Many chefs know they want to go into the restaurant industry at a young age. For Chef Rob Levitt, that’s not the case. Chef Rob was attending the University of Illinois pursuing a jazz music career when he fell in love with cooking while he was working as a dishwasher at a college town grocery store.
Chef Rob received a degree from the Culinary Institute of America and moved to Chicago with his wife, Allison. In 2008, they opened mado, [insert link] a restaurant with a Mediterranean-inspired cuisine with heavy emphasis on Italian cooking. Chef Rob and his wife use local ingredients as often as possible and source their meat and produce from farmers in the Midwest. Chef Rob believes that the animals raised by farmers are beautiful and are designed for us to eat. He prefers to buy animals whole and butcher them himself.
Chef Rob’s cooking has been featured in several food publications including: Food & Wine, Chicago Magazine, Restaurants & Institutions, Restaurant Hospitality, Chicago Reader and Chicago Social. His butchering has also been noticed by the sustainable butcher network, Protein University. Chef Rob is currently one of the finalists in a competition called “Who’s Your Butcher?” Levitt holds butchering sessions sporadically at mado and allows viewers to watch intently as he gets his distinguished cuts of meat off of an entire pig.
