CFM Asks: Chef Devon Quinn of The Paramount Group

What do you get when you cross a biology major with a culinary career? Culinary innovation in the form of Chef Devon Quinn of The Paramount Group including of Eden in Avondale. Utilizing herbs, florals and other produce grown in his on-site greenhouse or sourcing locally at farmer's markets, Chef Devon has created an ever-evolving menu that reflects his knowledge and refined palate. CFM recently interviewed the chef to find out how he's incorporated his science background into his gardening, recipe development and passionate obsession with all things food. 

*This interview has been edited for clarity*

CFM: Please tell our readers about yourself and what led to you becoming chef at Eden.

DQ: When I was in college at Hope College, I worked in laboratories. I knew I didn't want to do that long-term but wanted to finish my college degree. I really enjoyed going to school and I was good at it. Towards the end of my schooling, I took a lot of philosophy courses and one of the things I remember most is some philosopher, I don't remember who, had an idea that you never know anything about yourself until you remove yourself from everything you know. So, I took that as just that.

CFM: What was the moment that made you switch from being a Biology Major to wanting to be a chef?  

DQ: When I decided to make the switch from being in the world of biology to being in cooking, it was not an easy transition. I bought a car with the help of my parents at the time and drove to Southern California with my older brother. I lived on my own for a little over a year out there and was looking for work at the time in the biological field. There were no bites at the time but I needed money. I started working with my second cousins out there whom I call Aunt Patty and Uncle Hank. They owned a catering company in North County, San Diego, called Palate Pleasers.

I started working some shifts with them and then Hank also got me a job with one of his friends working at a restaurant called Monterey Bay Cannery in Oceanside Harbor where I was serving and bartending. To make ends meet, I picked up another position at a place called La Bastille Tapenade in La Jolla with whom I did some catering. And I really liked it. I had always worked in the hospitality world, in summer jobs and such growing up. My mom was an etiquette teacher, taught dining etiquette, so we learned how to serve from a very young age as well as the importance of etiquette and doing things a proper way.

When I started working at (La Bastille) Tapenade in La Jolla, I saw a different level of execution that really drew me to cooking. Within a month after I started with them, my mom had come out and visited and I decided I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. She's the one who brought up going to culinary school know and it was like a light went off.

A month later, I moved back to Chicago and signed up for Le Cordon Bleu's program and never looked back. Once I made the decision that cooking was going to be it, I ran with it and I've tried to learn everything that I can possibly learn about cooking and this business since.

CFM: We'd love to learn more about The Paramount Group's on-site greenhouse and your partnership with local farms and how you utilize these in your offerings. 

DQ: With the greenhouse, I was looking at Facebook one day and it gave me a memory of me and my dad when we built the first one nine years ago. I started the first gardens associated with The Paramount Group in our second location with these big, 12'x12'x1' beds which got turned into the 4'x4' mobile planters that are still with us. We're using the same soil and nurturing program today that we used at the very beginning. 

My mom has beautiful gardens at her home and her father was also a really avid gardener and farmer when he grew up in the foothills of Arkansas. I remember as a kid, watching my grandpa turn these sandy, rock-filled beds into these really fertile, beautiful gardens where he grew tomatoes and cucumbers. One of the best memories I have is him working in those gardens and giving away produce to people as they would come by. When I started growing things on my own and I got into this industry, certain things made sense. I saw how expensive food was and how that continues to increase. My dad taught me from a really young age that if you can do something yourself, don't pay somebody else to do it. I certainly am of that thought process most of the time and I'm very particular about how I want things done - if I want an herb cut a certain way, there's no way that I'm going to get that if somebody else is doing that harvesting. So, as we started growing our gardens and they continue to expand, I find cool new things to grow.

Eventually my dad and I put a roof over the first iteration of the greenhouse to extend it through the winters with a true agricultural-style house featuring a double-celled polycarbonate, allowing us to really do some cool things. For me, I would be a horrible salesperson if I didn't have that personal physical connection with what I'm doing and and likewise, I would like for my cooks to experience that same thing. From taking care of seed properly, harvesting, storage, planning, planting, to using every part of that plant as it grows and troubleshooting if issues come along. There's a lot of connection from beginning to end to what we're serving guests. It might be something as simple as some anise hyssop greens that is a super punchy herb and maybe something that somebody's never tasted before. We're not a super fancy three-Michelin-star restaurant but we utilize the same types of ingredients that they do in these places and probably at a fresher level considering they're coming from our garden that day. It makes something that we have very special and it keeps me in tune and connected and wanting to continue to do this stuff because it’s not easy work. 

