Big Jones Celebrates a Beautiful Vision of Regional Southern Cuisine
Growing up in Southern Indiana, spending time on his family’s farms and in their kitchens, Paul Fehribach knew from a young age he wanted to become a chef. “When I was seven or eight, I used to walk to the shop across the street from my house to buy graph paper and draw layouts of the restaurant I would own one day,” he says.
In 2008 that vision came to life in Big Jones, a restaurant in the heart of Chicago’s Andersonville neighborhood. Inside, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina adorn the walls as maps and on the menu in Southern dishes both classic (skillet cornbread with whipped sorghum butter) and decidedly modern (refried oxtails rendang with crispy chow fun noodles and coconut milk gravy).
It’s all part of Fehribach’s mission to serve the truest version of Southern cuisine he knows—one that is wide-ranging and ever-changing, and one that he enjoys researching now as much as ever. His vision is informed through myriad factors: —through his travels, active membership in The Southern Foodways Alliance, and work as a cookbook author (his most recent, Midwestern Food, debuted last year).
Here, we chat with Fehribach about the importance of regional cooking, the evolution of Southern cuisine, and why our simplest food memories can often be our strongest.
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When you opened Big Jones, what did you envision?
At the time, Southern food wasn’t being taken seriously as a regional cuisine of value. We wanted to change that. Many of the Southern restaurants that existed outside of the South were fueling stereotypes about what the cuisine was, without reflecting its true spirit. I would place Southern cuisine on the world stage with regional French cuisine, regional Mexican cuisine, and regional Chinese cuisine. In Italy, you can focus on dishes from Puglia to Piedmont — and the South is no different. We wanted to show the modern and evolving dimensions of these regions and seasons.
What regions do you draw from most prominently for your menus?
We’re inspired by many. There is Gullah Geechee, the coastal cuisine of the Carolinas, New Orleans, and South Louisiana. We make a distinction between Cajun and Creole, because they are very different cuisines with very different roots. We lean into Coastal Virginia Tidewater from time to time, when we make crab cakes and turtle soup. And then there’s Appalachia, where you have sauerkraut, a range of pickles, and skillet cornbread. There’s redeye gravy, too, which we’re serving on our current brunch menu with sweet potato biscuits and fried eggs.
What were some of the Southern foods that you grew up with?
I grew up in Southern Indiana, which is at the northern end of the Southern culture belt. My grandma had a huge kitchen garden, and a pantry filled with all of these strange jars of pickles and preserves. And my grandpa had a smokehouse — we ate a lot of ham because it was affordable, and it was delicious. Fried chicken was culturally very significant for our family. It wasn’t something that you went out for for fast food; it was something that you had at a summer wedding, or at your great-aunt’s 80th Jubilee. It was a very important, celebratory food. Biscuits were another big one — I learned how to make biscuits when I was just old enough to reach over the counter.
Southern food wasn’t being taken seriously as a regional cuisine of value. We wanted to change that.— Paul Fehribach
How did that interest grow as your culinary career began to take shape?
In my early chef days in kitchens in Indiana, I read a lot of cookbooks and food magazines and was fascinated by things like gumbo and jambalaya. I kept diving deeper into the research. When I did make my way to New Orleans, I visited institutions like Commander’s Palace, Herbsaint, and Bayona — and in Charleston, spots like The Glass Onion and Fig. All of them, in their own way, steered me towards wanting to cook elevated Southern cuisine.
You’ve mentioned the importance of tracking the evolution of Southern cuisine—can we find hints of this on the menus?
We’ve incorporated Latino and Vietnamese flavors over the years. We are seeing more Venezuelans settling throughout the South now, and we just put our first Venezuelan item on the menu — a guasacaca sauce with tempura hearts of palm and five pepper relish.
Regionality is intertwined with home, memories, and how we strive to preserve those memories through food. Do you have any favorite food memories?
My grandpa was a tomato farmer, and one of my earliest memories was going out with him and picking blackberries — buckets of them. I must’ve been about three years old. The next thing I knew, these pies were coming out of the oven — these bubbling over, black lava pies, and the smell that filled the kitchen was otherworldly. It’s so vivid to me, still. It was so simple, but I saw how something could be picked and cooked, right then and there.
It’s a testament to your passion for local, seasonal food. How do you reflect these practices at the restaurant?
My grandparents never ate anything that they didn’t grow or forage for themselves. Acquiring and preparing food was a family activity, and it was something that took place in the community. We may not all live on farms, but I look at the restaurant as a family and community table. We work with farmers here in the Midwest, but elsewhere, too — our hearts of palm are grown by a family farm on the Big Island of Hawaii. I called them on Sunday — they cut the hearts of palm on Monday, and they bought them a seat on an airplane. Our grits are from Anson Mills, who contracts with family farms in the Carolinas and Texas. Whatever it is that’s on your plate, we want people to have that connection to their farmers, and we want the farmers to have that connection to our guests.
