Chef Efrain Cuevas Can Slaughter Our Goat Anytime (And We Totally Mean That Like It Sounds)

Meet Efrain Cuevas. He’s a 31 year-old chef from Chicago and he’s single. Yum! Chefrain, as he is fond of calling himself, is so hip he doesn’t even need a restaurant. Oh no, mon freres. Chefrain is an underground chef who runs the super inside 24 Below club. If Jamie Oliver is Wilco, Chefrain is, like, Midlake. “WTF???” you ask? Exactly:

24Below is Chicago’s newest underground supper club. […] Members will have access to Roving Dinner Party Raves that materialize in underground venues all over the city such as lofts, galleries, and homes. Upcoming events include dinners in the park, dinners at the farm, food and fashion dinners, and dinners featuring local talented chefs. Seating is limited to 24 guests per event.

Oh my god. Show your egg at the Circle K and the clerk will give you the address! That is, unless your host is getting hassled by the man. The man, in this case, being those squares at the board of health. Chicagoist fills us in:

A dinner Cuevas planned two weeks ago brought about some backlash. Cuevas planned a birria dinner involving a goat he would personally slaughter and butcher.

Shocking. But where would he get an idea like that? It’s almost as if he’s…he’s…

Cuevas says he’s done the deed before–when he was growing up in Aurora his father used to kill and prepare goats for Mexican weddings.

Mexican! We’re so enchanted. But not in George Bush’s America. The Food Chain says it all went down like this:

He bought a goat named Tony from a farmer near Joliet, and was planning to transport the beast to the city and dispatch it the day before Sunday’s dinner. He posted notices of the event on [Chicago-based culinary chat sites] and his own [site], inviting people to witness the slaughter [...] Cuevas got an e-mail from an officer with the Chicago Police Department’s Animal Crimes Unit, saying that the Humane Society (and apparently many others) had complained. Cuevas was warned that if he went ahead with the dinner he and his guests would be subject to arrest for animal cruelty, and the restaurant he planned to hold it in risked being shut down [...] that was enough for Cuevas, who scotched the slaughter and used federally approved meat instead.

Animal cruelty, ay? Better warn everyone who’s ever eaten an animal ever. In the meantime, the above video features Chefrain and a friend retrieving Tony the goat from the slaughterhouse. We only include it because we think Chefrain’s dreamy when he’s engaging in silencing of the goats. This week: He makes Turduckenit (Turkey stuffed with duck, stuffed with at least two other animals) for hungry Chicago hipsters! We might be in love.

A Curse of a Different Billy Goat [Chicagoist]
Spiked: underground goat slaughter [The Food Chain]