A few weeks ago we had the word that Top Chef contestant Grayson Schmitz, who’s worked for the likes of Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Fabio Trabocchi in New York, was moving to Chicago to open a “salon.” That’s still very much in the development/business plan stage, she says, but in the meantime the bubbly-yet-focused Schmitz and her near-lookalike sister Olivia participated in the first of a series of events which will introduce her to Chicago over the coming months. And this time, the Top Chef challenge shoe was on the diner’s foot. Put on by 5 Rabbit brewery and held at Logan Square Kitchen, it was a dinner pairing four courses with four of 5 Rabbit’s beers— but the diners had to cook the four courses themselves under Schmitz’s guidance. The party of 35 guests divided into four groups, making pretzels with a beer and cheese dipping sauce, fish tacos, a crab salad and cupcakes with a beer, coconut and lime frosting. Apprehensive at first, the mostly-strangers crowd fell into cooking in large quantities in a professional space pretty easily and with little friction. In the end we as a group didn’t do a bad job of finishing all four dishes at roughly the same time, which as any Top Chef fan knows, is something professional cooks don’t always manage. Our slideshow of Top Chef: Logan Square is below.
