When is a 1924 Talbot touring car like a deep-sea scallop? When Chef Karl Beckmann indulges in each to heights rarely achieved. Beckmann, 57, known internationally as Chef Karl, is chef-owner of Chef Karl`s Edelweiss Inn in Libertyville.
His top lunchtime dish is sauteed sea scallops from Scotland. His chief hobby is restoring, trading, selling and racing vintage cars. And he performs all with an exaggeration and joie de vivre reminiscent of the legendary Baron von Munchausen.
Beckmann and wife Bernadette came to the United States in July 1960. He had worked as a chef in Germany and Switzerland and was looking for a good adventure. So he followed one of his dreams, he said, and set out for the U.S.: ”My wife and I arrived by boat as true immigrants in Hoboken, N.J. But we had money and a Swiss-made sports car, a silver-blue Enzmann.”
After stints as a chef in Eagle River, Wis., and the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee, Beckmann found a restaurant for sale in Libertyville.
The Beckmanns have been on Park Avenue for 22 years. ”The only restaurant in Lake County,” the chef said with a bit of a boast, ”that is 22 years under the same ownership, location and chef.”
By occupation, Beckmann is a chef; by interest, a car collector; but by nature, he`s an entertainer. With customers as a captive audience, he performs culinary and comedic art tableside during Thursday and Friday lunches. On those days the chef leaves the confines of the kitchen to preside over his patrons with some bombast and two frying pans.
”I don`t talk when I am cooking. Do you talk when you make love?”
Beckmann demanded of a questioning customer, as the flames leaped up to lick the baby salmon he was sauteeing. Later, while positioning the finished entree with its sauce on a plate of buttered new potatoes and carrots brought out from the kitchen, the chef faced a questioner who inquired about cholesterol. ”Look at me. I am happily oversized and healthy,” Beckmann responded.
”For entire days during the war, I had one piece of bread and one cup of water. I decided there that I would eat. What`s the proverb: `Eat today for the hunger you might face tomorrow.` And I season, too. Not like French cooking.”
Regular customer Cedric Sberna of Libertyville often baits the chef by asking for salt and pepper. ”He needs an irritant every now and then,”
Sberna said. ”I sometimes say that portions are small. Then he serves me on a turkey platter.”
”It`s very entertaining here,” Monique Rawson said with a smile and a touch of Swiss accent. ”I`ve known Chef Karl for years. He catered my daughter`s wedding, although one of his strawberry souffles exploded in my oven. He is very creative in sauces. When you come here for lunch, you stay until 5 o`clock.”
Competitor and friend Bob Tschurtz, chef-owner of Fritzl`s Country Inn in Lake Zurich, has eaten often at Beckmann`s restaurant. ”He`s a good chef,”
Tschurtz said. ”He`s nice, crazy and a very good chef.” The two chefs never have cooked together professionally but have shared kitchen duty on vacations and on hunting trips. ”Karl is a very interesting person,” Tschurtz said with a laugh. ”He is so enthused about life. He dabbles around with everything, but cars have been his main hobby all along.”
Though the term ”racing” is used, it`s used loosely. Instead of racing, it`s more like preening in old-time car rallyes. Beckmann said he has enjoyed taking cars to classic rallyes in Wisconsin and Illinois. But as Team Libertyville, he has shipped cars to Germany the last two summers to participate in a rallye through his homeland.
”Always in my heart-from a little boy on-always I liked toy trucks,”
Beckmann said, surveying the fleet of wood and tin trucks parked up on a shelf running high around his barroom. ”When I was 17 or 19 I got my first motor scooter. My parents said I had a car tick. It kept on going. I love cars. You can`t have just one. You can`t have two. It is a love,” said the man who stables 16 to 20 vintage motorcars in various stages of rebirth in shops around Libertyville.
”I had a dream to be a race car driver,” Beckmann said. ”I worked for an uncle in Germany where I did pastries and deliveries. The streets were quiet. People would call and say, `Who is that crazy guy driving so fast?` For a while in America I did stock cars. I had a Chevy Impala with a 454 (cubic inches) engine. It was so fast that even Karl Beckmann could barely handle it. Then, in 1987, I went to a four-day formula car racing school in California. Paul Newman did it. So could I. Well, I could barely zip up the suit.”
Beckmann laughed a booming laugh, then grew sober. ”At 2 p.m. on the last day, they took us to a quarter-mile track for a race. We had four hours of circling that track. It`s out of my system.”
Maybe formula car racing is out of his system but not speed and certainly not cars. ”A chef is confined to a kitchen,” Beckmann said with an explanatory shrug that pulled his shoulders to his ears. ”Some kitchens have no windows and you have to get the food out fast. The kitchen needs speed, so you automatically look for fast cars.”
