Eating out in Oak Park (IL), per 2009 Short History. How like you your bagel? Avoiding a wine war. Rambling folk in the warming room. Young man dead.
Two kinds of restaurant... When all is said and done, there are two kinds of restaurant, where the menu says it all and where it doesn’t. At the first you may have to inquire the soup of the day or whether (at Einstein Brothers) toasting the bagel beats nuking it. But by and large, what you see is what you will get if you can work up the nerve to ask for it.
At the menu-is-not-enough restaurant, on the other hand, there are “specials” that must be explained, down to the last splash of herbed mushroom gravy. How many times have you readers with now and then adequate kale (green stuff, moolah) sat patiently or otherwise while entree and other options are rehearsed? No wonder waiting table is a standard day job for underemployed actors.
The Einstein experience... At your standard bagel place, on the other hand, such as Einstein Brothers, you have the toast-vs.-nuke question answered with a word from one lady and approving nod from another.
It’s settled: toast it. Indeed, Einstein B. offered a sort of bonus the other day, namely watching window washers finish their job of making all things clear and beautiful. This at about lunch time on a week day.
Task completed, the two washers sat down to their lunch, brought to the table by one of the aforementioned ladies. Very nice. Homey, in fact.
They were what we call clean-cut fellows, workers worthy of their hire AND lunch. One wore a do-rag. No one I knew wore a do-rag when I was their age. But do-rags have come a long way. Also known as head wraps, they come with a tail and without it, in many colors.
There’s a Dale Earnhardt Jr. do-rag, for auto-race fans. The “Sport ‘Long Tail/No Tie’ DO-RAG” sold at SparklingEarth.com “is perfect for today’s athletes and active people . . . great for sports, wave control, under helmets, bad hair days and more.” So next time you see one, think NASCAR, football, hairdo.
Alas, Einstein Brothers at Harlem & North became history in late 2006, much mourned by fans -- one urged people to call 1-800-BAGEL-ME to plead for a speedy return.
But it had been driven away by taxes, said Les “Cut the Taxes” Golden in a January of ‘09 letter. Golden had been told by the marketing v.p., “Revenues did not meet costs” at the Harlem & North site.
Your historian blogged on the matter, taking a free-market position: I must consult my Filthy Capitalist Mindset, neatly balancing my deep love for community values with my Filthy Capitalist desire for maximized profits or at least enough to allow one even to stay in business...
It’s a bagel jungle out there, you better believe it.
However, the tax issue is real and enduring in our fair village; and Einstein Brothers was not the first to depart, nor would be the last, because of the high cost of doing business here.
Meanwhile, the village fathers and mothers had to mediate between two wine-sellers on restaurant row... It would have been unseemly for neighboring wine merchants -- northeast corner Lake and Oak Park, down a few doors -- to be out of sorts with each other, as might have happened if the village board had not revised a wine-bar license the other night.
Cabernet & Company lives by package sales, and it wasn’t easy getting his license, its owner testified. But the fast-tracked, new Abbey wine bar would have competed in wine-to-go from practically next door. No fair.
Cabernet complained to the board in urbane fashion. Abbey responded briefly and also urbanely, correctly observing that a wine war would serve no one’s interest, and the board changed the ordinance. It’s wine by glass or bottle at Abbey, to be consumed on the premises, wine and beer as take-home package at Cabernet. Smiles all around.
Alas, both establishments were gone at this writing, replaced by a toy store and a gay-friendly restaurant-lounge. Sic transit license problem.
Some do not eat at restaurants...
Warming up... The Book Nook’s warming room is handy for rambling folk, who arrive like clockwork at 7a.m., unless they come from the PADS pad in Forest Park or Berwyn, when it’s 8 a.m. The library coffee shop man explained it on a nippy February week day. He mostly ignores them. When a customer wants to sit in a customer-only seat where the rambling folk are sitting, he asks them to move, and they do. And he can always call the cops if need be.
Meanwhile, they sit looking, sometimes chatting, unless you look at them too closely. Then one of them might glare at the intrusion. A visitor showed up about 8:15 with a thermos of coffee and toast wrapped in a paper napkin. A nice lady, a regular, invited him to join her and a companion at table. He said he was fine where he was, next to a window -- thermos on floor, toast on ledge, where also lay his hat and coat, flung there when he sat to eat and read.
It was just as well he didn’t sit at the table. In conversation drawn from the day’s headlines, the companion turned out voluble and opinionated and also began to cast resentful looks towards the visitor, who returned these noncommitally.
Young man in trouble... Next day, passing the warming room at 7:30 or so, the visitor was hailed by a dark-bearded young fellow who had just shuffled out. “How you doing?” the young fellow said in greeting, surprising the stroller, who stopped to chat. The young man had been lucky to wake up that morning, he said, having “got out of rehab” two weeks earlier. “Lucky you woke up at all,” said the stroller, sensing the fellow had had a scare. Yes, he said.
Moving to a park bench, they talked further. The young man, an Oak Park & River Forest High alumnus, had a sad tale of being advised by an employer to go out on his own to ply his chosen trade. This had not worked out: he got only two calls, ended up watching TV in a friend’s apartment. He had his money in a local bank which “went computerized without [his] permission.”
His earthly goods had been stolen. A PADS social worker in Forest Park was “trying to get [him] on Social Security.” He complained matter-of-factly about “air” moving up from his legs (he gestured), the result of standing a long time the day before. (He had stood at Oak Park and Lake, while high-schoolers cavorted, paying him no heed.) The standing had made him cold, he said. But there was no room left in the warming room on this day; so he took a park bench seat.
A week or so later, on Holy Thursday at 8:30 a.m. or so, the stroller spotted him smoking on a bench and stopped to say “Hi.” The young man returned the “Hi” but remained busy talking to himself between puffs, perhaps of Winston or Marlboro but probably not. The stroller kept on walking.
Sad post-script: The young man was Mark Glende. He died seven months later, hit by a Metra train near Harvard, Illinois. He was 45 years old, had tried to work as a plumber, was “quirky” as a kid, was plagued by mental illness, his sister told the Wednesday Journal.
“We would offer him money, but he wouldn’t take it,” said an Ascension Church usher.
He was a “gentle man,” said a neighbor and fellow parishioner. “Whatever he had, he always shared it. Mark had a lot to teach us.”
“Like Jesus, he was among the disinherited,” said another parishioner.
He “had nothing except for the very breath that God had given him,” another wrote in a eulogy. “It was God alone that Mark had. I wanted to be close to God through Mark.”