After years of eating in fine dining restaurants, I am fairly good at clocking if I am going to like a restaurant immediately upon entry. A giant door that opens to the sexiest playlist I’ve heard in my life? (Ilis) Smash. White table cloths? (You know who you are) Pass. Little heart shaped lamps on the table? (HAGS) Smash. Spotlights over the table for Instagram photos? (Matsu) Pass. An open kitchen which chants in unison? (Jeune et Jolie) Smash. A line of heat lamps with chefs who all wear branded bakers skull caps like it’s 2002? (Lupi & Iris) Pass. A giant chandelier hanging from the center of your bar with colored glass windows that turn your restaurant into a kaleidoscope at sunset? (Herbst) Smash. Four people working your entry and a wall of service staff chatting while I can see straight across the restaurant that food is dying at the pass and your kitchen team is hanging on for dear life? (Porzana) Pass.
So upon entry into Schwa, I was confused, because it was 26 seats (smash) with It’s Goin’ Down by Yung Joc playing (surprisingly, smash) with zero welcome (pass, usually). And then a tall bald man came up to me and yelled (and I do mean yelled–it’s so loud in there they have to), “Someone will seat you in a minute,” and look I’ve had enough chefs yell at me for a goddamn lifetime (pass). Four giant white jock guys rudely brushed past my body to get out the door leading me to say (yell!) to one of them, “Do you see the women in your life or do you just run them over?” And he opened his mouth to say something back to me and that’s when someone yelled at me, “You’re right over there,” which, because I didn’t expect to write about Schwa until like 2pm that day, I didn’t do any research, so this is when I realized there were no servers (smash). I had no idea if I was going to like this place or hate it. But I did know one thing: whether or not I liked it, I was writing about it, because it was BYOB and my purse was full of N/A drinks I spent the afternoon mixing N/A co*cktails in an AirBnB in a $6 egg pan I got from H Mart to pair mygoddamnself.
I sat in the corner of the restaurant with a purse full of N/A drinks I made that afternoon, lined with thin ice packs. I started unpacking them. That’s when Chef de Cuisine Caleb Trahan came over and yelled at me, “Hi I’m Caleb and I’ll be taking care of you but you’ll also see,” and then he said the names of two other men.
Those names are lost to me, because I realized something as he was talking to me, I could take you here. I mean you, whoever you are.
Then he yelled, “We’ll get started in a minute,” as the music overhead blasted, “Meet me in the club, it’s going down.”
I knew one thing immediately. A common complaint I have about a lot of restaurants I wouldn’t have about this place. Regardless of if I liked anything that came out of that kitchen, at least it had some f*cking soul.
Writer’s note: I edited this piece to It’s Goin’ Down to make sure it fit the vibe. But you’ll never hear me listening to this song ever again.
It hit me when I was in Target in Chicago that I don’t think I, personally, would have been able to go into Target for months when I got sober, without picking up a drink.
The first three months of my sobriety, my ex-fiance had my wallet. I changed over all my cards so I couldn’t use Apple Pay or online booze delivery. I crossed the street when I saw a liquor store. The first few months I got sober, really and honestly, I should have been in rehab. I got sober on the shakes and in a house with a partner who had no idea what to do now that his addict girlfriend was in obvious pain on the couch. It took me a while to tell everyone else in my life because they had, until that point, all thought I was sober when I had been drinking (and smoking weed) for quite some time. That’s being an addict–it lives in the shadows.
I’m glad I got sober in a state where the alcohol at Target was limited to a teeny, tiny section, not bursting and bubbling out the door. In Chicago, they had these one serving mixed co*cktails that you literally had to walk right into. I am sure in the early days of my sobriety, I would have said to myself, “Just one.”
Two years sober, I stood in the door flabbergasted at the display. I said out loud, “What?” I tried to look behind me to see any way you could maybe enter and not get smacked in the face with alcohol. You can’t.
After going through the grocery aisle, I was even more flabbergasted. The alcohol in Target took up more floor space than the food. In the two floor Target there wasn’t a kitchen section, the thing Target is known for, where you can get a plate with birds on it and Ninja soda water thing as well as some ugly pillows from Joanna Gaines. When I realized there was no kitchen section, after walking the store three times on the phone with my sober boyfriend just totally flummoxed, I walked back downstairs and stared at the alcohol and said, “You took the place of my f*cking sauce pan.” I needed it to do what every girl does when she goes to Chicago–make cinnamon syrup in her AirBnB.
