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The Chef Who Can Teach Us a Thing or Two About Grit
Why we should get to know Iliana Regan
From all I had heard about Iliana Regan, I thought maybe she’d have a bow and arrow strapped to her back when we met. This is a chef who, raised on a farm in northwest Indiana, serves deer hearts with ribbons of celery at her Chicago restaurant, Elizabeth. She spears bullfrogs on night hunts and sautés the legs in butter. She once made raccoon Bolognese.
Instead, at the other end of a café table I’ve reserved for us at New York’s Rubin Museum of Art, she fishes two espresso spoons from her backpack and then holds them up in front of me, her pinkie fingers extended. Nothing else is better for making mini-quenelles. They’re textbook mini-quenelles — of bacon butter for biscuits, or birch bark ice cream to tuck next to mousse — but only if she makes them with those spoons. That’s why, when Regan left her job as a server at Alinea restaurant in the early 2000s, they had to go with her. “Hey, it’s just two little spoons,” she says. “It wasn’t that bad.”
