An Experimental Test Kitchen Helped Save Giant Restaurant – And Brought Energy and Joy Back to the Kitchen

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Anyone attending the Monday morning brainstorm session for Giant restaurant’s weekly test kitchen menu must abide by one rule.

“Everyone has to come with one idea,” said chef and owner Jason Vincent.

That goes for Vincent, kitchen leadership, and cooks, of course, but also interloping food writers with the expressed goal of observing and reporting. “You’re gonna participate,” Vincent texted me. “My goal is to create food nerds.”

Creative inspiration is the lifeblood of Giant’s experimental weekly menu that’s now entering its fourth month, which Vincent has credited with yanking the nine-year-old, creative Logan Square restaurant back from the brink of closing its doors.

On a sticky Monday in mid-July, I pulled up a chair in Giant’s darkened dining room to a few pushed-together two-tops scattered with notebooks, a temperamental laptop, assorted snacks from Joong Boo Market and cans of Celsius. Vincent and the senior kitchen team had already launched into a free association to decide which four test kitchen dishes would go live six hours later.

Sous chef Luis Diaz, who spearheads the test kitchen, rattled off a mix of conceptualized dishes (squash blossoms with goat cheese, fjord trout with sauce vierge) and building blocks (Klug Farm blueberries, quiche shells, lamb). Sous chef Daniel Jeffrey offered to blind bake the shells and test fillings, including Provençal-style quiche au thon (tuna quiche) with sweet Nichols Farm cherry tomatoes, a dish that ended up on the menu that evening. Meanwhile, a cumin lamb bun with tamago (Japanese omelet) was almost ready to debut.

“I grabbed the tiniest bit of shansho pepper to make mayo,” Diaz said. “That tamago came out good,” he added, but it needed another seasoning layer.

Chef de cuisine Mike Gaia promptly recited the bevy of powdered seasoning options on inventory: “Porcini? Shrimp? Matsutake?”

Gaia, meanwhile, planned to make dark seeded rye, which would accompany charcoal-grilled foie gras with cherry compote on Thursday’s menu. He’d pickle the baby cucumbers arriving the following day, perhaps to top the test kitchen cheeseburger made from chuck tail flap scraps. The kitchen had already rendered that chuck fat into tallow. I mentally filed this away as a building block for my own idea: borderlands-style chile con queso with a few of Diaz’s killer housemade flour tortillas.

Like many brilliant ideas, Giant’s test kitchen was born out of necessity. As the Covid-19 hangover gave way to inflation last summer, sales were slipping as the restaurant turned fewer tables on weeknights. Vincent admitted he’d grown careless and cooks had become complacent with the mostly static menu. The team’s depleted energy sank lower as the tip credit phaseout left many questioning restaurant industry work writ large.

Assuming much of the blame, Vincent apologized to the whole staff. “I needed to get their trust back and get them bought in again,” he said.

Whether or not the troubled economy or sales slump would eventually kill Giant, Vincent felt he owed it to his cooks to arm them with the sorts of skills he’d garnered by systematically building original menus daily, as he had during the early days of the now-closed Nightwood restaurant.

“I was like, I’m not sending these kids into the f-----g world not knowing some of this, because they have to,” he said. “They’re gonna be better off for it.”

Giant leadership started toying with different ideas to reinvigorate the kitchen. What if adjacent sibling restaurant, Pizza Matta, turned into an after-hours San Sebastian-style tapas bar, Vincent offered? Gaia proposed running a special per week; partner and general manager Josh Perlman suggested a rotating snacks menu. By February, they had settled on the test kitchen: a menu comprising four new dishes each night, priced a bit lower than the regular menu, tapping the diverse creative engines fueling Giant’s cooks. It debuted in April. Popular dishes can make it onto the regular menu.

“The test kitchen was just sort of like the coagulation of all those things that needed to be put in place, like, let’s take all our energy all at the same time and concentrate on this,” Vincent said.

Before too long, nightly covers and sales were ticking up, enough so that Giant has been able to hire another cook. But something else happened that felt more holistic and alive. Energy and joy returned to the kitchen; Vincent found himself eager to cook again. Test kitchen brainstorm sessions started bleeding into one-on-ones between Vincent and cooks mulling their next professional steps.

