• Michael Gebert
  • Leigh Omilinsky of Cafe des Architectes with brie—which they don’t make any more

The ambitious, possibly slightly insane charcuterie and cheese-making program that Cafe Des Architectes chef Greg Biggers started at the Sofitel Hotel—the first restaurant cheese-making program to be licensed by the state of Illinois—was the subject of this piece in the Reader‘s Food Issue last November. When I ran into Cafe des Architectes pastry chef Leigh Omilinsky (who’s in charge of the cheese part) at the voting for the Jean Banchet awards, she told me a little about how the program had changed even in the few months since she and Biggers had shown me around last fall. It’s now six months since they first started serving their handiwork to guests under the name Chestnut Provisions, so it seemed a good time to catch up with Biggers and find out what they’ve learned—and how guests are reacting.

The other thing that we’re doing, too, is Taleggio [an Italian soft cheese]. We’re on our fifth round and Leigh and I finally found our sweet spot for that. Our first rounds, they were OK, but they were superstinky, riding that line between stinky cheese and rotten. We upped the salt in our Taleggio by about 22 percent, and for some reason in our environment that was the magical fix, and what we’re pulling out of our cave now is really good Taleggio.

They’re everywhere, we do a cheese/charcuterie board, everything that’s on that plate is Chestnut Provisions—we do three different kinds of meat, three different cheeses, pickles, jams, house-made brioche. We’ve started making our own mustards, too, so we have a sarsaparilla mustard, we’ve started working with Dijon, really fermenting these mustard seeds and adding different things to them.

But it’s kind of taken off. We’ve gotten a lot of word of mouth from the media attention, and people come in asking about it. In the early days people were kind of shocked when we would tell them about it at the table, but now they ask for it—”Aren’t you the place that does your own cheese and stuff?” It’s kind of turned from us telling them about it to them asking us about it, which is nice.