Scotty2Hotty wrote:No reservations, I know... If I go at noon or 1pm, am I going to have to wait an hour? Has anyone gone in the last week or two?

Went with a big group for dinner last Friday. Started waiting around 7:30, and we were seated around 8:15. It seemed like if you only have a party of 2, the wait wasn't very long at all.

Btw - reviews of dishes around the table:
Wiener Schnitzel - pretty dry
Chicken Schnitzel - nice, pretty moist, not a fan of the tomato sauce though
Veal Marsala - not great
Duck - very good
Sausage plate - good
Filet - very good
Spaetzle - excellent
Creamed spinach - kinda bland
Potato salad - good

I thought the wienershcnitzel was very bland and dry too. They need more oil in the pan or something.

The saurbraten, however, was fantastic!

LTE wrote:

Scotty2Hotty wrote:No reservations, I know... If I go at noon or 1pm, am I going to have to wait an hour? Has anyone gone in the last week or two?

Went with a big group for dinner last Friday. Started waiting around 7:30, and we were seated around 8:15. It seemed like if you only have a party of 2, the wait wasn't very long at all.

Btw - reviews of dishes around the table:
Wiener Schnitzel - pretty dry
Chicken Schnitzel - nice, pretty moist, not a fan of the tomato sauce though
Veal Marsala - not great
Duck - very good
Sausage plate - good
Filet - very good
Spaetzle - excellent
Creamed spinach - kinda bland
Potato salad - good

Leaving aside things like the history, service, frustrations and remarks about the cafe, that about sums up the Berghoff

In case anyone is curious about wait times as D-Day approaches, I had business downtown today which gave me a chance to observe.

As I walked past at 10:50 am the line for the dining room went to Dearborn Street. At 11:45 am it was about the same length. When I went by again at 12:50 it was merely halfway to Dearborn.

Also, the line for the bar was just a few people outside the door at 11:45 am. It took about 20 minutes until I got my sandwich and beer.

At 12:50 there was no longer a line outside the Bar.

By the way, the corned beef sandwich is pretty good. No doubt the advantage of high turnover keeping the CB hot and moist. Accompanied by "German Fries" and dark beer it made for a satisfying, though sad, meal. Lots of people taking pictures, sharing memories with fellow Berghoff fans. I grabbed a souvenir coaster (it will never have any collectible value as I'm sure they will continue to be available at the O'Hare location).

I know some people are critical of the Berghoff, but for more than 30 years my wife and I found it to offer consistently good food and service at a reasonable price. That plus the atmosphere and history make it something that many of us will miss.

I meant to mention my recent experience.

I went with a large family group last month at possibly the worst time, 7:00 on a Saturday night. The line was down to the corner. However, it moved relatively quickly and we were seated within 90 min. The time flew, as we discussed Chicago food with fellow diners in line and we took turns drinking in the bar. Interestingly enough, one of the very long-time bartenders (20 years plus) stated that the bar would be closing and he would be retiring back to Mexico. However, when we were seated inside, the server and several fellow diners assured us that the bar was not closing, only the restaurant. I hope that's true. My recent visit confirmed that the bar is a treasure, but reminded me that the food at the restaurant pretty much stinks. (I would say that the wurst/smoked pork chop plate is an exception). All in all, I'd rather see the whole operation stay open. I really can't fathom the owner's decision, whatever his motivation.

Rich Melman has professed his love of the place; maybe he should ride in and save it.

PS, the hostess's estimated wait time was wildly off, on the high side. Maybe they do this to thin the herds somewhat.

JeffB wrote:Rich Melman has professed his love of the place; maybe he should ride in and save it.

I expect he and any number of others would love to do so if they were allowed to. The closure is the Berhoff family's choice. Had they wanted to sell the business or hire a management company to run it for them they could readily have done so.

Instead, they've decided to close, auction off the contents and turn the building over to their daughter who will reopen the bar and cafe section as something called 17 West at the Berghoff and use the main dining room for private parties.

