september

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By now we’ve all probably watched season 2 of The Bear. FX’s anxiety-inducing whirlwind series around a motley crew of cooks whose white-hot center is Carmy, former fine dining chef who’s returned home to resuscitate his dead brother’s Italian beef shop. 

If you haven’t seen it, you should. Not only is it a great show, but our dear friend and wedding consigliere, Braden, is the show’s prop master. The show is not without fault (but what is), but it’s safe to say it taps into the tropes that make restaurants—and people who work in them—tick. Tick—both in the sense of clicking forward in inexorable momentum, and the metonymic sound of the ticking time bomb. Because all restaurants, in some form or another, have their inevitable kaboom. 

(Fun fact: I spent a day helping out on set, cutting onions the way Jamie Lee Curtis would and roasting Branzino for the “Seven Fishes” episode.)

In season 2, each of the central characters has their own sort of hero’s journey. But for me, the most moving—albeit perhaps most idealistic—was Cousin Richie’s. In episode 7 (“Forks”), Carmy enlists Richie in a weeklong stage at “the greatest restaurant in the world.” Anticipating a week’s worth of grandes gestes and showboatery, Richie is stuck with the tedious and unrewarding task of forks. That is, monotonously polishing fork after fork into streakless, unblemished reflection.

After a spell of rankled indignation and getting called outside for headwaiter Garrett's “every day is the Super Bowl” spiel, Richie eventually finds a source of devotion and pride in the process and practice of polishing the forks. 

Richie is essentially undergoing his own kind of Mr. Miyagi wax on; wax off experience. By dedicating his focus on basic and seemingly insignificant fundamentals, Richie gains much more than a bucketful of twinkling silver. He gains an awareness, an appreciation and understanding of how sensibilities and attention can create a monumental shift in the experience of the guest—and in return, a sense of reward in facilitating delight and joy. 

Near the end of his stage, Richie learns of a visiting guest’s desire to experience Chicago deep dish pizza. He bolts out of the restaurant mid-service to retrieve a pie from Pequod’s—Chicago’s gold standard for deep dish—which the chef de cuisine transforms into a (frou frou travesty, IMHO) cheffy dish for the guest, who’s blown away, and Richie is too, now experiencing for himself the wild delight of meaningful, radical hospitality.

But hospitality, by its very nature, isn’t reasonable. It’s a radical display of generosity and vulnerability without the promise of return or reward. It’s inviting a wooden horse through the threshold into your space of security. 

(Side note: you should check out Will Guidara’s ‘Unreasonable Hospitality’ reels on Instagram, based on his book by the same name.)

At the core of this magic of unreasonable hospitality is something seemingly simple: paying attention. Attention, the act of attending, of being present. For most, attention doesn’t come easily. The late poet Mary Oliver became known for her devotion to a practice of attentiveness. “Pay attention. Be astonished,” she wrote as instructions for life. 

For Oliver, paying attention gave the sense of going toward the source. The sense of tapping into. Of being in the zone. This can mean many things to many people, but I think we all understand the ineffable sensation of being fully tuned in, of being so present that you get lost in the channel, lost in the feeling of unity and connectedness. 

My sister and I were talking recently about prayer. What it is, what it means. I told her I’d recently begun to think of gratitude as a form of prayer, and I remembered more of Mary Oliver’s words: “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is / I do know how to pay attention” (‘The Summer Day’).

Attention, she makes evident in her writing, requires empathy. “Empathy without feeling,” she says, “is only a report.” Attention requires empathy, yes. But it develops it, too. Empathy, gratitude; gratitude happiness. This kind of mindfulness is without question a very intentional practice. A repetition of the mundane until the miraculous is revealed. I’m reminded, too, of some words by Robin Wall Kimmerer, member of the Potawatomi Nation, a trained botanist and expert whose focus is on restoring ecological communities: “paying attention,” she writes in Braiding Sweetgrass, "is a form of reciprocity with the living world, receiving the gifts with open eyes and open heart.” 

I take reciprocity here to mean a kind of hospitality. Because isn’t that the fullest form of true exchange? Where guest and host become, for a moment, inextricable? Or at the very least, there’s the full acknowledgement of each other’s presence. 

