Chef Curtis Duffy: Fireproof
Chicago Michelin-starred chef Curtis Duffy—whose restaurant Ever appeared in The Bear—discusses how kitchen discipline became his path through personal tragedy.
Why we picked this
Duffy's first restaurant Grace earned three Michelin stars. His origin story involves a level of hardship that makes the achievement harder to understand and more worth hearing about.
Curtis Duffy is best known as the chef behind Grace, his first restaurant in Chicago, which held three Michelin stars for four consecutive years, and Ever, which has held two Michelin stars annually since 2020 and appeared as a backdrop in The Bear. What is less widely known is the trajectory that produced him—a childhood defined by violence and loss, a path through kitchens that became both obsession and survival.
Fireproof is his memoir: an account of how the precision, discipline, and total commitment required by serious cooking became a way of making a life when the one he started with was catastrophic. The James Beard Award for Best Chef: Great Lakes followed, along with appearances on Top Chef and Iron Chef—but the book is about before all of that.
Part of the Chicago Humanities Festival’s Northwestern University festival day, held at the Block Museum of Art.