As far as working with local farms, I enjoy more than anything getting to create and nurture those relationships over the years and understand how challenging of a life that these farmers have. They truly have that connection to the produce as well and I try to bring that full circle in letting them know how their stuff is being used in our operation. I ask a lot of questions - "How is this crop looking? When should we see this? Have you tried this indoors? Have you tried this outdoors?” to really engage the farmers that we're working with. I do that every Wednesday and Saturday and try to pick up the best bounty in the city so that our guests get to enjoy that. To me, it's very thoughtful that I'm hand-selecting and hand-curating these things for guests who walk through the door. When you have the best-looking gooseberries, black raspberries, and golden raspberries, and other goodies that make their way onto our plate that you're not going to find in other places in the city, I think that's cool and another special attribute that our restaurant has.

CFM: What are some of your favorite dishes to make using the greenhouse’s bounty? 

DQ: I think my favorite dishes are made with whatever is in season at the time because we can find a combination of flavors that’s utilizing something. Take our Thai green curry for example, where we're using a lot of Southeast Asian herbs that we grow. These herbs grow really well in our greenhouse because it mimics a tropical environment with high humidity, heat, and added artificial light to increase the spectrum that's hitting them. In something like a curry that takes Southeast Asian flavors, we want to add refreshing herbs to that mix - like different varieties of mint as well as Vietnamese cilantro. We've also added a Peruvian herb to that mix just because it goes really well with the dish, even though you wouldn't normally find that in Southeast Asia. We grow lots of Thai basils and African basils which we rotate through and change based on how they look while making sure that the gardens are sustainable and not over-picked.

I like walking through those gardens just popping things in my mouth and getting ideas of, “Wow, I haven't tasted that in a while, what would that go well with?” Flowers are one ingredient that we use a lot of and some of them have a really unique flavor to them. One of my original caretakers, Ambria, visited recently and told me that she had made hibiscus lemonade with nasturtium flowers. She really liked the way that the spice from the flowers added to the beverage so I tried it and sure enough,

CFM: Are you able to still utilize ingredients from the greenhouse in the colder months? Do you preserve during the spring and summer so you can use later in the year? 

DQ: Yes, from the greenhouse as well as the outside portion of our gardens which we have a structure built over. We cover it in six millimeter plastic to extend the seasons on either end. We put low-level oil heaters out to bump up the temperature. When you have mild winters, like we have had recently, you don't need much to keep things green all winter long. 

You certainly run into other challenges though. When it's so cold outside that you can't ventilate things well, you get a stagnant kind of air, so production certainly slows down because the humidity is so high. The plants aren't respirating at as high of a rate and they're not growing at as quick of a rate, so everything slows down. We have to make wise choices as far as what we transplant from our outdoor gardens into our inside.

We have lots of preservation techniques that we use throughout the year. Something that I'd really like to expand upon is our beverage program and creating fresh herbal teas. For example, we grow a ton of lemon verbena which we could make little bundles of and have them for fresh steeping. We can also be drying those herbs to be using in teas. 

I just recently hedged a bunch of epazote and Vietnamese cilantro to pulse with salt and make a flavorful herby salt or put into oil. I talked a little bit about seed-saving earlier and some of that goes hand-in-hand with preservation because we're preserving those seeds as well.

CFM: What makes the Mapo Curry your signature dish?

DQ: I'd say that I don't really have a signature dish but I have a chef de cuisine, Brian Shim, who I give a lot of direction to. I give him some ideas but it's a very open working relationship and I encourage him to run with his ideas for what the direction of the menu will take. Although I've made lots of different versions of curries over my life, this one I left to Brian, and, and it's really his signature. He came up with that broth and the different elements in it. I certainly give some pointers as to maybe some things that we should change but Brian is an experienced and talented enough chef that I don't have to formulate the ideas all within myself. I trust his judgment and I trust his talent to be able to come up with something good. It's a team effort to make sure how that goes onto the menu, and oftentimes, even from the direction that we start at, things will change drastically.

