Joiners

If you’ve been to a live show in Chicago, there’s a good chance Bruce Finkelman had something to do with it. Starting with just $900 and a dream of creating a place where he belonged, Bruce opened the Empty Bottle in 1992, turning a scrappy Ukrainian Village dive into one of the city’s most beloved music venues. Since then, he’s helped shape Chicago’s cultural landscape through Longman & Eagle...

Long before he helped build one of Chicago’s most recognizable hospitality groups, David Rekhson was trying to convince his mother that his nightclub was actually a fine-dining restaurant. This week on Joiners, we sit down with the co-founder of DineAmic Hospitality, the group behind Chicago favorites like Siena Tavern, Bar Siena, and Prime & Provisions. David traces his journey from an Ohio k...

Big question: what if food could change the way kids learn? Paul Kahan, Matthias Merges, and Jason Hammel decided to find out. What began with a group of Chicago chefs taking over classrooms at a CPS magnet school became Pilot Light, a nonprofit using food to make learning more engaging, relevant, and connected to the world outside school. Today, Pilot Light reaches students and teachers across th...

It’s a little wild that we made it over 200 episodes without Chef Tony Mantuano on the podcast. The longtime chef and true legend behind Spiaggia and a partner in The Purple Pig, Tony has helped shape Chicago dining for more than four decades, mentoring an extraordinary generation of chefs along the way, including a handful of past Joiners guests. We talk about growing up in an Italian-American fa...

This week on Joiners, we sit down with Chanita Chayaluk, chef and owner of TAAN, a new and exciting Thai restaurant in Humboldt Park. Chanita came to restaurants by way of a totally different career: she was working in education and mental health when the pandemic prompted a kind of “now or never” moment. She relocated to Bangkok, enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu’s Thai cuisine program, and followed a p...

Chef David Choi has always been a hustler. As a teenager in St. Louis, he skipped enough school to rack up hundreds of absences while tracking down celebrities at hotels, getting their autographs, and selling them on eBay. A few years later, he worked four jobs to save up for a BMW,  only to sell it and put the money into a beat-up food truck. That truck became Seoul Taco. Fifteen years later, Dav...

This week on Joiners, we sit down with Dominique Leach, chef, pitmaster, entrepreneur, and founder of Lexington Betty Smokehouse. Dominique’s story is a wild one: culinary school, Chicago kitchens, legendary mentors, brutal bosses, huge opportunities, hard lessons, and more than a few moments that could have sent her in an entirely different direction. What stands out through all of it is her resi...

Tim McEnery had an idea: a restaurant built around wine, a wine club built around community, and a company where people would be treated well. At the time, none of that existed. He didn’t have much money, he didn’t have much experience, and plenty of people told him, pretty reasonably, that it probably wasn’t going to work. Twenty-one years later, Cooper’s Hawk has grown from one restaurant in Orl...

This week’s guest arrived in Chicago during a brutal winter storm. Jose Sosa was sixteen, newly arrived from Mexico, spoke very little English, and needed a job. An uncle helped him get in the door as a dishwasher, and from there Jose built a remarkable career: eighteen years with Gibson’s Restaurant Group, including opening Gibson’s Italia; a stint opening UMMO with Carlos Gaytán; and now The Gre...

Devon Quinn had a biology degree and a standing offer to train mine-hunting dolphins for the Navy in San Diego. He turned it down (the water was too cold, the gig was unpaid) and ended up in a kitchen instead. Today he's Chief Culinary Officer of The Paramount Group and the chef behind Michelin-recognized eden. He walks us through the whole arc: training under Jean-Michel Diot, Dale Levitski, and...

This week, Tim and Danny sit down with Katie Renshaw, founder of Bar Bambi and 2019 U.S. World Class Bartender of the Year. Katie traces her unlikely path from software development into Chicago’s cocktail world, the bars and mentors that shaped her, the intensity of competition bartending, and the leap from working behind the bar to opening one of her own. They get into the long, unglamorous proce...

Call him crazy, but Chef Darnell Reed is a hospitality aficionado who believes the customer who walks in five minutes before closing deserves the same care as anyone else. Chef Reed started cooking professionally at 16 and spent nearly two decades working his way through Chicago’s hotel kitchens, eventually becoming executive chef at the Conrad. He joins us to talk about leaving that world to open...

