Don’t Worry, She’s Not Quitting Her Day Job
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A North Shore native, Tshilds graduated with a BFA in painting from Bard College in 1990, then returned to Chicago. In 1994 she began working at the Logan Beach Cafe, the restaurant she’d reopen five years later as Lula. “I was just living across the street and needed a job,” she says. “I started as a barista, and then I kinda asked the owner if I could start cooking.” At Logan Beach she met her future business partner, Jason Hammel, who became her boyfriend and then in 2004 her husband. “He was cooking at another place, but he would come in and we got to know each other,” she says. “Logan Beach went through a couple different owners and then eventually went out of business. I don’t know why, but Jason and I thought, ‘Well, let’s start our own place together.’”
Since 1999 Lula has grown slowly but steadily, expanding into an adjacent space in 2002, and these days it’s one of the city’s most beloved contemporary American restaurants, emphasizing fresh, seasonal ingredients from local organic farms. Tshilds consistently puts in 80-hour weeks, but for the first few years her schedule was especially grueling and she saw less and less of her bands. Tallulah broke up in 2004, shortly after the long-delayed release of their only album, Step Into the Stars, and by then Paulina Hollers gigs were few and far between.
That somebody turned out to be one of Tshilds’s employees, bartender Mike Eggert. A musician himself, he’d been toying with the idea of starting his own label and releasing Tshilds’s record; this past winter he was playing a CD-R of the album at Lula, and a restaurant regular who liked what he heard offered to loan him money to help get the project off the ground.
In August the Michigan label Genuflect Records will release a Silkworm tribute, An Idiot to Not Appreciate Your Time, which has been in the planning stages since before Dahlquist’s death. The final track listing isn’t settled yet, but the disc will include at least 20 Silkworm covers by indie acts from around the U.S. and Europe.
Where: Empty Bottle, 1035 N. Western
