Brian Lockwood had wanted a restaurant of his own since he was a kid. A kitchen fire forced Gingie to close just three days after its debut in Chicago’s River North. On August 29, Lockwood and Boka Restaurant Group reopened it.
“Gingie is the first time I put my name on something,” said Lockwood. “Midōsuji is an eight-seat counter restaurant in a hotel with a lot of other infrastructure, so it doesn’t fully qualify as my first full restaurant. Gingie is my first brick-and-mortar real restaurant. It’s a big place that requires a lot of people to run it. It’s what I consider my first real, full-scale restaurant opening.”
Midōsuji opened as a tiny omakase counter tucked away on the second floor of the Chicago Athletic Association hotel. It was Lockwood’s first opening with Boka Restaurant Group. He met the group’s co-founders, Rob Katz and Kevin Boehm, while working as the consulting chef on the Emmy Award-winning series The Bear.
“Gingie isn’t something that suddenly came to me,” said Lockwood. “I remember being a kid and thinking, ‘I’m gonna become a chef one day, and I’m gonna have my own restaurants.’ Every step I took in my career was to get to this point.”
Lockwood got his start as a teenager in what he calls “no-name Italian kitchens.” He trained under Gary Danko in San Francisco and later spent two years as chef de partie under Thomas Keller at The French Laundry. In 2010, he returned to his hometown of Boulder, Colorado, as chef de cuisine at Frasca Food and Wine.
From Frasca, he headed abroad, staging at restaurants including El Celler de Can Roca, which already held three Michelin stars. In 2012, he joined Eleven Madison Park as a sous chef, then became chef de cuisine at The NoMad. Both restaurants were part of Daniel Humm and Will Guidara’s Make It Nice group at the time. Lockwood returned to Eleven Madison Park in 2016 and went on to become chef de cuisine there, too.
