“At the beginning of my career, you couldn’t pay me to make collard greens,” Damarr Brown says over coffee inside Virtue, the Hyde Park restaurant where he’s worked for the past four years and which has won two Michelin Bibb Gourmand awards. But now, every week he prepares 400 pounds of the leafy greens, typical a staple of Black Southern cuisine.
Showcasing the techniques he learned growing up in Harvey, is exactly what made Brown stand out on the most recent season of “Top Chef” and what helped to make Virtue such a success in Chicago.
