"The other Chicago item shouldn’t be that big of a surprise as chef Phillip Foss of El Ideas, the funky experimental tasting menu restaurant in Douglass Park, is appearing on tonight’s show. Foss, a Milwaukee native, says he’ll be a guest chef on the episode which will feature Chaos Cooking, a type of style — a phrase coined in 2022 by Eater’s Jaya Saxena — as a new type of cooking that’s an “aggressive, weird, troll-y fusion that’s also thoughtful, being incredibly well received, and actually good.” Foss says he’d never heard of the term until he was approached to appear on the show. But he feels it’s a philosophy he’s embraced through the years at EL Ideas where the menu can include chicken liver Twix and a Chicago-style lobster dog. He also mentions how chaos cooking involves an element of shock. His restaurant has served foie gras and black truffle milk from a baby bottle, for example. But the biggest example might be a “cocaine” course which involves a line of coconut and lime powder served on a mirror with a razor blade and straw. “Though it is easily the most cost-effective item we’ve ever offered as a course, it provides exponential dividends in shock value for our guests,” Foss writes." - Ashok Selvam
