The world-traveling chef who just won Chicago’s only James Beard Award

I'm David Manilow and welcome to the Dining Table. On the table this week, about two and a half years ago, in early winter 2024, my wife and I were hosting a fundraiser. We do that every once in a while. And so that means, you know, if you have like 50 people, maybe, I don't know, 40 of them.

and people are kind of traipsing around having a glass of wine and maybe a little hors d'oeuvre and a nice woman comes up to me and goes, oh, you should be my son. He'd be great for your podcast. And I'm like, okay, tell me about him. And she says, well, he's going to open a restaurant in Westtown and it's going to be a tasting menu and you can follow him on Instagram or TikTok.

He's traveled all over the world, but you know, he's from Chicago and you should check him out. And I texted him, we met for a cup of coffee and he told me all about his restaurant that he was opening on Chicago Avenue. He said it's called Feld and it's gonna be completely different. And so I interviewed Jake Potashnik way back a couple of years ago about his upcoming restaurant.

And the winner is... And I guess dreams come true because... Jacob Potashnik. Jacob Potashnik failed.

Jacob Potashnik is Chicago's only James Beard Award winner this year in 2026 for Best Ship, Great Lakes. I've had this like mantra in my head all week sort of for like win or loss situation and it works for both. and it's from a poem I love and it ends, I already am, always was, and I still have time to be. And I think Feld...

Feld is a really young restaurant and we have so much further to go. We still have time to be. So thank you very, very much for this. So congratulations to Jake and his mom.

I'm so glad she introduced me to him way back when. You should get to the end of the meal and go, holy crap, that was a roller coaster. And turn to your dining partner and go, we barely chatted because that was so, we were just getting dish after dish after dish. And that was so fun.

And every time we did chat, it was, wow, that bite. And then that's what we wanted. Coming up, my interview with James Beard Award winning chef, Jake Potashnik, from a couple years back. Next, on The Dining Table.

joining me now is jake petashnik the chef owner of a feld restaurant in ukrainian village i think 2018 west chicago avenue and a kind of nondescript yellow building when we took this space people would say where's the feld location and because loving you is such a darling in chicago i say oh we share a wall with them and everybody goes oh yeah right across from the marianos got it exactly Exactly. Right across from the Marietta. This has been a voyage for you, but that voyage started a long time ago, really, because you were like a Northside kid.

Tell me about your culinary journey all over the world. I know you. It's Kyoto. I've been to a couple of places.

I've been to Kyoto. I've been to Berlin, but you've been to places and cooked farther and wider than that. Yeah, you know, I got some amazing opportunities. Let's start there.

I was very lucky. But, you know, so I went to college, I did a business degree, but like a hospitality business degree and graduated from that all my friends had jobs at consulting firms, whatever, but I knew I wanted to be in the restaurant biz. So I moved back to Chicago. I lived in my parents' basement for that first summer after graduation and got a job interning at L.

A.D.S. or like kind of working for the summer at L.

A.D.S. under Chef Voss.

For Philip Voss. Yeah. And had a great time. And, you know, I was only supposed to be there for the summer.

And so in the middle of July, Voss sits me down and goes, what do you want to do with your life? Like I'm a 22, 23 year old kid, right? He's like, what do you want? I was like, well, you know, these are my aspirations.

Have my own restaurant, this type of restaurant, blah, blah, blah. And he goes, you got to get out of here. And by here he meant Chicago and kind of the States. He was like, you got to go somewhere.

And by pure coincidence, the next day I had applied to a couple of restaurants in Europe and I got an acceptance to go work at a place in Sweden called Daniel Berlin Krug, which just it closed. It just reopened. He reopened a new restaurant called Vin, V-Y-N, but he had two Michelin stars. I was there when he got his first star.

And when I went there, it was like there were three of us in the kitchen. It was this tiny operation, just an incredible restaurant in the middle of nowhere, rural Sweden. Skona Tronis. It was a village of 300 people.

