A restaurant should be beautiful

Calavera, 1438 W. Chicago Ave.

     A successful restaurant is like a stool, in that it rests on three legs.
     The first is the food, of course. Delicious, unusual, satisfying—something good you can't make at home.  I'm sure somebody can make Thai beef & broccoli at home, but me, I'm heading for Star of Siam.
      The second is service. The person bringing you the food should be brisk, effective and, ideally, show a little flair. Fall down on this aspect and the first doesn't matter—the food at Greek Isles is great, but will have to be savored in memory, since we're still never going back. I wasn't even there when my wife and her sister were handled rudely by a waiter. Just her description was enough. Besides, Athena is practically next door. 
     Bad service turns customers away, while great service, on the other hand, cements love for a place. I went to The Dearborn, a new, airy bistro at 145 N. Dearborn, for the first time a few weeks ago. Pretty good. I returned Wednesday and our server, Matt, did something both appreciated and rare, if not extraordinary: he waved me off something on the menu. "You don't want that," he said, making a face. Then when he brought our drinks, and set them down, the table wobbled, slightly. He apologized, rushed off, and returned immediately with wedges, kneeling down and bracing the table. In 40 years of eating out I've never seen a waiter do that. And so The Dearborn enters the rotation of My Places.
     And finally, the one that gets forgotten: the atmosphere. The Dearborn must have paid a fortune on glazed tile and fancy light fixtures and exposed beams. You're happy just sitting there; the fact they serve you food is a lagniappe, an added bonus.
     That third leg is one that I pay particular attention to, since those opening new restaurants too often don't. There is a space a block from my house in Northbrook that has seen three, count em, three restaurants come and go in five years. The first, My Pi, served pizza that wasn't anywhere near Lou Malnati's just up the street. The second, Agave, was a Mexican Restaurant that couldn't hang its own sign straight. The place had bare walls—maybe a single colorful paper mache lizard, maybe a sombrero. That's it. I remember sitting there, on my one obligatory visit, thinking "Who would start a Mexican restaurant and not decorate it?" The third, Drumstix, fell short on both food (fried chicken should be crisp) and decor. The tables were metal painted to look like wood; no doubt the idea was to create that warm farm house feeling while saving a few bucks. I pressed my fingers to that cold metal table and thought, "A year, tops" which was about right.
     Which explains why this colorful report from Block Club on Calavera, which opened a month ago, made me resolve to visit the place as soon as I could. 
     "Calavera" is Spanish for skull, and is a prominent feature in Mexican Day of the Dead celebrations, brightly decorated, often rendered into sugar and intended to remind us of the sweetness of life and the colorful personalities of our beloved departed. They aren't considered morbid, but whimsical, just as the holiday is not really a festival of death, but of the circular nature of life. 

Sandra Rodriguez

     The restaurant was entirely empty at 12:45 p.m. Tuesday, and we were greeted by owner Sandra Rodriguez. We started with guacamole and homemade corn chips, then moved to a selection of enchiladas and chicken breast with mole. I got a glass of horchata. 
     My lunch mate thought the chicken was terrific and loved the mole. I'm not a food critic, and it wouldn't be fair judge a place after only one visit, particularly one that has been open for just a month. The chips were warm and thick, the mole complex, the horchata served in a jar with a light sprinkling of cinnamon and a note of rosewater. Otherwise, ... well, I'll withhold judgment, except to say that I hope in time the food will be as finely executed as the artwork. 
    Besides, you should decide for yourself. We sat there for an hour and not a blessed soul walked in the door—just as we were leaving, at 2 p.m., a lone diner appeared. That isn't right. Every person takes a shot at their dream, but it doesn't matter how good the food may be if nobody stops by and eats it. So if you are in the vicinity, please consider visiting Calavera, 1438 W. Chicago Avenue. Admire their paintings and grouped incidental objects, say hello to Sandra Rodriguez and get something to eat. Let me know what you think. I certainly plan to circle back and continue my investigation.


      

Toastmasters speak the global language of humanity, ambition

Dr. Hill Krishnan spoke about the need to keep trying at the Toastmasters semi-finals.

     James Traywick is wearing a dark gray suit with a bright yellow pocket square, a lemon yellow shirt, a bow tie with a sliced lemon motif and, we will learn later, is carrying an actual lemon in his jacket pocket.
     The retired Chicago public school teacher, 69, belongs to seven local Toastmasters clubs, and was among 30,000 members around the globe who entered this year’s speech-making competition. He’s tried several times, but this year was the first year he was among 106 who made it into the semi-finals, held last Friday at McCormick Place, site of Toastmasters International’s 87th annual convention.
     “It’s such a safe environment to make mistakes in,” said Traywick, of the organization. “To improve your speaking ability. That was the emphasis for me joining, and it has been a really great experience.

