Making the Neighborhood Safe to Cure Meat

In the coming weeks, the garages and cold basements of Bridgeport will be hung with sopressata.  Hundreds, even thousands of pounds of it will dry cure in cold air in an age old preservation technique.  And as it cures, John Schultz will re-calculate the future of Mr. Spanky’s, his restaurant at Shields and 31^st Street, where he’s been selling dry cured bacon from locally raised hogs for just over a year.

A few months ago, the bacon business was so good Schultz was looking for ways to expand production and sell through other outlets, but he was challenged by a regulatory environment geared for the mass production of big food.   Now he’s shuttered the restaurant for the season, and is just running his catering business, which delivers fresh salads under the name Foodism Chicago.

If you miss Mr Spanky’s well cured pork, you can taste it again downtown, where he’ll be selling pork buns, bacon and breakfast sausage at The Nosh, a roving Chicago food market designed to promote small batch, artisanal food.  The Nosh will be held at Block 37 every Thursday and Friday in February and March.

Schultz knows his career is in wholesome local foods, but he is still exploring the best way to make it a business that supports a sustainable life.  He grew up in a restaurant family in Joliet, and he crossed the country as chef for the Ringling Brother’s Circus.  He first opened his catering company at 335 West 31^st Street 9 years ago.

About 5 years ago, he started making bacon from his house.  He could accommodate up to 100 pounds of meat a week there, which dried down to 50 pounds of finished bacon.  At first he was selling it at farmer’s markets on Saturdays and Sundays, but before long he was selling all 50 pounds at one market.  It was either scale back to fewer markets, or scale up with more meat.

Through connections of a former employer, he gained access to the banquet kitchen of the Irish American Cultural Center, where he was working with 400 – 500 pounds of meat a week.  He says he could take in 1,000 pounds a week in the space he has at Mr. Spanky’s, if he took out a wall and had a bigger cooler.  But space and a willing customer base aren’t the only considerations.

Spanky’s has been making bacon as a restaurant, which allows Schultz to sell food he makes directly to the end consumer.  In order to sell it through someone else, through another restaurant or a grocery store for instance, he would have to be licensed as a processor by the Illinois Department of Agriculture.  The State says it tries to be flexible, it looks for end results, like the washability of surfaces, the smooth flow of product, water, and air through the facility, but Schultz says that would still translate into rules about the size of his drains and the material on his floors, and he’d have to develop a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan – a test-validated manual of sanitary practice specific to his facility that can cost $10s of thousands to create.

Schultz looked at hiring someone else who had already obtained licensing to process his meat.  He says there are 3 or 4 processors in Illinois who share his interest in sustainable food and do the kind of dry curing he’d like them to do, but they are at capacity making their own product.  In the end he found a family owned enterprise that has been curing bacon with traditional techniques for generations, and will use his recipes to prepare his product – but he had to go to Kentucky to find them.

He still gets his pork from a small Illinois farm.  He has developed a relationship with his farmer, so he can buy just the parts he wants.  He says it took him 5 years to get there, for the first 4 years he had to buy the whole hog, or a whole side of a hog.  He’d make bacon from the bellies, and make a lot of sausage from the rest.  He suspects that effectively caps the market for local, sustainably raised meat into the future - most people don’t have the freezer capacity to buy a whole animal at a time, they need a middle man to cut up the carcass and distribute the parts.

Schultz’s experience pretty much sums up what people mean when they talk about building an infrastructure, not just a market, for sustainable local food.  In Chicago, that agenda will be advanced a little further at the Good Food Festival and Conference, which will convene at the UIC Forum March 13^th- 16^th.  Now in its 10^th year, the Conference aims to build the unromantic but necessary structures to support growing demand for sustainably produced local foods: making connections between investors and small food business, building wholesale distribution chains to bring local food to market, and advocating revisions to a regulatory structure built to supervise mass production, so that it can monitor small producers effectively, without squashing them.

A couple years ago, participants on a panel of farmers and marketing companies that sell locally raised meat all seemed to agree that the biggest brake on the growth of the market for their product was a bottleneck in the processing and distribution parts of the chain.  Those middle segments have been emerging.  In Chicago, a handful of small butcher shops have been joined by Red Meat Market, an online hub where meat buyers and end consumers can source local, sustainable meat.

On-line and off-line forums buzz about how web based marketing can be supplemented by a network of meat hubs that would aggregate product, and facilitate its travel between producers, processors, distributors and buyers in real space.  For that network is to continue to grow, regulators will have to allow it.  There is some disagreement about what, if any, special considerations that would require.

