By Joel Frieders –
For the last four years or so, I’ve been working with my friend, Jeremy to build things.
We started by building ELEMY (I’m JoEL, and he’s JerEMY) in 2016.
Our motto right out of the gate was “building through buildings”. With Jeremy’s experience and brilliance in the construction trades through owning JDR Construction, and my experience in restaurants and customer service and communication and using the word, we joined forces to simply build everything.
We’ve built some restaurants, sure, but we’ve built much more in terms of a community of a slew of incredible independent businesses that are all uniquely interwoven into what we could call the ELEMY family.
Last year, Cody from Endiro Coffee, and Dan from Gillerson’s Grubbery, had an idea to battle for who had the better chili recipe, and because Jeremy loves a food party, the ELEMY Chili Bowl was born. We invited some of the restaurants we’ve helped build, or work with, and had a super delicious chili party. Combined, we raised more than $3,000 for World Relief DuPage/Aurora in 2018 with only a few weeks of planning.
This year we started a few weeks earlier and invited everyone from the 2018 Chili Bowl, as well as a few new members of the ELEMY family, to the competition, and we’re again raising money for World Relief DuPage/Aurora. Our intention behind supporting World Relief is three fold:
• We believe in their mission of welcoming immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers into our community.
• We understand, even if most don’t, that most food service businesses would not function without members of this community to and staff members to their kitchens.
• We think our diversity is our strength and we want to be the loudest voice screaming welcome! So we drown out the voices telling people anything other than hello! Welcome! Have some chili!
We’re lining up eight restaurants from the ELEMY family to serve chili to compete in the annual ELEMY Chili Bowl from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 19, at both Gillerson’s Grubbery and Endiro Coffee both on New York Street in downtown Aurora. Not only is this an extremely intense ego-battle between chefs, bragging rights for the year in two categories are at stake. We’ve got trophies for judge’s favorite and crowd favorite, and with the aforementioned bragging rights on the line, it’s bound to be a delicious afternoon of yum.
We are honored to welcome our friends from Endiro Coffee of Aurora, Gillerson’s Grubbery of Aurora, soon-to-open Beebee’s Deli of Aurora, Tredwell Coffee of Aurora, Craft Urban of Geneva, Burger Local of Geneva, Burger Social of Wheaton, and soon to open in downtown Aurora, Altiro of Geneva to the competition.
For only $15 attendees will receive samples of eight original chili recipes!
Help raise money for some strangers to help become new Americans with us!