Feed
Inside, Donna Knezek, one of the original owners of Leo’s Lunchroom and the founder of Bite, is roasting four birds on the WondeRoaster, a 40-year-old rotisserie. Her chalkboard menu begins: “1/4 chicken, 1/2 chicken, whole chicken.” One entire wall is decorated with framed close-ups of several dozen other birds–“celebrity chicken photos,” in Knezek’s words–and a few chickens, some with nests and eggs, have been hand painted above the molding. And then there’s the chicken on the plate: salty and succulent, with the golden crackle of skin that makes a rotisserie bird so viscerally satisfying.
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“Everybody likes chicken,” says Knezek, who opened Feed earlier this month with her girlfriend, Liz Sharp. “I’m at this intersection of neighborhoods here. We got majorly old-school Italian over here, I got blacks to this side of me, I’ve got the Puerto Ricans, and then I got the yuppies moving in. But everybody loves chicken.”
She pulls out a faded newspaper. There’s Knezek–“when I was young and skinny”–in the September 4, 1992, issue of the Reader, balanced atop the curved counter at Leo’s, a plate in her left hand and her right hand angled toward it like a game-show model. “With hundreds of ethnic cookbooks . . .”; she reads about herself and then stops to laugh. “And look what I’m doing now.
Specifically, she bought something called Fast Food House and renamed it Chicken Hut 17–that’s what her business license says. The final name came later after she acquired an actual feed store sign (from her friend Tracy Ostmann, who also painted the chickens above the molding), the word feed emblazoned across it in a font Knezek attributes to French’s mustard. The restaurant’s walls are barn red, and a slice of corrugated tin juts over the counter. A few semicommunal tables are placed around the perimeter, and there’s a white piano that was dragged in from the alley against one wall.