For instance, people have been curing meat with salt and dry air for hundreds, even thousands of years.  Residents of Bridgeport seem to consume great quantities of home cured sausage without getting sick.  But that doesn’t mean salt curing can’t go wrong.  Salt slows the growth of bacteria by taking water out of the meat.  But some pathogens are salt tolerant, and salt levels in the product must be sufficient to stop bacteria growth.

Few would argue they don’t want the food they buy from someone else to be monitored at all.  According to Food Safety News, makers of cured meats should monitor pH levels, water activity, and the potential for cross contamination between foods in a kitchen.  But do they need a fully validated HACCP plan?  When Madison, Wisconsin based Underground Meats launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to create a HACCP plan for making dry cured salami, they estimated it would cost $40,000.

Link to Underground Meats' on Kickstarter Campaign

Underground Meats developed their first HACCP plan with help from food scientists at Madison based Oscar Mayer.  They launched their Kickstarter campaign in September to develop an open sourced plan that could serve as a template for other small salami makers.  HACCP plans must be specific to each operation, they can’t be borrowed wholesale, even by makers of the same product.

But as Underground Meats told Food Tech Connect -- big producers regularly share their HACCP information, it’s the smaller ones that keep their plans proprietary because of the disproportionate expense. Underground Meats hopes its open source plan will level the playing field for small operations, and build community among producers and farms.

As that community grows, leveling the playing field may mean more hybrid enterprise, combining the functions of a restaurant and processor like Mr. Spanky’s has hoped to do, for instance.  It might also pave the way for some of Bridgeport’s sopressata to make its way out from the garage.

Calabruzzi's Cafe Adds a New Reason to Visit Halsted Street

Calabruzzi’s Café is a family owned and operated restaurant of Italian American cuisine, but it also marks the return to Bridgeport’s Halsted strip of a restaurant that had disappeared for awhile. At least it reminds me of a youthful version of the kind of place my parents might have gone on a date – a place you go for a nice dinner that starts with a fancy cocktail, something like what I imagine the Governor’s Table and the Coral Key used to be.

Saturday, I went in for dinner with the friend who is my source of information about those other establishments. He hesitates at the comparison, he remembers them being more formal – the menu more surf and turf, the bartender dressed in a jacket and tie. “We wouldn’t walk into Coral Key dressed like this,” he says. Though he agrees the dress code was partly a factor of the era.

It was an era before the arrival of intentional food, cable cooking programs and the widespread use of the term “foodie” to describe the amateur food critic. When a good restaurant was a place that served a meal with roots in home cooking, except with richer ingredients, cooked skillfully by somebody else – which is what our dinner at Calabaruzzi’s was like.



Owner Rosanna Mandile comes from a cooking family, and family is strongly represented at Calabruzzi’s. Her father, Angelo, was a cook at Papa Milano’s (also of that other era) when he first came to the States from Italy in the 1970s. Later he became a mason to better support his family, but the Mandile family always cooked. In the winter, when construction trades were slow, they started cooking mid-afternoon. They cured sopresatta and made wine, they jarred eggplant and tomatoes, and mushrooms her father gathered from the woods. They bought rabbits from a farm in Michigan, her father and uncle skinned their own.

Rosanna got her first restaurant job at 15 – she worked at Maggiolini’s, a pizzeria one of her uncles owned in Gage Park, until she married at 22. Pizza is a central part of the menu at Calabruzzi’s. She says it’s the water that makes Chicago pizza superior. Her aunts mix dough with Evian -- she can’t do that at the restaurant, but even Chicago tap water makes pizza here taste better than what they make with the water in New York and LA.

When she married, she moved back to Bridgeport with her husband. Her father-in-law was in the flea-market business and she worked for him for a few years. But she had cooking at the back of her mind. She traveled to Italy shortly after her marriage, learning recipes from her Italian aunts as she travelled the south and central regions.

She began planning to open her own restaurant in earnest 4 years ago. The family owned the building at 3304 S. Halsted, but first they had to clear it out. It had been vacant since the 1980s, her father in law had gradually filled it with furniture, it was part of a network of storefronts he used to warehouse merchandise for his flea market enterprise. They sent a semi-load of donations to the victims of Hurricane Katrina and shuffled the rest to other facilities.

Then they rebuilt the storefront from the floor to the ceiling. Angelo poured the concrete floor and built the bar out of masonry. They restored the tin ceiling with a copper finish in honor of the coppersmiths of her mother’s hometown. Her cousin, Nicholas De Crescenso, painted a large mural of Rome’s Trevi Fountain for the north wall at Rosanna’s request. The south wall is hung with maps of Calabrria and Abruzzo painted on towels. Rosanna says the family name, Mandile, means towel; her father came from Calabria her mother from Abruzzo; Calabruzzi’s is a conjunction of the names. The staff, 5 of whom are cousins, all wear Italian soccer jersey’s and puma track shoes – in honor of another cousin who is a 2012 Olympic hopeful in women’s steeplechase.



