It has all the right elements to be one of the city`s trendiest restaurant gardens: understated white stone walkways; a rotisserie and grill tended by a chef turning out such nouvelle entrees as softshell crab BLT`s with ginger and chili; an avant-garde clientele sitting at marble slab tables artfully arranged around the pool table.
Yes, the pool table. Your typical bowling alley special-set up under a string of lights smack dab in the center of the restaurant`s outdoor garden.
Its prominent presence at the offbeat, new-wave Star Top Cafe, at 2748 N. Lincoln Ave., is perhaps one of the strongest testimonials around that pool has not only become cool again, but it`s gone downright upscale, for men and women.
The table is such a hit with the restaurant`s hip patrons that despite the dropping temperatures, Star Top co-owner Michael Short says: ”We`re going to run this thing until hell freezes over.
”Maybe we`ll even put up a tent when it gets colder. Last night I had to close the garden, and these people were all squealing, `We came all the way from the suburbs to play on the table.` And now I have private parties back here because of the table. One group was a design firm, and the other was lawyers.”
Reverse chic
Needless to say, Short and his partner, Bill Ammons, are pool fanatics. They became really serious about the game two years ago. As a team they won the first Limelight Nightclub 8-ball tournament, and then placed second in a subsequent tournament-held because of the overwhelming response to the first. ”It`s reverse chic, the way bowling was a couple of years ago,” says Bill Monday, a commodities trader who was a spectator at the Limelight tourney. Monday, fond of dressing in costume for various events, came in his poolroom garb, complete with sleeve garters and a customized pool-rack bolo.
The 16 teams were drawn from the trendy: young restaurateurs, media types and dance-club owners and workers.
The event also drew a pretty fashionable crowd of spectators, including Diana Niedermaier, of Niedermaier Inc., an interior design company. She has been an avid pool player for two years. A year ago she bought a regulation-size table to put in her art studio loft. ”Pool is very social and very sexy,” she says.
The addition of a poolroom to the Limelight, which prides itself on being the trendiest of the trendy, is another indication of pocket billiards`
booming popularity both internationally and nationally (two new pool clubs and a 15,000-square-foot pool hall have opened in Manhattan in just the past year).
Brunswick Billiards, of Bristol, Wis., and Gandy`s Industries, of Macon, Ga., manufacturers of billiard tables and equipment, are swamped with orders. Quest for the best
Ron Blatt of Blatt Billiards in Manhattan reports all-time high sales. Blatt`s company, which has been called the ”Rolls-Royce of billiards,”
manufactures, restores and distributes custom-made and antique pool tables and equipment.
Blatt`s tables are for those with serious bucks to spend. Some customized models have had malachite rails, gold-leaf inlays and diamond sites (the points marked on the sides of the table).
He recently sold tables to Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy and Kathleen Turner and also counts among his more famous customers Malcolm Forbes, Mick Jagger, Harry Belafonte and Paul Newman.
”Having a pool table is becoming more of a status symbol today,” says Blatt, who ships his wares worldwide.
Indeed, having a home pool table is fast becoming a symbol of affluence, especially in crowded cities where residential space goes for a premium price. But beyond the initial cost of the table (an average slate-bed table runs between $1,500 and $2,000), there`s all sorts of customized furniture and equipment-graphite cues as well as customized racks, chairs and lamps.
Some in the billiards industry link the sale of pool tables to the housing market-pointing out that most new homes now are constructed with rec rooms.
An international fave
Pool is also picking up speed in other countries.
”Especially in Germany,” says European distributor Norbert Schmidt, who was passing through Chicago via the Chicago Billiard Cafe, 5949 W. Irving Park Rd., en route to the recent annual billiards trade show in Louisville.
The Japanese, too, have become pool fanatics.
”For about a year the Japanese have been opening up pool halls like crazy and buying up everything in sight, but it`s leveling off some now,”
says Don Bruno of American Family Products in suburban Addison, which manufactures customized poolroom chairs and lamps. Bruno is one of several distributors who says there is a shortage of cues and racks on the American market because of the Japanese demand.
