The three scowling faces look slightly familiar, yet they fail to ring a bell-at least not the sort of bell one might expect to ring in a celebrity-studded joint like Harry Caray`s Restaurant.
One cannot place the guys, exactly-just three big dudes wearing clothes woven from platinum credit cards, a trio of good haircuts and bad attitudes. How disappointing.
Hopping around town looking for the interesting, vivacious, famous or colorful in their native haunts is always a hit-or-miss proposition. They might be there at the same time you are, or they might not, or you may not be able to place the faces.
A random, arbitrary sampling can serve only as a rough guide to establishments where unusual, interesting characters make themselves at home. They could move on at any minute to a haven that suits them better. They could change careers, leave town or check into rehab.
When the paper this is printed on becomes slightly yellow, you can be fairly certain the trail has grown cold. Groupies, star-watchers and fad-chasers should then seek out fresh sources or consider getting a life.
The sporty set
Famous athletes do mingle at Caray`s, 33 W. Kinzie St., in sufficient numbers to confer upon it its standing as the No. 1 place in Chicago to spot well-known jocks.
”We get a pretty good cross-section from the various teams,” says Caray`s general manager Bill Downey. ”We get umpires, referees and a lot of the media people, a lot of broadcasters from the visiting teams.”
During the National Basketball Association finals, L.A. Lakers executives stopped in for steaks (the overwhelmingly favored item among the sweat set), but Lakers players partied elsewhere, as did their opponents, the Bulls.
”The Bulls go to the glitzy joints,” reports Channel 7 sports anchor Tim Weigel. That means, for example, 59 West, a club at 59 W. Grand Ave.;
Excalibur, another club, at 632 N. Dearborn St. and almost anyplace else where pounding speakers weaken the floors and the lights induce strobe frenzy.
When he`s up for casual chit-chat, Michael Jordan might wander into Bigsby`s Bar & Grill, 1750 N. Clark St., where he reportedly owns a piece of the action. The subterranean lair (beneath a Bigsby & Kruthers clothing store and its gigantic photo mural of Bulls coach Phil Jackson) all but smothers its customers with NBA paraphernalia-decor.
Blackhawks players and their coaches have demonstrated an unexpected affinity for the Kingston Mines Chicago Blues Center, 2548 N. Halsted St., where on a busy night the customers are packed tighter than a pack of Luckies and the twanging, bellowing volume makes the orange ceiling lights sway. This seems to have little to do with hockey, or Canada, but maybe the crowded Kingston Mines reminds coach Mike Keenan and his charges of the good fights they enjoy at work, eh?
Bears, as might be expected, go anywhere they want, particularly to the Prime Minister Restaurant, 3355 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Northbrook, where former wild thing and Super Bowl quarterback Jim McMahon holds forth. ”None of them go to Ditka`s,” Tim Weigel observes. ”That`s too much like work.”
Calling all aesthetes
But, hey, with all this grunting about athletes, somebody might get the impression that Chicago lacks establishments for aesthetes. Quite a few people here do know the difference, and they take their sensitive souls to the Wicker Park and Bucktown neighborhoods.
The Rainbo Club, 1150 N. Damen Ave., has built up the foremost paint-plaster-and-poetry-spattered clientele in its five years near the Damen Avenue/Division Street nexus immortalized by novelist Nelson Algren. Rumor has it that Algren, who lived nearby, used to visit the place a few decades ago, when it served as a polka club and poker parlor under the same ornate neon sign that adorns Rainbo today.
Almost any night, a sea of people wearing bandannas on their heads, faded black T-shirts, lots of khaki and denim mill around Rainbo`s horseshoe bar and jam the four booths. They sip $1 beers and talk, occasionally scanning the artwork that changes every month to boost the egos and sales of neighborhood talent. The more boisterous might grin for the photo machine in the corner. Owner Dee Taira and her key bartenders, Michael Cergizan and Ken Ellis, put the snapshots into a calendar each year.
”We get a really diverse group of people-carpenters, musicians, artists, you name it,” Taira says. ”We have a lot of waiters, waitresses and bartenders who usually come in after their shifts are over. Of course, most of them double as artists and musicians-or maybe it`s the other way around.”
Artists who no longer have to moonlight sometimes favor Jimo`s Cafe, 1576 N. Milwaukee Ave., and its somewhat pricier fare. For coffee and reading, they could commandeer a table in Urbus Orbis, 1934 W. North Ave.
”If I wanted to kill all the artists in this city at once, all I`d have to do is throw a bomb in the Wishbone on Saturday morning,” declares artist/ gallery owner Tony Fitzpatrick. The Wishbone, 1800 W. Grand Ave., serves substantial, Southern-style breakfasts, and the owners indicate they know the way to an artist`s heart by keeping prices low.
Fitzpatrick runs frequent artist soirees himself at his slightly wacky, always fun, World Tattoo Gallery, 1255 S. Wabash Ave. As each show opens, he turns the gallery into a party room with food, drink, dancing and revelry-admission payable at the door.
Money on their minds
Several blocks away, in the financial district, the frazzled but ever-game market crowd chills out at the Savoy Bar & Grill, a somewhat raucous saloon in the otherwise decorous Chicago Board of Options Exchange building, 440 S. LaSalle St.
