Love, joy, and mussels for dessert at Smyth

The ingredients transported from the various corners of the continental US to land on the menu at Smyth, in Chicago’s West Loop, read like an ode to American bounty. Rainbow trout from Hollis, Maine; quail eggs from Wilmington, Illinois; feathery seaweeds from Monterey Bay, California; enoki mushrooms from Four Star Mushrooms in Chicago; unagi from the Maine coast. Named after Smyth County, Virginia, where John and Karen Urie Shields once ran a restaurant in the town of Chilhowie, Smyth the restaurant is understated in its philosophy, but expansive in its execution. Smyth celebrates the relationships its chef-owners have cultivated over the years. And the accolades continue to be bestowed on Smyth, the 13th restaurant in the US to hold three Michelin stars. A week ago it entered The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list at number 90.

There’s a love story behind the success of Smyth. I talked with John Shields about how this love, like many of Smyth’s dishes, brought two people and many elements from across the US together to shine together in Chicago.

Shields grew up in Clearwater, Florida and moved to Chicago to take a job at Charlie Trotter’s. “He was my hero as a young cook. I had all the books. This was in the early days of the internet, well before any food blogs or social media. You had the books and that was it. Karen [originally from West Chester, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia] had moved there two years prior and when I got to Charlie’s, she was one of the pastry chefs. We didn’t start dating until four years later. We were really good friends. It wasn’t love at first sight. It was friendship at first sight,” says Shields. Eventually, “She became the head pastry chef at Charlie Trotter’s and took that place to another level.”

_{A dish at Smyth. Photo: Galdones Photography}

As a nod to his Florida roots and his childhood memories of tropical fruits, Shields now works with Miami Fruit, a small farm in southern Florida. “Right now, [we’re working with] their pineapples, sapote, cacao fruit which we got in and then froze, and that we also braised the insides of to preserve. We take the nibs out. We were doing a potato ice cream with those cocoa nibs.” Shields uses tropical produce in ways I’ve never heard of before.

“One dish I like a lot that we’re tweaking right now is a slushee of asparagus juice, using some of our old dried poblano and fermented peppers. We press peanut milk for it along with hoja santa oil, pressed from the leaves of two giant hoja santa trees in a guy’s greenhouse, which is 40 minutes away. On top of the ice slushee is the best part of the avocado—we cut its cheek down. We glaze the outside of the avocado with pistachio paste and some caviar. It’s a little bit luxury. A little bit Florida. A little bit Midwesterner.” The unused (by Smyth) part of this precious avocado goes downstairs to the Loyalist, Smyth’s sister restaurant, for its house salad.

“I think our philosophy is really to focus in on people that we like working with and if they have a great product, it starts from there. We see if there’s a relationship to be built.”

_{Smyth by Jackie Gillum}

This philosophy encompasses the timing of those peoples’ products, too. “We have to be super diligent about the aging of fruits, just like with a piece of fish or meat. You have to capture it on the vine. You have to pay attention to it, time it, slow it down.”

Shields slows down other fruits by making what he calls “boshis,” which function as glazes on products like the 10 Maine eels he gets delivered each week. “They’re like umeboshi [preserved plums], but we make ‘boshis’ out of everything by salting and sugaring spruce, blackcurrants, chilis, citrus blossoms. The liquid that comes off them is incredibly intense. Raspberry boshi is incredible, but strawberry is not. It depends.”

At Smyth, the boshi is painted onto eels with a brush and the eels are then smoked over the hearth for eight hours. Tableside, the eels’ skins are pulled back before being served.

Shields also admits a recent obsession with seaweed, sourced from Monterey Bay. “We have such a short window here [in Chicago] of what we can produce and get throughout the winter. But with seaweed, we have a fresh green in Chicago in February, when there’s a foot of snow outside.” Seaweed is fashioned into dessert—“We take blade kelp that we braise in a licorice syrup, and we mold it into the shape of a mussel shell and make a mussel caramel for the inside.”

I pause and ask him to please explain this further.

“This sounds weird and bizarre but it’s for the hardcore foodies. It’s a mussel reduction that’s folded into normal caramel and green tea custard, with some citrus blossom oil, a little bit of fennel frond.”

_{John Shields by Galdones Photography}

Despite the complexity of the dishes at Smyth, Shields nevertheless maintains an approach to ingredients influenced by the simplicity of Japanese cuisine. “Everything they do has a reason, a purpose, that starts with the produce. It’s gentle cooking, allowing things to be themselves. It’s very honest. They don’t overwork things. Our food can be the opposite of that—maybe we’re trying too hard in some people’s eyes, but I want to push the boundaries. When you eat the mussel caramel, it’s not going to blow your head off. It’s like having a licorice at the end of a meal…and then oh, I taste mussel.”

But back to that love story I promised you. There’s a longing for simplicity amidst all the complexities at Smyth. “We [Karen and I] had a restaurant in Chilhowie, Virginia [the Town House], which was in Smyth County. It’s incredibly rural, just 1800 people. It’s surrounded by wilderness and mountains. We lived there for four years. We were young and in love—now, we’re at least still in love.”

The couple now have two daughters. “[Now] my wife is more into the back end of the business. The operational side of things. She’s doing that 100% of the time now. It makes it easy [to be co-chefs] but even when we were working side by side, it was easy. We get along well. We have the same sensibilities. Honesty, doing things that feel pure, working with people of the same ideals.”