By John DeMers

As a Greek kid growing up in an Italian-Polish neighborhood in Chicago, third-generation restaurateur Jimmy Bannos had no idea his future lay in cooking New Orleans food.

And he had no idea the walls of his New Orleans-themed restaurants would someday be covered with bottles of the hot sauce so popular among lovers of Cajun-Creole cuisine.

That’s not to say Bannos thinks New Orleans cooking is just about heat - au contraire. But like the man said, some like it hot. And this particular Chicago chef is decidedly one of those someones.

“Everybody up here thinks Louisiana food has to burn your mouth off, that it has to blister you,” says Bannos, who has parlayed his Greek family’s purchase of a Jewish delicatessen on the seventh floor of an old office building into a three-location success called Heaven on Seven.

“I tell them it’s more about balance of flavors, about complexity, about blending sweet and sour, or hot and sweet. But sometimes they’re so busy cleaning their plates that they miss my big lecture altogether.”

Bannos, who visited New Orleans in the mid 1980s after cooking some recipes out of Paul Prudhomme’s first cookbook, will soon have a cookbook of his own. The recipe collection inspired by the food at Heaven on Seven is due from Ten Speed Press in early 2001. Some copies may even arrive in time for the holidays.

All three of Bannos’ restaurants (the original Heaven on Wabash in Chicago’s famous Loop, a bigtime version on Rush just off posh Michigan Avenue, and the newest on Clark Street a loping flyball from Wrigley Field) now feature a hot sauce collection the chef has dubbed the Wall of Flame.

Though he decided to cook New Orleans food after that first visit, after meeting with Prudhomme and being introduced to some of the best chefs in town, the hot sauce thing just happened on its own.

“I liked to keep hot sauces on the tables here,” Bannos says, “so whenever I’d go to New Orleans and taste a new sauce I liked, I’d buy a few bottles and bring them back. Before I knew it, I had about 400 bottles in the restaurant.”

One-upmanship took over from this point, with customers bringing in their own favorites from New Orleans, the Southwest, the Caribbean, the Orient or wherever, to see if Bannos had tasted or even heard of them. If they actually showed the chef something new, he’d reward them with a free lunch - a little something extra, or “lagniappe” in New Orleans Creole French.

It proved a win-win, all the way around. In return for comping a few lunches, Bannos developed walls in his restaurant filled with hot sauces lined on shallow shelves. The count is right at 1,300 different sauces in the original location on Wabash, more than 2,000 on Rush, and a respectable 1,000 at the new place on Clark.

“In the last 10 years, this hot sauce thing has gotten out of control,” Bannos says. “The king was always Tabasco, but then even in Louisiana there were Panola, Crystal and many others. Actually, Louisiana sauces are never really hot, but they have a lot of flavor - just like Louisiana cuisine.

“The Caribbean sauces tend to be hotter, with their Scotch bonnet peppers opening up a whole new avenue. But they also tend to be sweet, which I like with my hot, with plenty of fruit and even vegetables like carrots. Of these sauces, Melinda’s and Marie Sharp’s are a couple of my favorites.”

Recently, Bannos took the most logical (if predictable) step in his hot sauce fascination. After 20 years of operating Heaven on Seven and perhaps 15 collecting other people’s sauces, he finally launched a line of his own. More than most on America’s shelves, the Hot Sauce From Heaven line reflects its chef-creator’s fascination with hot and sweet. As such, the sauces tend to taste more Caribbean than Louisiana; though also as such, they add a dash of sheer exoticism to the most typical New Orleans dish.

Moving from mild to lethal on the peppery Richter Scale, the line includes Heavenly Blend, Heavenly Jalapeno, Heavenly Habanero and one more liquid guaranteed to spontaneously combust. That one, of course, Bannos had to dub Hot as a Mutha. Each bottle features an increasingly pained looking portrait of Bannos himself, the Mutha forcing the label’s designers to use computers to make the chef look like he himself is about to combust.

When he’s not down in New Orleans tasting what all the new and all his favorite restaurants are up to, Bannos is waiting for the day someone saunters into one of his Chicago eateries with a “new” bottle of hot sauce for the walls - one of his own Hot Sauces From Heaven.

The moment is sure to bring a big laugh around the kitchen. It’s unclear whether that particular diner will get a free lunch.

Filed Under: Food Talk