Here's some interesting speculation about why.

_____With strong German & Polish heritage, I was surprised my family never took us to the Berghoff. However, upon hearing of the closing, my parents sprung into action and decided to celebrate my mum’s 60th birthday this weekend by eating one last time there. As we waited our turn, a mere hour and a half, on Saturday my mum shared with me her story of the first time my parents ate there with me.
_____A mere 8 months old, sleep had been hard to come by and adventuring out to favorite restaurants became a more challenging task. Apparently once they sat down to eat at the Berghoff this day I slept the entire meal, giving my parents a much needed break and a moment to really enjoy the passion they’ve brought us all to enjoy, food.
_____My pregnant wife and I smiled as we heard the story and when we finally settled down to thaw out, I looked upon the restaurant in a different light. There have been so many stories like this through the ages and I was just one.
_____The biggest surprise of the evening was Jackie Bange from WGN stoppin’ by to do a final segment. I was going to includ two pictures, one of the interview, and the second my Schlacht-Platte, but I'm tryin' to figure out how... Obviously celebrating a milestone of 60 with your family, eating at a Chicago landmark for the last time, and rehashing old stories would have made the day perfect enough for my mum.
_____The best surprise for her came later that night when I received a call from a colleague at 9:30 PM asking, “Did I just see you on the news at the Berghoff?” Our two seconds of fame come during the two camera pans of the restaurant (we’re the table front and center in the shot, me in a brown roll-neck and my wife in green with a red jacket). Not surprisingly my brother captured the event on his DVR and will make my mum a clearer digital video. But for mum, this was the cherry on top of a delicious Berghoff sundae.
For the video, choose “Last Weekend for the Berghoff” from the play list http://wgntv.trb.com/news/local/eveningnews/?track=nav.

On February 28, 2006, Chicago's historic German restaurant, The Berghoff, will close after being in business for 107 years. The Berghoff Memorial Blog is a place to share stories and memories of this beloved eatery. The Berghoff may be gone, but it will never be forgotten.

Visit The Berghoff Memorial Blog at:

http://berghoffmemorial.blogspot.com/

Also I am hoping for this to be a centralized resource for news, updates, links, and related stories about The Berghoff in the days ahead.

How do you say "Auf Wiedersehen?"

Cheers

The Beghoff is not actually closing at all! This entire charade is being played out in an attempt to bust the union! According to him, they will in fact close down the main room for one year, retaining the bar and the downstairs dining areas. At the completion of the year, they will be able to reopen without being forced to run a union shop.

If all that wasn't cynical enough, the timing of the announcement and the fake closing was deliberately planned so that there would be huge crowds waiting in line to get their "last meal" in January and February, traditionally two of the slowest months in a restaurant's year. The owners are making enough money in these few normally quiet months to sustain them through the entire year until they reopen.

funks wrote:Also I am hoping for this to be a centralized resource for news, updates, links, and related stories about The Berghoff in the days ahead.

Yeah, this thread has been carrying on for a while and will probably get much longer. I know there are several LTH'ers who plan to be there tomorrow to ring down the curtain. I look forward to their reports.

Regards,

El Panzone wrote:The Beghoff is not actually closing at all! This entire charade is being played out in an attempt to bust the union! According to him, they will in fact close down the main room for one year, retaining the bar and the downstairs dining areas. At the completion of the year, they will be able to reopen without being forced to run a union shop.

I've heard the "bust the union" theory before, but I think the "sell the building" theory is more compelling. That real estate is worth a lot of money, especially since the Feds want to expand on the block. The building is orange rated, but closing the restaurant will make a public battle over demolition less likely.

In case you missed it, here's my favorite commentary on the closure.

