Schwa
Carlson, the 31-year-old chef and owner of Schwa, opened his 28-seat restaurant in the former Lovitt space last fall, and in a kitchen the size of a Wicker Park bedroom has been honing a progressive American cuisine that’s surprisingly creative and refined. A Glen Ellyn native, Carlson dropped out of the Culinary and Hospitality Institute of Chicago about eight years ago to learn to cook the old-fashioned way, doing a series of “stages”–brief apprenticeships–over the course of three trips to Europe. Most recently he did a stint at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal’s English temple of “molecular gastronomy” (which also has a ridiculously tiny kitchen). “That was awesome,” he says. “It was the first time I got to use liquid nitrogen.” Before that he spent almost two years at Spiaggia under Paul Bartolotta and a year and a half at Trio with Grant Achatz, who says he knew as soon as Carlson walked in the door that he had chops.
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The beet salad is a study in the possibilities of beets: wedges of roasted and pickled red and golden tubers with a swoosh of powdered beet. Dressed with a brilliant green parsley leaf puree, a parsley root puree, and foamed goat cheese, it’s vibrantly geometric; as the juices blend on the plate the flavors combine to create a mouthful far more complex than the component parts. In the pumpkin and chocolate dessert, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin puree, a dab of pumpkin oil, toasted pumpkin seeds, and creme fraiche gang up on a poor defenseless chocolate brownie.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Rob Werner.