After years of research and a lifetime of cooking, Rosanna had developed a menu that was 10 pages long. “Everyone said ‘You’re crazy,’” a 10 page menu would put her out of business. So she pared it down to the basics, “what people are used to around here,” and the rest of it will cycle through the specials list. There will be several preparations of rabbit; cardi soup, made with real cardoons, not American celery, for the New Year; and a pescara pizza with shrimp, clams, mussles and calamari for Lent. Meanwhile, the regular menu includes family specialties, like pizza made with their own sopresata mix, her father’s special pescara salad, and a cannoli she makes from a pizzelle cookie.

Calabruzzi’s opened for business quietly 3 weeks ago, 3 days before the Sox Home Opener, to be precise. “I wanted to give my staff time to get their bearings for a few days,” Rosanna says.

Its arrival rounds out a trio of new restaurants on Halsted Street that cover the culinary bases: Buffalo Wings and Rings is the Sports-Bar; Nana has the cutting edge organic cuisine; Calabruzzi’s is traditional Italian-American, served in a dining room with warm décor that makes you want to sit down and eat-in. And the owners of all three establishments have known each other for years; now they can lend each other mutual support.

The owner of Nana came to Calabruzzi’s to eat the first day it opened, and left a glowing comment on the restaurant’s facebook page. Rosanna says the partners at Buffalo Wings and Rings have been generous with advice and have sent her patrons when they’ve had an overflow crowd. Between the three of them, they’ve multiplied the reasons to stop in on Halsted Street.

Suggestions for the Future of Bridgeport Food

Griffith Laboratories - a tank of savory flavor?


I attended a trade show in mid-March and I’ve been muddling around trying to write about it ever since. There is no direct Bridgeport connection in it. Though it is about the food sector, and Bridgeport has one, and about reinventing the local economy, and if a blog is partly a way to nudge the world in the direction you think it ought to go by acts of selective description, take this as a suggestion for how Bridgeport Food might evolve.

The conference was the Farm to Fork Expo. Family Farmed, a local non-profit, launched the event 8 years ago to match up buyers and sellers of local and sustainably produced foods. It’s grown in dimension over the years.

There is a consumer trade show -- this year there were over 150 vendors showing off their local food products, and a lecture tract with workshops on how to make your own cheese, or be a conscientious carnivore by consuming the whole carcass.

But the meat of the conference is aimed toward lifting the local foods industry beyond its current scope. That includes building demand among big buyers -- both the Chicago Public Schools and the State of Illinois have set local food procurement goals and Family Farmed helps them source product.

And it includes building an infrastructure in finance, distribution and realistic regulation to bring local foods “to scale” -- which is to say, something between the scale of mass distribution that dominates the food industry now, and the volume small farmers can distribute themselves by making deliveries, or selling their own produce at farmers markets.

Illinois used to have a mid-sized local-foods infrastructure – it wasn’t until after World War II that the state’s farmers gave up growing vegetables for local markets, and for themselves for that matter, and focused almost exclusively on commodity grains for export. Today some estimate Illinois produces just 4% of the food consumed in the state.

The measure is imprecise. Cash receipts reported by Illinois farmers for crops that might be counted as human food add up to about $2 billion (as of the 2007 agricultural census), which is just 4% of the estimated $48 billion Illinois residents spend on food each year – though that $48 billion includes premiums from every station on the food chain that brings it to the table. On the other hand, a good portion of the human food grown in Illinois probably follows the food chain out of state.

The net result is that Illinois is both the nation’s second largest exporter of corn and soy products, and a net importer of food. As little as 0.2% of Illinois farm sales are sold directly for human consumption, and the average food item consumed in the Midwest is said to travel 1,500 miles before it reaches the table.

I got the last statistics from the preamble of the Illinois Food Farm and Jobs Act of 2007. It is part of a movement to remake the state economy by recapturing trillions in Illinois food dollars. The Act commissioned a plan to expand the state’s infrastructure for processing, storing and distributing locally grown foods.

Or as Ann Wright of the USDA described it at the Farm to Fork Expo, to build a companion economy to production agriculture, one that keeps wealth in farm communities.

The State’s plan set local food procurement goal of seeing 10% of Illinois food dollars spent on products grown and processed in Illinois by 2020, and 20% by 2030. State run cafeterias are charged with reaching a 20% local food procurement goal by 2020. Twenty percent is roughly the market share that organic foods have now.

