What Does It Take for a Tiny Chicago Restaurant to Serve a New Menu Every Day While Wasting Almost Nothing?

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On a bright Tuesday morning after a night of intense summer storms, Ethan Pikas slides the skin off a steaming potato with a towel. “What if we smoked the potato skins and made dashi out of them?” he asks Alex Cochran, one of the cooks at his restaurant Cellar Door Provisions in Chicago’s Logan Square. They’re prepping and testing dishes for the week of dinner service, which runs from Wednesday through Saturday.

Cochran pauses his work on a dish of short rib and chicory to drink from a deli container of water. He’s skeptical that treating smoked potato skins like kelp to make the fundamental Japanese stock is feasible. But he considers the idea and muses on how they could pull it off – and soon he and Pikas are enthusiastically trading suggestions, warming to the topic like water boiling for dashi. What if they boost the umami with a rind of Taleggio cheese? They’ve got some stored; they should render them and use the rich fat in a recipe, whether it involves potatoes or not.

None of this is really related to the dish that Pikas is currently preparing – which may or may not debut on the next night’s menu. The potato is for gnocchi, which will replace a Taleggio tortelloni (hence the rinds) that they’ve been serving for a while. “It’s good, but it’s been on the menu for like three weeks, which is a long time around here,” Pikas says.

He likes his gnocchi recipe, which includes quite a bit of aged cheese itself, but is always in search of something better. He once had gnocchi at the restaurant Elske that was blissfully soft, and is trying to replicate its texture. He’s heard that some chefs steam their gnocchi, so he’s experimenting with that technique. He carefully rolls out two cylinders of dough, then cuts one into individual pieces and keeps the other intact before steaming and then boiling them.

Cochran and Pikas thoughtfully taste the result, basted in butter. They discuss the strengths of each approach and the difference in texture and flavor, then bandy around flavor pairings.

When Wednesday afternoon arrives, Pikas and Cochran haven’t made potato skin dashi, but the gnocchi has made the cut. It’s on the menu – and it’s not steamed.

"You Begin Again Every Day"

Cellar Door Provisions rarely serves the same menu two days in a row. The only constants are bread and butter, a burger, and panna cotta with peppery olive oil. Everything else is dependent on the product Pikas has received from his trusted farmers and suppliers, the ingredients taking up space in his small restaurant, and the whims of him and his staff.

“I’ve always admired restaurants that are set up to prep everything the day of, because I think the quality is much better, and it challenges myself and the other employees to really be on our game, at least in our best moments,” Pikas says, citing the influential French chef Fernand Point’s La Pyramide. “His philosophy was you begin again every day. That philosophy really spoke to me. I don’t always achieve it, but it’s aspirational.”

Cellar Door Provisions, in some ways, has no choice but to begin again every day. While it has smaller fridges, it doesn’t have a walk-in cooler, meaning Pikas can only buy ingredients in small amounts and often has to turn to pre-refrigeration preservation techniques to make them last – which have the benefit of boosting and changing flavors. Unlike in most kitchens, very little is thrown out – a typical evening service produces just one small bag of trash, according to Pikas. And unlike on most menus, a recipe is never settled.

“I have baseline recipes that I’ve developed over the years,” says Pikas, who keeps extensive notes on his phone from his decade of operating Cellar Door. “And then I try to think of ways to manipulate those base recipes in ways that are maybe exciting for myself and the other cooks at the restaurant.”

Take the steamed gnocchi. Even if it didn’t end up on the menu, Pikas might return to the technique another week. Furthermore, the riffing about cheese rinds did affect a dish. By Thursday of that week, the gnocchi was served with a broth of rendered Taleggio rinds and rye, brightened by English peas and oxalis.

That evolution and flexibility is how Pikas and his staff manage to constantly change the menu. The process is not always successful, Pikas admits with characteristic humility, but it keeps things fresh and can yield brilliance. The team might start from one of Pikas’ basic recipes, or less often try something completely new. He and Cochran then riff on flavor combinations, drawing on the wide array of misos, ferments, cured vegetables, and fresh ingredients in their tiny kitchen. The sunny restaurant is full of small deli containers labeled in blue tape, ready to be used to build or flavor a dish.

What about blackberries with that golden chicken ballantine, Cochran suggests. I’ve never had pear and crab together, Pikas says; let’s try it and add in the sungold tomato butter you made. Or, we still have some housemade umeboshi and elderflower cordial; can we combine those with tomato to complement oysters?

