Thought for Food

Dont'e Shaw is a guy with ideas. Lots of them.

Ideas for what food can do. Ideas for what restaurants can be.

“I’ve got 30 ideas on my phone right now,” he says during a recent conversation at his South Bend, Indiana, restaurant, Bantam Chicken & Seafood. The ideas come from everywhere, quite literally, because Shaw has worked everywhere over the past 18 years.

“I’ve cooked at casinos, country clubs, even basic mom and pop restaurants,” he says. That includes stints around the United States, from Nantucket to Chicago, at restaurants, steakhouses and two years at Grant Achatz’s three-Michelin-star Alinea. “I learned a lot about how to think there,” he says.  

And he’s entirely self-taught.

“At first I wasn’t going to go into cooking,” Shaw says. Growing up in the Northwest Indiana/Chicago area, he had his eye on art and web design. But cooking, it turned out, came naturally to him as he watched and learned.

“With food, I catch on real fast,” he says “… I can (just) look at a recipe and taste things.”

Shaw worked in Chicago and as a sous chef at Café Navarre in South Bend, then took a job at a restaurant on Nantucket, Massachusetts. He spent more time in Chicago, then returned to Café Navarre as executive chef. During his nine months there, he says, he had some time to think. “I always wanted to do my own thing,” he says, and so embarked on the chef/owner path.

“I started off doing little pop-up gigs,” he says, at events around the area as well as venues such as The Whiskey Exchange in South Bend.

In 2018, during Shaw’s pop-up venture at South Bend’s L Street Kitchen, Bantam was born. Shaw quickly gained a following for his takes on classic comfort dishes like hush puppies and fried chicken, and for innovative ones like his trout ceviche.

Bantam went into hibernation in 2019 and Shaw moved on to Lasalle Kitchen and Tavern just a few blocks over. When Remedy bar and restaurant closed in spring 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, Shaw took over the lease at 1902 South Bend Avenue and reopened Bantam. At first the restaurant was carry-out only, owing to pandemic restrictions, but eventually Bantam opened for sit-down dining.

Bantam has loyal followers, but Shaw sees room for improvement. “In a city, you can walk into a hole-in-the-wall place and have good food and people will love it,” he says. Outside of the city, people tend to view dining out differently, and the décor and atmosphere take on more significance.

Shaw notes that he hears the cliché of ,“Oh, this is the Midwest, people want steak and potatoes, or they want things cheap.” He’s more optimistic about area diners’ tastes, though he admits that restaurateurs need to be ambassadors for the kinds of food they are passionate about. “There’s other places doing things around here that are really trying to up the ante,” he says.

Shaw says challenges also arise out of the amount of capital he has invested in the restaurant. “We do everything COD and we don’t have investors,” he says. “The flip side is we don’t have that debt.”

In a perfect world, he’d have investors who were in sync with his vision. “I definitely would love to invest in other concepts I have,” he says. “That’s how you get somewhere.”

And there’s the work. But that isn’t the most difficult part for Shaw. “I’ve always heard opening up a restaurant is hard,” Shaw says. “What’s hard is you never know. Will you be able to pay yourself? Will you close? How do we figure this out?”

That is a place Shaw has been before. “I somewhat grew up in poverty all my life,” he muses, adding that day-to-day uncertainty comes with the territory. It was a perspective that has served him well as a restaurateur.

But Shaw’s real concern is whether his restaurant is going the right direction. So many places, he says, are open just to make money, and the food, believe it or not, is secondary. That’s not how he wants to do it. “The one thing I’m not willing to do is sacrifice my integrity,” he says.

That integrity, and his creativity, will get a chance to shine again soon. Bantam needs to be out of its current space at the end of summer, and Shaw is working through concepts to see what could work. There’s a good chance Bantam will be very different.

“I honestly never wanted to be the guy known for frying chicken,” he says. “It’s a cultural thing. The chicken has been a skill from being around family, comfort food.”

Whichever idea becomes a reality, Shaw says he’ll be swinging for the fences. “I’m a really strong guy in the kitchen,” he says. “I’ve seen myself grow just within these two years. I can just imagine when we have the right team, the right capital …”

For information about private events, you can contact Shaw at 574.387.3890 or bantam1902@gmail.com.

Mike Petrucelli is a former food editor for the South Bend Tribune who now works in nonprofit communications. He and his wife live in Plymouth, Indiana.