![]() Bezsylko discusses a new pig’s tail breakfast dish with chef de cuisine Gabriel Moya while he shapes cardoon croquettes. “Your overly ambitious friend’s house.”īehind the counter, the orderly kitchen hums with activity. ![]() “People tell me being here is like eating at your friend’s house,” she says. Like any good GM, she seems to know everyone who walks through the door on a first-name basis. General Manager Emily Sher is at her usual morning post in the back corner, updating the week’s menu online (CDP is closed Mondays and Tuesdays). The breakfast and lunch menus, which will remain for just a week or two, are scrawled on two big mirrors affixed to the wall. The 20-seat room is bright and airy thanks to a much-needed remodel over the winter that traded dark, heavy wood tables for blonde reclaimed slabs dyed with turmeric and custom ash-wood chairs. by the time I arrive, the place by now buzzing with young families divvying up pastries and laptop-wielders sipping coffee. And to (hopefully) eat half my weight in bread and butter. I spent the morning there a few weeks back to understand what goes into the best damn breakfast in the city. It recently, however, found national fame from a story in Bon Appètit, who named ours the “Restaurant City of the Year” and described Cellar Door Provisions as the Sqirl of Chicago, “minus the crowds, national hype, celebrities and lines.” In the three years since it opened, Cellar Door has flown mostly under the radar. It also means you are not allowed to leave until you’ve had a croissant. That could mean bold, resourceful veggie dishes like mapo turnips and broccoli rabe kimchi (the menu changes, naturally). It’s the kind of bread that makes carb counters question their life choices, and is best enjoyed the same way my grandfather used to eat poppy seed bagels: with a pat of butter slathered upon every bite.īut at this Logan Square eatery co-owned by Ethan Pikas and Tony Bezsylko, it’s necessary to try everything. For a city that only recently began to take bread seriously, this is very good news.Įvery hunk is a good hunk: dark, crackly crust gives way to a chewy interior and a faint tang of sourdough. "A lot of that has to do with the fact that we use very good eggs, very good milk, very good cream and we blend it before we fill it," Bezsylko said.The first thing to know about Cellar Door Provisions, the little corner cafe with a soul of a bakery, is that the bread and butter are exceptional. Plus, it features the city's best quiche, made by blending eggs, milk and cream, then pouring it over soft onions, slowly-cooked in butter, all housed in a flaky, delicate, homemade crust. "There is kouign-amann, which is a slightly sweeter croissant dough made with a little bit of orange blossom water," Bezsylko said.Ī small lunch menu features simple fare but also hearty bowls of sauerkraut soup featuring root vegetables and tender beef brisket. But there's a lot more than bread here, including French pastries like canele and madelines, plus delicate macarons and a number of laminated doughs such as flaky croissants and chocolate-filled versions. The chewy, slightly tangy bread is made even more spectacular with Kilgus Farm Creamery butter topped with sea salt. "80 to 87 percent of the flour weight is water, that helps us get a nice texture, nice crust and crumb texture and open crumb," Bezsylko said. It ferments for four to six hours, then gets gently placed into flour-lined baskets before rising in a refrigerator for two nights. The dough is naturally leavened using a sourdough culture they make in-house. We buy some of our grain from Molly Breslin, who's got a farm a couple hours south of here in Ottawa, Illinois," said co-owner Tony Bezsylko. But Cellar Door Provisions is different in that the bread and pastries form the backbone of their operations, along with a quiche that is the best of its kind in Chicago. Most bakeries are content with cranking out some pastries and a few loaves of bread each day. A tiny cafe in Logan Square is quietly elevating both of them, along with a menu of pastries and lunch items. There are few things as humble as bread and butter, and yet those two items can also be incredibly complex, if you take the time to make each from scratch.ĬHICAGO (WLS) - There are few things as humble as bread and butter, and yet those two items can also be incredibly complex, if you take the time to make each from scratch.
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