“The [tattoos] would just come to me, but some are just fun.”
—Chris Barron
Chris Barron has worked in restaurants for more than twenty years. He started out as a bar back, stocking and cleaning, but decided that he felt more at home in the back of the house. His first kitchen job was making sandwiches, but he now works as a chef at Francesca’s Forno in Chicago, Illinois, where he cooks rustic Italian comfort food. Chris has cooked all over the United States. He says, “I’ve had the privilege of working so many great places.” He’s cooked in St. Louis, Los Angeles, and has orchestrated a dinner at the James Beard House in New York City. He’s even outlasted a few of the great restaurants he has worked at, including Chicago’s famous Charlie Trotter’s restaurant. Named the thirtieth-best restaurant in the world by Restaurant magazine, and fifth-best in the United States in 2007, Charlie Trotter’s finally closed in 2012. Chris has also done time at Ritz Carlton, Beverly Hilton, Border Grill, and Park Hyatt, and today he’s with Francesca’s Restaurant Group. But no matter where he’s cooking, Chris’s passion for good food and great ingredients comes through. Despite cooking for a living, he still enjoys cooking at home. Both Chris and his wife, Jill Barron (see entry in Part 4), the owner and chef of MANA Food Bar in Chicago, love to raid their local Chinatown market for fresh seasonal ingredients. Chris says, “I have been very lucky and privileged to work in many low- to high-end places with exceptional people. Over the years, I have come around to the philosophy of less is more. Less manipulation to ingredients is more natural.”
Chris has been getting tattoos almost as long as he has been cooking. As he has traveled, he has collected myriad tattoos, his skin becoming a scrapbook of his life. Most are tattoos of fun things or concepts that caught Chris’s attention. For example, the flying eye across his right arm is taken from the Von Dutch hot rod logo, and he got the square watermelon on his left arm nearly fifteen years ago after reading an article about the Japanese growing watermelons in boxes to make them fit into their refrigerators better. He says, “The idea cracked me up.” Chris’s left shin has the word “BACON” written in Scrabble pieces. He says, “I love bacon, and my wife kind of found out I’m pretty good at Scrabble and it makes her nuts.”
Chris’s culinary bent has also inspired many of his tattoos. Surrounding the Scrabble tiles is a garden of many of Chris’s favorite mushrooms to cook with. He got the snow peas on his right arm during a time when he was cooking a lot of pan Asian food and dealing with snow peas every day. And he actually got one of his favorite tattoos because of a severe allergy to shrimp and lobster. The tattoo, which stretches across his left forearm, shows a shrimp with a banner reading “My Nemesis.” Chris does still taste the dishes he creates with shrimp, but he can’t ingest the crustacean.
Though Chris admits that he isn’t motivated to get more ink, he probably isn’t done with getting tattoos. His back tattoo, a skeleton chef brandishing a T-bone steak and a knife, was started years before. However, he didn’t get the rest of his tattoos until several years later by a different artist. He says, “I still don’t know if it is done, but it works for now.”