A Lettuce Entertain You enterprise, the 5-year-old Savoy conveys a college-dive theme. Patrons in shirt-sleeves, loose ties and casual-executive garb buzz with pit-level energy as they pour in for the brief cocktail hour. Bartenders shout ”last call!” around 6:30 p.m.
A few fiercely loyal regulars stake out the buffet line at lunchtime and finger those who fail to pause at the cashier. ”They`re protective of us,”
marvels manager Frank Conaty. ”They help me catch people who are trying to beat the system.” The fact that he needs such help from time to time does not seem to surprise him. After all, most of his clientele beat the system for a living.
Except for a few traditional cocktail lounge/restaurants-notably the Ceres Cafe, 141 W. Jackson Blvd., and the Excelsior, 175 W. Jackson Blvd.-the LaSalle Street-area action seems to favor campus-style places much like the Savoy. Alcocks, Chicago`s Celtic Club and the Cactus Lounge,-all clustered in the 400 block of South Wells Street-blast the night away with beer, video games, pool tables and good-natured rowdiness.
It`s showtime
Believe it or not, the theatrical scene gets considerably more tricky.
Actors who pride themselves on their gritty, Chicago-style disdain for anything glamorous pile into the Gaslight Corner, 2858 N. Halsted St. Gaslight has remained resolutely neighborhood in style, even as the neighborhood itself changed from blue-collar to artsy. For years, members of the Steppenwolf troupe, who worked across the street, dropped in after performances and rehearsals. Now and then, such Steppenwolf alumni as John Malkovich and Gary Cole, or Remains Theater stalwart William Petersen still look in, mixing easily and empathetically with the gimme-cap regulars.
A somewhat grittier branch of show business is that strong-backed army of skilled technicians and masters of artifice who work on the film crews. Certain actors and actresses, the kind who don`t yet light up marquees but give a scene that certain Chicago snap, often go where the crews go.
A favorite stop for them is Danny`s Tavern, 1951 W. Dickens Ave., a dark, intimate place with neighborhood-generated paintings on the wall (we`re in artistic Bucktown again), underground tapes on the deck and a series of rooms on various levels.
The former owners had made Danny`s into a sort of Elvis Presley shrine. The new owner, Geoffrey Turner, axed that decor last August and went with stuff like zebra-striped wainscotting, touches of neon and abstract splashes everywhere. ”At first, business was just nothing, because people liked the Elvis Presley stuff,” Turner confessed. ”But I think most of them are back now.”
Steppenwolf, meanwhile, moved to brand-new quarters near the North Avenue end of Halsted Street this spring. Even before then, as if in anticipation, a smattering of actors began to cruise the narrow aisle at O`Rourke`s, virtually across the street. Recent sightings: Albert Finney, Brian Dennahey, Peter Falk and John and Joan Cusack.
O`Rourke regulars haven`t exactly embraced the newcomers, however, and even the Irish poets on the walls seem to peer down from their photographs with expressions of slight disfavor.
The situation hasn`t yet deteriorated into open conflict, thanks in large part to proprietor Jay Kobar, a nice guy who nonetheless gives strangers the impression that he doesn`t like anybody very much. A sign in the window probably further helps to keep a lid on hostilities. It warns that the premises are patrolled by vicious guard dogs and ”survivors will be prosecuted.”
Pressing on …
As almost everyone knows, the rough-and-tumble aspects of newspaper work have all but disappeared, anyway. Journalists making their way toward the bar at Riccardo Restaurant & Gallery, 437 N. Rush St., now must swim through schools of press agents, TV reporters, market analysts and speech writers. Once a hangout for artists and other Bohemians, then a newspaper bar, Riccardo has evolved into what might be called a ”communications” center.
Those who yearn for that old Front Page irreverence clump down the stairs into the Billy Goat Tavern, 430 N. Michigan Ave. (lower level), where gruff still is spoken and yellowing bylines paper the walls. Customers ingest huge quantities of grease, nicotine and alcohol, as if their hardened skepticism extended even onto surgeon generals.
Those who like to watch television people slop gravy on their Armani neckties and AnnTaylor bodices elbow their way into Prime Time Foodworks in the lobby of NBC Tower, 4555 N. Cityfront Plaza Dr. The gawkers here tend to be seeking out anchorpersons, weatherpersons, traffic persons and now-here-with-the-sports . . . persons, all of whom tend to look gorgeous even with pastrami-stuffed cheeks. But there`s not much intellectual discourse in such a well-groomed atmosphere, and the whole subject seems to be edging toward yet another category …
OK, let`s talk looks
Bimbos and hunks, bimbos and hunks-where does one find the best bimbos and hunks? The question came from an editor with the most politically correct sensibilities between Stanford University and Duke, so it seemed all right to deal with it. But the research quickly grew unwieldy.
A miasma of shopping-mall discos, drunken sing-alongs, factory dance clubs, sports bars, Stoly nights, Nintendo bleeps, gold chains, miniskirts, steroidal iron pumpers, frizzy hairdos and whiny voices overwhelmed us.
When the pall lifted, a single, strangely Giorgio-scented page of the notebook contained only one line: Baja Beach Club, North Pier Terminal, 401 E. Illinois St.
There`s no telling how it got there.