Since the summer rush began, the test kitchen has scaled back on the number of dishes it churns out each week, aiming to keep four through the week’s duration so that excited customers can plan a few days in advance. 

Test kitchen ideas come from all over: TikTok, YouTube, 10-year-old copies of Cooks Illustrated. Someone might spot an enigmatic British honey tart on a London restaurant’s Instagram, or bring in a cookbook, like Iquo Ukoh’s Nigerian Memories on a Platter. Gaia got the idea for sourdough ice cream, which he paired with burnt honey and a piloncillo tart on the July 24 menu, after seeing steeped-bread ice cream on Instagram. Diaz’s hibiscus sorbet with chamoy (now on the regular menu) was inspired by shaved ice from his childhood in El Paso, Texas.

“What I’ve liked doing with the test kitchen is bringing knowledge and culture from my hometown,” Diaz said.

In June, Vincent posted a callout for test kitchen ideas on Giant’s Instagram, and dozens of suggestions poured in, from Southeast Asian-inspired braised oxtail pasta to Balkan cevapi and baked Alaska. One respondent recalled loving a chilled poblano soup from the famed Montreal restaurant, Joe Beef, which inspired the test kitchen’s grilled poblano gazpacho with mascarpone and poached Canadian lobster on July 8. Yet Vincent bristles when asked to parse the difference between the test kitchen and a weekly specials menu.

“Specials are things to sell; they’re crowd pleasers,” he said. “The test kitchen is for us.”

My own idea sprang from a taste memory acquired while living in southern New Mexico from 2021 to 2023, 30 miles from the fertile Hatch Valley, which produces the famed long, green chiles of the same name. Hatch chiles (yes, that’s how New Mexicans spell it) are meaty-fleshed with a grassy, fruity, smoky flavor and a sneaky heat. When the harvest begins, usually in August, the glut of chiles is roasted in drums, bagged, and sold by the sack. At the century-old roadside joint Chope’s in La Mesa, N.M., roasted chiles are diced and simmered in their juices with aromatics and diced tomatoes, capped with grated white cheddar, broiled, and served with handmade flour tortillas for pinching.

While I wondered aloud whether we might be able to recreate it using lesser chiles from the Midwest, Gaia had already placed an order on The Hatch Chile Store website. The chiles were coming early due to the heat, he said.

“We got them, if you wanna come in when they get here.”

Two weeks later, I stood in an apron in Giant’s subterranean prep kitchen before a tub full of Hatch chiles that Diaz had roasted the night before. One of the cooks, Rob Blanchette, prepped lemony ricotta and pecorino pasta filling, while another, Angela Kladis, rolled, shaped, and filled bright-green spinach caramelle with the ricotta mixture. It would later get tossed with spring lamb bolognese for the regular menu. The caramelle resembled little candies.

“That’s what their name means in Italian!” Kladis said.

I slipped the char from the fiery peppers’ skins and cooked them in their syrupy liquor with tallow-sautéed aromatics and a few Nichols Farm cherry tomatoes. I submerged tasting spoon after tasting spoon into the bubbling cauldron, trying to put my finger on what was missing. Kladis suggested I grab a small deli container and experiment with seasoning so I didn’t risk losing the whole batch.

“I learned that the hard way,” she quipped. A dash of MSG helped, but what it really needed was a few ladles of chicken stock.

“I’ll thaw some; back in five minutes,” said Gaia, who’d just grated me a small heap of Chihuahua cheese. I thought about something Vincent had said earlier, that workplaces bound by curiosity often lead with empathy.

“Those are the best situations you work in, where everyone you work with is just kind of a nerd,” he said. “There’s a level of camaraderie, trust, and collegiality to base all other human interactions off of.”

Gaia returned after broiling my crock of chiles, their melted cheese lid speckled with char. He’d warmed a few of Diaz’s buttery flour tortillas on the flat top. The four of us tore off bits of tortilla and spooned the juicy, stewed chiles and oozing cheese on top. I held my breath until the murmurs of approval started flowing. 

“OK, this’ll go on tomorrow’s test kitchen menu,” Gaia said, and gave me a high five.