[url=http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4155/is_20051230/ai_n15982961]A gigantic step closer to the end of our world
Chicago Sun-Times, Dec 30, 2005 by Neil Steinberg[/url]

Someday you will be dead and I will be dead and everyone we have ever known or loved will be gone. Nothing will remain. The city will crumble into dust and the planet, reduced to a cold and lifeless cinder, will tumble eternally through the dark, endless and indifferent tracts of space.

That inevitable day came an elephant step closer this week, as the Berghoff restaurant announced that it will close at the end of February....

Damn the Berghoff family. Damn them. I know that's harsh, but what a selfish act. Close the Berghoff? For a catering business? That's like Marshall Field V's half brother, Ted, selling the Sun- Times so he could produce "Revenge of the Nerds."

There was always something odd about the Berghoffs, standoffish, strange and secretive....

In one more chapter in the Berghoff's saga, they're holding an auction on Saturday. It looks like they're selling everything - even the tables and chairs! http://www.auctionconsultants.net/details.asp?auctionID=3

You can preview the auction on Friday from 10am to 6pm. The auction itself starts at noon on Saturday.

neil had just gotten out of rehab when he wrote that. can u tell?! yessir, he used to be a bar regular. maybe we should get a group together and go to the bar/cafe reopening in two months or so. Maybe we can get reservations at the bar!

btw, they were trying out some menu stuff before they closed. DO NOT try the buffalo sausage skewers!!!! greasy sausage wrapped in fatty bacon
and slathered in sweet-oily nasty stuff intended to be barbeque sauce ;-(

saw Rene G at the bar after last call amongst the TV cameras Tues nite. if anyone goes to the auction, please stop him from buying everything!

btw, it appears that an earlier quote is mine in response to the Berghoff blog, but it is actually a quote pasted FROM the blog, attributed to a recent employee.

Funeral for a Friend

(accompanying slideshow ishere.)

It was a funeral for a friend. Sepia rays pierced the windows and golden tones from gilded chandeliers shone on postcards of the past. Wooden chairs and tables were piled near the old bar like freshly cleared storm debris. Chicago’s 107 year old Berghoff restaurant is now closed.

Two days after the closing, collectors of memorabilia gathered once more under the oaken wainscoting and plaster murals of the 1893 World’s Fair. This time, the gathering was not to dine on schnitzel and hoist steins of lager, but to view the available lots for tomorrow’s auction of restaurant fixtures and photos.

Sullen collectors filed past tables of memorabilia, as if paying last respects at an oaken casket. Some stopped and fingered photos or clutched at old beer bottles as if they were patting their departed loved one on the hand, or pulling at a clutch of rosary beads for one last time.

All that was missing…a suitable dirge.

We do not mourn for anything as simple as a crumbling building, or even something as abstract as the passing of Chicago history.

Rather, we mourn for the loss of craftsmanship. No one can afford to paint plaster murals, weld and gild tripod style chandeliers, or wainscot thousands of square feet, and not many are left who have the carpentry, welding, or painting skills to pull it off.

We mourn for the sweat of others. We can imagine the back pain, the knee strain, caused by overflowing steins and full plates. Muscling heavy trays with one arm left many of the Berghoff waiters with an imbalanced physique, one bicep and forearm bulging over the other. The last of the career waiters served us, some for over fifty years.

We mourn the Berghoff family, their investment of love in delivering community for all these years. How hard it must be to shutter the lifeblood of a family? We think of Herman Joseph Berghoff securing Chicago liquor license #1 at the end of prohibition.

We mourn for own family moments. We remember grandparents, parents, brothers, and sisters who have shared a plate with us during the Christmas shopping season, many who may already have departed. We miss hoisting steins with our friends, watching the Hawks, Bulls, or the Bears on some of the last tube style TV’s in any bar in Chicago. Plasma is what you donate, not what you watch TV on at the Berghoff.