Alcohol is everywhere. In bars. At brunch. In Target. Online. Inside chocolate. At weddings. In the goddamn office. In sauces (though cooked alcohol is fine for me). In N/A co*cktails I’ve ordered non-alcoholic without a f*cking stutter. On the lips of men I tried to date.
N/A co*cktails are becoming more and more of a thing, which I’m grateful for most of the time, except when alcohol crosses the bar or when a team serves sh*tty drinks for $120 on a pairing that doesn’t pair.
I was at Target because in the middle of my dinner the night before (Atelier) which started strong and let me down horribly with sweet drink after sweet drink, I got the same bee in my bonnet that I get from time to time. It’s a thing in me that says, “Fine, I’ll do it myself.” Schwa was BYOB. And Schwa had a menu up online, so I started planning it sitting at Atelier eating food that, honestly, wasn’t cooked all that well (sunken cornbread, overset custard, wet rice).
In the same way that I’m not a chef, just a girl who knows a lot about food and can whip you up a mean meal, I have no formal training in beverage. I also can still pair wine with your meal for you, if you’re drinking, and I love to do it. I got a friend’s mom a bougie vintage Cab Franc for her 60th birthday (a vintage for a good vintage). Muddy Waters (RIP) bartenders used to write my name on their port bottle when I was twenty one. I was a slu*t for Amaro, Japanese Whiskey, Veuve. I knew my dessert wines in blind tastings. I infused my own vodka with lilac or something dumb like jalapeno for god’s sake.
I hid my alcoholism behind knowing a lot about alcohol, with a giant bar and deep knowledge about urban wineries in the US doing weird sh*t.
I was also, just because we all love contrast, a Budweiser girl and I could out chug you beer to beer at Williams (RIP) in that basem*nt corner booth while the jocks played that deer hunting game and peanuts cracked below our shoes. No man was ever worried about that. No. They were impressed by that. They should have been worried, because somehow I got home—but I never really remembered how.
Like many women hiding their drinking, I drank Negronis and extra dry Martinis and bottles of wine at the end of my drinking days, hands shaking picking up the first one. I went to two bars in a tourist town, Boitson’s and The Anchor (RIP to them both), and on my 30 day soberversary one of those bars commented on my Instagram post saying, “We’re so happy!” One of the bartenders hugged me when he saw me walking my dog saying, “I thought you were going to throw your life away.”
Chefs from New York told me they were glad I got sober, which, look chefs and bartenders and your f*cking bar telling you they’re glad you’re sober, that tells you all you need to know about the way I drank.
Hard and fast. To bottom. Working on my business sitting at a bar from 5pm-9pm ordering a shot of whiskey for the door and continuing to work at home. Until I was 30, I was able to keep the alcohol away until at least the afternoon, though I thought about it all the time.
And no one told me this, so maybe no one has told you this, but most people don’t think about alcohol all the time.
In a dying relationship, in a town I didn’t know many people in, on the verge of losing the thing I had worked so hard to build, no longer able to keep it together until my last meeting of the day, no longer able to keep it together until lunch–that’s when I got sober. So, I know how to drink.
Unlike the movies you see where people pour vodka and cheap beer down the drain, I hopped off a plane (I got sober in an airport with a delayed flight) and immediately started pouring $5,000 of carefully curated port, sherry, champagne, vermouth, Campari, gin, vodka I infused myself, and Cab Franc (my favorite wine) down the drain.
Two years sober, I think you’d be hard pressed to find someone who has had as many N/A pairings as I have since I’ve been sober–and as far reaching.
From coast to coast, in the south, in the midwest, in rural towns, in big cities. Name an N/A spirit, I’ve had it. Name a dealcoholized beer, I’ve drunk it. Name an N/A wine, I’ve sighed over how the scene has gotten better but isn’t there yet. Name a 0 ABV bitter, I’ve used it. Name a canned mocktail, I’ve sipped it. Name a juice (carrot, cabbage, honeydew melon, persimmon, beet, whatever), I’ve had it inside some bougie restaurant next to a dish that might be better without it. Name a tea, someone has probably turned it into a mocktail for me. Name a city, I can tell you what their N/A scene is like–if they rely on spirits, things in cans, what their cult beers are, if their programs lean juice or tea or neither, if everyone loves to throw sh*t into whipped cream canisters, if they know what they’re doing (Seattle) or not (DC).