I stayed there for about a year and a half. I left, went to Apprentice in Japan for three months. I was in Kyoto for a month and Tokyo for a month, learning about kaiseki and Japanese traditional cuisine. Moved from there to France, worked at La Marine on the island, Normutier.

he's he's kind of become known because he has a chef's table episode about him but my chef it was there for a year again living on this tiny little island the island itself has about a thousand residents we were on the port de baudière which has like a hundred residents and and it was amazing i just threw myself into work i would on my days off i would go forge clams out of like the sand went during low tide and that was like my life but i was missing cities because i'm from chicago So I got a job offer in Berlin at a restaurant called Ernst and ended up being in Berlin for four years, two years at Ernst, and then two years kind of working at a bakery, being a head chef at this restaurant, Bara, which was kind of COVID time.

But Ernst really solidified my sort of worldview on food. And then in between, there were some stages, other places, London, Thailand, some places in the States. But really, that was kind of the big three were Sweden, France, and Germany. Well, you know, first of all, I love the fact that you're coming back, right?

Like this is a labor of love and you are bringing some unique fine dining experiences that you had in kitchens of restaurants overseas and you bringing them to Feld And I love the fact that you not going to be foraging for clams on Chicago Avenue I pretty sure of that But I think you trying to do some really really unique stuff and putting a new twist on fine dining at least from what I know Yes. So the operating idea of Feld is that fine dining as we know it is broken. And not that people can't do it.

But I think if you want to do fine dining in sort of a more modern, ethically minded way, the old school form of fine dining doesn't work. And what that old school is, is your three month set menu. Because, you know, that's how most restaurants operate. You have your fall, your winter, your spring, your summer menu, and you spend two months doing R&D for those menus so that by the time it's that season, you can just go with the menu.

And, you know, if you want to work with local produce, local producers, local farms, you can't actually operate in that three month system. It doesn't work because local farms can't supply you carrots at the amount you need every week for the next three months. They're going to have carrots for a week and a half or whatever it is because that's how true seasonality works. So, you know, it felled.

What we're trying to do is change the menu based around true seasonality. When produce comes in, we're going to change the menu around it. And that might be daily, that might be weekly, but we're going to have an ever-changing tasting menu that is constantly evolving with the seasons. And, you know, part of it is also, I don't know about you, I've been to so many, I love fine dining.

Like, I think that's a really important premise here. It's like, I love tasting. I love those kinds of restaurants. And this comes from like a passion for them and like a lifelong love of them.

But like, I've been to so many fine dining restaurants where there are dishes I just don't like. And I think to myself, like, well, they've been researching and developing these dishes, for months before they hit the menu and yet i still don't like a certain dish and i think because taste is so subjective you can research and test a dish a million times you're always gonna have people who don't like it so why spend two months r and d-ing when you could instead follow seasonality and every night experiment and mess around and try things and and obviously you're aiming for greatness, but, but you, you want to hit as much of a subjective good as you can, um, through that.

And I would guess also if, if I'm a customer and I come once on September 1st, my experience on October 1st is going to be pretty different. Absolutely. I mean, come, come August 1st and get the first tomato of the season from Jerry at Froggy Meadow, come September 1st, get the last tomato from Jerry, you know, and see how that season changes. And you can watch that for all the produce and all the meats.

And, you know, the winters, we will be using more meat, more seafood, more protein to offset the fact that we are in the Midwest and the winters are tougher. And then in the summer, it might be very little protein and just produce heavy, but you can come every two weeks and watch the seasons change in real time. And I don't know any other restaurant like that in the States. Right.

And so what, as a diner, should I expect as an experience? It's going to be a prefix menu. It's going to be multiple courses. It's going to be a little bit more experiential than maybe some other places.

One of the things I think I saw a lot in Europe and Japan and places I worked was a version of hospitality that maybe is not prevalent as much in the States. And so, you know, Feld, the food is really, really important. The sense of hospitality is number one. Like I want it to, you know, I've been very lucky because I was living in Sweden near Copenhagen.

