4-Feb-10 – The first things you notice about Graham Elliot Bowles are the tattoos. He has six. They include the logo of a band he was once in. The cover of a book by Lebanese artist/philosopher Kahil Gibran. A map of the states he lived in as a Navy brat – Washington, California, Maryland, Virginia, Texas, Hawaii, Vermont, Illinois, and on his inside left arm, The Philippines.

He will probably never forget his wedding anniversary as it is tattooed on his right wrist. Nor will his wife, as it is etched into her arm as well.

He is the chef and owner of Graham Elliot, what he calls a “bistronomic” restaurant combining four-star cuisine with humor and accessibility. It is located at 217 West Huron Street in Chicago’s River North neighborhood.

Bowles started his culinary career as a busboy and dishwasher in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He had dropped out of high school but knew that the art of cooking was something at which he excelled.

While attending the College of Culinary Arts at Johnson & Wales University in Norfolk, he was drawn to cookbooks, especially those of Charlie Trotter, the noted Chicago chef and restaurateur. “That introduced me to the whole world of cooking as a creative outlet.”

Charlie Trotter meeting leads to Chicago opportunity

He worked at two upscale restaurants in Dallas and it was at The Mansion On Turtle Creek that he actually met Charlie Trotter. “I told him I wanted to work for him. I eventually drove 16 hours to Chicago and worked for free for three days, just getting beaten up, but loved it.” Trotter hired him a month short of Bowles’s 21st birthday.

(Left) Charlie Trotter, photographed in 2008 at The Palazzo in Las Vegas.

By age 26, Bowles had worked his way up to his first chef position, at a Vermont inn. That’s where Food & Wine Magazine named him one of the ten best chefs in the nation. “When that happened, a ton of doors opened.”

He came back to Chicago in 1998, to The Peninsula’s Avenues restaurant. He is the youngest four-star chef in the nation. Chicago Magazine, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Tribune have given him perfect reviews.

Then in 2008, he got his own restaurant. Graham Elliott opened in June in a 120-year-old former warehouse on West Huron Street. The space has been a restaurant previously, but the building’s natural brick was covered with drywall. There was a suspended ceiling. Posts were clad in a different kind of wood. “It hid everything that was special about this building. We got rid of all of that, stripped down everything, stripped down to the wood, and just made this a nice, natural look.”

The restaurant, upscale but built for comfort, seats 140 people in the dining area and 20 near the bar. Even with the economy turning in October, Bowles says, “we have surpassed everything that we ever planned. We’re really happy.”

Stripping down did not stop with the building interior. A place setting at Graham Elliot will include just one fork and knife, one glass for everything, and one plate. No linen, no flowers, and no artwork. “Just very bare but pure.”

There are two types of chefs

Bowles says you can divide chefs into two different camps. “People tend to be either craftsmen or artists.” Some chefs want to follow a recipe and do something perfectly with amazing ingredients.

“I’m turned on by not just pushing the envelope but tearing it up. Making really beautiful, creative things that make people go, ‘Wow, I wouldn’t have thought of that.’ And hit people at more of a cerebral level as opposed to just, ‘this tastes good.’”

Can you go too far, be too artistic? Bowles say he used to think he should push the creativity as long as it tastes good. But if cooking really is an art, he reasons, it can be compared to fashion designers creating clothes that look interesting but that no one will ever really wear.

“It’s the same thing. If someone does some kind of anchovy soup with Parmesan ice cream, you’re not going to want a big bowl of it, but it might be interesting and thought-provoking and provocative as one course out of many.”

Although inspired by chefs such as Trotter and Ferran Adrià of El Bulli in Spain, and artists who “think outside of the box,” Bowles says he tries to follow his own voice. “I got to a point where I really don’t buy cookbooks anymore…because I don’t ever want to be seen as copying or taking too much of an influence.”

New menu includes cumquat marmalade, goat cheese foam

Bowles just got done changing the menu at his restaurant. He added 18 new dishes. “Beets are really delicious right now. We’re roasting them in salt and then they get peeled and we make a little salad with…micro-arugula and some hazelnut paper, which is hazelnut with a little bit of hazelnut flour and egg and then we smear it paper-thin between two sheet trays and then bake it.”

He designs and serves a chive marshmallow with a potato skin with sour cream and pancetta chips and grated nine-year-old cheddar. “And then we pour the soup at the table and it dissolves the marshmallow and it makes the chive flavor come out. That’s fun.”

Advice for people who did not attend culinary school

Often, says Bowles, the issue is not that a person does not know how to cook, but that they lack the proper equipment. At Marina City, where Bowles has lived since 2008, “I got four little burners and no real hood system, and so the smoke alarm always goes off. I constantly have to fan it and open the doors. It’s just not intended for that really. But I think, you give somebody a big kitchen and a monster hood system and it’s a lot easier to cook.”

His advice for someone truly challenged, however, is to just limit food choices to what is in season. Roots, for example, “like turnips and rutabagas and leeks and things like that. If it’s warm out, maybe you just grill something and serve it very simply. But if it’s freezing and snowing, stew it and breeze it and cook it longer, make it a little more rustic.”

(Above) There are five people in the kitchen at Graham Elliot, Bowles explains, one responsible for each section – hot, cold, sea, land, and sweet. “They do all their own ordering, butchering, prepping, cooking, plating, and then cleaning up after. It’s like five chefs under one roof.”

graham elliot restaurant 217 West Huron Street 312-624-9975  Web site