When Alex­is Lev­erenz opened Kitchen Chica­go five years ago, she knew her busi­ness mod­el was new to the city: she want­ed to rent a ​“shared-use kitchen” to small busi­ness own­ers like arti­san bak­ers, pre­servers and cater­ers. She called the Depart­ments of Health and Busi­ness Affairs & Licens­ing to make sure she could run it legal­ly. ​“Both said, ​‘Great idea, peo­ple are look­ing [for kitchens] all the time,’” Lev­erenz says.

Lula Cafe became another victim of its own innovation last October, when health inspectors dumped 200 jars of preserved fruits and vegetables after they discovered the restaurant lacked a license to can.

How­ev­er, the city’s enthu­si­asm was short-lived. When her first client tried to apply for a retail food estab­lish­ment license – which costs $660 and is the only exist­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion for a food-relat­ed busi­ness – she was denied and told there could be only one such license per address, which Lev­erenz already had. For months there­after, Lev­erenz and her client were shut­tled between the depart­ments of licens­ing, health, and zon­ing, each claim­ing anoth­er could answer her ques­tion about the license. ​“There was nobody address­ing the sit­u­a­tion,” Lev­erenz says. ​“For years we were oper­at­ing under the assump­tion that we could [rent the kitchen] and no clients could get their own licenses.”

Then one day in late Jan­u­ary, the Depart­ment of Busi­ness Affairs & Licens­ing told her clients they must stop oper­a­tions until each busi­ness had a license of its own. Two of Leverenz’s 13 clients, Sun­day Din­ner Club and Flo­ra Con­fec­tions, final­ly had their appli­ca­tions accept­ed, and two weeks lat­er they sched­uled a health inspec­tion to com­plete the licens­ing process. But instead of grant­i­ng approval as expect­ed, inspec­tors ​“just start­ed throw­ing food out,” says Lev­erenz – hun­dreds of pounds of local, organ­ic fruit purees, cheese, gra­nola bars, and bak­ing ingre­di­ents, among oth­er things, all tossed in the garbage and dena­tured with bleach.

“It came down to the fact that they didn’t have a piece of paper they were told all along they couldn’t get. There was noth­ing wrong with the estab­lish­ment or the food,” Lev­erenz insists.

The Depart­ment of Health did not respond to inter­view requests, but in a joint state­ment with the Depart­ment of Busi­ness Affairs it told the WTTW-PBS show Chica­go Tonight, ​“Each busi­ness own­er requires his or her own indi­vid­ual license … In terms of health and safe­ty, the license ensures that each indi­vid­ual busi­ness meets the san­i­ta­tion cer­ti­fi­ca­tion required to oper­ate a food business.”

Act local­ly, think bureaucratically

Kitchen Chicago’s expe­ri­ence is not unusu­al in Chica­go, or in any big city for that mat­ter, where com­mu­ni­ca­tion with­in and between gov­ern­ment depart­ments is often want­i­ng. More­over, licens­ing and health codes tend to lag behind new culi­nary move­ments and mod­els. Pio­neers of the trend toward local, sus­tain­able eat­ing find them­selves pit­ted against a bureau­cra­cy that is used to deal­ing with an indus­tri­al­ized food system.

“I feel like there are very inno­v­a­tive entre­pre­neurs and very struc­tured munic­i­pal depart­ments that live in very dif­fer­ent worlds and are try­ing to work togeth­er as best we can,” says Zina Mur­ray of Logan Square Kitchen, one of the three shared kitchens in Chicago.

Lula Café, also in Chicago’s Logan Square neigh­bor­hood, is nation­al­ly rec­og­nized for its local- and organ­ic-focused sea­son­al­ly chang­ing menu. And like the shared kitchens, Lula became anoth­er vic­tim of its own inno­va­tion last Octo­ber, when health inspec­tors dumped 200 jars of pre­served fruits and veg­eta­bles after they dis­cov­ered the restau­rant lacked a license to can. How­ev­er, a Chica­go can­ning license doesn’t even exist – ​“mod­i­fied atmos­phere pack­ag­ing” is some­thing that usu­al­ly hap­pens in fac­to­ries, and the Chica­go health code doesn’t spec­i­fy under what con­di­tions it is per­mis­si­ble in restaurants.

The jarred roast­ed pep­pers, beets and stone fruits destroyed by the inspec­tors all came from local farm­ers. In light of Chicago’s short grow­ing sea­son, can­ning them allowed Lula to put its eth­ic of sus­tain­abil­i­ty into practice.