Jim Slamma, the founder and director of Family Farmed, spoke enthusiastically about how the state’s local food goals would reverberate through the economy. He says food spending has an economic multiplier of 3 to 5 times. Illinois’ 12.5 million consumers spend almost $50 billion on food; if 20% of that food were produced locally, the local food industry would be worth $10 billion, and its impact would echo through the economy to $30 billion, or more.


Ed Miniat still makes cooking oil from tallow just east of the CMD


My own interest in all this is less about the kind of food I want to eat, than the kind of economy I want to live in. I gravitate toward any evidence an artisanal economy is making gains on the big-business old-industrial one.

Because I think an economy where things are made by skilled craftsmen with some independence, with control over their process, and pride in their product, seems inherently more wholesome than one where things are made by workers who occupy one station on an assembly line, who sell their time in increments, and accept the tedium of their jobs in exchange for a paycheck they’ll spend fueling the machine that employs them by buying more stuff.

I also recognize that big business and old-industry have real virtues. The number of people who can choose to pay extra for distinctive products is limited, and the great majority of consumers may be best served by a mass production machine -- by economies of scale in manufacturing, and distribution by giants whose size gives them leverage to urge their suppliers toward the lowest possible price.

In fact, food is a good illustration of both points. Because everyone has to eat it, and as world population grows by leaps and bounds there is a real ethical obligation to maximize production, and make it cheaply available to everybody.

But in this country, food is relatively affordable for a lot of people, and the pool of people who can afford to be choosy is much broader than the pool who can commission a house full of custom furniture, for instance. Demand for artisanal food reaches beyond the bobo class.


Clearing the former Fontanini sausage facility for something new.


One reason the Farm to Fork Conference is so interesting is that participants like Bob Scaman, President of Goodness Greeness, an organic produce wholesaler in the Englewood neighborhood, sit on panels and testify that the biggest brake on their ability to move local-organic product is a shortage of supply.

In fact, Scaman is concerned enough about generating more supply that he actively works with local farmers to build their capacity, and he’s helped Family Farmed develop a technical manual on post- harvest handling to encourage more of them to sell to wholesalers.

He says Goodness Greeness’ business is growing fastest in minority and ethnic markets; for instance, he points out one of the biggest growth segments in organic foods nationally is among Hispanic mothers who want to feed their babies organic milk.

But even beyond proving and building demand, there are moments when the Food to Fork conference challenges the big-business mass-production model where it seems to be strongest – in its claim to be the most efficient way to produce and distribute food.


The last of the Swift buildings: one prospective buyer reports this building contains an old fashioned laboratory that was left untouched after a small explosion.

Bridgeport food got its foothold on the border of the Union Stockyards, where the meat packing industry once pioneered those claims. As William Cronon describes it in Nature’s Metropolis, the innovations in the stockyards were as much organizational as technological, starting on the disassembly line – live animals varied in their body shape as individuals, and human eyes and hands could slice them up better than machines could, but by breaking down each process to the simplest component the human assembly line achieved the efficiency of a machine.

The packers bought efficiencies with huge capital investments. They built slaughterhouses, refrigerated cars, and a network of cold store facilities to penetrate provincial markets. The capital investment increased their capacity, and their incentive, to grow.

Both farmers and butchers complained bitterly about the big packers. Ranchers had fewer places to sell their herds, and the price fluctuations on distant urban exchanges seemed like conspiracy. On the other end, as the packers entered new markets they put smaller butchers out of business, they were willing to sell below cost if they had to, they needed volume to pay for their plants.

And yet the big packers’ ability to compete on price seems to prove their efficiency claims. They could sell meat for less than the cattle cost them, because they found ways to make money off of the refuse. Bone, bristle, blood and offal could be made into buttons, brushes, fertilizer and tallow when they were collected in volume; the average independent butcher didn’t collect enough material to open a sideline businesses in glue.

The ranchers benefited too, despite their complaints, because the big packer’s investment in infrastructure and especially in cold store facilities guaranteed a more stable, year round market for cattle, while providing more affordable meat, in some cases more safely, to the consumer. It was the small middlemen who suffered and went out of business. Once they did, the 4 big packers had near monopoly powers. Though they still had to compete with each other, Cronon observes.

The meat packing industry is still dominated by 4 big packers today. And over decades, a similar process of consolidation has been repeated on the farm, with mid-sized farms disappearing into much larger ones. But that’s not necessarily because the big farms are more efficient.

