LINCOLN SQUARE — Joel Rund isn't comfortable with the title "ice chef."
"There's really no recipe. We're freezing ice," he said of his job description.
Rund is being modest.
What he and the bartending staff are doing with water at The Sixth, 2200 W. Lawrence Ave., elevates the lowly ice cube to art form.
Flowers frozen in ice, as cubes for cocktails. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]
Since it opened in late 2015, The Sixth has been winning attention for its quirky cocktails like the Spaceman Spiff, which features cedar-lemon smoke as a key ingredient, and the Silly Rabbit, a technicolor concoction that's an alcoholic riff on Trix cereal.
Both drinks produce a reflex in patrons known as camera phone-itis, but the cocktail guests most frequently post to Instagram is actually one of the least fussy on the menu.
The Doris, named for the grandmother of The Sixth's beverage director Benjamin Schiller, is a streamlined mix of gin, lemon and flower water.
Here's the wow factor: a single rose, encased in a four-inch-tall clear-as-glass block of ice. Only the tip of the berg is visible, creating the illusion of the flower floating suspended in liquid.
"Think about what you want in your glass — they're romantic," Rund said of the cube's effect.
Though he jokes about being employed in a line of work that entails an unusual amount of familiarity with Ecuadorian spray roses, make no mistake, Rund is serious about his craft.
He may not have set out to become an ice chef — does anyone? — but Rund prepared for the specialty without knowing it.
He paid his way through film school at Columbia College by working as a union carpenter — "Local 58," Rund said proudly — and his handiwork can be seen at the CVS-apartment building at Lawrence and Damen, where Rund also lives.
Turns out, an artistically trained eye plus the ability to handle power tools are precisely the qualifications an ice chef needs.
Ice-making at The Sixth starts with tap water, same as it does in most home kitchens.
Here's where it diverges: The Sixth pours its water into a dual compartment Clinebell freezer — a piece of equipment found in only a handful of bars in Chicago — instead of ice cube trays (with one notable exception). It's like the difference between cooking on Viking range and a hot plate.
Instead of chilling water from the top down, the Clinebell freezes it from the bottom up, a method that eliminates air bubbles and produces crystal clear, as opposed to cloudy, ice.
The Clinebell freezer. Looks like water, but it's ice. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]
Worrying about the transparency of an ice cube might seem overly precious, but Rund compared it with taking care to garnish a drink with a fresh lime versus a brown one. Details matter.
Rund used to rely on Igloo coolers — the same coolers you find at picnics and barbecues — to create clear ice, but The Sixth has taken the process to a rarified level.
If you'd told Rund a decade ago, when he was first starting out as a bartender, that some day he'd care about whether an ice cube was riddled with bubbles or not, he'd have laughed while pouring you a daiquiri.
"This whole craft cocktail thing didn't exist," he said. "If you could make a [Cosmopolitan] it was a big deal."
Rund elevated his game at Trump Tower's Rebar and fell for ice while staging (a restaurant term for unpaid internship) at Aviary.
Today he's as comfortable with terms like "directional freezing" and "dilution rate" as his peers are with "on the rocks."
Working with ice provides an opportunity to shape a drink's raw material, in the same way that a carpenter fits together crown molding or pays attention to the pattern in a plank of hardwood floor, he said.
"I take a certain sense of pride in that," Rund said.
Two-by-twos are The Sixth's workhorse ice cubes. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]
Every few days, Rund "harvests" roughly 600 pounds of ice from the Clinebell. Each compartment of the freezer produces a 300-pound block, lifted out of the machine via hoist.
The blocks are typically stored in The Sixth's ice freezer until Wednesday — Rund's "cutting" day.
Heavy metal music blaring, he slices big blocks of ice into hundreds of two-by-two cubes. Some are packaged and labeled with the tune playing when they were carved, destined for The Sixth's sister bars in the Fifty/50 Group, including the Berkshire Room.
Before the Clinebell, "the Berskhire would buy big blocks and carve them down by hand," said Rund.
Cougar Juice calls for a barely visible long block of ice. [The Sixth]
The two-by-twos are The Sixth's workhorse cubes, but the introduction of a new spring menu of cocktails has added a couple of twists to Rund's routine.
Cougar Juice — pisco, sauvingnon blanc and cantaloupe shrub — calls for a block similar to The Doris, minus the flower. On first glance, the drink scarcely appears to have any ice at all.
The 7th Cup is "proper punch service" for six to eight people. During a tasting preview, the punch was poured over a 15-pound faceted ball of ice, chipped by hand. Rund has since experimented with freezing floral "centerpieces" into the ice balls.
The punch bowl, with a 15-pound ball of ice. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]
Custom requests are where the real fun is at, though.
On a recent day, "Star Wars" and "Game of Thrones" figurines were being frozen in the Clinebell along with bunches of flowers.
"It's the first time I've worked with action figures," Rund said, with the enthusiasm of a kid with a new toy.
Action figures on ice. [DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]
Then there was the guy who entrusted Rund with a diamond ring and gave the ice chef free rein to carve a memorable proposal.
Rund froze the ring and water-proof LEDs inside a diamond-shaped block of ice and when the woman in question arrived at her table after touring the "ice kitchen," the sculpture was awaiting her.
"She sits down and is like 'cool ice,'" Rund recalled.
A full 10 minutes passed — the proposer-to-be "sweating bullets" all the while — before the purpose of the diamond ice dawned on the heroine of this tale.
"He gets on one knee, she cries, the whole bar applauds," Rund said.
There was just one problem.
"It would've taken 16 hours to melt," he said, a trait that's convenient for The Sixth's fancy cocktails, but not so much for the newly-engaged couple.
So Rund quickly improvised: he gave the pair ice picks.
The Silly Rabbit's multi-colored, multi-flavored cubes are created in trays. The Sixth can go through hundreds of these cubes in a single Saturday. "I'm having nightmares over that," Joel Rund said. [The Sixth]
Rund created this sculpture for his mother's 60th birthday. [The Sixth]
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