The Walnut Room, the legendary Chicago restaurant best known for Mrs. Hering’s chicken pot pie, on the seventh floor of the store forever known as Marshall Field’s on State Street, opens holiday reservations this week with a new executive chef.
Reservations, for arguably the season’s toughest tables in town, open on Sept. 25 at 9 a.m. on OpenTable.
The 45-foot Great Tree, however, won’t be lit until Nov. 1, the first Saturday of the month, as is tradition, but will stay on until Jan. 11, a week longer than years past.
The holiday tree in the Walnut Room at Macy’s on State Street in Chicago on Dec. 14, 2022. (Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune)
The restaurant will offer a full holiday menu, including the chicken pot pie, of course, and the Walnut old fashioned cocktail, a relatively new favorite, plus five historic items.
The Walnut Room serves an estimated 30,000 pot pies and 20,000 old fashioned cocktails in November and December alone.
New executive chef Antoine Whitfield will be in charge this season. He’s a 21-year restaurant veteran who last worked for the White Sox at ChiSox Bar & Grill, but as general manager. What’s surprising is that this position marks his first time as a chef anywhere.
“If in December of last year you had said, ‘Hey, Antoine, you’ll be executive chef.’ I would’ve been like, yeah, that’s probably not a thing,” he said. “Now that is a thing.”
Previous Walnut Room executive chef Brad Saylor hired Whitfield as a front-of-the-house supervisor last season, then as the new executive chef in February. The transition is unusual for the industry, but has precedent at the restaurant.
Saylor began working at Marshall Field’s 21 years ago, not as a chef, but as general manager of the Seven on State food court on the seventh floor, before he became executive chef at The Walnut Room.
“When I took the job, it took me a good three years to get my feet underneath me and for people to understand the way I wanted to run the business,” Saylor said. “You’ve got some really tenured colleagues who know what they’re doing, and they’ve been through a lot.”
Saylor is now a Macy’s regional chef, with an office in the building, and still stewards nearly 5,000 recipes dating back more than 100 years, some on original recipe cards in four massive card catalogs.
Whitfield, born and raised in the Pullman neighborhood on the South Side, is also an award-winning veteran stage and screen actor, so he is uniquely qualified for his new leadership role at the legacy restaurant that’s focused on seasonal theater around the holiday tree.
The executive chef position focuses on management and not necessarily on cooking on the line. But Whitfield has now worked every station in the kitchen too.
Regional chef Brad Saylor looks through an historic recipe card catalog at The Walnut Room inside Macy’s in Chicago on Sept. 9, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
“If someone doesn’t come in, I will go on the line,” he said. “I will light up that station for as long as I have to.”
He’s made himself knowledgeable all around the kitchen.
“But at the same time, I am here for that management purpose,” said Whitfield. “To make sure the right people are in the right place.”
Sarah Haring, born Sarah Alice Kevan, was the first manager of the tea room that became The Walnut Room, and lives on in lore as the Mrs. Hering of the chicken pot pie recipe.
Marshall Field himself consulted Mrs. Ledra W. Haring, as she was known, around 1890, according to a 1901 story in the Los Angeles Times.
“I knew nothing whatever about the catering business, the restaurant business, nor about any business whatever, but that I did know how to keep house, and that I had tact and control, and that if he wanted to let me work the matter out in my own way, I believe that I could make a success of it,” Haring said in the story.
The famous chicken pot pie at The Walnut Room at Macy’s in Chicago, Sept. 9, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
Historic recipes are kept in a card catalog at The Walnut Room at Macy’s in Chicago, Sept. 9, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
It’s unclear when or why Field’s changed the spelling of her last name from Haring to Hering.
But it is clear that the recipe has changed over 135 years.
In the 1990s, the pot pie crock was topped with a puff pastry round. By the early 2000s, that top became a pair of crisscrossed triangular puffs.
“The filling was pretty simple,” said Saylor. “Chicken stock, cream, and chicken breasts, not overly seasoned.”
In the mid-2010s or so, a Field’s vice president decided they needed to make some changes to the recipe, so they sourced a new pot pie topper.
“We bake off little pie crusts,” said Saylor. “And that tops the filling.”
He upgraded the filling with fresh corn, leeks and a lot more fresh thyme.
Saylor still hasn’t found the original recipe card for the pot pie, but he has been on a pot pie recipe testing quest for many years.
“I’d love to bake every one of them individually and like a traditional pot pie,” he said. “But we do 30,000 of them in two months, so I haven’t really figured out how to do that.”
