Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual OUT OF BUSINESS 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...
...Strulevitz was always on the premises, his wife and sister-in-law cooking in the kitchen...
...He never reopened the restaurant...
...Ashkenaz named sandwiches after show business celebrities...
...He would describe Homeric meals that, in the 1930s, cost 65 cents...
...Signed glossy 8 x 10s of secondary show-business celebrities were on the walls...
...They had tired, flat-footed Jewish waiters who had wandered out of Jewish waiter jokes to work there...
...The Berghoff dates from an era when the German presence in Chicago seemed greater than it has for a long time...
...I remember a sandwich called the Lou Breese, after the band leader at the Chicago Theater...
...Since I hadn't known I was in the running, the news was less than shocking, and the food was great...
...The steaks, the ribs, the baked potatoes, the cole slaw, everything at Miller's was done to perfection...
...He must have dined out a great deal, for lots of restaurants had a signed Shecky Greene 8 x 10 glossy...
...He, too, worked the seven-day week, no rest, no holidays...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...Was the food in all these restaurants as good as I remember...
...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...
...If you staggered in alone with a knife at your back, she would still ask, "And how many in your part-tee...
...They must have worked an 80-hour week...
...Talking about it, Edward liked to give the suggestion that he'd remained faintly hungry ever since...
...He enjoyed himself so much it ruined him...
...Everyone _ ought to have a long-defunct restau-(i rant about which he can fantasize...
...I remember one of the comedian Shecky Greene, who grew up in the neighborhood...
...Then Howard bought a white Lincoln, and took his family off on a brief vacation...
...I like a restaurant with a definite article before its name...
...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...
...Vich von of you gentlemen vant the clean glass...
...He was eating a ham steak in a pineapple sauce, and seemed to be enjoying it immensely...
...I'd rather have had a sandwich named after me than an honorary doctorate from Oxford...
...Edward kept a menu from the place, documentary evidence of its existence...
...I once saw Joe Louis in the place...
...Strulevitz died, his nephew Howard took over...
...Ashkenaz, a large deli on Morse Avenue, half a block west of the El, was noted for its soups...
...It may have been the last restaurant in town with professional waiters...
...It was crowded at all hours...
...When I was a student at the University of Chicago, I ate at the Tropical Hut in Hyde Park every chance I got...
...It had been in existence for 107 years, and now the 70-year-old grandson of the founder is closing it down...
...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...
...A woman there greeted you at the door, asking, "How many in your part-tee...
...The quality of the food did not drop off...
...He apparently hadn't realized that such things as vacations existed...
...Actor, oh actor," a silly joke has it, "there's a fly in my soup...
...The Berghoff was the definite article in the other sense, too...
...An air of success pervaded the place...
...Another such establishment, The Berghoff in Chicago, bit the dust a couple of weeks ago...
...My friend Edward Shils used to recount stories to me of his own favorite restaurant, Strulevitz's on Roosevelt Road...
...These days most waiters are passing through, killing time between jobs...
...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...
...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...
...When Mr...
...He also bought the prize steer at each year's stock-yard show, when Chicago still had a stockyard...
...I remember the maitre 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...
...Probably best that I am unable to find out...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 19