Last year’s Farm to Fork conference included a presentation by Ken Meter of the Crossroads Resource Center. Meter has done extensive study of the Minnesota food industry, including a survey of research on economies of size.

He concludes most of it shows that economies of size are not the main driver of consolidation among farms and other rural firms, and he’s found little proof that size translates into efficiency per unit of production, though it may translate into bigger cumulative profits. As a group, though, it’s not clear most farms are actually profitable.

Meter found that Minnesota farmers spend more per year producing crops than they earn selling them. Over 10 years, he calculated productions costs exceeded cash receipts by an average of $465 million per year. He found Minnesota farmers depend on up to $1 billion in federal subsidies, and other kinds of “farm related income" to pay the bills.

Something similar is true in Illinois. The 2007 agricultural census shows Illinois farmers produced crops and livestock with a “market value” of $13.3 billion (comparable to the $13.2 billion market value of Minnesota product), and spent $9 billion in production expenses (vs $10.3 billion in Minnesota) – appearing to generate a $4.3 billion surplus. But that “market value” includes produce placed in the Commodity Credit Corporation loan program, a federal program for supporting prices for agricultural goods. Cash receipts from actual sales were $8.6 billion, or $400 million short of expenses.

Meter argues continued farm expansion has been fueled by federal incentives, the availability of capital, and the scale of infrastructure and other food business, not by actual efficiencies of production. Larger farms seemed better in the decades after World War II, when a global population surge sparked fears that global food production would fall short. Internationally, the Green Revolution applied first world farm technologies, like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, to ramp up third world production. Domestically, the US encouraged its farmers to expand for export to global markets. As meat packers had found before them, expansion was expensive. Loans taken out to fuel expansion in the 70s fueled the farm debt crisis of the 80s.

Looking at the imbalance between production costs and cash receipts of US farms today, Meter suggests the main beneficiaries of the US farm subsidy system are producers of inputs, like seeds and equipment, and the finance industry. He says nationally, farmers have spent $600 billion more paying interest to lenders than they have received in subsidies.

Even where consolidation has appeared to increase profits, it’s not clear that it has reduced the retail price of food, so much as it has redirected where food dollars go. The USDA dissects consumer food spending into portions captured by industry. In 1950, about 40 cents of each consumer food dollar paid the farmer who harvested the food. Today, the farmer’s portion is roughly 16 cents, if the measure includes food consumed away from home. Though it is closer to 24 cents for food consumed at home.

Meter says research has consistently shown that consolidation of power in the manufacturing and distribution sectors actually appears to increase the retail price of food. It’s an observation confirmed by USDA food dollar data. Adjusting for inflation, the USDA shows that dollars earned by farmers have remained relatively steady since 1950 even as their portion of the food bill shrank – fluctuating between $150 and $200 billion a year. It’s the marketing bill that multiplied, from roughly $250 billion in 1950 (in inflation adjusted dollars) to about $600 billion in 2004.

Back in 1976, Russell Parker, a former FTC official, came to some of the conclusions as farm expansion was taking off. He concluded that expansion did very little to create new efficiencies, he believed expansion was fueled mainly by the availability of capital, and he pointed out further that higher food prices were helping to feed a new surge in inflation – he found over half the increase in the US consumer price index in 1973 traced back to the higher price of food.

The food economy as it operates now may be the most efficient means for extracting profits for those firms who best consolidate their buying power. And that could be good news for the future of local, sustainably produced foods. It suggests there in room in the food bill to rearrange where the profits go.

Today, small producers charge a premium and a limited market of conscientious consumers are willing pay it. But adjustments in the marketing dollar may also make room to sustain small producers even as the local food economy is brought to scale, and prices for artisanally-produced product come down.

And as Illinois reorganizes its economy toward local food production, what place is better poised to participate than Bridgeport, with its central location, and its legacy of industrial food? That legacy includes disused plants that might be remade as the infrastructure for new production. But it also includes the traditional food businesses that are still prospering here.

In a study of the “artisanal economy” emerging in the business sector, Intuit-IFTF describes the context as a “barbell economy” in which a few very large firms are balanced by a proliferation of small upstarts at the opposite end of the scale. Intuit calls them artisanal because they use skilled labor to assemble complete products.

The mid sized firms have been squeezed out by the larger ones. But the firms at the extremes of the scale have a symbiotic relationship. The large firms outsource tasks, and especially innovation, to the smaller, nimbler ones. Maybe something similar could evolve between new and old food businesses in Bridgeport.