My fridge is so full of N/A drinks that friends don’t even ask if I have something in the fridge anymore, they just open it. And strangers all over the country send me menus while inside bars asking me what to order—and if I see that, I answer. Because addict to addict, I will give you my time whenever, and because most of this sh*t is so disappointing that I’ll be able to tell you when to steer clear of a $15 and pick up that $4.50 Heineken 0.0 instead.
I know what’s good. I know what’s bad. I know what makes a meal better. I know what makes a meal worse. I have the canker sores and frown lines to prove it.
I truly believe that if you consume enough of something, something inside you gets good at making it. It’s how I learned to cook Indian food (eating it), how I figured out molecular gastronomy (sitting and staring at boring dishes stuck in 2009), and how I figured out how to make a salad dressing that bangs (chasing gorgeous salads city to city and stockpiling what my boyfriend affectionately calls a library of vinegar to recreate them).
So while standing in Target cursing the inability to find a saucepan with a basket full of sugar, cinnamon, and chamomile tea, I was confident that my DIY AirBnB last minute unstocked bar pairing was going to be better than most of the ones I had in Chicago.
Because I’m not making it as a supplement to my preferred wine or co*cktail pairing–I’m drinking these pairings like it’s one way I save my goddamn life.
Beverage directors, somms, mixologists, whoever, understand that you pair beer, wine, and co*cktails differently with meals. Because they are different things. But N/A drinks have often been thrown into the same category as one of the above.
I’ve seen people pair meals like wine even when they’re using zero non-alcoholic wine. I’ve seen people use the pairing of light to dark with tea, but some tea is actually pretty light in flavor and dark in color (say, a purple tea mostly made of flower petals). I’ve seen people just pick whatever the heck is easiest, like the same three wines I’ve had over and over and over, not actually considering flavor notes–and look, I know, it’s harder to consider flavor notes like brioche or oak on N/A wine. There are fewer bottles, and some things you might look for in a Pinot Grigio are not present in the 2-3 on the market for a dish you’re making.
But you choose it because you’re like, “f*ck it, that’s close enough for sober people.” I’m here to tell you it’s not.
My favorite menus pair element to element directly. Not like the popcorn note in Chardonnay pairs with popcorn, but like Oksusu-cha pairs with popcorn. Not like the strawberry in this Cab Franc pairs with your strawberry dessert, but like this strawberry tonic pairs with your strawberry dessert. Take a carrot boba drink from Ever, with the carrot terrine as a prime example.
Ever does N/A pairings masterfully, pulling one element out of a dish and making a drink revolve around it, so it actually pairs. I think it’s part of why I love Ever so much, when lots of my food savvy friends think it’s great but not excellent—the N/A pairings make the food better. That is their potential.
I’ve been told by some beverage directors that they don’t do that because it feels heavy handed, but then they serve me six sweet drinks like that ain’t heavy handed.
My favorite pairings take a minor element in a dish–the flower you used mostly because it’s pretty, the nori salt, the one orange dollop at the bottom of your pour over soup, the bit of puffed rice, smoke–and then turn that into a drink.
So like:
Rose petals on top of a lil baby salad paired with a rose and tonic.
Nori salt paired with a weird ass N/A margarita that has a nori salt rim.
One tiny orange dollop under your soup paired with a playful take on an orange whiskey sour.
Tiny bits of puffed rice paired with a take on multiple Indian soda’s little puffs.
Smoke on a dish paired with a tea you’ve put on C02 and smoke table side in a dumb little dome.
Your girl even infused a honey with truffle, made a goddamn spritz, and paired it with popcorn I shaved truffle all over for my goddamn birthday. For me. Alone. At my house. For fun.
Far more interesting, far more alive, than giving me the same N/A wine I’ve had 50 times because there are like 15 good ones and you all use the same ones.
I think the reason I think this way is that I’ve been vegetarian for long enough to know that most of the time, restaurants pair wine with vegetarian meals like sh*t, too. Used to thinking of meat, not used to thinking about anything else, I think that most restaurants aren’t intentionally phoning it in, but they’re missing the point: pairing is about the dish, not just the protein, and creative N/A co*cktails, like vegetarian pairings, normally don’t rely on the protein. They rely on something minor but important, something that makes you taste both back to back and go, “Yeah, that paired.”