There’s something extremely wabi-sabi about this notion of vulnerable acceptance and total recognition. Wabi-sabi. The term is thrown around excessively—carelessly, even—often as a justification of error or imperfection. But doing so in this manner suggests a meaning that, by contrast, values that which is complete and perfected, permanent and refined. Polished. Though the notion became a precursor to various anti-aesthetic movements like beat, punk, or grunge—movements that cut against the grain of celebrated tropes of achievement—the ideal is a cornerstone for understanding beauty in ways that are rough, rustic, or unrefined. Beauty in ways that are organic, natural, unforced. 

Wabi-sabi is noticing the beauty of the imperfect and irregular. There’s a sense of intimacy, a vulnerability of form and being-ness. Considering wabi-sabi is a way of unlearning the necessity for the congruence of form.

When it comes to what we’re trying to achieve with TXA TXA, I believe that hospitality, too, has much to gain from understanding wabi-sabi. From the aesthetics of idiosyncrasy, impermanence, irregularity. That strict ideals of service administered across the board miss the point of hospitality altogether. It wagers the individual against the systemic implementation of rules. It sterilizes and neutralizes the subject into a kind of static singularity, where the individual is subsumed into a collective and homogeneous whole. It’s a one-size-fits-all approach that totally misses the generative exchange of what true hospitality should aspire to—that of radical openness and recognition of the other, and the self within the other. 

With TXA TXA, we believe that the best form of hospitality is personalized and recognizes individual needs within the collective experience. That intuition outseats institution. “Every table is its own universe,” says Michael Muser, restaurateur and co-owner of Chicago’s prestigious Ever—also the inspiration for the restaurant where Richie staged in The Bear.

What we strive for with Supper Club is this kind of radical shift, a realignment of the values of hospitality that recenter a harmonious exchange instead of a mere transactional encounter. For us, it's an invitation to share in this vulnerability of attention and gratitude. 

On his way out from completing the stage, Richie encounters Chef Terry, played by Olivia Coleman, gracefully and attentively peeling mushrooms, strand by tender strand. “Time well spent,” she says. The chef, like the poet, recognizes the empathy in attention, and how nurturing it can radically change another’s world.

yours,

dsp + liz

comin’ up

WILD TABLE

w/ hopewell brewing

monday, oct 23rd

6-9PM @ the hopewell tasting room ///

2760 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60647

A season marked by cooler weather and the changing of leaves, cozy cardigans, and pumpkin spice galore, fall represents a season of abundance, of harvest, of reaping our wild oats from summer. 

We’ll be celebrating all the season’s hype and hygge with Hopewell Brewing and the return of their vintage Wild Table Beer—a fruity and funky table-strength saison—with a wild menu to follow suit. You can expect some surprising twists on seasonal offerings, like brussels sprouts, pumpkin, and pears, paired with the saison and other Hopewell classics available for purchase. We’ll be dining communally in the brewery space with our typical Supper Club flair. The event will be ticketed with limited bar seating available for walk-ins. 

So come and, as the French say, soyons fous—let’s get wild and experience a beautiful fall dinner together. 

GRAB A SEAT

VIS-à-VIS ///

w/ MIDDLE BROW (wine)

MONDAY

october 16th

/// 6-9pm

@ the TXA TXA CLUB studio in Logan Square

We’re extremely thrilled to share the table with Chicago’s first natural winery (which also happens to be one of the city’s best breweries and pizzerias). Since pitching camp in Logan Square in 2019, Middle Brow has become a neighborhood favorite for patio hangs and Tavern Tuesday pizza. We’ve been friends with Polly and Pete for several years, so we’re honored to partner with the brand for an early fall wine dinner. 

TXA TXA will be creating a menu to pair with the versatile and quaffable wines—to lock step with their playful monikers as much as their tasting profiles. Delicious wines with names like rind, tinned fish, pollen, or float make for an exciting invitation to craft dishes to fit the vibe. Dinner will be an intimate 6+ course food experience at the TXA TXA studio to pair with the pours from Middle Brow. It’s gonna be CoZySeXyCool.