Schulze and Burch Biscuit Company's 35th Street Plant

Schulze and Burch Biscuit Company has been innovating since they were founded in 1923. They had a hand in inventing the modern saltine cracker, the toaster pastry, the granola bar, and the dual textured cookie (chewy inside, crispy outside). They are sometimes approached by small food producers asking to hire out the mixing equipment and ovens at their 35th Street plant, because USDA approved bakery space is expensive to build and rentable space is in short supply.

Griffiths Laboratories opened shop as food chemists in 1919. Today they’re a 3rd generation, family owned enterprise employing 2500 people around the globe. They produce taste and texture components for food processors and restaurants; they produce savory flavorings under the brand name Innova at their 38th Street plant, which is surrounded by tanks and the aroma of meat.

One investor at last year’s Farm to Fork Conference raised innovations in ingredients -- extracts of healthful berries for superfoods, for instance -- as a potential growth segment for artisanal food producers, as local meat and produce becomes more common and prices, and profits, potentially drop.

Two former meat packing plants in the Bridgeport vicinity have already been repurposed for a new era of food. Last year, Barkaat Foods reopened Chicago’s last slaughterhouse to process halal meat for the Muslim market. Though there is wider demand for small slaughter-services.

Panelists at the Farm to Fork Expo report the demand for sustainably raised meat is strong and growing, but their growth is slowed by a bottleneck on the processing end. Big slaughterhouses do kills of 2,500 animals a day, it’s not worth their while to get the plant running and wash it all down again to accommodate kills of a couple hundred animals.

Meanwhile, the former Peer Foods building in the stockyards is being reinvented as The Plant. Developer John Edel gets the most press for his plans to build an actual “vertical farm” in an indoor, multi-story environment. But he is subdividing the rest of the building as a small business incubator – much like the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center he redeveloped on 37th Street -- except it will focus on food and beverage producers. When it’s finished, it will help incubate a new food industry in the footprint of the old one.


The Peer Foods building in its first youth as a meat packing plant.

Arrival of the Bridgeport Pasty

It’s not clear if the Bridgeport laborers who dug the I & M Canal ate pasties to sustain their strength, but if they were digging it again today, they probably would. Carrie Clark and Jay Sebastian aim to have the Bridgeport Pasty Company open for the business at 3142 S. Morgan by spring.

“Make sure you say it’s pronounced ‘pass-tee’,” Carrie urges. Not to be confused with ‘paste-ee,’ a sparkly ornament worn by strippers, or ‘patz-ee,’ a gullible dupe. A pasty is a pastry pocket, filled with potato, onion and any kind of savory meat, or fish.

“It’s not a light food,” Carrie admits. It’s got a substantial history. Knights in Arthurian legends fortified themselves with pasties. So did Cornish miners, who brought them to the copper mines in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where the portable meal proved to have broad appeal. It stays hot in the lunch pail for hours, and it can be held by its pastry corner and eaten without a fork.

Jay and Carrie ate their first pasty from a street vendor on a Christmas trip to England 2 years ago. They couldn’t believe no one was selling them at home.

Jay manages a legal research team at a big firm downtown, and Carrie coordinates the international vetting process for proposals to use the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne Labs. They’ve been looking to open their own business on the side for some time.

They briefly considered opening a produce market to replace the Egg Store, but the space got leased to a physical therapy center, and now Cermak Produce is opening across the street. Pasties, as street food, were still on their minds.

Street food, sold from trucks, is a hot concept in other cities. It’s evolved from the sandwich trucks that pull up alongside construction sites, to a vehicle for cool chefs, who post their itinerary on Twitter, so fans can meet them along the route.

Jay has fond memories of a childhood enterprise selling lemonade and other treats from a simple food truck built from a wagon. He envisioned a human powered vehicle could be ideal for bringing pasties to city streets today. He bought a Workman tricycle-based food truck, and was working out plans to rig it with a hand-washing sink to meet city licensing requirements.

But when he got to the City Hall, the self-powered truck didn’t fly. “It has to be a (automotive) truck,” he was told. He protested bicycles are vehicles with rights of automobiles under the law, but the people behind the desk weren’t convinced.

He’s still got the Workman trike-truck in the garage, in the event they come around, as the city’s thinking on new businesses evolves. It is in the process of evolving on the food truck question right now.

Currently, food trucks in Chicago are limited to selling pre-packaged foods. Chicago chefs like Matt Maroni of Gaztro Wagon, and Philip Foss of Meatyballs Mobile, are pushing the new truck-food concept with dishes they prepare at their restaurant kitchens. And they’ve found an advocate in 32nd Ward Alderman Waguespack, who is backing an ordinance that would allow food trucks, properly outfitted, to sell foods prepared on the truck, provided they stick to a regular route, so food inspectors can catch up for random inspections.

