People Who Feed You

For a loaf of bread from Publican Quality Bread to reach you, wheat must be grown and harvested and sent to a stone mill to be ground into flour, which then goes through a process as long as 60 hours at the bakery. 

Coffee as a beverage similar to what we drink today is first noted in Yemen. Now, a new wave of entrepreneurs from Dearborn, Michigan are spreading unique Yemeni coffee across the United States, including to the suburbs of Chicago.

Mike Alesi and Jennifer Pou-Alesi got married just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world. They decided to start cooking the food of Pou-Alesi's home country of Malaysia, a story recounted in a new short film. 

If you've eaten tofu in Chicago, you've probably eaten Phoenix Bean's product. Jenny Yang bought the company on something of a whim in the mid-2000s, but now it has had to expand into a new factory to keep up with demand, while still only using Illinois-grown soybeans.

Two cousins opened the first Eggholic, a restaurant featuring a distinctive style of Indian food focusing on eggs, in Schaumburg in 2018. By the end of this year, there will be 28 Eggholics across the country. How did they do it?

Honey Butter Fried Chicken celebrates its tenth anniversary in a challenging business this year. From almost the beginning, it has offered benefits to its employees, unusually for the time, and has recently supported their own businesses and pop-ups.

The celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich came to America as a child and found a new home and life. In a new special, she visits, cooks, and eats with immigrants, especially those who have settled in less urban parts of America, as a way of thanking her adopted home country. 

Sam Rattanopas and Mina Sudsaard met while children in Thailand, and now co-own NaKorn in Evanston, where they serve upscale Thai food. 

At his Chicago restaurant Hermosa, Ethan Lim offers Cambodian-inspired sandwiches during the day and a "Family Meal" multi-course private dining menu at night. He's the subject of a new American Masters profile. 

“God bless the pioneers of the Indian community who brought Indian food [to the United States], but we’ve gotten settled into this greatest hits world,” says Zubair Mohajir, the chef behind the buzzy Wicker Park restaurant Wazwan. 

Fatima Zabiha Foods was started by a Pakistani immigrant who realized that "halal" meat in the U.S. was ill-defined. He wanted meat that conformed to his expectations. Now Chicago is a leading provider of halal meat, and Fatima continues to grow.

Devon Quinn operates not just the Avondale restaurant Eden and the various catering businesses of The Paramount Group, but also grows a wide variety of plants for their use in a greenhouse. "It’s just about that connection from earth to plate,” he says. 

“Fewer and fewer people just don’t know farmers, and so they don’t understand what goes into it,” says Abra Berens, who has received national attention for both her produce-focused cookbooks and her literal farm-to-table cooking at a farm in southwest Michigan.

Sisters Amy and Clodagh Lawless own and operate The Dearborn in the Loop, but previously chafed at the lack of recognition they received as women in the restaurant industry—and scions of an Irish restaurant family. “We’re always Billy Lawless’s daughter or Billy Lawless’s sister,” Clodagh says. “I’m like, ‘Excuse me.’”

The exuberantly creative Esmé presents plenty of culinary conundrums for beverage pairings, which are handled by Tia Barrett. But she also champions beverage producers who are people of color or have a charitable component.