I just don’t think most people in these restaurants have eaten an entire meal paired with the drinks they make, with the intention of consuming the drink in its entirety over the course in front of them.
I think they’re sipping, thinking really hard, and saying, “Sure, fine, that’s the best we can get.” And I don’t really vibe with best we can get when you’re charging me $120, ya know?
Most beverage directors are not sitting there at dish seven with canker sores, a headache, and the aftertaste of fake wine sitting in their mouth and ruining the flavor everything else. Or they’re not at the end of the meal like, “Did I drink so much vinegar that my insides are squeaky clean like my windows?”
Or they’re not realizing that they have a unique opportunity to make the drink less about the alcohol replacement and more about the food, which means they have more freedom, not less. They’re often not thinking about these things. But I am.
Sitting at Atelier, not finishing my drinks, I pulled up the Schwa menu and got to work. I stared by pulling out an element from each dish listed online, which is honestly kind of a hard thing to do, because I hadn’t tasted anything else and was going based on feeling. Here’s how I started–just one element pulled out after another. Ignore the squiggles. It’s a screenshot.
If I had been home, or if I had tasted the menu, I would have done things differently.
I would have custom made every drink over multiple days. I would have actually brought sh*t in and tasted it beside the dish, like one does. But I was in an AirBnB with no ability to taste the menu before hand. I had stick up my butt and a bee in my bonnet and canker sores from Atelier, so I took that menu and did what I could with it, relying mostly on my own arsenal of drinks, with some help from my favorite canned N/As.
I drove out of Target to H Mart, scouring the aisles for a short list of things: a f*cking pan I could use since Target didn’t have one (secured), roasted corn tea, apricot juice. Then I headed out to the N/A stores–two of them honestly not very good and one excellent–I picked up most of what I needed from In Good Spirits, but the full list of what I got across stores was: Champignon Dreams (De Soi), Proxies Rose, Three Spirit Nightcap, and Woodnose Sacre. Then I sat my ass down in this giant, unstocked, wasted AirBnB kitchen and got to work.
My friends thought I was a little nuts. To spend an entire day in Chicago making syrup in your AirBnB? Honestly, kind of weird! But that’s who I am. Meticulous and slightly manic and once something enters my head, it’s hard to get it out.
I made cinnamon syrup. I reduced apricot juice. I drained a can of chickpeas for the aquafaba. I took the truffle shavings off my Kasama croissant and made a teeny, teeny, teeny amount of syrup with it. Then I put that sh*t in my purse on ice. I did not intend for this purse of mine to become drink purse, but it is–perfectly fits five drinks at the bottom and one on the top.
Two of my favorite N/A drinks in cans were lovingly placed in my purse, but I wished I had had time to make a truffle soda (I just didn’t have enough truffle) and strawberry black walnut martini.
I spent the entire day in my kitchen trying to prove something: that elemental pairing done in a couple of hours blind will always outweigh old school methods of pairings when it comes to N/A drinks. I think I was right.
I’ve walked by Schwa so many times. I mostly navigate major cities on foot, in a way most locals in those cities don’t. I get it from living in a city where 40 minutes is walkable and then applying that to my short stint in Philadelphia. You learn a lot about a city by how it changes when you walk around it. So I knew right where I was going. A pretty nondescript door with an awning over it that just says schwa.
Then I had a minor scuffle at the door with another patron who acted like I didn’t exist and then I was sat in a corner table, looking out over the restaurant, listening to rap music, kind of bewildered that no one ever told me, “You should go to Schwa,” in the way people told me, “You should go to Boka.” (Boka is fine.)
Chef Trahan asked me if I was pairing every course (not every), is my only restriction alcohol (yes–Schwa is the only restaurant I ate at sans restriction in Chicago, and I did that on purpose), if cooked off alcohol fine (yes), and do I need multiple glasses for that (no).
When he left, I looked at my table. There was no sign that I was pairing my meal. That’s when it became apparent to me that at least one person in the kitchen knew what I was doing from my social media.
Look, I’m grungy, and I lived in my car, and I don’t need to make more work for you by having six glasses. I used to reuse needles in my teens (I know this makes people squirmy but find me a long-time addict who hasn’t), I can reuse a glass. So I said that two was fine and I would rotate them out. I chugged water between courses out of glasses that held other drinks, now glossy with my slightly greasy fingerprints. All night, the team kept asking me if I needed more glasses in a way that made me feel cared for, or looked after, and I kept saying no, which is my own way of caring for a kitchen.
