Joel Nickson had a simple mission: to create a neighborhood hangout that served healthy, affordable southern cooking. Though raised in New Mexico and New Jersey, he learned to love the south through visits to his grandparents in North Carolina. At age 15 he ran away from home to live and work for a year and a half with a family who operated Pauline’s Passion Pit, a Harlem soul food restaurant. A dozen years later, having amassed a solid cooking background that included culinary school, stints in elegant San Francisco restaurants, and terms as food and beverage manager at several large resorts, he opened Wishbone in a storefront at 1800 W. Grand in July of 1990. His “southern reconstruction cooking”–Dixie standards like baked bone-in-ham, blackened catfish, and Carolina crab cakes, prepared with a minimum of heavy oils, deep frying, or added sugar–with its mix-and-match menu of side dishes such as sauteed spinach, mashed sweet potatoes, and macaroni and cheese, caught on fast. After only six months in business he expanded into the back room, doubling the seating to 46. A year later–after Nickson was wooed by an interested landlord–plans for a second, larger Wishbone in the industrial area west of the Loop took off. He moved into the former Goodyear Tire Shop at 1001 W. Washington, and enlisted his artistic family to help transform it. Joel, once considered the black sheep of the family, became the glue that brought them back together. First, he convinced brother Guy, then a writer and teacher, to come on board. The brothers turned to other family members (and some friends) to finance the expansion, ultimately raising $40,000. Youngest brother Greg, a filmmaker by trade, and his wife, Bianca, an accountant and now a partner with the two older brothers, designed the interior. Artist mom Lia Nickson created bright, whimsical paintings of chickens and barnyard scenes for the walls at both locations. And family standard poodle Dolly (now deceased) lent her mug for the T-shirt.
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