Ena Agbahovbe,

     Founded in California in 1924, Toastmasters has 357,000 members in 143 countries. About 1,700 were at the convention, attending networking lunches and talks with titles like, “How to Get What You Want: Influencing Others Into Action.” The halls were crowded with men in three-piece suits and white Arabic thobes, women in colorful dresses and flowing chadors, entire districts clad in matching outfits: maroon golf shirts on a group from Northern California, goldenrod dashikis on 20 Nigerians, including Ena Agbahovbe.
     “This is my first time wearing something like this,” said the petroleum engineer from Lagos. “In our culture, when we’re having a big ceremony, we like to dress similarly, to show we’re like a family.”
     He joined Toastmasters two years ago.

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Happy anniversary, Kitty!

Kitty, relaxing in her suite at the Palmer House Hilton. 

        Eight years.
        Eight years ago today: Aug. 28, 2010. The bar mitzvah had been a great success, the luncheon afterward at Prairie Grass consumed and paid for. Now the only thing left to do was collect the boy's present. It had to be done quickly, like jumping out of a plane, lest nerves undo my resolve. In my journal that night I described it this way, "2 Petsmart for leash, puppy chow. Get name tag, 'Kitty' cut by laser. Picked up puppy. Not stressful. Dog never barked. Fell asleep in Kent's arms in back seat."
     That "not stressful" was worth mentioning because it was surprising, to me. Somewhat amazing even. I thought a dog would ruin our lives. 
     And so the adventure began. The 3 a.m. walks in the rain. Back to Petsmart for training both pet and owners. It was effort, yes. It was at times uncomfortable, yes. But it was all somehow necessary and, even, wonderful.
     Eight years. What's to say? Either you get dogs or you don't. Before I didn't. Now I do. Dogs enrich your life, add purpose and meaning. That time we stayed with her in a hotel downtown—the Palmer House was promoting its dog-friendly services and invited me to a sleepover—was as close to being a celebrity as I will ever come. Every eye in the grand lobby swiveled in her direction with interest and delight, and I mused on suddenly finding myself as a fussy older man with a little dog. At Miller's as we walked past, the barflies tapped on the window and waved and smiled.
      She was the perfect dog for us. Sweet, loving, energetic. People mistake her for a puppy still, though of course she is now in the definition of middle age. Eight is half of 16, which evokes the haunting line of Mary Oliver's, "How many summers does a little dog have?" 

Drying a wet dog

     A lot, I hope. This is the end of her ninth. 
     But a dog doesn't worry about the future, and I've learned a lot from having a dog. Walk frequently. Eat food. Smile if you can. Don't worry so much. The future comes whether you worry about it or not.
     Walking falls to me. She fixes me with a look, and I somehow just know. I almost said, "She doesn't even have to speak," though frankly, if she started talking, it would only surprise me a little. As it is, we communicate.
     Walks morning, noon and night—well, right after waking up, right before dinner and right before bed. We have a ritual. A big, seven-block circuit in the morning, watching our neighbors back their Jaguars and Audis out of their driveways and rush off to work. A shorter walk later in the day, maybe nipping around back, by the village community garden. Then toward downtown, around what I called "The Point," a triangle of flowers and grounds cover across from the train station. Sometimes the spirit moves her and we head downtown to make a loop through the park.
     What's she thinking? Who can say? She has a brain the size of a walnut. "I'm a dog" perhaps. What am I thinking? With my far larger brain? Not much more. "I have a dog. We're walking." Often, this year, I've been listening to books on Audible. Chekhov skewering a "journalist of minuscule reputation" with such specific skill I suspect we must have met, that he must have seen my office and peered into my heart.
    Here, the dog helps. I've certainly taken good care of this dog. Nobody can say I haven't. She could lose a pound or two—my fault, diverting chicken from atop my salad. But not fat. By no means fat. 
     A dog is a kind of exquisite timepiece, a clock I set ticking shortly after Kent's 13th birthday that will, if we're lucky, start ringing a couple years after he leaves law school. I'll look up then, astounded and heartbroken and ask myself where the time has gone. A question that sits there now, to be honest, waving its hand, trying to get my attention. But I won't call on it just now. 
     

TV and the 1968 Democratic convention: 'They hated us for showing it to them'

Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, by Naim June Paik (Smithsonian American Art Museum) 

     This book was so bottomlessly fascinating I just had to share. Among the facts I hadn't room to include: Thomas Hart Benton did courtroom drawings at a kidnapping trial for NBC. At the 1952 Republican convention in Chicago, Robert Taft hired "all available models" to dress in cheerleader outfits as "Belles for Bob" and hold signs in front of any live TV camera they could find. Television cameras took 15 minutes to warm up, and after NBC's PR department tried to dub the first entirely mobile camera a "walkie-lookie," a newspaper writer offered up a more popular moniker, the "creepie-peepie."

