Welcome to It City, where the population of celebrity chefs is growing with every passing day.
Sean Brock left Nashville to win a James Beard award and returned last year to install a copy of his Charleston restaurant Husk. Jonathan Waxman just opened Adele's in the Gulch after years of success in New York and California. Maneet Chauhan spent years shuttling between acclaimed restaurants in Chicago and New York before landing here to open Chauhan Ale & Masala House next month. And Dale Levitski just arrived from Chicago to open Sinema in the old Melrose Theater.
This is what happens when your city becomes white-hot — everybody wants a piece of it. Just ask the people who keep moving here. (Memo to people not in Nashville right now: Please stop moving here. You're killing the rental and housing markets for the rest of us.)
Of these four, only Levitski doesn't have a chef de cuisine, a lieutenant running the place while they tend empires and make food television. If you walk into Adele's, you're probably not going to find Waxman, who swapped out his chef de cuisine right before opening last month. Brock, likewise, had to replace Morgan McGlone after nine months.
But at Sinema, there's Levitski in the pass, monitoring the food and rounding his kitchen into form. Is that a guarantee of success? Not necessarily, but in Levitski's case there is a certain comfort in knowing that the name attached to the marquee did more than just write the menu. He relocated here with his boyfriend Tony and their dogs, taking a place in the new Melrose apartments just behind the restaurant.
"It's the best commute," he says, laughing.
I've been fascinated with Levitski since his days on Top Chef. Here's a guy who replaced Grant Achatz at Trio — yes, that Grant Achatz, the chef in the best restaurant in America, Alinea — and probably should have won that 2007 season of what he calls "the game show." He was going to use the prize money and the notoriety to open Town and Country, a 200-seat breakfast-to-dinner place in downtown Chicago. It was a dream project, but it never got off the ground. The economy tanked, his mom Joan contracted cancer and Levitski went into an 18-month tailspin that found him waiting tables at one point just to make rent.
But he rebounded to open Sprout in 2009, garnering praise, three stars from the Chicago Tribune and a semifinalist nod from the James Beard foundation for Best Chef: Midwest, something that might be considered a coup considering the glut of competition in the brutally tough Chicago-centric category. In 2012, he opened Frog N Snail, a more casual bistro. Both closed last year after he left, unable to continue without his presence. The strain of running two places took its toll on Levitski, giving the former college athlete hypertension, and his blood pressure would spike and crater.
At that point, Dale and Tony decided to leave Chicago. They were looking for a "small big city," Second City native Levitski says, in part because "I needed to live somewhere besides Chicago or Iowa." A competitor suggested him to a recruiter, who happened to be searching for a chef at Sinema. After cooking for the restaurant's partners this spring, he won the job.
I asked Levitski if being openly gay gave him any pause about moving to Tennessee, home of a constitutional ban on gay marriage and such notable legislation as Stacey Campfield's infamous "Don't Say Gay" bill. He shrugged it off, noting that the city isn't like the state. "I look at it like Austin, a liberal city in a very conservative state," he says.
Over lunch at Arnold's — he's working his way through Nashville's standards; as of this writing he still hasn't had hot chicken — Levitski seemed quietly thrilled at how Sinema has gone.
"It's definitely been the most comfortable and rewarding opening I've done," he says. Sprout was a shotgun wedding, opening mere weeks after he took the gig. Frog N Snail "didn't have the organization" required to sustain itself, Levitski says. That shouldn't be an issue at Sinema, which is backed by Ryman Hospitality's Colin Reed (and sons Sam and Ed) and M.L. Rose's Austin Ray, with Memphis veteran Q-Juan Taylor running the front of the house.
Levitski's food at Sinema features elements of what he did at Sprout, which was a pretty unique, modern take on comfort food. There are pirogues filled with pork, but played against stone fruit and mushrooms. The licorice salad sounded pretty unappealing to me — I hate licorice — but it's quintessential Levitski, a mix of seemingly disparate elements that blend into a satisfying finish. And a pork chop with a demi-glace of root beer? He wasn't kidding when he told the Scene months ago that this wasn't going to be another updated farm-to-table version of Southern food.
The most intriguing part of his arrival, though, is that Levitski wants to be here, not in New York or Charleston or wherever else. If Husk or Adele's succeeds or fails, it's largely an issue of management from afar. Whether Sinema is wildly popular or closes in a month, it will be with Levitski spending 12 hours a day actually in the restaurant.
Is that mandatory for a "celebrity chef?" No. Is it refreshing? Yes.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