The restaurant establishment is loudly opposed to changing the rules. Restaurateurs complain it’s unfair competition if some guy in a truck can pull up outside their brick and mortar store, which cost them millions to build, and benefit from the same customer demographic. The Illinois Restaurant Association says food trucks should be limited to food deserts.

Some of the complaints – that the trucks don’t have bathrooms so they’ll add strain to other people’s facilities, that they will exhaust city inspectors, who are already in limited supply, that they have an illicit, “gypsy-like” feel – sound weird. The trucks aren’t designed to compete with a restaurant’s sit down business, and they are, by design, on the move.

At any rate, while the proposed ordinance navigates the gauntlet, the pasty is the original pre-packaged food. Jay and Carrie have been lining up their incorporation papers, their licenses and their state health certifications. They’ve also been looking for ways to link up with other local businesses.

The kitchen at at a local pizza restaurant sits empty until afternoon, and it turns out equipment for preparing pizzas also works great for pasties. The Bridgeport Pasty Company could source meat from Allen Brothers on Halsted Street, and produce from Goodness Greenness, the organic wholesaler in Englewood. “The more local, the better,” Carrie says.

Traditional pasties are better known for being filling than for being flavorful, but Carrie has been working on that. She’s developed various wine, herb and curry enhancements; Jay’s been perfecting a flaky, but chewy crust. On New Year’s Day, they hosted a party that turned out to be an advance sampling of some of their best recipes.



The tasters were diverse in their expertise: they included the personal chef for the Governor of Virginia (who is considering setting up shop in Bridgeport when he finishes his current post), as well as an eminent expert in holography, the glass blower for Argonne Labs (who creates all their custom glass instruments by hand), a mixed crowd of cyclists, musicians, sound and video engineers, and at least one Bridgeport blogger.

We all sampled pasties under development for the Bridgeport Pasty Company. And now, we can all attest that they are filling, wholesome, and very, very good. Personally, I predict the pasty will emerge as a Bridgeport specialty, like hot dipped Italian beef is now, except with more vegetables, and more variety, and easier to eat.

Cermak Produce Steps Up Where Jewel Backed Out

Cermak Produce aims to open for business in the former Jewel Store on Halsted and 31st sometime between the last week of February and the first week of April. According to George Bousis, whose family opened the first Cermak Produce in 1993, the Bridgeport store will be the 12th store for the independent grocer. It is also the latest example of an unsung trend in the Chicago grocery market.

The press tends to focus on price wars between supermarket giants, and historically, chains have gained advantage over independentsby steadily consolidating their buying power. But in Chicago, the acquisition of Jewel and Dominick’s by large chains opened new footholds for independents. The behemoths proved less nimble to meet local needs.

Dominick’s lost market share after being purchased by Safeway, one local wholesaler recalls. “One of the first things they did was pull Italian sausage off the shelves,” a misstep they eventually reversed. “That was one of the things the DiMatteo Family was famous for. If you wanted a specialty product, they would get it for you.”

Regulators forced Jewel to divest some of its stores when it acquired Cub Foods 10 years ago, and both chains have gone on to close other urban stores for strategic reasons. Smaller independents – like Caputo’s, Garden Fresh and Pete’s Fresh Market – grew in the gap, sometimes in the abandoned stores.



“We like to open stores in underserved markets,” Bousis says. Like its independently owned peers, Cermak specializes in ethnic niches. Bousis names stores on the far south side and close by on Cermak that specialize in Hispanic products; he says the Bridgeport store will have more bok choy and imported Italian foods.

Meanwhile, he is busy revamping the store’s web-site to make it a portal for consumer input, so the store can respond more directly to customer requests. Whether those requests are for or food items, or for other amenities. Will the Bridgeport store have bike racks? “If people request that, we will.”

Bousis believes Cermak’s products are fresher than products in the big chains too, because the supply chain from the tree to the store is relatively short. “Our guys are at the Chicago Produce Market at 3:00 in the morning, picking out the best produce every day. Jewel has bananas ripening in a warehouse, it might be 8 weeks from the tree to the store. For us, it’s two weeks from the tree to the store.”



Cermak Produce’s stores don’t typically display large selections of organic produce –Bousis says this is partly a technicality. Organic foods in a cooler with non organic ones can’t be labeled organic anymore. “We buy apples from the same place Whole Foods does, they spend more on display and marketing as organic. Their mark up on the apples is 300%; ours is 30%.”