A sim­i­lar phi­los­o­phy informs the grow­ing trend of head-to-tail eat­ing, which chal­lenges chefs to use an entire ani­mal rather than a few spe­cif­ic cuts of meat. This move­ment has also become a cause for con­cern among health offi­cials, since small-scale char­cutiers often try to stay off-the-books rather than going through a licens­ing process that can be lengthy, expen­sive and confusing.

Last Decem­ber, state health inspec­tors decid­ed to pay a vis­it to three of Rick Bay­less’ restau­rants on the basis of an arti­cle in the Chica­go Read­er, a local alt-week­ly. Mike Sula’s ​“The Char­cu­terie Under­ground” (Novem­ber 25, 2009) men­tions that Bay­less shared a meat sup­pli­er with E&P Meats (not that he sourced from the off-the-books char­cutiers them­selves). But the Illi­nois Depart­ment of Agri­cul­ture found some bacon and head­cheese that hadn’t received a stamp of approval from Illi­nois or fed­er­al author­i­ties – the head­cheese only had one from Wis­con­sin, whose inspec­tions aren’t accept­ed across state lines. The meat was destroyed and Bay­less fined.

“It’s not that any­body did any­thing wrong, it’s that the health depart­ment just didn’t know how to han­dle the sit­u­a­tion,” says chef Rob Levitt, own­er of the loca­vore-friend­ly Chica­go restau­rant Mado, of the rash of food dump­ings. ​“With a lot of things chefs would like to be doing, [the city and state inspec­tors’] stance seems to be: because we don’t know any­thing about it, you can’t do it – rather than try­ing to work togeth­er and fig­ure out how to make every­body happy.”

‘ Food entre­pre­neurs’

An arti­cle on the Kitchen Chica­go licens­ing flap caught the atten­tion of Advo­cates for Urban Agri­cul­ture (AUA), a group of Chicagoans ded­i­cat­ed to pro­mot­ing urban food pro­duc­tion. Accord­ing to mem­ber Martha Boyd, the AUA will soon send out an open let­ter sug­gest­ing that the city cre­ate a work­ing group to address the licens­ing issue, made up of offi­cials from sev­er­al depart­ments as well as prac­ti­tion­ers, just as it did for urban agri­cul­ture zon­ing. ​“Our sug­ges­tion is to say, ​‘Here’s anoth­er exam­ple of a place where inno­v­a­tive busi­ness ideas and prac­tices need depart­ments to real­ly think togeth­er about the best ways that the city can cre­ate and facil­i­tate policy.’”

“This is a real­ly great time for all of us to work togeth­er,” she con­tin­ues. ​“Inspec­tors are used to a real­ly dif­fer­ent kind of business…Part of what we [the AUA and Chica­go Food Pol­i­cy Coun­cil] can offer is help­ing to recast the under­stand­ing of this stuff.”

Shared kitchens are poised to ben­e­fit from all this dis­cus­sion. Lev­erenz and Mur­ray are cur­rent­ly work­ing with the depart­ments of health and licens­ing to fig­ure out a bet­ter way to address their busi­ness mod­el – though accord­ing to Lev­erenz, ​“It still feels like bit of standoff.”

The own­ers of the three shared kitchens have also sought sup­port from their alder­men, and Ald. Wal­ter Bur­nett (27th Ward) has offered to spon­sor an ordi­nance for a new license.

“I think that we need a food entre­pre­neurs’ license – some­thing that licens­es an entre­pre­neur rather than an estab­lish­ment,” Mur­ray says. She and Lev­erenz would like it to have a fee clos­er to the $250 required for a lim­it­ed busi­ness license, since ​“the food retail estab­lish­ment license is way too expen­sive for a lot of lit­tle micro-enter­pris­es to take on. We’re already see­ing that hap­pen in the last month– peo­ple being dri­ven out­side Chica­go, back into their kitchens, or choos­ing not to start a busi­ness, because the fee is too high.”

Though the kitchen licens­ing issue seems close to being resolved, the city’s restau­rants may have to wait longer before they can cure and can legal­ly and eas­i­ly. The cur­rent health code stands open to a broad range of inter­pre­ta­tions, which only height­ens restau­rants’ vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty to fines and clo­sure. One own­er refused to speak for this arti­cle out of fear that it might attract more scruti­ny from the health department.

“Most­ly restau­rants like to stay off the radar,” Levitt says. ​“There are lots of things I’d like to see done dif­fer­ent­ly, but try­ing to change them would just raise a stink. I just want to be left alone to do my thing.”