Punk-rock food and rap as tasting menu

...and the nerve of out-of-season Christmas music!

On a recent Wednesday, Dean and I popped by Cellar Door Provisions for dinner. This whimsical, decade-old slip of a restaurant has, at various times, been a cafe and bakery, bistro, tasting-menu restaurant and wine bar from its corner perch in Chicago’s Logan Square. Like its shapeshifting form, Cellar Door’s hyper-seasonal food menu changes constantly, the primary anchor being thick, burnished slices of uncommonly good, housemade sourdough bread with house-cultured butter. It’s scrappy, restless and so exciting—a real punk rock sort of place.

A few hours before we went for dinner, I interviewed chef and owner Ethan Pikas, not about Cellar Door per se, but the fact that his restaurant (and its tight-knit kitchen crew) recently provided the backdrop for a music video shot by the Chicago-based hip hop artist Ben Glover, who raps under the moniker Blvck Svm. (It was published on WTTW.)

In 2023 Ben had the brilliant idea to make a rap album that sounds like a tasting menu. His aptly named michelinman dropped in November. Even more brilliantly, he and his small production crew released a companion series of “Bvck of House” music videos, in which Ben raps at a vintage mic in the kitchens at fine-dining restaurants around the U.S. and Canada.

Ethan Pikas (left) preps while Ben Glover aka Blvck Svm (right) shoots the video for “faustian” at Cellar Door Provisions (photo courtesy of sologroup and Michael Tinley)

For Ben, the light went on while he was experiencing his first-ever tasting menu at Atelier in Lincoln Square: The way dishes flowed into one another, the colors that popped on the plate, the invigorating palate cleanser that signaled a transition to the meal’s denouement. I just ate an album, he thought when it was over. I’m going to make a rap album that sounds like a tasting menu.

The thing is, it does. Between jazzy strings and melodic beats, he raps about consumption and prestige on a lyrical scaffolding built out of of fine-dining’s luxurious larder and meticulous attention to detail. He samples chefs demystifying Iberian ham and sardonic lines from “The Menu,” and repeatedly pulls at the threads culinary arts share with consumer goods and rap. He even drops in a “palate cleanser” track in homage to a life-altering black currant sorbet interlude he tasted at Rge Rd in Edmonton, Canada.

To say I struggled mightily to write this story would be a gross understatement. Music isn’t my language, after all. Every time I strayed into the weeds of song composition or lyricism, I felt lost, like trying to carry on a complex conversation in a language that wasn’t mine. Then I’d get back to the food and the word bank would refill like a reservoir.

In any case, music was acutely top of mind when we took our seats at one of Cellar Door’s blonde-wood tables that evening. The playlist started somewhere in the 1980s: Billy Idol, Wham, and—was it me—or did “Private Eyes” by Hall & Oates play twice? There’s something hilariously discordant about romantic vigilante pop-rock accompanying the delicately muted colors of pre-spring on the plate.

But no matter! There was springy sourdough bread with its thick crust and almost custardy, cobwebbed middle, followed by creamy, vinegary boquerones lazing in preserved tomato water slicked with olive oil.

Suddenly, a jarringly familiar electric guitar riff fell in.

“Jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock,” sang Bobby Helms in the eponymous 1957 Christmas song. “Jingle bells swing and jingle bells ring.”

Never mind that I loathe Christmas music outside maybe five weeks in November and December. I believed at first that this was intentional—a performance art piece, maybe. Or perhaps it had become cool to ironically slip holiday songs onto playlists out of season, the way oversized Santa Claus belt buckles seem to be fashionable accessories to women’s trousers. Such is the creative gravitas of this place, I suppose.

“The music is doing weird things tonight,” said Ethan, thoroughly unbothered, as he deposited a salad of the fattest endive leaves we’d ever seen, which were draped with lacy sheets of shaved manchego and set over a puddle of kumquat vinaigrette.

“Giddy-up jingle horse, pick up your feet!”

Soon everyone in the place was laughing and the song got cut off. Just like that, things returned to aging-hipster-restaurant normal, under the gentle crooning of Belle and Sebastian and early Cat Power. Aside from a small cohort of us, no one would ever know that unwarranted Christmas music briefly jolted CDP into an alternate reality.

As expected, Belle and Sebastian’s “Stars of Track and Field” made for a dreamy sonic backdrop to the mussels escabeche, which hid beneath a billow of nutty-sweet celeriac espuma. Each plump mussel we excavated from beneath that buttercup-hued cloud dripped dots of brown butter on the way to our mouths. Would I have noticed the same details if I’d eaten this dish while, say, listening to “Silent Night?”, I wondered absently.

It’s not easy to keep on making the fearless, probing kind of art that the small crews behind Cellar Door and Blvck Svm make, to stay in a place of raw creativity, iteration and risk taking. So many things try to beat you into capitalist, mass-market submission, like investors and fickle consumer attention.

The same night Ben got the idea for the Bvck of House music videos, he fired off hundreds of Instagram DMs to restaurants around the country with a pre-proposal for the series, though he had yet to release a single song from the album. Finally, three restaurants said yes, and the thing could begin in earnest.

“If I hadn’t gotten those three yeses, I don't know if I would’ve had the confidence to pursue this idea and make a full album,” he told me.

The “faustian” video at Cellar Door was one of the last the crew shot, in December. When I asked Ben about his meal there, he said he can’t stop thinking about the salad he had—frisée with verjus vinaigrette. “Every time I have a salad now, I always end up comparing it my head to that one, and I’m disappointed.”

I can relate to the unforgettable Cellar Door salad, though—this time—for slightly different reasons.