No One Wants Milkweed Juice at a Neighborhood Restaurant

Chicago is a very segregated city in both class and food culture. It's either hot dogs and tacos or a $700-per-person dinner. It hasn't had many culinary establishments that arein-between as long as I've been here, which is the last five years. When I spent some time at Le Chateaubriand in Paris under Inaki Aizpitarte, it opened my eyes to casual dining. They were able to express themselves through food and have spontaneous cookery, and I realized it's possible to do stuff like that here. Although I've learned something at every place I've worked, it was one of the places that really opened my eyes to all possibilities and showed me how to have my own voice.

I'm originally from Cincinnati, Ohio, but I've spent most of my cooking career in New York City. After ten years in New York kitchens, I was ready for a change. I started talking to some friends from South Korea, and they told me about Yim Gi-Ho at Sandang, a restaurant in the mountains two hours outside of Seoul. I had read about him in Food Arts in 2006, when he was on the cover, and I found him interesting because he had been foraging and serving foraged cuisine since the 90s—before the new Nordic existed. I had my friends call him up to see if he would let me stage there. He said yes.

When I started staging at Sandang, I was the first and only foreigner to work there. It was a weird experience. Yim Gi-Ho's a very spiritual person: He goes on his gut a lot, and he said he felt like I was a good fit, even though he had never talked to me. He turned out to be really eccentric—and really fun. I ended up staying for the whole summer, and I learned a ton about Korean culture and food.

Yim-Gi-Ho is known for his spontaneous cooking—he would run up to the mountains and grab a bunch of weeds and make something out of it. Now that I've opened up my restaurant, Parachute, some of our menu items are inspired by those practices, but it's a harder sell here. We're a restaurant that's trying to appeal to the average customer, and the average customer doesn't really like the more experimental stuff. At Yim Gi-Ho's restaurant, people drove two hours from Seoul to have dinner. It was a destination venue where people really knew what they were getting into.

Yim Gi-Ho was also a painter. He painted my aura,like Jackson Pollock or something—he'd use paint markers and brushes. If he found someone interesting, like a special guest, he would go in the back and paint a picture of them and bring it out to them. It wasn't a portrait; it was a globular, abstract finished product.

People here think having a "craft" is like being a woodworker. He didn't necessarily see it like that: He saw it as something from the heart; you either have it or you don't. I think that was his philosophy. He firmly believed in eating the right way to maintain a healthy lifestyle, wherein everything revolves around food.

At Parachute, my two biggest influences are South Korea and Chateaubriand, and the experiences I had there. I learned more at both places than anywhere else that I've worked in the United States, and in some ways, I feel like I didn't know how to cook before working at those establishments. They're very different restaurants, but I feel like most people don't know how to cook food like that. Both Yim Gi-Ho and Inaki Aizpitarte are self-taught, and never really worked for other people. I've found that, without that influence of rigidity and tradition, they're able to do their own thing, to be innovative because they never went under someone else's wings. They followed their own hearts.

I think that chefs in America are still really into creating "tweezer food" and using smoking guns or foams on the plate to be progressive. Others have been catching on to the new Nordic foraging thing, but not using it in a way that's relative to American culture. No one wants to eat "milkweed juice" at a neighborhood restaurant.

Yim Gi-Ho didn't look at cookbooks. All of his inspiration was pulled from nature. He'd look at a rice paddy or a tree, and return to the restaurant and tell us, "Oh, I had a great idea." At Le Chateaubriand in Paris, they would order a bunch of stuff—whatever the farmer had—which would be waiting for us at the door when we arrived every morning. The delivery drivers had keys to the restaurant. When we got there, within 30-40 minutes of assessing whatever produce we had, the chefs would sit down and put it altogether. In a way, it's just as spontaneous as Yim Gi-Ho's cooking, but the food is more relatable to Westerners.

Now that Parachute is open, I think our dishes reflect the influences of both places. One of our menu items is a seared hanger steak that we top with a puree of Roquefort cheese blended with miso, and then plate with kale and a puree of oysters mixed with tapioca. It binds everything together. The dish echoes the simplicity of Korean cooking and the improvisation of Le Chateaubriand.

I also learned how to make this green plum sauce in Korea that involves a fermentation process that takes four or five months. You buy the plums in June and bury them in sugar, and it extracts all of the liquids out and creates this sweet and sour fermented plum sauce. We serve that with a seared duck breast, along with fresh plums and scallions. That's it. It's something that you look at and then think, what the fuck? when you taste it.

I'd describe Parachute as a neighborhood restaurant. Some of Yim Gi-Ho's food was often as minimalist as two river crabs on a plate with a dot of sauce, and we try to keep our menu in that same spirit. There are some things that don't need more than two or three ingredients on a plate, but that's really hard to do. Sometimes being simple is not easy.

Johnny Clark is the co-chef and co-owner of Parachute in Chicago, Illinois, with his wife, Beverly Kim. The duo was nominated for the 2016 James Beard "Best Chef: Great Lakes" category and the establishment was a finalist for the 2015 James Beard "Best New Restaurant." Visit Parachute's website for more info.