The Field’s Special is an edible time capsule, consisting of buttered rye bread, Swiss cheese, bacon and a small head of iceberg lettuce smothered with Thousand Island dressing. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
The holiday menu will also feature historic items, including the Field’s Special (a possible descendant of the wedge salad and a cold variation of the turkey Devonshire, an open-faced sandwich).
“Nobody really knows who made it first or when they made it, but it could be traced back 100 years,” said Saylor, who previously dated its origin to the 1940s. “I have about four different card catalogs full of recipe containers.”
They weigh about 400 pounds each, filled with recipes that date as far back as 1917. Most are from the ’40s, and a lot from the ’70s and ’80s. But there are no chef names.
The Field’s Special, originally known simply as the Special, was nicknamed “the Cyclops” by restaurant staff, according to “The Marshall Field’s Cookbook” published in 2006. It starts with a slice of marble rye bread that’s buttered, then topped with a slice of Swiss cheese, two slices of applewood smoked bacon and a small head of cored iceberg lettuce, all smothered with Thousand Island dressing and garnished with wooden speared slices of red tomato and hard-boiled egg, plus a whole black olive.
While awkward to eat, it’s an edible time capsule to an era when a whole head of fresh lettuce for one dish seemed so fancy.
The peach basket at The Walnut Room is Macy’s famous chicken salad on a scattered bed of fried shoestring potatoes with fruit, Sept. 9, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
The Peach Basket, another nostalgic holiday item, was also available during the restaurant’s 118th anniversary celebration in September as a historic menu entree, but from the recent history of the 1990s.
“When I first started, you could have your choice of tuna salad or the Marshall Field’s chicken salad inside a nest of fried shoestring potatoes,” said Saylor.
Now it’s only the famous chicken salad, on a scattered bed of fried shoestring potatoes, topped with toasted almonds, and a side of sliced canned peaches, fresh red grapes and strawberries plus strawberry cream cheese. For the holidays, it will be served with three tea breads: banana walnut, zucchini and cranberry orange.
An orange daiquiri came from a previous Marshall Field’s menu in the 1970s by way of restaurant general manager Gino Tarallo.
The historic cocktail, garnished with maraschino cherries over orange sherbet and orange liqueur, packs a punch with a strong pour of The Walnut Room vodka (available by the bottle in the basement wine shop, alongside the Frango mint chocolate liqueur).
The orange daiquiri cocktail at The Walnut Room came from a previous Marshall Field’s menu in the 1970s, Sept. 9, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
The Walnut old fashioned, the signature drink on the modern craft cocktail menu Saylor created, beautifully balances house-made walnut simple syrup with black walnut bitters and bourbon by FEW Spirits in Evanston.
The Canadian cheese soup, a historic item that’s been off the menu for decades, will be back this holiday season.
“It was extremely popular in the Michigan markets, but also in Chicago, I believe in the ’70s,” said Saylor. “If you’ve been to a fondue place, it’s not as thick as that, but the cheese flavor is intense with a couple of different cheeses, and sauteed vegetables pureed into the soup.”
The mandarin orange salad and the double chocolate fudge cake (the latter dated between the 1940s and the 1990s) are also highlighted as historic items for the holidays, along with a new cookie platter.
“It has 25 beautiful assorted little holiday cookies,” said Saylor. “Everything from thumbprints to little trees and little ornament sugar cookies.”
Lezza Desserts, the family-owned bakery founded by Salvatore Lezza in Little Italy on Taylor Street in 1905, will make the cake and cookies.
Macy’s acquired Marshall Field’s in 2005, and renamed the stores in 2006, but has intentionally kept the Field’s brand alive throughout the State Street store with the historic Walnut Room menu items and vintage logo merchandise, from tote bags to Frango mint holiday gift tins.
The Frango mint chocolate ice cream pie at The Walnut Room, Sept. 9, 2025. (Terrence Antonio James/Chicago Tribune)
“I love the fact that Macy’s recognizes that that legacy customer still wants to know that Marshall Field’s is still around,” Saylor said.
For your best chance to book a holiday reservation, get the OpenTable app, then search for The Walnut Room. You’ll see available times in red boxes, then swipe all the way to the left to a “Notify me” button in white. Click that, then choose your party size, date and time. You can set multiple alerts.
Meanwhile, the new executive chef is preparing his team for a new era in the legendary restaurant.
“If I hear that someone loves the pot pie, I put down my apron, go to the table and talk to them,” said Whitfield. “I want everyone to feel warm, to feel at home, to feel like they’ve come to the right place to come eat.”
The Walnut Room (in Macy’s, on the seventh floor), 111 N. State St., 312-781-3139, macysrestaurants.com/walnut-room
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