We miss lunchtime at the bar, a pile of lean corn beef and creamy melted swiss on fennel scented rye bread, with a schmear of dijon mustard and a dollop of palate stinging horseradish. We mourn the steaming meatloaf shrouded in beefy gravy. We imagine Mike Royko or Irv Kupcinet throwing back a few brews with the newsies, contemplating yet another column to fill our hearts. We miss filching our own swigs of the dark beer before heading back to office drudgery.

We mourn our own mortality. If a revered citadel of brick, wood, and glass can fall, we again know the frailty of our own soft bodies, our own weak knees, and backs.

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: and so it goes.

Tomorrow, there is one last chance to say goodbye, but it will not be a funeral. It will be more like a wake, with the carnival bark of excited auctioneers, and hopeful Chicagoans bidding on one last piece of history. If you do not get the chance to go, do not mourn. Hold your own personal wake for the Berghoff. Call the living family you shared meals with, the friends you hoisted glasses with, cook yourself some saurkraut and thick juicy sausages, break open a six pack of Berghoff beer or root beer, and once again, raise your glasses, and toast the Berghoff, its craftsmen, waiters, proprietors, and soul.

I wish the Berghoff weren't gone, but I find any sentimentality I might have over its demise more than wiped out by my anger with the owners, who didn't have to close it. They had a choice, and they chose greed. So, pardon my French, but I'm much less inclined to cry out "Say it ain't so, Joe!" than I am to cry out "Good riddance, motherf*ckers. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on your way out."

How can a family who's stewardship lasted 107 years and three generations be considered greedy? Can you blame a couple of 70 year olds for wanting to retire?

I imagine you'll say, well they could have sold the business or hired consultants as mentioned above. Do you really want consultants to run a business who's identity was defined by your families love and sweat?

You say they're greedy because their daughter and sons had their own thing and didn't want to take over the family business. Is the daughter selfish because she wants to run her own business her way? How many of us have worked on escaping the oppressive hand of a parent....and wanted to forge our own path.

So are they sweet, burned-out old retirees, or overbearing and oppressive parents, or both?

For better or worse, they have an institution on their hands. I suppose the Bears' owners could sell the team but demand that it no longer be called the Bears, since it's a private enterprise and all. That might be considered greedy, or maybe just callous and ungenerous to a city that nurtured the family business for so long.

How much will the first post-prohibition liquor license go for at auction? (Might have already happened.) I might take on the stewardship of some old beer steins and menus, then share the honor with my friends at eBay. Can't take it with you, you know.

For better or worse, they have an institution on their hands. I suppose the Bears' owners could sell the team but demand that it no longer be called the Bears, since it's a private enterprise and all. That might be considered greedy, or maybe just callous and ungenerous to a city that nurtured the family business for so long.

Well put. As much as The Berghoff gave to Chicago, Chicago gave back by embracing The Berghoff. So yes, the family should have repaid Chicago's loyalty and perpetuated the institution by finding capable new owners, if the kids didn't want the business. That would have made them very rich. But instead, they want to be even richer. They've, in so many words, told Chicago to go f*ck itself. (Sorry to resort to coarse language, albeit with asterisks, but "go jump in the lake" doesn't quite do justice to the message the family delivered.) The more quickly the Berghoff family is completely forgotten, the better as far as I'm concerned. Unless a year from now there's a story in the Tribune that Caryn's catering business has been sunk by some bad egg salad served at a function for 1000. That would be amusing.

Okay, I think that's quite enough of Berghoff-owner bashing in obscene terms here.

No business has an obligation to remain in business for ever. No one owes you sauerbraten unto the fifth generation. Restaurants close. There's a lot of speculation about why and how, exactly, the Berghoff is closing but until we have real facts it is just that, speculation.

A little gratitude for whatever pleasure you enjoyed there during their time would be in order.

Mike G wrote:A little gratitude for whatever pleasure you enjoyed there during their time would be in order.

I'll go along with the "obscenity ban" (it's your site, after all, besides which I respect the thought behind it), but instructing me how to feel about the Berghoffs and their restaurant is going way too far.

riddlemay wrote:I'll go along with the "obscenity ban" (it's your site, after all, besides which I respect the thought behind it), but instructing me how to feel about the Berghoffs and their restaurant is going way too far.