CFM: Besides your Mapo Curry, what do you recommend a diner order upon their first experience at Eden? 

DQ: When I go out to eat, I like to try as many different things as possible, so that would be my advice to someone dining at Eden. We try to hit a lot of really unique flavor profiles to highlight the ingredients that we're using well. I would say more is better and would recommend sharing things with people. That's the way that I like to eat. Certainly our menu is designed to be able to eat if there are not sharers amongst us! You can also have your own entrees and starters and stuff but I recommend sharing so that you get a broad spectrum of flavors.

CFM: What is a dish or dishes that you’d like to add to future menus?  

DQ: As far as future summer menu items, I would like to go pretty veg- and fruit-heavy. You'll see in our dishes, we use fruits as a lot of accents to add natural sweetness to a dish instead of adding corn syrup or granulated sugar. Likewise, we can add sourness through the use of a natural fruit instead of adding lemon or vinegar to something.

CFM: Any tips and tricks for home cooks on taking advantage of their own summer gardens?

DQ: Any land and/or pots or patio space that you have, maximize it as far as things that can be grown. You don't want to overgrow to the point that you have too many peppers or tomatoes that end up sitting there rotting in a pile in your yard. Instead, give some produce away if you grow an abundance or have ingredients that dictate what you cook. There are a couple places in Chicago where you can pick up starters plants. Adams and Son’s, Farmer's Market Garden Center on Elston and a few others throughout the city that do a really good job with edibles and medicinal herbs. Overall, I would say try to grow some more unique plants and add some different things to your diet. 

CFM: Where are your favorite places to eat and drink in Chicago? Any places that have inspired current or future dishes? 

DQ: Usually on Mondays, I get a pulled pork sandwich from Soul & Smoke. I have also frequented Tempesta Market for lunch, they do a really good job with sandwiches and all of their charcuterie meats. I also really like what the people at Galit are doing, they should be opening a new restaurant at the end of the year right next door to their current spot. I also recently ate at Mira at St. Regis, that was pretty good as far as Japanese cuisine is concerned. We love to eat, and it's really important that we go out and check new places out.

I've been making it a priority on Mondays and Tuesdays to try to check out new places with our team, so Brian and some of our other sous chefs have gone out in the past. I know my pastry chef, Josephine, is really into it as well but we've checked out a couple of places recently. One was Brasero, John Manion's newer restaurant and we ate at Giant, that's been around for quite some time. 

As far as if these places inspire or have any inspiration in our dishes? I'd say absolutely. We live in a world where my job is really unique in that it's not just that we go out and eat, but we also have a lot of high-level chefs that come into our operation that I always try to learn something from. Mashama Bailey and her team came to our kitchen and we were able to learn some new techniques. With somebody like that, I don't have a ton of background in Southern cuisine and she was really diving into a lot of the early slave food in the United States and resurrecting what her ancestors had done in the early days of the United States and in West Africa and the Caribbean. 

CFM: What does your ideal day off look like? Are you cooking at home or taking the day off from that too?  

DQ: Well, I don't get a lot of days off and that's mostly by choice. Honestly, I don't know what to do with myself when I'm not working. My wife and I have built this business and I've found that every time I try to distance myself from it, I end up not liking the direction that it starts to head in a pretty fast order. I like to be around to make sure that we're still doing a good job and that we're paying attention to all of the details and holding standards high.

Every once in a while, I need a day to myself to veg on the couch. I certainly need those occasionally, probably once or twice a month. On other days off, it's nice to just be able to go out, walk the dogs, get some exercise in, and eat nutritious meals, things like that. We also take a good chunk of travel time off, at least twice a year. 

I like cooking at home on my days off. Last night for example, we were planning on vegging all day but as the day went on, we decided to invite a few people over and I was able to put together a really nice meal for Hannah, our daughter, and her boyfriend. I also enjoy the time off from it but especially in the summer, it's hard not to get excited by food and what the possibilities are, the different flavor combinations and getting really creative.