What It Was Like for One Chicago Hotel Restaurant to Serve Its VIP Democratic National Convention Guests

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One night last week, Richie Farina sent his cooks home around midnight as business at Adorn Bar & Restaurant in Chicago’s Four Seasons Hotel, where he is the executive chef, finally slowed down after a busy evening. “Next thing I know, the [order] machine starts going crazy and it’s me and the overnight guy cooking for 45 people by ourselves,” he says with a laugh. “I think I got home at 3 that night.” He had arrived around 10:00 am, and the restaurant would open again at 6:00 am the next day.

Adorn isn’t typically open that late, or that early, or that busy that late. But the Democratic National Convention was in town, and delegates, politicians, aides, donors, and power brokers were all staying at the Four Seasons – and schmoozing, socializing, and angling for connections at the bar, restaurant, and seats in the lobby deep into the night and throughout the day.

“There would be people holding meetings here. They would camp out at a table” and eat and drink, says Richie Farina, the executive chef of Adorn, which flows unobstructed into the lobby. “Like, ‘You’re my 1:00, next person’s at 2:00.’” They would then shuttle off to the DNC at United Center on buses before returning to the Four Seasons late at night, excited to continue their conversations and mingling into the wee hours – hence the rush that took Farina by surprise after midnight.

“Hotel lobbies are prime territory,” a Democratic lobbyist toldThe New York Times about the hobnobbing that goes on in places like the luxury Four Seasons during a convention. “People are unobstructed. You see the governor or the senator walk through the lobby, you can go talk to them.”

Adorn’s staff lubricated and fed it all, over hours longer and numbers greater than Farina has ever witnessed at the restaurant in his almost two years at the hotel.

“We had lunch periods of 200-plus [people], which I’ve never seen,” he says. 50 to 60 covers is typical for a weekday night, while 80 or more is usual on the weekends.

“I had my rollerblades on,” jokes Stacy Johnson, a veteran server who worked twelve-hour shifts in the mornings of Wednesday and Thursday during the DNC. “It was just a lot of fun, and they were just so excited and so engaged.”

With the restaurant open an expanded 20 hours a day during the DNC – from 6:00 am to 2:00 am – and the hotel at over 80% occupancy, all of the staff worked more and longer. “It didn’t matter if you were a busser or front desk or whatever, anyone that was walking by, I’m like, ‘Take this food there,’” Farina says with a laugh.

“We’re cooking for 200 people a day for lunch, plus room service, plus breakfast, late night, and there’s four cooks back there,” he says – although as his AM team started to turn over to the PM during some of those busy lunches, they had as many as ten cooks working at once.

The return of DNC attendees to the hotel after a night’s programming at United Center also proved hectic, as scores of people arrived all at once. “I would have the DNC on to see, ‘That speech just ended? They’ll be here in 20 minutes,’” says Farina. He’d take that moment to tell his staff, “‘Go to the bathroom now, get all your stuff ready to go, because as soon as you see that first person with a sign, you know there’s a hundred more people coming behind them that are excited to carry that energy from the last speech to the bar.’”

“The team performed really, really well,” adds lead bartender Adam Chase. “It was chaotic, but it wasn’t chaos.”

Road closures in the hotel’s Gold Coast neighborhood for security reasons also complicated things, forcing Farina to increase the size of his ingredient orders and reduce the number of days they came in. Additional security and VIP guests were extra snarls, but everything had been in planning for more than a year in advance, with regular meetings both internally at the hotel and with the city, according to the Four Seasons Chicago’s general manager Stephen Wancha.

Despite all these hurdles, Adorn still saw regular local customers, and the hotel had non-DNC guests, even as downtown itself emptied of local workers whose companies closed their offices to let employees work from home. (Several downtown restaurants told the Chicago Tribune their business was down more than half, while Metra ridership was also nearly halved.)

One hotel guest not involved with the DNC brought his French bulldog down to the bar multiple nights and chatted with the DNC guests, Chase says. “He was there on Thursday night before the start of the rush [of delegates returning], and he was one of the last guests to leave.

“There were multiple people like that, enjoying that we were open to the public and they could brush shoulders and meet people,” he says.

DNC attendees also seemed to revel in the mixing, given that many of them are regular functionaries or volunteers mingling with big-name politicians and donors. Chase and Johnson delighted in having many of the same guests four days in a row.

“You get to develop mini relationships with them, and get to know their orders, and what they like and don’t like,” Chase says.

Martinis and espresso martinis were unsurprisingly fashionable, but Chase was also intrigued to note the snowballing word-of-mouth popularity of Sancerre – he had to “emergency acquire some” to keep up with the demand. His guess at the reason? White wine wouldn’t stain people’s teeth or lips before they were visible on TV.

He also got to sell plenty of glasses of some of the expensive, rare wines on his reserve list, at a bar where everything is already on the pricy side – it is the Four Seasons, after all. But tastes weren’t all high-end.

“I was kind of surprised by the amount of grilled cheeses we sold,” says Farina with a laugh. “When you’ve been walking around all day or you’re in a convention, you come back and want a comfort item.” A lot of people even ordered food from Adorn to bring to the convention – or its long security lines.

Farina was also surprised by the “lack of special requests,” he says. “At the end of the day, they were just normal people. They’d come back, they’d get a glass of wine, they’d order a burger, they’d hang out and talk to the local that was next to them…It humanized everybody.”

Johnson says guests would “use my name – that says a lot. They remembered who I was.” Given all the meetings happening, she was careful to read cues and not interrupt potentially private conversations over policy or appointments, giving her guests a simple sign to show her they were ready to order: standing their menus up on the table. Being circumspect obviously comes with the job; she wouldn’t admit to hearing more than “snippets.”

From the standpoint of the staff, it was a rewarding, revealing, successful, and exhausting week. “I spoke with five people who had never been to Chicago – coastal: L.A., New York – and they said, ‘Wow, what a great city,’” Wancha says. “In my mind, it’s like, ‘This is what we needed. Get these people back here.’ They see it and realize how great a city it is.’”

And the staff had barely any time to rest, despite the long, busy hours. The hotel was completely sold out the week following the DNC.