FELLOW NAME OF PRUFROCK used to measure his life in coffee spoons, but I am beginning to measure mine in favorite old restaurants that go out of business. Another such establishment, The Berghoff in Chicago, bit the dust a couple of weeks ago. It had been in existence for 107 years, and now the 70-year-old grandson of the founder is closing it down.
I like a restaurant with a definite article before its name. The Berghoff was the definite article in the other sense, too. It may have been the last restaurant in town with professional waiters. These days most waiters are passing through, killing time between jobs. “Actor, oh actor,” a silly joke has it, “there’s a fly in my soup.”
The Berghoff dates from an era when the German presence in Chicago seemed greater than it has for a long time. When I was growing up, a few beer gardens were still around, also a Germania club, and a restaurant called The Red Lion where, in the late 1960s, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly Press, Peter Davison, took me to dinner to inform me that I had lost out in the running for the job of biographer of Walter Lippmann. Since I hadn’t known I was in the running, the news was less than shocking, and the food was great.
The first restaurant whose closing I took as a personal loss was Miller’s, a steakhouse on Western Avenue, owned by a man in the air-conditioning and heating business, who had the Midas touch. He used to bet combinations of 13 (the 6 and the 7 horses, or the 4 and the 9 horses) on the daily double every day, and he seemed to win there, too. He also bought the prize steer at each year’s stock-yard show, when Chicago still had a stockyard. The steaks, the ribs, the baked potatoes, the cole slaw, everything at Miller’s was done to perfection. An air of success pervaded the place. I remember the maître d’ once announcing over the loudspeaker that someone in the parking lot had left the lights on in his eight-year-old Dodge Dart, and saying to my dinner companion that no one would have the nerve to leave the restaurant and thereby acknowledge he had come in such a dull car.
I don’t know what became of Joe Stein’s, located first on Roosevelt and then on Sheridan Road, whose specialty was Rumanian strip steak and large platters of French fries, with pickled tomatoes and chopped liver served on serious rye bread for starters. They had tired, flat-footed Jewish waiters who had wandered out of Jewish waiter jokes to work there. (“Vich von of you gentlemen vant the clean glass?”)
When I was a student at the University of Chicago, I ate at the Tropical Hut in Hyde Park every chance I got. A woman there greeted you at the door, asking, “How many in your part-tee?” If you staggered in alone with a knife at your back, she would still ask, “And how many in your part-tee?” The Tropical Hut was one of the few restaurants in the city of Chicago in the 1940s and ’50s where one could take a black friend or business acquaintance to dine without having to worry about his or her being seated. I once saw Joe Louis in the place. He was eating a ham steak in a pineapple sauce, and seemed to be enjoying it immensely.
Ashkenaz, a large deli on Morse Avenue, half a block west of the El, was noted for its soups. It was crowded at all hours. Signed glossy 8 x 10s of secondary show-business celebrities were on the walls. I remember one of the comedian Shecky Greene, who grew up in the neighborhood. He must have dined out a great deal, for lots of restaurants had a signed Shecky Greene 8 x 10 glossy. Ashkenaz named sandwiches after show business celebrities. I remember a sandwich called the Lou Breese, after the band leader at the Chicago Theater. I’d rather have had a sandwich named after me than an honorary doctorate from Oxford.
Was the food in all these restaurants as good as I remember? Probably best that I am unable to find out. Everyone ought to have a long-defunct restaurant about which he can fantasize.
My friend Edward Shils used to recount stories to me of his own favorite restaurant, Strulevitz’s on Roosevelt Road. He would describe Homeric meals that, in the 1930s, cost 65 cents. Mr. Strulevitz was always on the premises, his wife and sister-in-law cooking in the kitchen. They must have worked an 80-hour week. Edward kept a menu from the place, documentary evidence of its existence.
When Mr. Strulevitz died, his nephew Howard took over. The quality of the food did not drop off. He, too, worked the seven-day week, no rest, no holidays. Then Howard bought a white Lincoln, and took his family off on a brief vacation. He apparently hadn’t realized that such things as vacations existed. He enjoyed himself so much it ruined him. He never reopened the restaurant. Talking about it, Edward liked to give the suggestion that he’d remained faintly hungry ever since.
–Joseph Epstein