     We can't come close to agreeing about what's happening in this country. Illegal presidency of a pathologically narcissistic would-be tyrant? Or Golden Age of proud true Americanism reclaiming our stolen birthright? You decide!
      Given the gulf in perspectives of what's happening right now, what are the chances we'd agree about the few crumbs of history we carry around on our shirtfronts? Nil.
     The next few days mark the 50th anniversary of Chicago's 1968 Democratic National Convention, from Aug. 26 to 30 of 1968. To get myself in the mood, I've been devouring a fascinating 1991 memoir, "Out of Thin Air," by Reuven Frank, then president of NBC News.
     TV affected the 1968 convention. Then again, TV always does. The four networks began on May 1, 1948; ABC, NBC, CBS and the short-lived Dumont. Those new networks, thanks to the miracle of coaxial cable, could only reach 17 stations in seven cities on the East Coast, from Boston to Richmond, but that was enough to sway the choice of where the 1948 Democratic National Convention would be located.
     "When the manager of WFIL-TV, Philadelphia ... pointed out that a third of America ... would be 'within reach' of a television set, San Francisco, which had more hotel rooms, withdrew its bid," Frank writes.
     Anyone who thinks that the dawn of television was all Edward R. Murrow speaking truth to power should read this book. I couldn't tell if my favorite moment was R.J. Reynolds, sponsor of NBC's Camel News Caravan, forbidding shots of "No Smoking" signs, real living camels (nasty) and anyone smoking a cigar, requiring Frank to get special permission to air an interview with Winston Churchill.  Or Texaco writing a news report that Chet Huntley read word for word.
     Then comes the 1968 convention.

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Gene & Jude's is right not to serve ketchup

Gene & Jude's, 2720 N. River Road, River Grove.

     Google Map offers alternate routes if traffic gets bad. But I'm more of a stay-the-course kind of guy. So when it suggested Friday that I slip off 294 and onto Mannheim Road in order to save four minutes on a trip to Oak Park, I ignored it. 
      At first. But I could see traffic building ahead, and four minutes is four minutes. So I touched Manheim Road on the little map and the directions reoriented themselves, taking me overland, down River Road and, to my surprise, past Gene & Jude's.
    It was about 10:40 a.m.
    I knew it was somewhere. I had been hearing of Gene & Jude's for years, as a mecca not only of franks and fries, founded by a city worker in 1946, but the center of the High Church of No Ketchup, an orthodoxy that I have always met with fierce apostasy. But I never expected to roll right past the place. To be honest—and this is embarrassing to admit—I always assumed the place was in a distant corner of the map, way to the southwest, down by Oak Lawn somewhere, by the "Here Be Dragons." 
      Of course, I felt unease, a vague concern. I had heard—or read, or perhaps just imagined—something about hectoring signs. At Gene & Jude's, you couldn't even get ketchup for your fries. The idea being that some might then contaminate your hot dog. I don't think I've ever eaten a french fry without ketchup. What would be the point? I love ketchup. There, I said it.
     The Oak Park interview went well, was over in about 45 minutes, and I was on my way. I got there shortly after 12 noon. Prime time. 
     The place was mobbed. Twenty people in line, all salt-of-the-earth sorts. An Elmwood Park police officer with bright pink handcuffs on his belt. There seemed to be a story behind that and I almost asked him about it, then thought better. The line moved very fast. 
     "It's almost like a shrine in here," said an egg-shaped guy in front of me, to his buddy. That is true. A certain purity. The choices are "Hot dog & fries," "Double dog & fries" or a corn tamale. Or you could get just fries, and a variety of drinks. That's it. No burgers. No brownies. You could dress your dog with mustard, relish onions or a sport pepper.  Your choice.
     I could paint myself as a weisenheimer and lie, and say I considered asking for ketchup, just to go with the fries. But that wasn't happening. The clerk repeated my order back to me: "hot dog, mustard and relish," and a Diet Coke with a tone of ... I'm not sure what. Questioning, or censure. I almost thought I did it wrong somehow. "It's my first time here," I explained, sheepishly, and he reassured me that I had done fine. Maybe I under-ordered. Most people seemed to be getting double dogs, but I wanted the basic Gene & Jude's experience. 

You can catch a glimpse of hot dog to the upper right.

