Brazil meets France at the next Monday Night Foodball

A printing press took three fingers off Chrissy Richards’s left hand when she was 18.

That was her fretting hand, which meant that her days playing guitar for the southwest side’s hardcore Turkey Sandwich Sound Machine were over.

“It absolutely sucked,” she says. “But the saving grace was I was so deep into the music, I cut a hole in my bandages to stick a drumstick in. I taught myself how to play drums, and two years later, I was in a nu metal band.”

Today, Richards is the head chef at Clinton Street Smoked Meats in the French Market, and also manager at neighboring Retro Pizza. But to get there, she also had to adapt her knife skills with only a thumb and a partial forefinger to anchor the red onions for her flammekueche.

I’ve seen her take an allium down in 31 seconds, reducing it to tissue-thin, translucent slices to be strewn across her Alsatian “tarte flambe,” baked with creme fraiche and bacon lardons.

You can taste this triumph over adversity for yourself on March 24, when Richards and a small but mighty crew brunoise like sabreurs at the next Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Frank and Mary’s Tavern.

Richards, who grew up in Clearing, near Midway, mostly supported her music before and after the accident with a series of fast-casual food service jobs. But she didn’t lean into cooking until she followed a partner to Dallas, where she found herself isolated and largely alone during the pandemic.

“I didn’t have a band anymore,” she says. “Being queer, it was not a very accepting community. I couldn’t find friends, couldn’t find a job, so I started to really dial in a lot of my cooking skills.”

She returned to Chicago in 2022 and found work at La Boulangerie, in time for the French bakery mini chain’s ganache-glazed croissant rolls to go viral. Under founder Vincent Columbet, and head chef Raphael Beilharz, Richards received her first intensive professional training, helping to develop recipes—including a flammekueche variant—for Retro, which the group opened a year and a half later.

Last year, Richards took on a second gig, overhauling the French Market’s Montreal-style pastrami smokhouse, where she brought on Brazilian-born Verinha Bastos as sous chef. Together they began plotting a unique French Brazilian concept, which they’ll be introducing for the first time this Monday.

Start with that flammekueche, and Richards’s brisket “a la tartare,” a smoked and chilled pastrami riff on the raw beef classic, with pickled mustard seed, dill oil, and smoked mustard.

There’s a take on moqueca, the creamy Brazilian coconut fish stew, with shrimp, toasted cassava, and a red blaze of palm oil, over rice; and also a pan-seared pork filet over housemade pickles and parsnip puree.

For dessert, La Boulangerie pastry chef Ryan Bockenfeld steps up with a chocolate tart with hazelnut frangipane and raspberry puree, and a bourbon-soaked date cake with toasted banana ice cream.

This two-fingered transcontinental synthesis of two very different but compatible cuisines begins at 5:30 PM this Monday, March 24, at 2905 N. Elston.

Meantime, look down upon the full Foodball schedule, every Monday this spring in Avondale: