• Michael Gebert
  • Iliana Regan with ramen noodles

If you wanted to do something cool in the food scene at the moment, you could have a tasting menu, make doughnuts, hold a pop-up, or offer ramen. But the only person it occurred to to do all of those at once is Iliana Regan, whose Elizabeth will continue with its new chef de cuisine (as reported yesterday) while she prepares her “microbakery” Bunny for a spring opening in Lakeview—and she’ll use Bunny’s space after hours for a pop-up space called Wunder POP, which will host a variety of different concepts and formats over time.

The test is promising, no question: the stock has great pork flavor, if not as silky-thick as some (like that at the city’s hot new ramen spot, Furious Spoon). The pickles are a standout, bright-tasting, and so is the pork shoulder. But there’s just too much sweetness and yuzu flavor in one gelatin owl for the size of the bowl; it throws the bowl off balance, and they talk about how to scale it back, so it’s an accent, not a dominant flavor. Anyway, they have plenty of time to tinker.

So we’re working on that. After that, we’re going to set it up to have a break with some weekend bread classes. Give people a few recipes, help them learn how to maintain a starter and do some basic bread making. After that, I have some other things that I’m working on that I think will be pretty exciting. I’m meeting in New York next month with one possibility.

We have worked on a couple of recipes and several noodle recipes, and tinkered with [whether] we want egg in it, do we not want egg in it. So we’re still really in the baby beginning stages of it. We’re experimenting with making our own misos, everything we’re going to be putting on top of it will be homemade, so if there are little shrimp chips or whatever, everything will be from scratch.

I think that we’ll give people some fun little twists on it from our end. We’ll still bring to the table a little bit of wacky flavor combinations, and the technique will still be very refined but for this product that is way more casual. The other part that will be fun and that is unique to us is that it will have this quaint atmosphere of Bunny.