FOR NEARLY TWO DECADES, ERICK WILLIAMS WAS THE RESPECTED EXECutive chef at MK. Working under chef-owner Michael Kornick, he helped to relate a story of farm-to-fork dining in the way it was oft told, with an American perspective superimposed on a classical European framework. But it wasn’t until he opened his own restaurant, Virtue in Hyde Park, that Williams hit the big time in terms of national recognition. Here, the native Chicagoan told a culinary story from a more specific point of view, that of Southern cooking through the lens of his Black forebears and the Great Migration.
Many chefs open restaurants to share