Frontera Grill

The History

In 1987, Rick Bayless and his wife Deann opened Frontera Grill at 445 N Clark Street in Chicago's River North neighborhood. It was the culmination of a six-year odyssey through Mexico — years spent traveling from village to village, market to market, learning the regional cuisines that most Americans had never heard of. Bayless, who grew up in an Oklahoma barbecue family with a restaurant of their own, had fallen completely in love with Mexican cooking. Before he ever turned on the stoves at Frontera, he wrote "Authentic Mexican," the cookbook that would become the bible of real Mexican cuisine in the United States.

What Frontera Grill introduced to Chicago was nothing short of revolutionary. This was not Tex-Mex. This was not fast-food tacos or combination plates smothered in orange cheese. Frontera served the complex moles of Oaxaca, the pit-roasted cochinita pibil of the Yucatan, the rich pipians of Puebla — dishes built on techniques that were centuries old and as sophisticated as anything in French or Italian kitchens. Bayless sourced ingredients obsessively, eventually establishing a farm in Michigan to grow his own produce. The salsa bar featured salsas that rotated with the seasons. The guacamole was hand-ground tableside. Every dish told a story about a specific region, a specific tradition, a specific family who had taught Bayless how to make it.

The restaurant won the James Beard Foundation Award for Outstanding Restaurant in 2007 — the highest honor in American dining and a recognition that stunned no one who had eaten there. Bayless expanded the Clark Street building into a culinary campus: Topolobampo, his fine dining Mexican restaurant, opened next door; XOCO, a street food concept, joined them later. Together, the three restaurants became the most important Mexican dining complex in the United States, and Bayless became a household name through his PBS show "Mexico: One Plate at a Time" and his Top Chef Masters victory.

What Made It Famous

Rick Bayless single-handedly changed how Americans think about Mexican food. Before Frontera Grill, "Mexican restaurant" meant chips, salsa, and combo plates — enchiladas, burritos, and tacos that bore little resemblance to anything actually eaten in Mexico. Bayless showed that Mexican cuisine was as complex and worthy of fine dining as French or Italian. He demonstrated that the moles of Oaxaca required as much skill as any French mother sauce, that the chiles of Mexico were as nuanced as the grapes of Burgundy, and that the markets of Mexico City rivaled anything in Paris or Tokyo. He didn't just open a restaurant; he reframed an entire cuisine in the American imagination.

Frontera Grill's farm-to-table approach was years ahead of its time. While other chefs were still ordering from Sysco, Bayless was growing his own tomatillos and epazote on a farm in Michigan. The rotating regional specials educated a generation of Chicago diners — people who walked in knowing nothing about Oaxacan cuisine walked out understanding the difference between a negro mole and a coloradito. The restaurant became a classroom as much as a dining room, and Bayless became as much a teacher as a chef. His cookbooks, his television show, and his restaurants all served the same mission: to make Americans understand that Mexican food was one of the great cuisines of the world.

The impact rippled outward in ways that are still felt today. The explosion of authentic Mexican restaurants across America, the celebration of regional Mexican cooking, the willingness of American diners to seek out mole negro and huitlacoche and chapulines — all of it traces back, in some fundamental way, to what Rick Bayless started at 445 N Clark Street in 1987. Frontera Grill didn't just serve food; it changed the culture.

Key Facts

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