How to get a steak named after you

You don't even have to be a beloved retired judge!

Steak frites Manion style

Have you ever had a dish named after you at a restaurant? My friend John Manion has. His namesake entrée, which is technically a preparation style akin to steak frites with sauce au poivre, has been on the menu for a few months at Le Bouchon, an exceptional little bistro in Chicago’s Bucktown neighborhood.

The essential maneuver that makes a steak “Manion style” is to plop the beef on top of the skinny golden fries before dousing the whole thing in peppery cognac pan sauce, which takes you on a magical potato journey that keeps unfolding.

“There’s this alchemy that comes with putting the bistro steak on the fries that makes the potatoes a separate, third thing,” John told me. “So you have the benefit of crispy, beautifully cooked fries at first, and as the meal goes on, they become something completely different.”

But by now you must surely be wondering, who is John Manion?

Is he a beloved retired senator or judge? A longtime local news anchor or an all-star shot-putter who grew up in the apartment above Le Bouchon? No, in fact John is a chef who owns El Che Steakhouse & Bar—one of the best steakhouses in the city, if you must know. He’s been a Chicagoan since 1995. Back then, he was a young cook living on a friend’s couch in Lakeview—attending culinary school by day and working at an Italian restaurant by night. One evening, a server invited him to hang out at a cool, then two-year-old French restaurant “in the middle of nowhere” on the Near Northwest Side, owned by the quintessentially French chef Jean-Claude Poilevey and his magnanimous wife Susanne.

“We go into Le Bouchon and it’s ‘closed,’ but it’s not,” John recalled. “Jean-Claude is there, and I meet him and end up talking to him. I was in culinary school, where French cooking was the cornerstone, mind you. So it’s, like, the coolest thing ever that I’m drinking red wine and smoking cigarettes with this French guy. I didn’t even know he was an icon.”

Jean-Claude loomed large in that pint-sized restaurant, and not just as a steadfast champion of the homestyle French cooking he helped popularize in Chicago. He’d circulate the dining room and often sit down with regulars to chat and steal a sip or two of their wine. He’d bus tables and rib customers for staying too long past close.

For John, who aspired to open a restaurant of his own, the place and the man became something of an obsession.

“Whenever I could go out, that was the place,” he said. “I spent many hours sitting there after hours with Jean-Claude. It just, it became my favorite place bar none. It was my bar, the center of my universe to an extent.”

After a while, whenever John would post up at that old wood bar for steak frites, the cooks knew he was going to plonk the steak on top of the fries and request a side of peppercorn sauce, so they just started serving it to him that way. This ritual continued when the next generation assumed the helm at Le Bouchon after the death of Jean-Claude in 2016 and Susanne in 2019.

“My dad loved John—and he was old school, so he didn’t like many younger chefs,” said Le Bouchon chef/owner Oliver Poilevey, who’s Jean-Claude’s son. “John loved my dad, too. That’s how I got to know him.”

A Man(ion) and his steak

Oliver now runs Le Bouchon with brother/co-owner Nicolas Poilevey and executive chef Waldo Gallegos (who’s worked at the restaurant since it opened), alongside a crew of longtime servers, cooks and bussers, who—like John and me and so many Chicagoans—can’t quit this magnetic place. Simply go in on a Monday night, a.k.a half-priced-wine-bottle night a.k.a industry night (if you can get a table), when the energy in the room crackles from open to close.

“It’s like an epicenter—and there’s this whole new generation of cooks, servers and people in the hospitality business experiencing that now like I did almost 30 years ago,” John said. “I don’t know how widely acknowledged it is, but Le Bouchon is such a big part of the fabric of restaurant and kitchen culture in Chicago.”

Since taking over the bistro for their late parents, the younger Poileveys have opened two relentlessly popular restaurants of their own, inventive taco joint Taqueria Chingón (with chef Marcos Ascencio) and modern French restaurant Obélix. Oliver calls John from time to time for advice, seeing a mentor in the chef who for many years was mentored by his dad.

“That’s how it should work, I think,” Oliver said.

John still comes to Le Bouchon at least twice a year—and still orders his steak the same way. At some point, Oliver finally tried it for himself.

“I realized, oh, I kinda like it this way,” he said. “What’s interesting is when I’d work station, I’d make it and discover that it’s just as good cold as hot, so I’d make one before we turned off the grill and that’d be my dinner at like 1 am.”

He talked about adding it to the menu for a while before making Manion style official in November after texting John. “I was like, ‘Is this cool?’ and he’s like, ‘Fuck yeah!’” Oliver said.

“I was so touched,” John recalled, “because I know it’s funny, like, very tongue in cheek. But to me it means the world.”

If you’re lucky, you might show up at Le Bouchon on a night when John is there and ordering his own steak. (How modest!) Longtime Le Bouchon server Heather Christie-Delabar was positively delighted when John, some friends and I came in a few weeks ago to do just that. In fact, she wasted no time turning him into a human billboard for Manion style, pointing him out each time a customer asked about it, then loudly announcing each time she deposited one while gesturing animatedly in the direction of the man himself.

“Did I overdo it?” she asked me the last time I was in. “The thing is, it seemed like everyone was ordering it that night.”

Come to think of it, perhaps John should abandon his existing and forthcoming restaurants, forgo evenings spent with his wife Nicole, two children and dog Tina to instead appear at Le Bouchon every night, propped up at the same table over a plate of Manion-style steak like a bearded, sailor-mouthed hologram.

In case you were wondering what ‘Manion style’ is, there’s the man himself, eating one! Feel free to go have a look or ask him about it. As you can see, he’s just wild about the dish. It’s a wonder his heart hasn’t given out yet!

Fortunately, John seems to be taking this newfound burden of having a namesake dish in stride.

“It’s so audacious to have a menu item with your name on it,” he said. “Next time, I’m going to put on an apron and drop it at every table. You ordered this? OK, I’m going to cut this up for you, and baby bird it.”

It’s the least he could do, really. Though Le Bouchon might need to add a footnote to Manion style.