LITTLE VILLAGE — The basement of Cook County Jail’s Division 11 used to be a kitchen and cafeteria, where inmates formed assembly lines and passed ladles to scoop out rice and beans, split rations of turkey chunks and maybe savor a slice of yellow cake — all with one hand chained to the table and bench.
For the last decade, the basement has housed a different kind of kitchen. Inmates work together, chef smocks over Department of Corrections sweats, to cook up what some of them say is the best pizza in Chicago.
Soon, that pizza will be available to those beyond the barbed wire.
The pizza is the product of Recipe for Change, a nonprofit founded by celebrated chef Bruno Abate that occupies almost 13,000 square feet in the Cook County Jail, offering culinary certifications, art and life lessons to a handful of medium-max inmates, in hopes they’ll never have to come back.
“There’s still no place worse than this,” Abate said. “But in any corner of the world, you can create something beautiful.”
Mack Liederman details how ‘Recipe for Change’ works:
Recipe for Change is working to launch a food truck, funded by $175,000 Abate received in private donations.
The local chef and restaurateur plans to employ about a dozen former inmates on a rolling basis — many just out or on electric monitoring — so they can make a steady wage while figuring out what comes next.
The food truck, serving pizza, panini and salad, will be stationed outside familiar grounds for those working it: Cook County’s Criminal Courthouse, 2650 S. California Ave., across the street from the jail.
Abate hopes to open in the spring. And he hopes the food truck shows there’s still possibilities for those stuck in the cycle.
“Try this pizza, and you’ll find there’s more humanity to be given to people, more education, compassion, self-esteem, more hope,” said Abate, who has opened Chicago restaurants including Follia and Tocco. “We’re capable of being more creative to make the world a better place.”
‘The Best Pizza In Chicago’
The incarcerated chefs start their creations with tomatoes and flour imported from Italy and finish off their pies — topped with barbecue or hot chicken, sausage, pepperoni or spicy veggies — in a brick oven worthy of one of Abate’s fine Italian restaurants. The finished product is a thin pizza with a bit of a crunch.
“Most important, the food tells their story,” Abate said as the dishes hit his table.
Daquan, 27, and Romerio, 37, weighed and sorted bags of mozzarella cheese alongside other inmates as they laughed and reminisced about their favorite pizza places: Lou Malnati’s, Italian Fiesta, Home Run Inn.
“But for now, I’ll say this is the best pizza in Chicago, because we’re making it,” Romerio said.
“Even the bosses ask up for it,” Daquan said.
Chef’s knives are attached to cords connected to the tables. Handcuffs lay next to rows of spatulas and strainers. A dry-erase calendar has the cooks’ court dates colorfully circled.
Ethan, 22, buried his thoughts into a book about the Louvre. He was drawing in his cell and selling portraits of loved ones to other inmates when a pizza delivery worker one day caught a glimpse of one of his sketches. Now, Ethan is also learning to cook.
“I’m going to make my grandmother steak tortas. Hopefully they’ll be decent,” Ethan said. “When I come home, I want to be able to contribute something.”
There are 48 inmates participating in Recipe for Change at any given time. Requests to join the coveted program can be three or four times that each month, Abate said. Each inmate tells Abate a story about what they’ve left behind and what they hope to regain. He doesn’t feel the need to ask what they’re in for.
Since launching in 2014, Recipe for Change has graduated over 4,000 inmates from its program.
Abate said he likes to see the best in the program enrollees. The chef recently gave a former inmate $100 when he told him he couldn’t afford to get his car back from the pound.
And though the program aims to give inmates a marketable skill for when they’re released, Recipe for Change is as much about growing the person as it is about making a pizza pie.
“I’m not here to make chefs,” Abate said.
Room To Grow
Recipe for Change has grown since its inception a decade ago, and it has more space to expand in Cook County Jail after changes in pre-trial detention laws.
The cooking program started with about 20 students and has doubled in size since then. Recipe for Change has also added a music studio and art classes, with students painting replicas of famous works by Van Gogh, Picasso, Dali, da Vinci and Giotto on the jail’s basement walls.
The authentic brick pizza oven was added to the jail kitchen in 2015. Abate’s program won a $50,000 MacArthur Foundation award in 2016 to help with further expansion.
A common room near in the basement has been revived with wine racks, $14,000 lounge chairs and a grand piano Abate brought over when his Wicker Park restaurant, Tocco, closed in 2018.
With a rise in electric monitoring, lighter sentences for minor crimes and the new Pretrial Fairness Act, the jail’s population has dwindled from over 10,000 inmates in the 1990s to less than half that, said Tierney Brosnahan, program director for the Cook County Department of Corrections.
“That’s why we have all the extra space to give,” Brosnahan said.
With that space, Abate plans to build a bakery in the former mess hall where inmates once ate, hands chained to the table.
Each holiday season, Division 11 welcomes Cardinal Blase Cupich of the Archdiocese of Chicago for a meal. Abate picked out an inmate’s painting of the Madonna to give the Cardinal and laid out the menu: filet mignon, salmon, lasagna.
“It must be perfection,” Abate told the inmates. “This is food for the heart.”
Despite the bustling nature of his program, Abate said his goal is for the kitchen and arts studios to actually have less participation.
“My dream is to have these kitchens empty,” Abate promised the inmates.
‘It Keeps Your Mind In Better Places’
Abate, born in Naples and raised in Milan, parked his Alfa Romeo out front and strolled into jail on a recent morning wearing green lounge pants, tortoise glasses and a cream turtleneck, accented with a bracelet that read “love.”
He declined to elaborate on what brought him to work here, beyond saying it was a “3 a.m. call from God.”
After finishing his lunch, the 6-foot-5 Abate toured the jail kitchens with the towering presence of a head chef. He doled out wisdom with pinched fingers and an Italian accent thicker than the pizza dough on inmates’ prep tables.
While Abate secures final permits, the food truck is parked behind the women’s jail, next to a grassy patch where the chef plans to plant a vegetable garden come spring.
He’s picturing an awning and chairs outside the food truck in the summer, where police officers, judges, lawyers and neighbors can all enjoy some pies after their day in court.
Abate doesn’t call the food truck a second chance — “because people are always changing,” he said.
“When we come into this world, all that we need is food and love,” Abate said. “This is how we discover and rediscover ourselves.”
David, 21, is undergoing the process of self-discovery in Recipe for Change’s art and cooking programs, he said. David told Abate he hopes to return home and teach his newborn daughter how to paint.
“Being in this program, it keeps your mind in better places,” David said.
See more photos from the program:
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