Ryszard Anton Zawadzki
Chopin Mon Ami
Pierogi Inn
4801 N. Milwaukee Ave.
773-685-0782
Polish
While attending hotel chef school in his native Poland, Ryszard Anton Zawadzki also was an amateur boxer, of all things. The fighting allowed him to travel to places like Italy, and in 1968 he escaped from Poland as a refugee. Arriving in the States, he first worked at a factory in Connecticut, then attended chef’s school.
After responding to a newspaper ad in 1971, he went to work for Hugh Hefner as a chef at his Los Angeles Playboy mansion. “Hefner would taste everything at the banquets,” Zawadzki recalls, “but what he really preferred was pot roast, pork chop sandwiches and Lipton’s chicken noodle soup.”
Zawadzki came to Chicago in 1980 when he launched Pelican’s Catch, a seafood restaurant, followed by work as head chef in the Lake Point Towers restaurant and Mareva’s, and ten years as host of a cooking show on cable television. In 1989 he opened the popular Pierogi Inn, noted for its hearty Polish fare, and in February 1998 Chopin Mon Ami debuted.
His signature dishes at Chopin Mon Ami include salmon champagne/grapes, snapper hunter’s style and veal a la Warsaw, while in the adjacent Pierogi Inn he serves traditional Polish food, but also items like shrimp pierogi. “The only thing the two restaurants have in common,” he notes, “is the kitchen and the Chopin music.”