I got to go to Copenhagen a lot. I had the opportunity to eat at Noma twice. And the thing about Noma that nobody talks about is like the reason why Noma is the best restaurant in the world or was the best restaurant, whatever you want to say, is because the food is very interesting and good. The service is the best in the world.

It's just mind blowing how good the service is. And so, you know, Feld, from the moment you walk in, we want to do a big hello, a big welcome. Like Feld is not going to open if I'm not there because I should be there to greet every person that is coming to this passion project of mine. I'm not looking to build an empire.

I'm looking to build one restaurant up from the ground. And so from the moment you walk in to the moment you leave, it should feel warm and welcoming. And there will be one tasting menu. Everybody sits at the same time.

It's 20 seats. We have a really unique setup where everybody's going to sit on, we have banquettes that wrap around the room and it's almost like dinner in the round. Everybody's going to look on the, the, the middle islands as we do all the prep and the plating and the cooking. And it's completely open.

By the time you leave, you should just feel happy. You know, like that, I know that sounds so basic, but that's really the goal is, is to provide everybody a thing where you leave. You should have two feelings. You should leave and you should feel really taken care of and you should leave and you should say that was a meal I could only have had on the day I had it.

And that's part of that seasonality change of produce. You know, it's you eat on June 27th. That's a meal you should only feel you could have had on June 27th, 2024. Right.

You know, you brought up like service in Europe. I was lucky enough to go to Europe three times in the last year. I have never cooked in Europe, but of course I've never cooked in the States either. So I don't have that much of a comparison, but I will say there's something about standards and there's something about genuineness and kind of life's work that I'm not saying you can't find it here in the States, but you find it in abundance in Europe.

And so part of your challenge must be who you're hiring, right? Because they have to have that built in. Yeah. And we're following that sort of Nordic system of the Cooks or servers.

We have like No service team. Our service team is two people and they are both essentially there to serve wine. The cooks are going to be running dishes, explaining dishes, clearing plates, marking cutlery. And so our whole team is hired.

They're all in place. They're all sitting and waiting for the call to start. And you know about 50 of that was what is your skill sets in the kitchen for the cooks What is your skill in the kitchen What is your experience And then 50 of it was what your personality What your vibe check You know, because I had cooks come in for interviews at Feld who, if I was opening a traditional a la carte restaurant, I would have hired in a second. Cause you could just tell these are bad-ass line cooks, but that doesn't work for Feld.

You know, these need to be people who can interact with others, work in a team that is constantly thrown into change because that's how it's going to work. Every day we're going to sit down on the menu meeting and say, what's today? So you don't get to come in with your prep list like at most restaurants. So I would say I hired for personality and just general common sense capability a lot more than most restaurants would.

You must be putting some things, craftsmanship that you've had over time and into whatever you're serving. We're going to be in the heart of leafy green season. We might get spring peas, you know, which the thing about Chicago is everything comes a month and a half later than you ever expect it to. But like we'll probably be tail end of asparagus, tail end of rhubarb and then strawberries and currants, all sort of early fruits, cherries.

and so you know i don't i don't buy into the philosophy that if you have something once on a menu you can't have it again which some spots so so we are on the tail end of asparagus when we open you're gonna have asparagus like six times and you're gonna have cherries four times and strawberries four times and we're gonna work with four star mushroom which is the closest farm to fell that's four blocks away and we'll have their mushrooms on the menu and you know in the summer we're gonna offset with just a tiny bit of protein because i really want it to feel like a produce driven menu.

So I have a bunch of lamb and a dry ager that's, that's been aging just for when we open. So the first couple of weeks will be lamb and we'll get more meat in the dry ager and keep it going. We'll have a little bit of seafood, probably some mackerel that are really fatty in the summertime. Um, but you know, it's hard for us to say what on a specific day.

And I used to give a number of courses too. I used to say like, ah, 30 ish courses, but it depends what you A, count as a course. Because for me, a perfect strawberry that's been grilled and topped with, I don't know, strawberry vinegar from last year, that's a course. For some people, they'd say, yeah, that's an amuse-bouche.