     They serve their hot dogs buried in fries—"Depression-style" I've seen it called— wrapped and inserted into a brown paper bag. I took mine, tried to hand money to the guy who handed me the bag, which is how it's usually done. But he directed me to pay another clerk—specialization keeps the line moving. "I could take it from you," he deadpanned, "but then you wouldn't have money to pay for lunch."
     I liked that; it showed spirit.
     I took my brown paper bag and repaired to the white formica counter. The fries were hot and good and perfect, slightly well-done to give them flavor and interest. They looked like they should taste greasy but they didn't. 
      The hot dog had snap to the casing. To be honest, I inhaled it all so fast—hungry—that I barely had time to register the details. I was also listening to the conversation all around me.
     "I told her, 'You're too young to be unhappy,'" a man explained to his buddy—paternal advice to a teenage daughter, I would bet. I considered intruded with, "And how well did that work?" but thought better of it.
     What surprised me about Gene & Jude's is that there was no harsh sign condemning ketchup. I somehow expected that. "NO SEATS," is their slogan online, "NO KETCHUP NO PRETENSE NO NONSENSE." But I didn't see that at the stand. True to their beliefs, they didn't make a big deal about it. Also good. Nobody wants to be yelled at while they're eating.
     There was a sign saying that they take cash only, and that is something to bear in mind if you go. Bring cash. My lunch set me back five dollars.
     I left the placed buoyed, thinking I have to bring my wife here to try those french fries. She loves fries. I really don't love them, generally, though I liked these fries very much. Very very much. I even felt as if my mind was expanded a little bit. Make no mistake; I still believe that condemning people who use ketchup is unbefitting the proud citizens of a free nation. But Gene & Jude's french fries are so good, they can be consumed without ketchup—easily. That's the way they should be served. I found myself picking up every crumb of potato, down to the last speck.


     
  

The Saturday Snapshot #3

Beecher, Illinois (photo by Tom Peters)

     This, from regular reader Tom Peters—thank you Tom!—reminds us that we need to expand our idea of natural beauty. We have no trouble recognizing parks and forests as lovely; some of us don't, anyway. But farmland fails to meet the cut. Perhaps because it is cultivated—not raw, pristine natural beauty, but curated by man. Perhaps because, under certain circumstances, it can look bleak—fallow in winter, mile after mile of barren fields. But then again, so can the most gorgeous national park, as someone who has hiked out of Yellowstone through a hazy, humid morning after a sleepless night can assure you. 
     Tom employed two photographer's tricks that are worth mentioning. First, he stopped the car—a lot of people aren't willing to do that, both being in a needless hurry and, I suppose, for valid concerns about the safety of pulling over to the side of a road, even momentarily. He also took a number of exposures and picked the best. The results speak for themselves. 
     This scene of amber waves of grain and fluffy white clouds was captured in Beecher, a village just under three square miles in Will County, about 50 miles south of Chicago. 

Katharine Lee Bates

     "Amber waves of grain" is of course the second line of "America, the Beautiful" whose lyrics began as a poem written in 1893 by Katharine Lee Bates, a 33-year-old English  professor at Wellesley. She was inspired by Pike's Peak, the "purple mountain's majesty" in the song, but also, as the year of composition hints at, by a visit to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, whose White City shows up in the final stanza as "Thine alabaster cities gleam/Undimmed by human tears."
   Speaking of human tears, the rest of the original poem went like this:

America! America!God shed His grace on theeTill nobler men keep once againThy whiter jubilee!

     While "Thy whiter jubilee" could easily be the heading for our current sad chapter in American history, it was swapped a decade later for the closing lines we are all familiar with, "And crown thy good, with brotherhood/From sea to shining sea." A nobler, if less readily attainable ambition. 

  

If you saw an 8-year-old walking a dog, would you a) go "awww" or b) call the cops?

2004: Police intervention not necessary

Marshmallow, the terror of Wilmette

      When my older son was 8, he wanted a dog. I refused. “You’re not asking for a dog,” I’d say. “You’re asking me to pick up dog crap twice a day and I’m not gonna do it.”
     My father grew up in the Bronx. He never had a dog. I never had a dog, had no experience with dogs, and sincerely believed a dog would ruin our lives. No dogs.
     Besides, I argued: Who’d care for it? Not me. I’m a busy man. He, a small child, couldn’t be relied upon to help.
     I thought this sealed my argument. But the future law student saw an opening. He would prove me wrong. He could take care of dogs. He would show me by starting a dog-walking business.
     “Go ahead,” I said, thinking that would be the end of it.
     To my vast surprise, he went ahead. Next thing I knew, he was rushing out at 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning in July to call on his first customer, a family down the block.
     I drifted to the street in time to see him arrive, leading Lady, a black-and-white spaniel, his little brother marching behind. They proceeded to walk Lady up and down the block for half an hour.
     Nobody called the police. Which is more than Ted and Corey Widen of Wilmette can say after allowing their 8-year-old daughter to walk Marshmallow, their Maltese puppy, around their block. A neighbor called the cops.

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