“Just wait; it’s going to happen fast,” Jake Potashnick, the executive chef and owner of Feld, warned with a smile. For several minutes, a quiet, if anticipatory, calm pervaded the dining room at this Michelin-starred temple to extreme seasonality in West Town. I sipped on a sprightly opener of chilled rhubarb, peach pepper nectar and chamomile.
Then, boom! All 10 staff streamed forth from the centralized prep area and small open kitchen, bearing eight tiny amuse-bouches each for 20 diners, including me, seated shoulder to shoulder around the warmly lit room’s perimeter.
Cheerful, rapid-fire descriptors tumbled out to accompany each bite, always yoking technique to purveyor and place. Sustainably farmed California mountain trout belly on a tangy, allium-studded crumpet. A golden nasturtium flower cradling a pocket of pickled pine honey. A savory chicken fat tamal made from Wisconsin-grown corn wrapped in a sweet ramp leaf. A single tempura-fried asparagus spear, which Potashnick retrieved two days before from Falak Farms in Baroda, Michigan.
Known in Feldspeak as “the drop,” it was a delicious, verbose onslaught — like being sucker-punched by the tender, verdant first bites of spring after a long winter. It slingshotted us into 20-odd dishes across a 2½-hour, $225 tasting menu that breathlessly tells the story of our seasons.
“I love the idea of being a little overwhelmed,” Potashnick told me later. “The whole experience of Feld is this odd dichotomy. On the one hand, I want you to be incredibly comfortable. I want the team to be warm, fun and bubbly. I want the cutlery to feel great in your hand. On the other hand, I want you to be so uncomfortable, I want the pace to be shocking.”
Potashnick is no stranger to the oppositional. Feld’s highly anticipated 2024 opening was a critically rocky one indeed, temporarily yanking the narrative out from under this exacting young chef who had wanted a restaurant of his own since childhood.
He persisted despite early backlash and weeks of empty seats, and now the accolades are piling up — among them a Michelin star and green star for sustainability, best new restaurant nods from the Jean Banchet Awards and Bon Appetit and a James Beard Awards Foundation nomination for best chef Great Lakes. Potashnick and company can breathe a little easier as they hone the viewpoint of this ambitious restaurant that’s scarcely left the limelight.
A Chicago native, Potashnick got into food early, owing partly to a mom who cooked five nights a week and loved hosting weekly gatherings. In interviews, he tells the formative tale of emailing Alinea at age 13 asking to shoot a short video for his school science project and winding up with a private tour of the restaurant led by Grant Achatz himself.
By freshman year of high school, Potashnick had mastered spherification, a molecular gastronomy trick, at home, “but I didn’t know how to make chicken stock.”
He graduated from the Cornell School of Hotel Administration and briefly attended the Culinary Institute of America before going to work in Europe for several years at pioneering high-end restaurants, including Daniel Berlin Krog in Skåne-Tranås, Sweden; La Marine in Noirmoutier, France; and Ernst in Berlin.
The motivated chef absorbed lessons from each like a sponge — about rigorous sourcing, in-the-bones hospitality and how to handle the sudden onslaught of global fame. He traveled in his limited free time, collecting and documenting exceptional meals, sharing his musings on Medium and in pithy, opinionated TikTok videos.
When he moved home in 2022, his TikTok morphed into a video diary of opening what he coined a “relationship-to-table” restaurant in West Town. Items from handpicked specialty farmers, ranchers and cheesemakers would dictate what appeared on the plate. Hype swelled alongside Potashnick’s following, and with it, the scrutiny of being a mostly unknown quantity in Chicago with naked ambition and a big online presence.
The investor-backed restaurant debuted on June 28, 2024, with a packed house and full bookings calendar. When a couple of online critics pounced early with negative reviews, the internet piled on as it’s wont to do — trashing the minimalistic plating, a la the now infamous three-day cheese plate that featured three slices of the same cheese produced on different days.
Some of the criticism was valid, Potashnick later said — that some dishes needed seasoning, that courses were too small and plentiful. He stuck up for the restaurant on socials then took more heat. But he insists Feld was on to something.
“In the restaurant from very early on, I was seeing guests have an incredible time,” he said. “From the outside, you had two posts with very viral reach saying the opposite.”