But that's what we're doing at Phil. We're doing 40 produce-driven amuse-bouches. But it could be anywhere from 25 to 45, depending on the day. We're just going to make sure you leave full.

That's important to me. You've got to leave full. Yes. But it sounds like it's going to be well-paced.

It sounds like nobody's going to sit around for a half hour saying, oh, what's my next dish? The first one came out and I can't find the next one. Pace is my number one thing. I think annoyingly so.

And I think for my cooks, they'll realize that's my annoying quirk is like, I want this meal done in less than two and a half hours. I hate sitting for four hours. I hate tasting menus where you feel like you're there forever. I want you to have time afterwards to sit and drink and relax if you want.

I'm not going to push anybody out the door. but for the food, I always find I get so disgustingly full if I have like 12 courses over the course of three and a half hours. But if I have like 30 small bites in two hours, two hours, 20, I feel great after. And so that's what we're going for.

Well, I think that's really unique because I can't think of at least fine dining places I've been to. And I'm kind of like you, I do like fine dining, but I've been married for more than 20 years and my wife does not want to sit across from me for three and a half hours or anything other than maybe a long theater thing where you can watch somebody on stage. But I like the fact that you're doing something that's kind of very active and giving me a lot of different tastes. And if you have 30 courses, what difference would it make if I have eight different asparagus courses?

There's a lot of stuff going out. And you know, your wife likes theater. Like I view Feld very much through the context of theater. I'm a theater kid at heart.

I did improv comedy for way too long. Like these things that I love and the way we're set up, like I said, like dinner in the round, theater in the round. So, you know, in an ideal world, you have very little time to talk to your dining companion because the moment you finish a bite, the next bite is coming. Obviously, we are never going to be machines like that.

But you should get to the end of the meal and go, holy crap, that was a roller coaster, you know, and highs and lows and just pushed through. and then at the end you go wow and you need like that's the goal you should get to the end and turn to your dining partner and go we we barely chatted because that was no we were just getting dish after dish after dish but that was so fun and every time we did chat it was wow that bite and then that that's what we want you know speaking of theater this is like you could almost compare this to theater you've put a lot of time and thought into it you've put a lot of production into it.

Are you nervous about this? I don't know if I have energy to be nervous anymore. Has it been beaten out of you? Has it been beaten into submission?

Another chef who opened a restaurant not too long ago in Chicago who's been very nice to me texted me and goes, have you lost your mind yet? I think I lost it five months ago. I don't know if I... Right now, my eye is on the day-to-day.

I've said this a couple of times to different people, but like, I think the summer is just going to be so much that I'm not going to have time to be stressed. I think when we open, I'm not like, I think we're going to hit fall and I'm going to take a day off and just, it's all going to hit me and I'm going to go, oh my God, I should have been way more stressed. And one of my cooks keeps saying like, are we going to be on the coffee or like the Red Bull cigarette diet? and I really hope not like that's the goal is to not do that I I want everybody to go home at the end of the night and have time to re-energize before the next day but it's still going to be a big enough push that that yeah I don't know of course I'm stressed but like I'm trying not to think of it you know well it a word actually when you super busy you don have time to be stressed but when you ready to open and you ready to open and you waiting on the damn city and you waiting that the worst It the worst You know, what stresses me out is not so much running a restaurant.

Like, there's a lot of people who run a restaurant out there. So it's doable or people wouldn't keep opening them. You know, what stresses me out is that Feld is an incredibly personal project. It's a very unique project.

It's very much my baby. and so if the public doesn't like it or if this doesn't do well that's very much a a statement on me as much as it is on the restaurant and so i think my nerves are more like well am i giving this i don't know what if i'm mistaken what have i missed what where are my errors i don't i don't worry like oh are my cooks gonna show up are they gonna be good enough like we'll figure that out I think people in Chicago and around the country are very accepting of unique and genuine.

And it comes from the heart. You're not doing it because you think this is what's going to sell. Oh, no. You're just like, this is built in.

And that's fantastic. So you had an interesting kind of go-to favorite restaurant where I asked you what your favorite restaurant in town is. Tell me about it. Yeah, Siam Noodle and Rice.

