Chicago's wild foie gras chase
Mayor Daley calls the ban the `silliest' law. Restaurants across town serve up the delicacy in defiance. Now the question is whether city officials will actually try to enforce the new law.
By Josh Noel, Brendan McCarthy and James Janega, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Michael Higgins, Gerry Doyle and Mickey Ciokajlo contributed to this report
August 23, 2006
Foie gras appeared on pizza on Archer Avenue Tuesday, complemented cornbread and catfish at a South Side soul food place, and was stacked on sausages like pats of butter at a gourmet hot dog joint on the North Side.
Chicago's immediate reaction to a city ordinance banning foie gras--the French dish made from the livers of force-fed ducks and geese--was to embrace the gray goo like never before, in flights of culinary imagination.
Rhetoric and pate abounded on the first day of the City Council's ban, as restaurateurs and gourmands openly flouted the prohibition--cultured, giddy, goose-liver-fueled acts of defiance.
On Tuesday morning the Illinois Restaurant Association filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court seeking to overturn the ban, accusing the City Council of overstepping its authority.
At the same time, many diners tried the dish for the first time, drawn to the outlaw pate out of curiosity or desire to chomp on the wild side.
Some profusely thanked the restaurateurs who served it. Others laughed as they nibbled away, rolling their eyes at Chicago's avant-garde concern for poultry.
The city Department of Public Health delayed enforcement, and even Mayor Richard Daley raised his hands in bewilderment.
"I think it's the silliest law that they've ever passed," he said Tuesday.
Call it the City Council's foie gras faux pas.
The ban began with the outrage of animal rights activists, who cited the cruelty of force-feeding ducks and geese with tubes until their livers swelled to 10 times normal size.
But Tuesday brought an opportunity to goose the ban's proponents.
"Why would they pick this and not anything else?" Daley asked. "How about veal? How about chicken? How about steak? Beef? How about fish?"
If a foie gras ban is OK, Daley said, "all of a sudden, you can question any type, basically, anything that can be served in a restaurant. The poor snails and the mussels and the shrimp. I could go on and on. The lobsters."
$250 to $500 fines
In April, aldermen promised fines for violators ranging from $250 to $500 beginning Tuesday. The city Public Health Department unenthusiastically accepted the responsibility of overseeing it--and promptly put it off until the heat blew over.
"We're not exactly chomping at the bit to devote resources to this," said Tim Hadac, spokesman for the Public Health Department.
But they would enforce the law, he added, beginning Wednesday. Complaints will be taken through the city's 311 information line, or by e-mail to the Department of Public Health, he said. The department will mail warnings to restaurants on a first offense and send inspectors with ticket books for a second complaint.
"I don't expect them to go out with SWAT teams inspecting every restaurant in the city of Chicago," said Ald. Joe Moore, who sponsored the ban. "But if somebody were to register a complaint with the appropriate city department, I would hope they would go out and investigate."
Allen Sternweiller, executive chef and co-owner of Allen's New American Cafe, whose company is a plaintiff in the restaurant association's lawsuit, said Chicago is getting an unwanted reputation based on its proposals regarding trans fat and foie gras.
"Some of my colleagues (around the country) call Chicago `The Nanny City,'" Sternweiller said.
Diners enjoy defiance
As a host of restaurants thumbed their noses at the ban by hastily introducing the dish, diners joined the revolt just by going out to lunch.
At BJ's Market & Bakery, a soul food restaurant on Stony Island Avenue, a sign placed next to the cash register declared foie gras the special of the day, and those who had it proclaimed it delicious.
"I've had regular liver and it doesn't taste like that. I hate to say it, but it tastes like chicken," said manager Steven Jones, 22. "I tried it and I thought it was pretty good."
At Connie's Pizza on Archer Avenue, employees wedged a foie gras pizza on a table display between a pork cutlet sandwich special and a bucket of Miller Lite bottles.
His table shaking with laughter, 54-year-old Jerry Stout of Naperville pronounced that "it tastes like expensive liverwurst. But I better not say that, they might try to ban that too."
In a "Farewell to Foie Gras" spectacular, Harry Caray's Restaurant on Kinzie Street offered a foie gras on sea scallop appetizer and a foie gras and tenderloin entree. Managing partner Grant DePorter said he considered having the farewell a day earlier--but decided Tuesday made "a bigger statement."
`The Joe Moore'
A less publicized but long-standing protest continued at Hot Doug's, where proprietor Doug Sohn offered three variations of a foie gras-laced sausage despite the prohibition. In April he named the foie gras and sauternes duck sausage (with green apple mustard and goat cheese) "The Joe Moore" in honor of the proposal's sponsor.
Sales have been brisk, Sohn said, and he doesn't plan to stop selling it until more clarity about the law arrives.
The line of customers stretching out the front door of his jammed red-and-yellow store widened his smile.
