Top Chef Joe Flamm s restaurant Rose Mary opens in Chicago chicagotribune.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from chicagotribune.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
For a city once dubbed the “Second Croatian Capital,” ithere are very few Croatian restaurants in Chicago.
“This is just such an amazing culture with such great, amazing food, and it doesn’t get spotlighted somehow, especially for a city where we have such a big Croatian and Balkan population,” says Joe Flamm, former executive chef at Michelin-starred Spiaggia, “Top Chef” winner and owner of soon-to-open Croatian-Italian restaurant, Rose Mary.
According to the 2015 U.S. Census, about 6,000 Cook County residents identify as Croatian, but because Croatia didn’t have political autonomy when many immigrants arrived, they were counted with Slovenians or Yugoslavians. Community leaders estimate the actual number of residents with Croatian heritage to be 150,000 to 200,000.