Tell me why. I love that place. So Siamon Noodle Rice, it moved. It's on Broadway now, I think, in Argyllish.

It was on Broadway just off Lawrence. Okay. I think it's on Western now. It may be on Western now.

I still go. I just know the path there. It's like, I don't know. It was this tiny little hole in the wall that had bars on the window and that kind of thing.

But it was a block down from... In my youth, I was part of this thing called Circus Team, which is an unbelievable organization in Chicago. That supports youth by, especially at risk youth, by getting them into a circus program that gives them circus skills. But they also do homework, tutoring and all this kind of stuff.

And just an unbelievable organization. And it's based in Uptown. And I was a part of it for about a decade. And the original site for Simon Newton Rice was a block from there.

And so I would finish circus team and then I would walk to Simon Newton Rice. But it's my favorite because they have what is my single favorite dish in the city. which is their fried dried beef. It's essentially deep fried Thai beef jerky.

You have to order it with sticky rice. It comes with their house homemade hot sauce, which is studded with garlic and chili. And you dip the sticky rice in the hot sauce, eat it with the beef. And it is truly my, it's my last meal dish.

Like my, my parents know this. Everybody knows how much I love this dish. And I just think that they're a fantastic restaurant and they have not gotten any worse since they moved. It's the kind of place where you walk in and the grandma literally who owns it is always sitting there counting cash or whatever.

And it's like, that's- It's the best. Yeah. First of all, I love, I describe places like that. Grandma's in the back.

That's all you have to say. Like grandma's in the back or grandma's in the front or whatever. And that says everything. But I love the fact that you gave me a go-to dish now that I can literally go to a place like that.

I can go to Sam and try that dish. Sticky rice, by the way, completely underrated. Like anything with sticky rice is good. Oh, so underrated.

so under here here's i'm gonna throw this out there for if anybody goes to siam noodle rice this is the order okay so you have to go with you have to go with at least two people ideally four but you get a fried dried beef with sticky rice which if you're there with four people is not gonna be enough you're gonna need two you get the fried tofu you get the um pod pre-kig with roast pork the basil duck uh and then my parents would throw on the pad cu i don't know how i feel about that it's a pretty good pad see you though but like the basil duck the paprika king roast pork and the fried dried beef are just must they're so good let me tell you you're speaking my language and by the way i am like i am like a pad see you thai guy okay so i'm a complete pad see you like i'm like a chicken parmesan italian i'm a pad see you thai well like what i like about their pad see you is not just like this slicked on sweet soy sauce they throw like fermented black beans in there they really use like the the leaf of the chinese broccoli not the stem so you really get like it doesn't wilt completely it almost fries and be oh it's so good yeah well i the way i first of all they can't see you but the passion in your description you can feel it you can feel it and it's about the food and i assume it's a great place and i'm sure the owners are great and all that stuff so listen people can follow you on social media at feld or jake potashnik and and see your journey i know maybe we'll watch as you if you keep on doing it when you're running the restaurant, we'll see, we'll see if the, you know, the wrinkles under your eyes start growing as you go.

But listen, it was really lovely having you. I, I, like I said, I think we live in a city historically that has had some very unique fine dining places. So the fact that you're doing this consistent with our past, which I think is great and it's been great, really great having you. And I, I wish you all the luck in the world and I can't wait to try it out because my wife, good.

She won't have to talk to me. And she'll still be there for two hours. Everybody wins. Thank you.

And the one thing I would say is if people are interested, follow at Not Yet a Chef or Feld Restaurant on Instagram. Thank you. I really appreciate you having me. Really good.

That's our show this week. I hope you enjoyed my interview with Jake Patashnik, the new James Beard Award winner in Chicago for Best Chef Great Lakes. And, of course, thank you to Todd Manley, producer extraordinaire. You can follow me on Instagram at Eat Drink Dave or just David Manelow on the rest of the socials.

And I hope to see you around the table again sometime soon. Thank you. Bye.