Gordon Ramsay brought Kitchen Nightmares to Chicago this year to work on Borelli's Pizzeria in Lincoln Square, and when he needed someone to vouch for the pizza at the end of it, he called our founder. The episode aired in early August. FOX posted the moment to Instagram a few days later, and that is Jonathan and his wife Renee at the table.
Here is the part that makes the story: Jonathan had no idea what he had signed up for. It started with a phone call he took on Michigan Avenue between tours, a producer telling him a major TV show was filming in Chicago and it was centered around pizza. "I could barely hear the guy," he told WGN, "but I'm like, absolutely." A few weeks of short calls and scattered emails later he had a location and a time, and nothing else.
"I have no idea what the show is. I have no idea who the star of the show is. And I still didn't even know after the show. I found out like everybody else did." Jonathan Porter
The production kept it that way on purpose, starting with a check-in that was not at a restaurant.
"I checked in at like what was an abandoned workout gym, to get checked in, sign my NDAs and all that, take a picture. Then they put me in an unmarked van and drove me around Chicago for 10 minutes." Jonathan Porter
The van did its job right up until it did not. Jonathan knows this city block by block, which is the entire premise of what we do. He had gotten in at Western and Lawrence, and ten minutes of deliberately weird routing later he clocked it: "By the time we get to where we're going, I'm like, I know I'm only two blocks away from where we started."
Then came the instruction that finally made it feel like television. He and Renee were to walk in and ask for table nine. They did. Gordon Ramsay walked in behind them. The voiceover Ramsay recorded for that scene is the clip above, the one where he says he has invited Jonathan Porter to help spread the word. Jonathan's reaction to watching it back is the most Chicago sentence in the whole interview.
"What almost took me out is watching him on TV say, 'Good to see you both,' to me and my wife. And I'm like, we summer in the Hamptons." Jonathan Porter
If you watched the episode and thought the wait for the pizza looked painful, it was. The meal ran about two hours. Asked whether he was acting or actually annoyed, Jonathan gave the only honest answer available: "There was some really good editing there." He also remembers the line that finally got the pie fired. "I believe Gordon Ramsay's line was, table nine is now urgent."
The oven was the real story
The pizza nerd in him could not let this one go. Borelli's has a carousel deck oven, a genuine piece of Chicago pizza history that Jonathan describes as "almost like a Ferris wheel on the inside with like six main decks." The kitchen was using exactly one of them, power baking everything on that single shelf. He is careful to say that is not automatically wrong, just unnecessary for what Borelli's was trying to make.
Ramsay reworked it, along with a lot else. "Gordon installed some new systems, some new equipment, showed them how to do some things and drastically changed the pizza," Jonathan said. "So he really does put the work in to help the business." His verdict on the food that night was short and unqualified: "The food was incredible."
Borelli's has been feeding Lincoln Square and Ravenswood since 2013 and is still at it, thin crust and live music, with jam nights on Thursdays. Their hours move around their event calendar, so check the schedule before you head over. The episode streams on Hulu.
WGN Radio 720 Hear Jonathan tell the whole story himselfNo van required for ours. Check the calendar and come eat with us.