Monday night, June 15th, two thousand people in their best clothes filled the Lyric Opera of Chicago. There were awards. There were speeches. There was, presumably, an open bar and whatever catered thing you feed two thousand people who've just spent forty-five minutes congratulating each other on being in the same room — poached salmon, probably, and a speech about community.
I was not there.
This was not an oversight. I know where the Lyric Opera is. I know what the James Beard Awards are — I've cooked under the shadow of the nomination process long enough to understand exactly how much and how little it means. I just decided that on Monday night I had better things to do, which mostly involved my couch and a bottle of something from Burgundy that didn't need an audience to be excellent.
Tuesday, though. Tuesday, I got in the car.
Chef Jake Lancie was a finalist this year. In case you missed the envelope — and apparently he did — he did not win. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't sting, because I know firsthand how much it does, and anyone who tells you awards don't matter is either lying or has never spent three years trying to be taken seriously in a city where taken seriously has a zip code, a valet, and a tasting menu.
But here's the thing about Jake Lancie: the man went back to his restaurant on Tuesday. Mise en place at three. Service at five-thirty. Forty-odd covers in a strip mall in the western suburbs, a BALUT sign in block letters above a door that has made its peace with the weather, and a kitchen running at the kind of quiet intensity you can only build when you've stopped caring what the room sounds like from the outside.
I respect that more than I would respect a medallion.
The room is modest. I say this not as criticism but as statement of fact. There are maybe sixteen tables, wooden chairs, a chalkboard menu above the pass, and walls hung with what I can only describe as a curated family archive — photographs of people eating, cooking, laughing, aging. It smells, when you walk in, of garlic and vinegar and something roasting low and slow in the back that makes your posture involuntarily improve.
The server — I'm told his name is Manny, and he moves with the calm efficiency of someone who has given this particular speech a thousand times and means every word of it — walked me through the menu without performing it. No narrative arc. No metaphor about grandmother's hands. No menu printed in a font that costs more than the produce. Just: here's what we make, here's what it is, here's what you should probably have.
I had the kare-kare first. Oxtail, braised in a peanut sauce with fermented shrimp paste on the side — bagoong, for the uninitiated, a condiment that smells like a dare and tastes like a revelation. The oxtail was falling off the bone, which is not remarkable. What was remarkable was that the sauce had texture. Depth. It didn't taste like it had been made that afternoon; it tasted like it had been thought about for considerably longer. That's not a technique thing. That's a caring thing.
The sinigang came next — a sour tamarind broth with pork ribs and long beans, aggressive in its acidity in a way that I found clarifying rather than assaulting. This is the kind of food that asks something of you. You have to meet it. A lot of chefs are afraid of that. Lancie is not.
Then came the balut.
I want to be precise here, because precision is the only courtesy a fertilized duck egg deserves.
The egg has been incubated for — depending on tradition and preference — somewhere between sixteen and twenty days. Long enough for the embryo to develop, not long enough for it to be anything other than what it is: a duck, in progress. You crack the shell from the top, drink the broth that has collected inside, then eat what's there with a pinch of salt and a splash of vinegar.
Manny set it in front of me without ceremony, which was exactly correct. There is no ceremony appropriate to a fertilized duck egg — no amuse-bouche, no presentation, no server crouching beside the table to describe the chef's personal journey to this particular embryo. You either eat it or you don't.
I ate it.
What it tastes like is difficult to describe to someone who hasn't had it, so I will try only once and then be done: it tastes like the ocean and a barnyard have reached a diplomatic agreement, and someone has resolved their negotiations with salt and acid. The broth is rich in a way that is almost uncomfortable, the kind of richness that makes you slow down. The egg itself is tender. The embryo — and I'm not going to look away from this — is small and soft and entirely recognizable for what it is, and you eat it anyway, because Lancie has set it before you in the spirit of honesty, and the least you can do is meet honesty with the same.
It is not a dish designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make you present.
Jake Lancie didn't win the James Beard Award. Two thousand people were at the Lyric Opera on Monday, and his name was not on the envelope. Someone else's was. I won't say whose, because I would like to continue eating in this city. On Tuesday, he was back in his kitchen, making oxtail and sour broth and fertilized duck eggs for forty people in the suburbs, and he wasn't performing grief about it — he was just cooking.
I've cooked in kitchens that won awards. I've cooked in kitchens that deserved them and didn't get them and cooked in kitchens that got them and didn't deserve them. The award is a conversation. The food is the truth.
At Balut, in the western suburbs of Chicago, on a Tuesday night in June, the truth was very, very good.
Balut is located in the Chicago suburbs. Reservations recommended. Go hungry. Order the kare-kare. Eat the egg.