THERE ARE SEVERAL ways to enter Kindling Downtown Cookout & Cocktails, the new restaurant in the Willis Tower. One revolving door opens into its soaring main dining room. Another takes you to a vestibule where the seating staff — chic and businesslike with iPads and headsets — awaits. The best approach, though, is through the tower’s lobby: Upon entering the restaurant, you see the reason for its campfire smell: an 11-foot-long wood-fired grill.
In this vicinity you will also likely spy Kindling’s celebrity chef, Jonathon Sawyer. After a storied run in Cleveland, where he was named a best new chef by and won a James Beard Award for his work at Greenhouse Tavern, he returned to his hometown of Chicago to open Adorn in the Four Seasons Hotel in 2021. When his contract there was up, Sawyer joined the Fifty/50 Restaurant Group (Roots Handmade Pizza, Berkshire Room) to undertake this ambitious project. If he’s not at the kitchen pass, he may be sitting with visitors at table 52, a booth with a front-row view of the action, or planted at the grill-front counter with his laptop cracked open. He doesn’t migrate far; this rig, which can reach a temperature of 900 degrees, is his baby. Get him talking and he’ll enthuse over the benefits of Michigan white oak and the engineering required to vent smoke from the base of a 1,450-foot skyscraper.
