Brandon Dumot traffics in soft, warm five-inch saucers of astonishment, pillows of char-stippled pita bread that gently exhale steamy gusts when he pulls them from the fire. They taste like they’re alive.
Most of us are so accustomed to plastic-shrouded factory flatbread—dead bread—that when you first encounter a fresh one, licked by live fire and kissed by smoke, it can feel like time stops and nothing exists but your own pleasure.
“Whenever you get one that’s exceptional, it’s a little bit shocking,” says Dumot.
You could say the same thing about his silky hummus, or his creamy white labneh with the density of ice cream and a sharp tang softened by a dusting of nutty, herbaceous za’atar.
Dumot began developing this particular set of skills in Lincoln Park when he was the opening sous chef at Galit, Zach Engel’s extraordinary modern Israeli restaurant, where the wood-burning oven is the heart of the open kitchen.
But that was only the last great restaurant he worked for before striking out on his own this summer under the name Laimoon, a virtual Middle Eastern restaurant and pop-up for which he draws from his childhood and nearly two decades grinding in some of the city’s most challenging kitchens. Since arriving in Chicago after graduating from the Culinary Institute of America, he’s worked for Andrew Zimmerman at Sepia, Thomas Lents at Sixteen, and Michael Carlson at Schwa, to name a few. These were all radically different restaurants in terms of food and kitchen culture, but it was the latter, he says, that impacted his development the most.
“Thinking outside of the box and never putting limitations on anything was really the ethos,” he says. “Like, you can do anything if you think about it long enough. Trying things out, eventually, you can make it work. I felt like nobody was thinking about food like that, at that time.”
Equally formative, but perhaps less tangible, were the lessons he absorbed as a tyke, running around his grandmothers’ kitchens banging on pots and pans as his aunts rolled grape leaves or kibbeh; or curdled and strained yogurt for the cheese known as shanklish, pickled in olive oil and vinegar.
That was just north of Pittsburgh where his grandparents’ Syrian Orthodox church published cookbooks from its members’ home recipes. Something rubbed off on him. He lost interest in business school after he took a job to pay his way at an Italian restaurant where the chef and owner religiously stuck to scratch cooking—so much that by the time they pushed him toward culinary school, he was well beyond the skill level of most of his classmates.
When he landed at Galit, it seemed the job was tailored specifically for him. “I was working in all these fine-dining restaurants and learning a ton and really getting all the fundamentals. But there wasn’t anywhere that I thought was doing elevated Middle Eastern food in the city. It just seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to combine family background and my work background.”
The first year was intense and exhilarating—both familiar and foreign. He recalls catching the comforting scent of the warm spice blend baharat, while confronting new territory like the labor-intensive, laminated Jewish Yemeni bread kubaneh. But during the pandemic, the shift to to-go orders and outdoor dining eliminated the guest interaction that fueled him. “I couldn’t just put food in cardboard boxes any longer. It wasn’t really making me happy.”
He found work for a while for a corporate hospitality consulting company, but before long he started thinking about cooking the food he wanted for himself for others. “After having eaten fresh-baked pita bread every day for two years, you miss it. You get addicted to having that fresh hummus and fresh pita every day. That’s my soul. People started asking me to make them stuff.”
He started experimenting with his own pita recipe in his home convection oven, but after cooking with fire, it wasn’t the same. He tried to order an Ooni portable wood-burning oven—which became the standard for pandemic home pizza makers, so much so that it was sold out for a year. Then supply chain issues slowed it down further—his first model was marooned on the container ship Ever Given in the Suez Canal for months before the manufacturer canceled the order.
When an oven finally arrived after a two-year wait, he began tweaking, something he still does each week. He uses a blend of Janie’s Mill Turkey Red wheat and all-purpose flour, along with a bit of King Arthur bread flour, the combination yielding “a higher protein content,” he says, that “allows for longer fermentation time (two to three days) and more flavor development without compromising the structure.” They’re incredibly soft on the inside and slow to go stale—even though he won’t sell any of them past the day they’re baked.
Laimoon is Arabic for “lemon,” an acid Dumot relies upon in its many forms: zested, juiced, and preserved. He’s dialed in mezze too, like the hummus; the labneh; marinated feta; smoky baba ghanoush; and smoked carrot and red pepper muhammara; along with larger plates like chicken shawarma and merguez-spiced lamb kebabs. In June he appeared at his first pop-up at Kimski, his girlfriend and partner Jasmin Spilotro running the front of the house while he tended to the Ooni.
For now, there’s catering, packaged preorders, and more pop-ups—frequently on the patio at Easy Does It in Logan Square where he debuted his serrano and cilantro-marinated olives, which he tumbles over the fire in a cylindrical grilling basket. They’re a showstopper.
Laimoon at Monday Night Foodball
Mon 10/9 at 5 PM
Ludlow Liquors
2959 N. California
ludlow-liquors.com
He’s hoping to package and place his mezze in wine bars around the city. And he’s definitely thinking brick-and-mortar down the road—maybe a falafel and shawarma shop, or who knows? “I’ll probably want to cook crazy tasting menus again at some point.”
That’s not before this Monday, October 9, when Dumot and Spilotro are introducing a brand-new fall menu at Monday Night Foodball, the Reader’s weekly chef pop-up at Ludlow Liquors, 2959 N. California in Avondale. They’ll be taking orders beginning at 5 PM until they sell out for endive salad with grapes and hazelnut dukkah; grilled mushrooms with hummus and Urfa biber chili oil; grilled sweet corn fritters with a Moroccan spice blend; chicken shawarma pita sandwiches; and baharat-spiced carrot cake.
“I want to take my experiences with my family, my childhood, the food that I used to eat, and combine that with everything that I’ve learned throughout my career,” he says. “And do everything the right way: not taking shortcuts. Sourcing the best product I can find, as responsibly as I can. And sharing it, getting to interact with people and seeing
them enjoy it.”