I try not to be in the way–I mean I know I’m in the way, I’m writing these vignettes and I’m hard on restaurants, but I try my best not to be in the way outside of being a bit of a pain in the ass. Quiet and polite (yes, please, thank you), not asking for anything extra, in and out of your table, though I know my face sometimes looks screw-y (as a general rule, the more perplexed I look, the happier I am, and I’m sorry about that, but it’s because I’m thinking).
The first dish hit my table and once again someone was yelling at me, music blasting behind me. It didn’t feel abrasive. You get used to it.
You get used to it like you get used to bass at concerts or how you get used to salt in a restaurant that knows how to salt their food. Friends of mine sometimes come with me to restaurants and tell me that a meal is too salty on dish one or two and I’ll say, “No, you’re used to undersalted food,” and by the end of a perfectly salted meal, they’ll get it (and it sort of ruins undersalted food for them, which, sorry), but it takes time.
Schwa paired the first dish with a float–and it was the first (and unfortunately last) time that I would have uni (I realized in Chicago that I have a mild shellfish allergy).
The float was good, good enough for me to think that if they had an N/A pairing, it would also be good.
The float was a good indication of what was to come, but the uni wasn’t. Every other flavor was drowned out by the little cracker vessel which looked like it came from the sea, like some kind of coral, and felt beautiful. I picked the “legs” off the vessel before I ate the uni because I knew it was too much cracker. Even with everything I cracked off, it still felt like too much.
But as far as Schwa goes, that’s literally my only one of two points of (minor) feedback I have on the food.
Because the rest of the meal? Rap music and yelling and men on double dates with their wives talking about stocks all night be damned, it was twee and wildly creative and felt a little like Alice in Wonderland. I have no other word but: gorgeous.
All my pairings held up except my first one–the Champignon Dreams, one of my favorite N/A drinks, was too strong of a flavor against the raviolo and crab. But that’s the risk of blind pairing. If I had time, I know what I would have done. A champagne style N/A wine with truffle and sassafras syrup and maybe something else, depending. You shoot the raviolo back. It’s a classic, executed well. It feels disjointed from the rest of the menu in its simplicity.
The eating of the dish (shooting it) feels in line with the rest of the meal, but the dish itself feels more classic than Schwa leans. It felt safe in a way no other dish did. Who doesn’t love a truffle raviolo? People did–love it. Everyone around me who was paced with me was giggling while shooting it. One man kind of got some on his shirt and his wife took her finger to get the sauce on her finger and then licked his shirt when she didn’t get it all, which try that at Daniel, and I’m sure someone across the room would look at you like you just broke some kind of code. So interactively, this dish felt like the soul of Schwa, and execution wise (perfect), it felt like Schwa.
But for me, when I think of what I love about Schwa it’s that the play comes from the food itself. Wildly inventive. Deeply personal. I felt those things at Schwa. I think maybe, thinking about it now, knowing more about the creation of the menu now, the reason I didn’t feel it was cohesive is that maybe it wasn’t nested in story like the rest of the menu was. But that’s a guess.
I am sure some people would tell me that it was sequential, right? That they build you up to the weird, the wild, the creative. But I think that Schwa could hit people over the head with a weird dish right out of the gate and nail it. For me, with dish one and two, I was spinning my wheels waiting for magic.
The menu started on dish three—for me. The crab.
Designed to be a take on a crab dip, you take the piece from the rim and swipe it across the bowl. Before I did that, I tasted each element alone. Perfectly salted, each could stand on their own, but together, it was whimsical and fun.A man broke his stock talk to say that, “That’s fun,” he said, before returning to predicting if they should hold or sell their Tesla stocks. And look, you can talk about whatever you want at Schwa, but I think maybe you should spend less time talking about Tesla and more time talking about something—anything—else.
My sablefish was beautiful (and I don’t actually like fish all that much, but I could eat an entire plate of it) paired next to cornbread, a strange trend in Michelin starred restaurants that came out of nowhere and has now taken coast to coast starting in Michelin starred restaurants and working its way into some of the fine dining restaurants in my hometown, with each chef saying that they didn’t realize other people were doing it. I’ll be writing about what I’m calling Trend Cornbread later in the year, but this cornbread is made by a man from the south, and so it was Actually Good Cornbread, covered in sabayon as a reminder of how a mother once poked holes in the cornbread to let the butter soak in (which is, honestly, my preferred way to eat cornbread, fancy or not).
I could say more about this dish, but I’ll save it for another time, when I’m looking at cornbread in fancy restaurants head to head. What I can say is that I paired this dish like a f*cking champ. Roasted corn tea is underutilized outside of Korean restaurants in pairings and it shouldn’t be. In another world, I would have put that sh*t in a whipped cream canister with some rhubarb syrup, but roasted corn tea in sparkling water was the break I needed, personally, from sugary-syrupy drinks.
For me, the moment I realized that Schwa had something–that Schwa was something–was when Chef Trahan brought me a quail meant to look like a candied apple. When he stepped away, I didn’t eat it right away, I just stared at it.
The bone like a stem. The candied apple shell actually green and crackling. I felt deeply moved by it visually. It felt like something right out of Snow White. I was looking at it long enough for one of the other men working there to ask me if everything was all right. It was. I’m not the too pretty to eat kind of girl, but I felt awe struck by it.
I mean—look at it. Really look at it.
So many restaurants reach for a dish like that, which is creative and bold and also deeply representative of something else, like a mirror, and this dish achieved it. I don’t think a candy apple shell on a bird should work. But it did. It felt alive and different. After meal after meal after meal in fine dining restaurants, it’s rare that something stops me in my tracks. But this one did. And that’s my bias. That’s what I eat for. Can I get this anywhere else, and if so, can I get it done as well as here? The answer to both of those questions is no. This is a dish of Schwa—and if you tried to recreate it, I don’t think you’d do it right.
I eat to feel like this, just totally stopped in my tracks. I don’t eat for sustenance. And I don’t eat to be full (though I clock if a meal can fill you up and I am kind of grumpy when I eat a bad meal and then need pizza).
The night before I published this piece, my boyfriend and I talked about that—how I’m happy leaving a restaurant not totally satiated, because I’m satiated by other things. “That’s not what you’re there for,” he said. And it’s not. He sees food as a craft—and himself as a craftsman. I see food as either art or craft—and I chase mostly art.
I’m in a restaurant chasing something like this. Staring down a dish and saying, “That’s perfect and no other kitchen can do it quite like that.”
The shell cracking in my mouth reminded me of childhood, the use of the bone of the quail instead of a fork and knife felt whimsical and slightly animal. Every element was bursting with flavor, but more than that, with creativity.
The pairing I had with this–and the following dish–a standard (well executed) take on a foie tart but with apple jack and cinnamon, worked like a bridge between dishes to tie them together. It was chamomile tea, soda water, cinnamon syrup. Easy, simple, better than some sugary wine substitute.
It’s rare for me to have a meal that just keeps getting better. Most meals have moments of brilliance and then the light goes out by dessert–and I’m fine with that. The moment, for me, is enough. But Schwa kept getting better.
Wagyu so beautiful it made me say, “Oh,” out loud without meaning to, dressed up to look like a deer or mystical creature in the bowl. It felt like fantasy. Once eaten, a ramen broth with tea and kataifi that once rehydrates resembles noodles. Proxies rose, which is strawberry heavy, does pair well with this dish and I recommend it.
I normally hate when restaurants try to make me a savory tea. It’s boring. It’s old. It is deeply referential and no one tells you the reference. I've never had a tea and been like, “That’s special.” I’m like, “Cool, you can make a savory tea, thanks for sharing.” Sometimes, honestly, it’s the best thing on a menu and that often makes me sad because it’s like why is your turnip tea better than everything else (looking at you Eleven Madison Park)?
But I loved this one. I thought it was special. I took my time with each element. I cared for it in a way I don’t normally with food.
I was writing so intensely about this dish that someone tried to come and take it away from me before I was done, but when I look at my notes, they’re honestly useless, because I wrote things like, “It feels like magic.” Most of my notes at Schwa are useless in a way that makes me kick myself. I didn’t stop to write down everything that was said to me. I didn’t even really write anything about the flavor profile. It’s just a jumble of sh*t like, “Beautiful,” or, “Gorgeous,” and when I got home I was slightly mad at my past self for it.
It became apparent to me, reading it back, that I wasn’t focusing on flavor but on whimsy and feeling, because I didn’t have anything to say about the flavor except: bang on. And that’s a compliment, but it doesn’t make for the best writing, ya know?
