There are hundreds of chorizo-stuffed date recipes online. Most of them get the dish approximately right but miss the three specific details that separate Avec’s version from a generic interpretation:

The chorizo type. The recipe uses fresh Spanish-style chorizo — an uncooked sausage seasoned with smoked paprika (pimentón), garlic, and salt. This is not the same as dry-cured Spanish chorizo, which is a hard, salami-like stick that is already fully cooked and too firm to push into a date cavity. It is also not the same as fresh Mexican chorizo, which has a completely different spice profile (dried chiles, cumin, vinegar — no smoked paprika). The smoked paprika in fresh Spanish-style chorizo is the flavor that makes this dish taste specifically like Avec. If you use the wrong chorizo, you will get a good appetizer but not this one.

The temperature and time. Avec uses a wood-burning oven, which delivers both ambient heat and radiant heat simultaneously. The home-oven equivalent is 350°F for 40 minutes, followed by a 2-to-3-minute broil. The low-and-slow bake is what allows the date’s sugars to caramelize slowly and for the chorizo fat to render fully into the date cavity. Higher temperatures — 400°F or 425°F, which many copycat recipes call for — brown the bacon before the dates have fully softened, and the date sugars can scorch. The broil at the end handles the bacon crisping. Do not collapse these two steps into one by raising the temperature.

The sauce placement. The piquillo pepper-tomato sauce goes on the plate first, below the dates — not in a small bowl served beside them, and not drizzled over the top. This is not a stylistic preference. When the sauce pools under the dates, every bite of date and chorizo arrives with some sauce. If you serve it as a dip on the side, the first few dates get too much sauce and the last ones get none. The plate presentation is the serving mechanism.

Paul Kahan published the dish in his 2019 cookbook Cooking for Good Times: Super Delicious, Super Simple (Lorena Jones Books). He credits his father-in-law, Robert Klonowski, with the original version — Klonowski made something similar for a Avec staff holiday party in the early years, and Kahan put it on the restaurant menu. The dish has not needed a revision in more than two decades.

The cookbook recipe is the version below. The quantities scale cleanly: six portions require 24 dates, 8 ounces of fresh Spanish chorizo, 12 strips of bacon, and two jars of piquillo peppers plus one can of good tomatoes for the sauce. Every element is pantry-accessible except possibly the fresh Spanish chorizo — look for it near the Italian sausage at Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, or a Latin grocery, or online. Brands like Cacique and La Española make fresh versions that are widely available nationally.

Piquillo peppers are small, sweet, mildly smoky roasted red peppers from the Navarra region of Spain. They are sold almost exclusively jarred and roasted, never raw, and the jarred version is what you want here. The sauce is not complicated: peppers and tomatoes simmered over medium-low heat for 40 minutes while the dates bake, then pureed to an almost-smooth consistency. It is warm, slightly acidic, brightly colored, and thick enough to hold the dates in place on the plate.

The 40-minute simmer is important for the same reason the 40-minute bake is important: you are concentrating flavors and cooking off liquid. A 10-minute sauce made in a blender will taste thin and raw. The sauce that has cooked down for 40 minutes has a depth and a slight caramel edge from the reduced tomato that the quick version lacks.

If you cannot find piquillo peppers, roasted red peppers (jarred, in water or oil) are a reasonable substitute. The flavor will be milder and less distinctive, but the basic structure of the sauce — warm, pepper-forward, slightly acidic, pureed to sauce consistency — will be correct.

These are one of the best make-ahead party appetizers in existence. Pit the dates, stuff them with chorizo, wrap them in bacon, and arrange them on the baking sheet. Cover and refrigerate for up to 24 hours. The sauce can be made the day before and refrigerated. When guests arrive, pull the baking sheet from the refrigerator, let it sit at room temperature 15 minutes, then bake and broil as directed. Reheat the sauce in a small saucepan. The whole operation from refrigerator to table is under an hour, and almost all of it is unattended oven time.

The only thing you cannot do ahead: serve the dates cold. They are not a room-temperature dish. The fat in the chorizo and bacon congeals when cool, the date loses its yielding softness, and the sauce, which should pool warmly under the dates, thickens to a paste. Hot from the oven to the plate is how the dish works.

Four dates per person is the Avec standard. They are rich — sweet, fatty, and salty in every bite — and four is satisfying as a first course. For a cocktail party, two per person is plenty. Use a low-rimmed plate or a shallow bowl for individual service: you want the sauce spread across the whole plate surface, not pooled in the bottom of a deep bowl.

The dates pair with Cava, dry sherry, or any southern-European white with enough acidity to cut through the bacon fat and sweet date. At Avec, the wine program has always leaned toward the same geography as the food — Spanish, Italian, and southern French bottles at an unusually accessible price point.

Avec has a third location opening in Highwood, IL, in October 2026. The West Loop original is at 615 W. Randolph Street. The River North location is at 141 W. Erie Street. All three take reservations; historically the West Loop location operated as walk-in only, which is partly why the dates became famous — they are what people ordered while waiting at the bar.