The day I talked to him, wholesale prices for apples at the Chicago International Produce market centered around 75 cents per pound. Apples at the Cermak Store just west of Ashland were 99 cents a pound, across varieties, from Red Delicious to Honeycrisp. Down the street, Dominick’s was selling some varieties for 99 cents a pound with a membership card, but regular prices ranged from $1.99 to $3.99 – Honeycrisps were selling for $2.59 with a member card.

A 300% margin buys more real estate, but not necessarily a better store. The aisles in Dominick’s are vast and increasingly staffless. The aisles at Cermak’s store near Ashland are far more compact: the frozen food section is contained in 2 coolers; the bakery is an electric oven at the front of the store. But you’ll find every type of product you might want at a larger grocery store, with more choices of aloe beverage. And from the meat counter, to the produce aisles, the store is humming with staff restocking the shelves. The produce displays are impeccable, and none of it is sopping wet.

Overall, Cermak’s arrival may be the best reason Bridgeport has to look forward to February

Nana Restaurant's South Side Concept

Omar Solis stands on the roof above Nana restaurant at 33rd and Halsted and looks out over blocks of underdeveloped real estate. Some of the Halsted storefronts are vacant, but all of the rooftops are unused. He’s envisioning a network of small gardens – on rooftops and squeezed into side lots -- all growing herbs and produce for his organic restaurant downstairs, and maybe for other restaurants as they arrive.

The Solis family has been in the restaurant business in Bridgeport for 50 years and 3 generations, since Omar’s grandfather opened Tacos Erendira. Family members were a little skeptical when Omar and his brother Christian first proposed opening a new restaurant featuring organic and locally grown foods. They said it sounded like a north side concept. “That just fueled our determination,” Omar says. “It made us more thorough about what we were doing.”

When Nana opened for brunch a year ago, lines waiting for a table formed out the door. In its first year Nana has expanded into a second storefront, hired a chef and added a dinner menu designed to be constantly changing with what is fresh and locally available. The dinner crowd has grown more slowly, but the food has gotten rave reviews. Locally grown organic appears to work as a south side concept too. Though Omar says when they have a large dinner reservation, half the party still shows up looking for a restaurant at Halsted and Belmont first.

Now, Omar is already a little restless anticipating his next project. He’s been approached by potential partners about bringing Nana to other neighborhoods. He says he’d never really imagined himself pursuing the family restaurant business, he’d always wanted to work for a greater cause. It was only as he’d read about problems in the commercial food industry that he found himself circling back to restaurants. He wants to follow “the concept” -- a sustainable restaurant tied in to the local seasons and fostering a local farm economy -- beyond the neighborhood where he grew up.

But there is still plenty to do in Bridgeport. And Nana has worked out to be something of a development lab. In its first year, Nana teamed up with a class of IIT students to develop potential environmental enhancements, including schemes for adding solar power to the roof, recycling waste heat from the kitchen and converting used cooking oil to fuel the Nana-Mobile, which makes the restaurant’s deliveries.

But the simplest project has been to grow the restaurant’s herbs around the outdoor seating, and Omar hopes to multiply that to rooftops and city owned vacant lots next season. “It’s still a science project at this point,” Omar says. “We have a lot to learn, but we’re looking at using about 15,000 square feet on vacant land, and other buildings my family owns.”

At the same time, he has been trying to put the storefront behind the restaurant to good use. Originally, he had hoped to lease the 1,600 square foot space, but has been frustrated by lack of proposals backed up by written business plans. As the summer drags on, Omar has had some ideas for opening another business in the space himself.

He has so far resisted persistent suggestions from one interested party that he capitalize on relationships with the 30 plus local farmers who already supply the restaurant, to open a badly needed little green grocery. In fact, I am that interested party – it broke my heart when the Egg Store closed, and Halsted Foods could use some back up in the fresh produce department. But Omar is right that the grocery business is notoriously tough, especially in a tiny format. He is considering other restaurant concepts that might build off Nana’s existing kitchen instead.

Meanwhile, one of his neighbors has been building out another new restaurant behind the curtains in a storefront across the street. Omar says that when he asks, the owners have been vague about what kind of restaurant it will be. But he is enthusiastic about potential synergies as Halsted Street wakes up.

For a long time, he says it seemed like property owners on Halsted were hanging back, waiting to see what would happen. Now, new businesses are percolating and the Bridgeport arts scene has been getting press. As owners of neighboring business bring clients to Nana for lunch, Omar has been floating the idea of a new business association to help them cross-fertilize.

“If you look at Wicker Park, or Lincoln Park, they have very active business associations. And I think that’s a weakness in this area, there’s a disconnection among local businesses. There is power in numbers, but we can’t capitalize on that if we don’t really talk to each other."