My favorite bite of the night was a parmesan ice cream with black walnut disguised as a choco taco. I texted a friend in all caps THAT’S SO FUN. I’ve had lots of takes on choco tacos in my time in fine dining, but this aged parmigiano number is definitely the best one. Salty, sweet, my favorite cheese course of all time, really. It made me rethink what a cheese course can do. Even in top restaurants, it’s normally … just cheese, even if it’s not “just cheese,” you know? Like one time I had cheese shaped like a duck and I didn’t really need to think about how much a man had to touch my cheese to shape it into a duck. Another time, I had cheese on top of beautiful savory biscotti with pickled berries from summer. Gorgeous, right? But the cheese was just cheese on the plate.
This felt like a daring dash away from that category, where Schwa was trying to do something with and not around cheese—and not in an obvious way. Goat cheese ice cream exists, right? But parm ice cream is something that I’m sure took more than one shot to get right.
I paired it (and the final course) with Three Spirit nightcap, Sacre, apricot, aquafaba, though if I had time, I would have pulled out the black walnut and paired on that, with some kind of silly parm candy straw.
There’s a tea you get to dip your teeny tiny fritter in. I wanted a giant one, the size of old school doughnut shops, like y’all could mail that sh*t to me and I’d reheat it and be the happiest lady alive. To me, it felt like the space where I realized that the menu was playing with the whimsy of fine dining and childhood. This is something lots of restaurants try to do—and fail at. I can’t tell you the number of dishes I’ve had inspired by grandmothers where I think the grandma’s dish as is would probably be better.
I think the thing about Schwa is that the soul that is maintained—it’s a fritter, not a take on a fritter, or it’s cornbread, not a take on cornbread—and that’s why Schwa (and Chef Trahan) succeed while others don’t with reaching back to their roots.
Like that beef and matsutake dish was inspired by opening a bag of dried strawberries that smelled like hay and tea, reminiscent of working cows and bailing hay in the barn. So earthy barnyard and dry hay aromas with beef became a dish. And that’s, I think, how you execute childhood memories at the fine dining level in a way that transcends just a worse version of what you had as a kid. Food, in so many ways, is storytelling. And that’s a whole ass story on a plate that translates even if you don’t know it.
Maybe it was because the entire night felt like fairy tail, and childhood, to me, but the last dish of the night kind of looks like Snow Miser from Rudolph. A friend said it looks like Queen Charlotte on Bridgerton. It was beautiful, but not my favorite dish—and I don’t mean that as an insult. If my favorite dish of the night is dessert, it means you didn’t do your job. Because I am all in always on savory and lots of fine dining restaurants in 2024 feed you as much dessert as they do in savory courses. It drives me crazy. This wasn’t that.
Gorgeous, whimsical, a perfect end to a perfect meal.
I stared out at the restaurant and felt something I can only describe as my version of satiation.Not full as in stuffed to the gills, full as in this is what I want fine dining to be. This is what I want to feel in restaurants like this.
Normally, I am listening to the people around me to see how they feel about the food. But both of the tables I could hear were men knee deep in stock talk while on dates with the women they loved who sat silent. And look, I’m going to be real, I do not give a sh*t what men like that think about food like this, and I don’t quite care about opinions of people who can’t even involve an entire table in conversation.
For what it’s worth, they loved it.
I walked into Schwa and my first thought was, “Oh you cannot ask the woman you love to marry you here.”
This is most of what I think about in restaurants–some of what I think is lost in 21st century food writing. I am not asking if I should go here–I am asking if you should. I’ll eat anywhere and I eat out often, back to backing fancy dinners in Chicago because it’s not dinner for me. It’s beyond that. But most people don’t eat like that. I think of it as a duty of a writer to tell you where to go that is special.
Schwa is special. And I forgot, I think, for a moment at the door that I can give you a caveat or note or disclaimer. You can ask a girl to marry you at Schwa, she just probably has to be punk as f*ck.
She probably has to be a girl like me–who loves food but hates pretension, who wants twee but hates those dumb little crumb sweepers, who wants to eat food made by people who you can feel are pushing for greatness–and if that means you’re blasting rap music, so be it, but when I made my co*cktails, I was listening to Kenny Chesney, so definitely don’t hand me the aux.
The Michelin Guide describes Schwa as a teenager that refuses to grow up, which is exactly how my mom (if alive) would describe me. That’s not what Schwa is.
