Kasra Medhat, chef-owner of the Magnolia Cafe, which opened on a nondescript stretch of Wilson just ten days before Christmas, has spent the last six months learning that running a kitchen and running a whole restaurant are two completely different animals. “Everything went wrong not once, but three times,” laments Lisa Karam, Medhat’s girlfriend and the restaurant’s manager/server/hostess. “I broke my foot, we had to rewire all of the electrical, we had six floods….The day before our opening party we had a gas leak. Luckily we have cooperative landlords.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
As a kid growing up in Oak Brook, Medhat’s main exposure to cooking was through his Iranian father (“a grill man”) and his Turkish mother (“lots of rice dishes and vegetables”). He graduated in 1990 from Hinsdale Central High School, where he played singles tennis and was part of a state championship squad his senior year. After high school he moved to Winter Park, Florida, to attend Rollins College, where he gave up tennis in favor of a busy social life and graduated with an environmental studies major. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. I hated office jobs.” He enrolled at Evanston’s Kendall College culinary school in 1996, working on the side at Jack’s on Halsted (then Jack’s American Blend), where chef and owner Jack Jones soon became a mentor. “At school they would say, ‘Today we’re going to make a mayonnaise,’ and at work it was like, ‘Just do it!’ Culinary school alone just doesn’t cut it. [Young chefs] have to get their asses kicked, spend tons of hours in a working kitchen, and the pay sucks….You have to have the passion.”
In July 2001, his brother noticed that the old Earth Market space at 1224 W. Wilson was available. The previous owners–caterers who opened to the public for lunch and brunch–were getting out of the business, and when Medhat signed the lease he also bought up their chairs, tables, and kitchen equipment. He and Karam ripped out the old water heater and then had to patch the resulting eight-foot hole. “We refinished the floor, built a bar, put up drywall, added the banquettes, and re-covered the chairs,” he says. “It took us three days just to clean out the basement.”
