Stumptown Coffee Roasters. Intelligentsia Coffee. In October of 1995 Doug Zell and Emily Mange left San Francisco to open an in-store coffee roaster-retailer on Broadway Avenue on the north side of Chicago.
At that time they were simply hoping to bring great, fresh-roasted coffee to their own coffeebar with the help of a charming, but perhaps too often erratic 12-kilo roaster. Since then Intelligentsia has evolved considerably. Intelligentsia now has three cities it calls home: Chicago—a city that is brooding, practical and reluctantly beautiful; Los Angeles—a city that views creativity as a birthright, is immensely vast, decidedly impractical and equally messy and marvelous; and New York—a city of paradoxes, hulking but chock full of intimate corners, timeless but achingly current, polished but decaying, worldly yet oddly provincial, all crashing together in perfect cacophony (or is it harmony?).
Honestly, we love all of these places, but for very different reasons. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Lantern Kinfolk. An interview with Andrea Reusing, chef-owner of the celebrated Pan-Asian restaurant and bar Lantern in the North Carolina college town.
Focusing on Pan-Asian cuisine with locally/regionally sourced ingredients from North Carolina farms (and often named one of America’s top restaurants), Lantern opened in 2002 by brother-sister team Andrea and Brendan Reusing. Andrea, author of Cooking in the Moment: A Year of Seasonal Recipes (Clarkson Potter, 2011), is a James Beard award-winning chef, and their restaurant has had a huge influence on the Triangle’s farm-to-table food scene. Lantern recently expanded its space to include (along with the dining room and bar that already exist) a room called Lantern Table, a community meeting space where they can entertain visiting chefs, offer classes or just gather around a large table.