I get why the Michelin Guide says that. If you’re used to white table cloths and servers who clear your plate as soon as you’re done, you might walk into Schwa and think it immature or rude or young or whatever.
But if you’re a punk yourself, you walk into Schwa and recognize it for what it is. Schwa is deeply adult. Schwa is grown up, in the way I am grown up, with a f*ck you if you don’t like it attitude on the outside and a sensitive inside. A couple of things were said to me during service that made it clear that at least one person kind of gave a damn if I liked the food. I saw relief when I said to Chef Trahan, “I really liked that.” He said, “Oh, you do?” And he obviously knew I was pairing my drinks without me saying so.
Which, look, I find giving a sh*t deeply endearing in an industry where when I walk into the door, most chefs bore a hole in my head with their eyes.
Schwa is punk in the way I am punk. I’m going to tell the guy who ran into me as I walked into Schwa “f*ck you,” in my own way, but only because I’m sick of men acting like I don’t exist. On the street when a man asks me where I’m going, I’m going to yell, “Your funeral with your mom, wanna come?” But only because I’m afraid of what he might do to me. And I’m going to give any man I’m dating kind of a hard time with all the walls I’ve got up and I’m going to have relief when he still likes me. I’m going to say, “Oh you do?”
Hard outside. Soft inside. That’s me. That’s Schwa.
I was writing the above passage in the restaurant when Chef Trahan told me a secret–Pure Leaf Lemon tea looks just like whiskey in the dark. If I wanted, he’d give me a shot of that instead of whiskey to shoot at the end of the meal.
He said it in a way that showed deep understanding of sobriety, telling me he understood if I’m not comfortable with it. I was comfortable with it. More than comfortable, I was moved by it.
As he walked away, tears came to the corners of my eyes. After a year of (literally!!!) whispered N/A substitutes at chef’s counters with pairings served all at the same time and sh*tty co*cktails with bases of apple cider vinegar or lemon and being served an alcoholic co*cktail once a month when I don’t f*cking stutter, a restaurant that takes your sobriety seriously and lets you take a fake shot of whiskey? Deeply moving.
When it came out, in the dark, it did look just like a shot of whiskey. Everyone took their shot before me. I took a moment to compose myself, thinking of the woman I was two years ago (I got sober May 28, 2022–I ate at Schwa May 31, 2024). Two years ago, I was detoxing in bed crying my eyes out and unsure if I could stay both sober and alive. I was terrified. Trauma rolled up to the surface making me afraid of the dark. I laid in bed staring at the ceiling doing everything I could to get sober, even buying some f*cking crystals (hey, the answer is not crystals, it’s AA, just in case you’re wondering).
Here I was two years later, laughing with joy at a simple gesture that was the opposite of how I lived my life. This time, instead of pretending to be sober, I was pretending to be drinking in a room full of other people too drunk to drive.
Chef Trahan asked every single one of those people if they were getting home safely before they took their shots–and that moved me, too. Schwa joins a very short list of one restaurant (HAGS) that I would take my most crusty-ass punk friend to in order to show them that fine dining isn’t what they think it is.
Schwa doesn’t feel like an investor or the diners in the front created it–it feels like chefs created it for people like themselves. Chefs listen to loud rap when you aren’t in the kitchen to hear them. They yell at each other over the music. They act like they don’t give a f*ck but they’re actually sensitive people who deeply care if you like the food. If they aren’t drinking, they still have to be able to hang, and are creative enough to figure out the tea that looks just like a f*cking whiskey shot in the dark.
Schwa is full of f*ck you if you don’t like it, but full of heart hoping you do. I think you should go, but not with your mom or your friend who wears earplugs to concerts or your friend who can talk for 2.5 hours about his stocks. No.
Go to Schwa with your most crusty friend who knows how to pair beverage with food and somehow, despite the years going by, still knows how to party.
After taking that shot, I listened to a little more stock talk and then went out into the night, full of hope that fine dining restaurants like this still exist—reminding me of what it’s all for. For moments like this, standing on the street of Chicago, the sounds of people and cars and the city at night, but inside, I’m so, so, quiet. Like food has the power to turn down the volume on everything except my heart.
PS: Michelin Starred Cornbread is so much a thing this year that when a cat was dropped off my door and I couldn’t think of a name, I named her Michelin Starred Cornbread. I call her Miche but Michelin Starred Cornbread is the name she is registered under at my vet. Anyway, here’s Miche.