Their preference is for simple, clean dishes that spotlight the elemental flavors of their ingredients while belying the labor involved in making them, an approach they liken to Japanese cuisine.

If they get stuck, Pikas might consult cookbooks from someone like Alice Waters or Alain Passard for flavor profile ideas, while Cochran might step outside for a smoke and hope inspiration hits him outside the kitchen. Pikas plays pedal steel, and Cochran was a music major on double bass before dropping out of college, and Cochran likens the dish ideation process to improvisation in jazz.

Along with their third cook, Megan Macias, they often tweak dishes over the week to reach a more refined version by Saturday. But the food on Wednesday, the first day of a week’s menu, has a different attribute: the excitement of a novel dish. Different days of the week have different strengths. “You can feel collectively when the enthusiasm around a dish wanes,” Pikas says.

“It’s the only place I know that changes their menu as often as he does,” says Trent Sparrow of Catalpa Grove Farm, which supplies lamb and pork to Cellar Door. Sparrow eats at Cellar Door’s polished wood counter most Wednesday afternoons after making his deliveries to the city. The fluid menu benefits Sparrow because the restaurant uses odd cuts from an animal such as tongues, hearts, and heads, even if he only has a few to offer. “When you’re breaking down whole animals, you have to sell all of it. He’s never said, ‘No, there’s not enough,’ or ‘No, I don’t know what to do with that.'”

While Catalpa Grove is a newer supplier, Pikas has worked with farms like Three Sisters Garden, Froggy Meadow, and Mick Klüg since Cellar Door opened in 2014. He shops at the Green City Market at least once a week, gets beef from Slagel Family Farm, flour from Janie’s Mill, more produce from Frillman and Spence Farms, and seafood and specialty products from Regalis. He even gets eccentric ingredients such as Egyptian walking onions, mulberries, elderberries and -flowers, and shiso from his own backyard, courtesy of his wife’s garden.

“The use of hyper-seasonal products served simply and with confidence transports the diner to the farm and place," says Matthias Merges, a respected Chicago chef, of Cellar Door's food. "Not many have the wherewithal to accomplish this.”

The small size of the restaurant helps small farms, whose limited yield might mean a bigger restaurant’s order would use up most of their product. “That can be painful, because we want to be able to spread our stuff out amongst all of our customers,” says Tracey Vowell of Three Sisters.

“The world is an ugly place for the smaller restaurants in the city right now,” says Vowell, “and Ethan is still holding on. He’s still ordering from us, and he’s still doing everything he can to – for lack of a better way of saying it – do the right thing: not give money to [multinational wholesale distributor] Sysco.”

Getting Ego Out of Food

Pikas is tall and handsome, with the coiffed, graying dark hair of a classic Hollywood star and the deep, smooth voice of a public radio host. “I could listen to that man’s voice all day,” says Vowell. “But if I have something to say to Ethan, he’s going to square up and listen to every word I say. He’s very civilized. He’s very, very polite. He’s interested. He’s engaged.”

Cochran has only been at Cellar Door for a few months, and yet Pikas already treats him like a full collaborator, eager to listen to ideas for dishes or ways to get more people in the door. “I appreciate the willingness to be wrong about s--t,” Cochran says. “I feel like the staff can all make suggestions and have our voice heard.”

That relative equality is evident in the lack of a dishwasher on staff. The restaurant’s six employees – three front-of-house servers and three cooks, including Pikas – wash dishes when they have a free moment during service. One fewer employee means everyone gets a greater share of tips, which are split amongst everyone but Pikas, and the money that would be used to pay a dishwasher can go to other projects and wages. (Pikas also does things like clean the grease trap himself instead of hiring someone to free up more money.) Plus, it’s humbling in a beneficial way, Pikas says.

When he worked at the fine-dining restaurant Binkley’s in Phoenix, Arizona, the chef washed dishes with the staff during prep times. “It was a kindness from someone who didn’t always show it in other ways,” Pikas says.

His time at Binkley’s showed him both what he valued and what he disliked about fine dining. A native of Evanston, he started working at a diner when he was just 14. He attended culinary school in San Diego and worked jobs throughout the West. He eventually returned to Chicago to stage at Alinea and was offered a job there – but he turned it down. He decided that he didn’t want to work in another tasting menu kitchen.

While Cellar Door Provisions is essentially a neighborhood wine bar, its dishes are often at the level of a tasting menu course. “It’s rustic that appears refined, or maybe vice versa,” says Cochran, a Highland Park native who has worked at such Michelin-starred restaurants as Boka and Smyth. “It’s passion food,” he says. “What cook doesn’t want to work with every great farmer in the area and make food like this?” 