Bo Fowler is a true Chicago restaurant powerhouse, though she is far too modest to describe herself that way. After leaving medical school and finding her way into professional kitchens, she went on to open some of the city’s most memorable restaurants, including Fat Willy’s Rib Shack, Owen & Engine, and Bixi Beer. Her food reflects the full range of her upbringing -- Korean, Vietnamese, Scand...

This week we sit down with Barry Sorkin, founder and pitmaster of Smoque BBQ, a personal favorite of the Joiners boys and, for our money, one of the best barbecue joints on the planet. But the road to BBQ greatness wasn't exactly obvious. Barry joins us in the studio to talk about leaving a career in IT consulting to chase an obsession with barbecue, building Smoque from scratch, surviving the cha...

Chef Danny Grant earned two Michelin stars before he turned 30, making him the youngest American chef of his time to hold the distinction -- and you could argue it all started with an Easy-Bake Oven. These days he's building Maple & Ash into a national hospitality brand, with restaurants in Chicago, Dallas, Scottsdale, Miami, Boston, and soon New York. This week, he joins us in the studio to w...

This week, we're joined by Chicago hospitality veteran Mike Boschert, whose career has taken him from rookie back waiter mishaps in Columbia, Missouri, to the openings of some of Chicago’s most beloved spots, and now to his role overseeing operations at the historic Medinah Country Club. Along the way, he’s built a career around relentless preparation, gracious hospitality, and the belief that mis...

For the first time in Joiners history, we welcome back a repeat guest: Mindy Segal. A longtime friend of the pod, Mindy remains one of our favorite people to talk to. She's funny, fearless, deeply thoughtful about hospitality, and never especially interested in keeping an opinion to herself (but she's working on it). She continues to hold it down at Mindy’s Bakery, the deeply personal neighborhood...

This week’s guest entered the restaurant business by offering strangers free labor at a dinner party. Sixteen years later, he’s still at it. Chef Nate Chung is the co-owner of Mott St, the enduring Logan Square restaurant known for Asian-American comfort food, one of the most celebrated burgers in the city, and the kind of hospitality that turns regulars into friends. He joins us at Joiners HQ to...

This week’s guest was sketching out his dream bakery in a high school notebook. That alone might not be too remarkable, but turning those daydreams into one of Chicago’s most talked-about bakeries certainly is. Pastry chef Justin Lerias is the owner of Del Sur Bakery, where Filipino flavors meet Midwestern pastry traditions in creations like longanisa croissants, turon danishes, and toasted rice c...

This week's guest is Chef Richie Farina, a man who turns food into theater without losing sight of flavor. A Johnson & Wales grad, three-time collegiate ice-carving champion, Moto alum, Top Chef competitor, and host of Carnival Kings, Richie has spent his career reworking familiar pleasures into strange, funny, technically impressive dishes, like Cuban sandwiches as cigars, smoked fish as a ri...

This week, we sit down with Chef Stephen Sandoval for a globetrotting whirlwind tour through a career that spans McDonald’s franchises in Southern California, Michelin-starred kitchens in the Bay Area, wood-fire cooking in Argentina, classical Mexican cuisine in Mexico City, and some of Chicago’s most celebrated restaurants. Stephen is a tour de force who’s worked alongside the likes of Rick Bayle...

We’ve wanted to have this week’s guest on since we started the podcast. Andrew Zimmerman is one of Chicago’s most respected chefs -- a five-time James Beard finalist and the chef behind Sepia’s remarkable 15-year Michelin star run. In a special episode, we hosted the Gratuity Round live during a dinner at the Stock headquarters featuring Andrew and Jonathan Zaragoza before sitting down with Andrew...

This week’s guest is an enjoyable diversion for us. Chef Zealand started cooking as a teenager, learning almost entirely through curiosity, YouTube, and trial and error before graphic design school, COVID, and a few hard pivots pushed him toward kitchens for real. He went from cooking in a senior living facility to grinding on the line at a suburban tavern, all while quietly building the voice and...

This week's guest is Chef Zubair Mohajir -- and he's got a lot going on. A former finance guy who found his calling in the kitchen after the 2008 crash, Zubair has since built one of the most compelling culinary identities in Chicago, rooted in the idea that food is migration made edible. He's the force behind Lilac Tiger, the Coach House, and Mirra -- and this summer, he's opening three more: Mar...

This week, we’re sitting down with Megan Marshall, the publisher behind Edible Chicago, whose work starts from a simple but expansive belief: food is never just food. It’s access, labor, sustainability, culture, policy, pleasure, and community, all in conversation with each other. After years moving through food, hospitality, and food systems work, she took over Edible Chicago with a vision to bro...