They say the restaurant business is tough, and it is. For every new eatery that gets glowing reviews and has tightly packed tables on Saturday night, another one sinks into oblivion. Yet there’s always someone crazy enough or passionate enough to tempt the odds. Including Wendy Gilbert, who recently opened the Savoy Truffle in West Town.
The sounds of Afro pop are wafting through the Savoy Truffle, and Gilbert, who likes to dance to salsa music in her spare time, pivots in her sandals on her way to the stove in the kitchen. Her multicolored bracelets jangle, and she lets out a whoop. It’s just after 9 AM on an August Wednesday. Gilbert was out late the night before at the Jazz Showcase, but now she’s all energy. “I only need four hours of sleep. This thing about people being tired makes me nuts. What’s the point of being tired? Tired translates to depressed in my book.”
Moving down a list, Gilbert steams up zucchini and carrots. She quarters some shiitake mushrooms, then sautes them in sherry and chicken stock to produce a mushroom ragout. She makes potato chips, seasoning slivers of potato with garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper and sticking them in the oven. Perales hands her bars of white chocolate, which she decorates with purple food coloring and cuts into triangles that will adorn hot-fudge-and-caramel sundaes.
“Whatever she wants me to do, I do,” Perales says later, then shrugs. “If I don’t do something right she makes me do it over, and she gets mad, excited. But she’s not getting mad directly at me.”
“How’s business?” Witkowski asks her.
“Leo, it’s tomato-leek soup–and it’s wonderful.” She’s fiddling with some sesame noodles in a bowl. “Everything here is wonderful.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Her mother was not the inspiration. When Gilbert was a girl her mother piled the family dinner table with standard ’50s fare–a roast, stewed vegetables, potatoes. “Oh, I cooked,” says her mother. “But no one would ever have called me a cook.” Gilbert remembers not her mother’s skills but that her father loved to eat out at Chicago’s modest bunch of ethnic restaurants.