Get tix fast. We have limited seating and this one is not to miss…

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SUPPER CLUB vol. 27

FRIDAY october 27th

6-9PM

a very serious gallery

673 N Milwaukee Ave, Chicago, IL 60642

A MOVABLE FEAST

For this month’s Supper Club, we’ll be returning to A VERY SERIOUS GALLERY for a showroom feast. The menu will be inspired—somewhat—by the theme’s resonances of Paris’ generation perdue, taking a few new spins on various French classics. The dinner is also a preamble to the gallery’s feast in situ exhibition for the weeks following the dinner. 

Let’s glitz and glam over a spread of black soy bourguignon, green curry cuisses de grenouilles, and other iconoclastic riffs on classic plats parisien. Come for the art and stay for the food. Or vise versa. Just come. And if you miss this Supper Club (this dinner is sold out), be sure to swing through VSG to check out the ongoing show.

This one is sold out but we have some incredible end of summer dinners still available in the SHOP. Don’t sleep on these. They will be wonderful…

RECIPES

GRILLED SPAGHETTI

Most of our dishes have some form of direct inspiration. A big bang or origin story. This one was simply conceived at the height of corn season with the intention of creating a vegan dish that was layered with flavor and freshness. I suppose the simplest locatable inspiration would be cacio e pepe, or at least that’s where it ended up. 

This dish exudes a feeling of wild air with the slight grill char and smoke on the pasta, the oceanic salinity of the seaweed, and the sweet buttery corn that screams peak summer. The Cambodian peppercorn gastrique is vibrant and fruity, buzzing with back-palate heat, with a razor-sharp sweetness and acidity to cut the unctuousness of the buttery corn emulsion. 

—here we go…

1 box Barilla spaghetti

1 qt CORN-GALANGAL EMULSION

2 TBL dried hijiki seaweed

4 oz CAMBODIAN BLACK PEPPERCORN GASTRIQUE

1 cup pasta h2o (reserved)

grated black lime (for garnish)

CORN-GALANGAL EMULSION

(makes ~1qt)

280g corn

56g shallot 

30g galangal

20g (2 ea) lemongrass

15g garlic

1 tsp salt (diamond crystal)

½ ea 14-oz can coconut milk

1 cup veg stock

1 birds eye chili, seeded

1 TBL palm sugar

2 TBL olive oil

BLACK PEPPERCORN GASTRIQUE

(makes ~1 ¼ cups)

1 TBL kampot peppercorn 

1 cup sugar

1 cup apple cider vinegar

FOR THE SPAGHETTI: boil the pasta according to package directions for al dente noodles. We like Barilla. Drain and toss (do not rinse) immediately with a heavy dousing of olive oil. You want each strand of pasta to be individually coated. Spread on a sheet tray and place in the freezer for 10 min. Remove from freezer, toss again, and set aside until ready for grilling. Grill in batches in a grill pan over medium hot coals. You want a little char, some blackened tips, but mostly you’re doing two things: imparting flavor and texture to the noodles (think: lo mein). Pasta can be done a day ahead. 

FOR THE SAUCE: slice  your shallot, garlic, galangal, chili, and lemongrass—no need for NASA-grade precision here, as it’ll all get blitzed—and add to a medium-hot, enamel-bottomed pot with a TBL of olive oil. Hit with a good pinch of salt and saute, then cover to prevent browning. Once shallots are translucent (~2 min), add corn, coconut milk, stock, and sugar, and cover. Maintain medium heat, making sure not to let it reach a boil, and let cook for 5 min. Remove from heat and let cool. Transfer to a Vitamix or high-powered blender and blitz until smooth. Add another ½ tsp of salt if necessary. Very slowly, drizzle the olive oil into the mix while blending. You should have about a quart altogether. Divide into two containers, then pass one of the two through a fine mesh strainer. (The strained sauce will be for plating; the thicker puree will be for the pan.)

Soak 2 TBL of dried hihiki in cool water for 30 min, then strain. 

When ready to serve, combine the reserved pasta h20 and the unsieved half of the corn sauce. Heat in a wide, flat pan, and toss the noodles until warmed through. Have the strained sauce warmed and charged in an ISI canister (or simply warm in a sauce pot, then transfer to a blender to aerate). 

Remove the pasta from the pan, with as little sauce as possible, and plate. Top with a spluge of the ISI foam (or a few tablespoons of of the aerated sauce), a drizzle of the gastrique, a scattered pinch of the hijiki, and finish with grated black lime. Surf’s up, my dears.

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