Says Bruno: ”Some people will tell you a booming housing industry accounts for this expansion in the billiards industry, but that`s not it. The real thing that makes pool boom is more disposable income-something both the Japanese and the yuppies have. And part of the reason yuppies like pool is because-to put it in their language-they can do this whole cocooning thing. They like to be home and safe.”
Every home needs one
Indeed, a good number of the pool tables being purchased are for homes rather than pool halls.
Sheri and Dean Balice made certain they had ample room in their Lincoln Park home`s basement for a table. In fact, when Dean proposed marriage on Valentine`s Day last year, Sheri said ”yes”-on condition that she get a pool table instead of an engagement ring.
”What can you do with a ring, anyway?” asks the self-confessed tomboy, who started playing pool at 10 with her father in bowling alleys.
”We must play about four or five hours a week, and when we entertain we always end up in the rec room playing pool,” she says.
Sheri is a business manager for a cash-management business that handles Fortune 500 companies. Her husband is a corporate banker.
”All of our friends love the game, and that`s both men and women,” she added. ”For the most part they`re like us-no kids, in their late 20s to late 30s and making six figures for the household income.”
That`s a far cry from the typical pool-player profile that somehow manages to encompass two extremes-the rich, stuffy English lord of the manor who keeps a billiards room, and the sleazy hustler who hangs out in seedy smoke-filled pool halls where there`s enough booze, gambling and drugs to corrupt even the Lone Ranger.
That latter image worried Chicago aldermen so much that in 1939 they enacted a law that still prohibits the sale of liquor in poolrooms.
Can`t go wrong
But today nightclub owners across the city are enthusiastically jumping on the pool bandwagon-and none seems worried that a newly acquired billiards table will draw the ”wrong element.”
”We don`t have the wrong element in here in the first place,” says Michael Kudesh, the manager of Union, a trendy dance bar on the North Side. Kudesh keeps on his desk a few sets of clear Lucite balls. The customized balls are only used at special parties for play on the club`s table-a sort of Star Wars model with stainless-steel rails.
Most aren`t that fancy, but pocket billiards tables are popping up all over Chicago-from the offbeat Weeds tavern to newly opened downtown clubs Traffic Jam and Dick`s Last Resort. And though pool tables have always been in neighborhood bars, the Charleston, a Bucktown bar, has an impressive antique. Of course, for the really serious players, there are genuine poolrooms themselves, though nothing exists in Chicago today that can compare to ”the Room” downtown. That was the 60-table Bensinger`s pool hall, which sport legend Minnesota Fats himself called ”the greatest place to shoot pool in the world.”
But Bensinger`s shut its doors long ago, and now many of the serious pool players can now be found at places such as Chris` Billiards, 4637 N. Milwaukee Ave. Chris` was one of the sites used to shoot ”The Color of Money,” with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, which is credited by some with helping pool`s new resurgence.
TV would do it
Chris Crisman, who has presided over his Northwest Side poolroom like a proud parent for nine years, is a walking encyclopedia on all things billiardy.
”Used to be a time when pool players made more money for playing in tournaments than tennis and golf players,” says Crisman. ”The difference is television exposure. If we could just get that exposure-like in England, where snooker champion Steve Davis` name is a household word because of TV.Tribune photos by Michael Budrys
Bill Ammons (left) and Michael Short of the Star Top Cafe plot their strategy at the Limelight tourney.
smaller pix
Martin Venit from Park West breaks to open a game.
”If we got that kind of exposure on televison here-well, then our pool champions could actually make a living off tournament play.”
Those days may soon be coming. Brunswick has signed a two-year contract with the ESPN sports network, which has already televised the company`s 9-ball tournament. That tourney, in Las Vegas` Caesars Palace, featured male and female contestants in formalwear and tuxedos.
We`re talking actual tuxes and TV here. You know, the things that start with T, which rhymes with P-and that stands for pool. –
