CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) — Jenner Tomaska, the chef and co-owner behind Lincoln Park’s Esmé, is among a handful of chefs who could take home a high honor this June: the 2024 James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes.
After spending a little more than three decades working in kitchens, Tomaska and his wife Katrina Bravo opened Esmé in 2021. From the very beginning, Tomaska said their goal wasn’t to highlight a certain dish or style of cooking: it was to create a platform for the local arts community.
“Esmé is meant to be a jumping off point for someone who we feel should be highlighted [and] should be pushed forward,” Tomaska told WBBM.
For Tomaska and Bravo, this connection between art and food goes beyond hanging up some local artwork on the walls. At Esmé, diners experience a Michelin Star tasting menu that doubles as a full-on artistic showcase meant to highlight a Chicago artist.
“Creatively, I’m not the person who loves to talk about himself,” Tomaska said. “So to be able to put someone else’s story out, and to be able to lean into that, has become a passion of mine.”
Service at Esmé traditionally begins with an offering of inventive, small dishes — including, at times, Tomaska’s famous take on a Flaming Hot Cheeto — before transitioning into a multi-course dinner served on dishes that have been crafted by local artists.
Tomaska’s team launches two or three new menus each year. The goal, he added, is always to put the artist’s story first and tell it in a manner that strips away some of the pretentiousness that can make art or fine dining seem uninviting.
“Above all else, it should be fun,” Tomaska said. “That’s really the backbone of Esmé.”
Part of that process, he said, is having the artist run a training session on their own work for Esmé’s staff, much like how some restaurants may bring in a sommelier to help servers and bartenders better understand the wine they’re selling.
“They give a little class on who they are, what their background is, why they’re creating the art, and everyone connects to something so differently,” he said. “And that’s really where we start our training with Esmé, you know … our staff is kind of telling someone’s story through their own lens.”
It only takes about 15 minutes of listening to Tomaska to figure out that this is one of his favorite parts of bringing an Esmé menu to life.
He brought up a memory from 2023, when his team invited Latin American artists and chefs to collaborate on a Latin American-inspired menu. One of the Esmé sous chefs, who’s from Honduras, shared a story from his childhood that was all about how he would pick tamarinds when he was growing up — and related it to their choice to serve the fruit as part of a prawn dish.
“It’s not this regurgitated story of, you know, ‘The prawns are from Santa Barbara, and the heart of palm is from Hawaii, and here’s something else that’s expensive,’” Tomaska said. “Why we serve a prawn dish with tamarind … is much more important to me than the prawns coming from Santa Barbara.”
Tomaska credited the kind of connection that he gets from these stories with helping him to fight the burnout that he’s experienced over his time in the industry.
“I think I’ve fallen in and out of love with cooking several times over the last 15 years,” he said. “But, for me, it’s the connection that I think I’ve always missed, and I think I found that through this creative collaboration.”
As he thought about the potential of winning the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes, Tomaska turned instead to heap praise on the community that’s allowed this project to thrive.
“They label it as the Best Chef: Great Lakes, but honestly, there’s no Esmé without our team and without the community that we are trying to support and highlight,” he said. “I’m beyond humbled.”
The 2024 James Beard Awards will take place in Chicago on June 10.
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