Riddlemay,

Mike was speaking in general, not in particular, how he felt, not, in effect, how you should feel. You, my friend, are at liberty to feel however you wish about whatever you wish. Harkening back to Hammond's Contentiousness is contagious let's give our fellow posters the benefit of the doubt.

Far as going along with the "obscenity ban" LTHForum's User Agreement also stresses civility, polite interaction, courtesy and, at least a tangential, relation to things culinary.

Enjoy,
Gary

I value and support civility, which is why I used asterisks instead of vowels in the potentially offending words. (There might be children present, after all!) So I'm right in sync with the LTH "bylaws."

Your link to the "whatever" that I'm at liberty to feel exercised about--was there some particular point to that? Were you implying that the particular gripe you linked to was any more or less valid than any that many another LTH poster has been perturbed about at one time or another? If so, that wasn't very sporting of you, now, was it?

riddlemay wrote:I value and support civility, which is why I used asterisks instead of vowels in the potentially offending words. (There might be children present, after all!) So I'm right in sync with the LTH "bylaws."

Riddlemay,

This is exactly the sort of potentially endless back-and-forth that our policy discourages, litigating minutiae distracts from discussing things culinary.

I do, however, respectfully suggest a single asterisk in the middle of the word motherfucker is not in keeping with 'supporting civility'.

If you care to, briefly, discuss this further please feel free to PM or email me directly at gwiv@lthforum.com

Back to food now.

Enjoy,
Gary

G Wiv wrote:Back to food now.

Fine. The creamed spinach s*cked.

riddlemay wrote:Fine. The creamed spinach s*cked.

Riddlemay,

Where did the creamed spinach suck, are we still talking about the Berghoff? Why did it suck, too much allspice, not enough allspice, no allspice. Did the cream curdle, was the spinach bitter. Was the overall dish dry, gummy, filmy on top, burnt on the bottom with an overall displeasing aftertaste?

Please be a little more specific, after all LTHForum is a board dedicated to the the discussion of things culinary.

Enjoy,
Gary

we definitely have to get a group together for the opening of 17 West
Btw, in Funks blog above i am in three pictures and i know those were taken in the weeks leading up to the last day. but two pics were posted with times on them as tho they were taken on Feb 28--they were not.
Be among the first ten to find El Panzone and he will be you a beer at
"17 West"!

I always loved the creamed spinach at the Berghoff and it was an endless debate in our household as to whether it was better at the Berghoff or at Lawry's, our two top picks. Some months ago, we finally had an opportunity to try them both within a short period and I'm happy to report that we agreed that Lawry's had a slight edge.

It's creamy but not gloppy. You can taste the spinach. There's a hint of onion and bacon.

Don't wait till another institution is on the verge of closing before you go to try it. (Yes, Lawry's is part of a chain that started in Beverly Hills. But the Chicago restaurant was its second location when it opened in 1974. Between that and its location in the McCormick mansion, I think Chicago can claim it as a local institution.)

The prime rib's very good, too. And the retro service, with waitresses in uniforms with little hats and the meat wheeled up in headless horse armor, is an experience no one should miss.

And for those of you missing the Berghoff bar, Lawry's does have an ale and sandwich bar at lunch. I haven't been, so I don't know if it's really comparable.

Lawry's the Prime Rib
312/787-5000
www.lawrysonline.com
100 E. Ontario St.
Chicago, IL 60611

Lawry's does have an ale and sandwich bar at lunch. I haven't been, so I don't know if it's really comparable.

Actually, IMO, it's better, with the possible exeption of the Berghoff brats. The quality of the meat, particular the beef, is good, the selection (if I'm remembering correctly) is wider, and the prices are surprisingly not-expensive (I won't go so far as to say inexpensive) for the location.