Chicago chefs Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark on the high price of living the dream

As Chicago icons go, Bing Bread might be right up there with Michigan Avenue and Wrigley Field — at least to people obsessed with eating, which, in this town, is legion.

If you never got a taste, the dish, invented at Parachute, a 50-seat restaurant in Avondale, is an adaptation of a traditional Chinese scallion pancake rendered deliciously unrecognizable. The round, yeasted loaf is fortified with potato and cheese, stuffed with bacon, sprinkled with sesame seeds and baked to a mahogany shellac. Slather with sour cream butter to thy heart’s content.

Parachute brought Bing back for a last dance on the restaurant’s closing night.

“We definitely sold a lot,” said Beverly Kim, Parachute’s chef and owner with her husband, Johnny Clark, also a chef. (Thirty-five piping-hot loaves went to tables that day.) “It was fun. But I remember how much work it was, too.”

Parachute closed its doors for good on March 23, after 10 years of serving refined takes on Korean cuisine.

In the weeks since shuttering their beloved first born, Kim and Clark have cried, taken stock and announced their comeback: Parachute Hi-Fi. Their former restaurant, at 3500 N. Elston Ave., will be reimagined as a casual “music bar” with creative cocktails and pizza puffs, slated to open in summer.

The other part of the plan, still under wraps, is to reopen Parachute downtown.

Kim and Clark won’t reveal much, but they will say that the new Parachute will be big. It has to be big. And therein lies the conundrum of the chef-driven independent restaurant these days. To stay alive, it’s cost-trimming pizza puffs or a glitzy, major investment with prices to match. Kim and Clark are going for both.

“The universe is just telling me that it’s time for change,” said the petite 44-year-old Kim in March, two days before Parachute’s final day of service. “What worked 10 years ago might not work now. What people have experienced in the past five years, you know, it’s been a lot.”

Which is to say nothing about what the restaurant industry has experienced: Nearly 3.7 million jobs evaporated between February and April 2020 as the COVID shutdowns hit. Thousands of full-service restaurants shuttered, never to return. The industry was in “free fall,” as the National Restaurant Association told Congress in its plea for help at the end of that year.

Today, the restaurant industry has more or less bounced back: 12.3 million people are employed by the sector, roughly the same as in 2019, according to Labor Department statistics. Datassential, a food-industry market-research firm, told Crain’s that in Chicago more restaurants opened than closed in 2023 through October — 910, compared to 849. The NRA, the sector’s trade group, forecasts that U.S. restaurants will this year top a record $1 trillion in sales, up 5% from 2023.

But the recovery favored fast-food chains over sit-down restaurants, according to industry data. And small independent restaurants — ones often owned by the chef in the kitchen or by generations of a family — are struggling to adjust to skyrocketing labor costs, as detailed in recent reporting by The Wall Street Journal. Here, chef-owned independents, arguably the reason for Chicago’s reputation as a great dining city, are feeling the strain like never before.

The indie restaurant’s ‘math problem’

Parachute closed because, Clark said, the long hours and meager payouts became untenable, and the couple realized they needed a business that could sustain their family for the next 10 years.

“The margin is too thin to nothing,” Clark said of Parachute’s revenue-to-cost ratio. Before the pandemic, the restaurant could pull in a healthy 12% profit margin; by the end, it was more like 1%.

He cited today’s fast-rising wages, a scarcity of workers and much higher food costs. Clark noted that people also seem to have lost their appetite for late dining: Parachute’s “third turn” — a restaurant’s last seating that starts around 9 p.m. — had practically ceased to exist.

“It got to the point where Beverly and I were working for free for years,” Clark said. “It’s a math problem. We just have to fix the equation.”

Reopening Parachute closer to downtown is their attempt to adjust the math. The West Loop, convenient for tourists, is a target. Clark said that just getting anyone’s attention is a challenge these days. “You almost need a piece of culture to get people to come out,” he said. “A special guest, Restaurant Week, guest chef. Food alone doesn’t do it.”

“We’re at the point in our lives where it all is coming to a head for us. We have three children who are very young, so we’re still in major provider mode,” Kim said. The couple’s three sons are 14, 7 and 4.

“Our goal is to make these places work for us. I feel like we can’t work any harder. So we need to work smarter,” she said. “You have to take a step back and think: OK, how are we going to actually, like, do the next 10 years?”

“Such a small staff, so little money”

Restaurants come, restaurants go. And Parachute, admirers will tell you, had a great run.

Kim and Clark’s second restaurant, Wherewithall, earned enthusiastic reviews for its farm-to-table menu. From 2019 to 2023, it lived through the full pandemic cycle of catastrophe. Last October, the couple opened Anelya, named after Clark’s Ukrainian grandmother and run mostly by women cooks from Ukraine, in the same space.

Andrew Friedman, who wrote a book about Wherewithall, published only a few months after the restaurant closed, said there’s far more competition today, compared to the era when lumbering, old-school steakhouses reigned in Chicago.

“I think the dining public kind of treats restaurants the way they treat movies,” said Friedman, who regularly interviews chefs in his long-running podcast. “If they see it, it’s checked off their list. If they loved it, maybe they’ll go see it again and bring some friends. But [restaurants] have become a little disposable.”

With social media fueling warp-speed trends, every buzz-generating novelty helps. John’s Food and Wine in Lincoln Park has sparked curiosity in its self-service model: Diners step up to order as they would at a McDonald’s, then sit to receive a dish that is a far cry from Chicken McNuggets. More like, duck breast with charred radicchio and date and shallot jam ($47).

Owners Adam McFarland and Tom Rogers, also the restaurant’s chefs, have said their counter-service system is designed to address the stiff competition for experienced workers. They eliminated wait staff but still charge a 20% mandatory service fee that is distributed among all hourly staffers, including cooks, the roaming sommelier, bartenders and dishwashers. Line cooks at John’s earn $31 an hour.

Kim and Clark seem to be testing a new strategy: The accessible neighborhood bar concept will have lower food costs and thus lower prices; the high-end downtown restaurant will allow them to create an experience that warrants big-ticket pricing. In other words, exit the difficult middle ground.

Parachute Hi-Fi’s hook is music and curated DJ nights, the “piece of culture” that Kim and Clark hope will draw people to come out.

“You need to be able to dance. To get lost in music. It’s like a release,” Kim said. “We’ll provide the food and the drinks that match that fun vibe.”

As for the bigger, splashier Parachute, investors will help fund the venture, injecting the capital needed to scale up. Kim hints at top-grade fish flown in from the Toyosu market in Japan, a private dining room and special equipment to make dishes with a wow factor. “That you’re like, Wow! They went full out!” she said. “For Parachute, I want to go as big as I can.”

It’s the sky or bust.