For a time it seemed like the naysayers might win. By mid-August the restaurant sat nearly empty most nights. Potashnick tried to stay positive. He worried his cooks would start jumping ship. None did.
“Then there were three days at the start of September where we didn’t have any bookings,” he said. “I said, well, let’s close. Let’s go meet a producer.”
They flew to Maine to spend a few days with Sue Buxton, owner of Day Boat Fresh and Ingrid Bengis Seafood companies in Deer Isle, who supplies Feld with seasonal scallops, lobster, halibut and sweet peekytoe crab. Potashnick covered lodging, meals and the car rental out of his pocket.
It was an important week, he said, not just for connecting the team more deeply to the product.
“This group of people got to really decompress after a very unfortunate period.”
They streamlined, upped portion sizes and seasoning. By fall, Feld was filling up again. A year later, it earned a Michelin star and green star. (The latter will reportedly be phased out by the end of the year.)
Many Chicago chefs value working with local producers, but most also deal in volumes that far outpace what these specialty farms can provide. A restaurant serving 200 customers a night can’t build a weekly menu centered around a 45-pound weekly asparagus order. But a 20-seat restaurant with one seating every night except Saturday can.
Over the course of a week, Feld’s menu might change 40% depending on what’s at the farmers market or arriving at the door. (Roughly 95% of ingredients come from Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana.) A seemingly reliable core of dishes will live for at most three weeks before seasonal shifts or restlessness force their hand.
But for a fleeting moment in that theater-in-the-round dining room, you can slurp hour-old Illinois cheese that’s set like silken tofu then seasoned with sweet, citrusy spruce shoots and a piquant dribble of ramp oil. You can know the delicate brininess of the first tiny, curled Oregon crawfish of their brief season, basking in mole made fiery through last summer’s peppers. You’ll get an earful about elusive white asparagus, grown in total darkness at Flatwater Farms in Buchanan, Michigan, before Feld’s cooks pummel the nutty little spears with enough citrusy beurre blanc to make them a little, deliciously, indecent.
This might all veer into self-seriousness if it weren’t delivered with a wink.
“Because where else would you put carrot?” quipped chef de partie Caroline Schrope as she detailed a mind-bending little dessert of carrot purée, carrot ice cream, miso caramel and acorn syrup tuile. Sure, the carrots’ almost toothachey sweetness was offset beautifully by their complexly earthy, nutty, umami accessories. More importantly, the dish was fun.
Potashnick makes no secret of his rejection of fine-dining tropes like gilding indiscriminately with truffles and caviar. He’s also particular about word choice: On a Tuesday preplanning Zoom call he hosts weekly with his small team, he told the group, “I don’t wanna say the ‘C’ word,” in reference to a back-and-forth conversation with chef de partie Alex Felix about how to steam masa almost like a custard to achieve multiple textures.
Addressing me with a grin, he quipped, “Chawanmushi is a banned word at Feld because every fine-dining restaurant does it.”
Yet he knows some of his isms read as insufferable and so he tends to get ahead by saying the punch line out loud first. Field trips are archly called “Feld trips.” (An upcoming one will take the team to view the University of Chicago library’s antique cookbook collection.)
When Potashnick was building the restaurant, he created a “Feld bible” of 42 core fundamentals that define the restaurant.
“It sounds really bad, but it’s not,” he told me.
Commandment One: Do not break plates: Less literal than it sounds, it means to handle problems with a sense of mindfulness, “though our plates were custom designed,” he noted.
Snakebitten though he may be, Potashnick has never shied away from the spotlight. The night I dined at Feld, the couple next to me booked their reservation after one saw the 2025 docuseries featuring Potashnick called “Knife Edge: Chasing Michelin Stars” on a flight. He also still posts regular, narrated “Day in the Life” reels, recapping his day from answering emails to butchering cured trout and starting granita.
Call it a survival tactic for an ambitious restaurant charging $225 a head. These days, such destinations can’t live on Chicago’s special occasion diners alone.
But perhaps it also stems from a need to regain control of the narrative for someone who’s been building this high-wire dream for most of his young life.
Despite the accolades, “We’re such a tiny small fry,” Potashnick said. “I still feel like we’re just trying to get our name out there.”