While Pikas appreciates the “commitment to technique and execution” of fine dining, he dislikes how high-level restaurants tend to treat their employees.

“Often, the places that get most celebrated are difficult places to work,” Pikas says. Health insurance is available to full-time employees of Cellar Door if they want it, as is paid time off – still relative rarities in the restaurant world. “One of the main projects of this very small restaurant is to see if you can make a successful restaurant without mistreating – maybe that’s too strong a word, but just to have less ego.”

“When you look at the mean skills that Ethan has, and he’s trying to get ego out of food – that’s a tremendous compliment to his very own self,” says Vowell, who worked in the kitchen at Frontera Grill for eighteen years before becoming a farmer. Pikas was a semifinalist for a Best Chef: Great Lakes James Beard Award in 2019 and 2020.

Pikas is reluctant to take credit and unceasingly complimentary of his staff. “I’m really grateful for the people that work here, and that I get to do this,” he says. “I think about this a lot. As difficult as it is, it is a luxury.”

Cochran’s addition means that Cellar Door’s staff can run a full service without Pikas for the first time since 2018. Pikas thinks that his current team can lead the restaurant into an outstanding period. He’s still striving for a bit more “precision” – a favorite word – but thinks the restaurant is nearing his ideal of what he wants it to be. “It’s getting close,” he says.

A Never-Ending Work in Progress

Everything is a work in progress for Pikas; he’s always tweaking things to get a little bit closer to his imagined ideal. (A 2019 Bon Appétit story was headlined “Cellar Door Provisions Is the Perfect Restaurant That Is Positive It Could Be Better.”) In addition to the recipes he’s continually refining, there’s the warm, roughly 1,000-square foot space itself. It’s a point of pride that he has never paid for a new build-out but instead has improved the interior bit by bit, rejiggering seating, adding shelving, inserting a new appliance, changing the flow.

He has endless aspirations for the restaurant, among them to be more sustainable. He would love to completely eliminate plastic, and already uses glass bottles for oils and other cooking liquids instead of plastic squeeze bottles. Anything organic they can’t use is composted, but there’s not much they can’t use. “Waste” from processing product is often turned into something else – that’s why Pikas was musing on ways to use potato skins. Fava bean pods are inoculated with koji and turned into miso that then adds a floral, savory note to dishes for the next year. Oyster liquor might be used to preserve the oysters or season a beurre blanc or Japanese tare. The solids left from straining tomatoes into “tomato water” could be added to salt that is used to cure fresh tomatoes and intensify their essence in turn.

Even with excellent farms supplying the restaurant, produce can vary in its qualities because nature is fickle. Pikas trusts his suppliers, takes what they have, and adapts to it, for example curing or roasting peaches that are under-ripe. That’s a “more responsible way to cook, because you don’t turn back on something a farmer has grown,” he says.

Nothing has received as much devotion and honing as Cellar Door’s bread. The restaurant emerged out of “Bread Nights” hosted by Pikas and his former business partner Tony Bezsylko. The levain Pikas uses dates back to 2004, from his time in California.

Bread is always on the menu, served with cultured butter that is made in-house and enlivened with a bit of brine or ferment from the Cellar Door larder. The dough is mixed on Tuesdays and baked fresh every day of service. Because it continues to ferment over the course of the week, the bread – like the menu – changes slightly every day, becoming a bit funkier and more complex by Saturday, according to Pikas.

He has been developing his bread recipe over the ten years that Cellar Door has been open, learning from mistakes and responding to the changes in the environment to which bread is so responsive. “Bread is so simple but also so hard to master,” he says. He prefers to feel and adapt to the dough in a tactile, intuitive way, rather than depending on moisture charts and adjusting ratios. He likes to get out of his head and away from a conceptual, abstract recipe.

Pikas suggests that the restaurant is currently producing the best bread it ever has – but quickly qualifies that it’s hard to be objective about such things. “See?” Cochran says, pointing out Pikas’ constant humility and inability to be satisfied with his efforts.

Over all the bread he has baked in a decade of running Cellar Door Provisions, Pikas does think he has achieved the perfect loaf, thanks to his constant tweaking and adjusting and willingness to change. It hasn’t happened often: certainly not every week; not even once a year.

“I think there have been five days where it was exactly what I wanted it to be,” he says.