graduated from Brookstone
School and went on to Southern
Methodist University in Dallas, but didn’t
get interested in cooking until he followed
his girlfriend to Chicago, where she
was attending law school at DePaul.
Originally he’d wanted to pursue a graduate
degree at Northwestern University’s
journalism school, but along the way he
decided to take some culinary classes at Le
Cordon Bleu in his spare time. “I ended
up knocking out the entire program in
about eight months,” he remembers.
While taking classes, Cary worked
nights and weekends for the restaurant
group of Charlie Trotter, one of the original “celebrity chefs” whose eponymous
flagship restaurant was rated the fifth
best restaurant in the United States by
Restaurant Magazine in 2007. “To complete
the assignments at cooking school, you
had to do an internship, so I asked [my
boss] if I could do it at
the flagship restaurant,”
Cary says. “My first real
job was at one of the
best restaurants in the
world.”
From there, his
career took him to
Chicago’s highly
rated Blackbird
restaurant and the
five-star Peninsula
hotel; the Lettuce
Entertain You group,
which operates more than 70 restaurants around the country,
and training in San Sebastian, Spain.
With a wide variety of experience under
his chef’s hat, Cary soon decided it was the
right time to strike out on his own.
Settling down in the windy City
Five years ago, Cary arrived at the
Chaise Lounge, a chic restaurant in
Wicker Park that had just lost its chef. “They let me come in and do my thing,
and we got good reviews,” he says, “but it
was a little too fine-dining for the neighborhood
we were in. The space wasn’t
quite right. So we decided to revamp it
and turn it into The Southern—upscale,
casual, fun takes on traditional Southern
fare.”
Early on, Cary decided his new establishment
would try to run the gamut of
Southern cooking, which covers a wide
array of cultures and styles. “We try to be
as diverse as we can, with everything
from Virginia ham in one dish to
Louisiana crawfish tails in another, or
cornbread from other regions besides just
your traditional, sweet Yankee-style
cornbread,” he explains. “If we came in
and tried to do only Low Country—the
food of Charleston and Savannah—and
called it a Southern restaurant, yeah,
that’d be Southern, but there’d be a lot
of people in the Midwest who wouldn't
understand why we didn't have crawfish étouffée on the menu.”
Five years in, Cary says, The
Southern has found its niche in
Chicago’s dining scene. And he’s able to
spend more time with his wife—Annie,
the girl he followed up from Dallas—and
their 1-year-old daughter, Siena.
“I’m very lucky to have a really good
team that knows how I ‘run the offense’
over there,” he says. “So I can step away
on a Thursday night to make sure I get
home and read a story to my kid and kiss
her goodnight.”
The Challenges of
Southern hospitality
That doesn’t mean the balancing act
is easy, Cary points out. Trying to be
authentically Southern in the Windy
City can be a double-edged sword. On
the one hand, he’s getting to introduce
Southern food to native Chicagoans
who may never have tried it before. On
the other hand, Chicago is a diverse city
with plenty of transplants—including
native Southerners who hold anything
calling itself “Southern cooking” to a
very high standard.
Cary remembers the day a food writer
from the Chicagoist website came in and
tried their burgoo, a Kentucky dish he
likens to Brunswick stew. “But we tried to
gussy it up a little, and that just infuriated
some people. We had this fancy plate
where we poured the smoked tomato
broth tableside, but otherwise it was just
meat and vegetables on the plate. And
the banter in the comments section on
this website was 15 or 20 people talking
about how furious they were that we'd
have the gall to call this burgoo.
“But I respect that—later I went back
and totally changed the dish,” he adds. “We call ourselves a Southern restaurant
and strive to be as creative as we can, but
we've got a lot of people from four or five
hundred miles away who are pretty protective
of their notion of what is burgoo.
If you call it ‘pork and tomato stew,’ it
sounds Southern, but if you call it ‘Kentucky burgoo,’ boy, it better be
exactly like what your grandmother used
to make after church on Sunday.”
That hasn’t stopped Cary from experimenting
with new ideas, though.
Among the most successful: a food truck
bringing Southern-style mac and cheese
to people all over Chicago. “It was just
crazy enough to be successful, and sure
enough, it has been,” Cary says.
The one dish The Southern still
hasn’t ventured into is barbecue. “That’s
a totally separate thing. That’s an art,”
he laughs. “And a lot of people still get
upset that we don’t have it.”
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