In Beckmann`s case, that means any cars at all, even cars that do 30 to 35 m.p.h. tops in road rallyes.
The dream rallye for Beckmann is the annual 1,200-mile, eight-day tour that crosses the center of Germany, then circles back north. The event is in its fourth year, and this month will be Beckmann`s third time motoring in it. He`s the only American accepted among 130 or so entrants. More than two million spectators line the route to cheer the vintage cars and their drivers. In 1990 Beckmann entered with a 1956 Cadillac limousine. Last year he took a 1936 Studebaker President. (He sold them both in Germany after the rallies.) This year he will leave on Aug. 11 to lead a three-person crew of Team Libertyville on the eight-day odyssey from Aug. 15 to Aug. 23. His rallye car will be the Talbot, one of 21 made in France in 1924. It`s a long and low yellow-green touring car with a canvas folding top, oak wheels and spokes, wood dashboard, bug-eye lights, tan Naugahyde seats and a black trunk attached to the rear bumper. Beckmann added hot pink stripes on the wheel`s wood spokes for some flash.
Team Libertyville`s position is second at the starting line because the Talbot is the second-oldest car in the rallye.
”The first week in December,” Beckmann said, ”I flew to Tampa to get this car. I traded a 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark 3 two-door convertible for it. I had to take measurements first, though, to make sure my 300-plus-pound body would fit,” he said, eyes twinkling.
The eight-day endurance test starts and ends in the chef`s hometown of Moenchengladbach, a village in northwest Germany near Dusseldorf.
”It`s not a race,” Beckmann said with emphasis. ”It`s an endurance test. The owner must be sure the car is prepared, and he must keep the car moving and be back eight days later, after arriving at all checkpoints. No, it`s not all waving at spectators. It`s working all night on the car. It`s like the kitchen. You have a long day and must go from start to finish.”
But there is some waving at spectators, right?.
”Okay,” he said, with a purse of his lips that rumpled his salt and pepper mustache into a smile. ”So I sit on the fender of the car as we go through towns. So I hop off to kiss the pretty girls. And I have little toys that I give out to the children. You give with the work on the car all night long, but the receiving is to hear the applause.”
”It was an exciting experience being with Karl in Germany,” said Julius Marx, owner of Libertyville Lincoln-Mercury and Classic Chevrolet-Geo of Libertyville. Marx was one-third of Team Libertyville in 1990; the other member was Bill Davis, who is in the plumbing business.
”The most amazing thing to me,” Marx said, ”was the East Germans`
interest to see the cars in the rally. And no one had ever seen a large car like a 1956 Cadillac limousine. It`s two and a half tons of car. The kids just swarmed around us. In Leipzig, 7,000 to 8,000 people were in the square when we arrived about 10 at night. I was frightened. I thought they would crush us against the car they were so eager to see it.”
In each stop on the tour, the participants proceed to the town square to sign in with the burgermeister, or mayor, or lose 50 points for missing a check point.
”Karl is a character,” Marx said with a laugh. ”No matter how late we arrived at a checkpoint, Karl always was on his own program to entertain people. Even after 10 hours on the road, he`d pull out what I called his pogo stick (a bumban stick, Beckmann calls it a musical cane-like contraption fitted with bells, miniature tambourines and assorted noisemakers) to start the fun.”
This year`s Team Libertyville, Beckmann said, is flying to Germany on Aug. 11. It consists of a chef, a baker and a curtain salesman. The chef is Beckmann; the baker is Eugene Bernhardt of Libertyville; the curtain salesman is Robert Greenstein of Glenview.
”No, I`m not the mechanic on Chef Karl`s magical tour,” Greenstein said, with a roaring laugh similar to Beckmann`s. ”Curtains are my life. I`ve known Chef Karl since 1978, when we were both at Club Med in Guadeloupe. I heard a bunch of what I thought were noisy German tourists. Then I heard the words Belmont and Lincoln. `In what part of Berlin is Belmont and Lincoln,` I said to myself. So I introduced myself and we`ve been friends ever since. He`s a treat. Very adventurous.
”The last time Chef Karl and I talked, he said we were going to Poland. Where next? It`s okay. I ordered flying helmets with goggles for the team. It goes on and on. He`s terrific.”
Beckmann`s list of vintage cars goes on and on, too, ensuring limitless trips to future German rallyes. Past and present cars in his stable include a `39 Porsche, `29 Austin-Daimler, a second `36 Studebaker President and a
`57 Studebaker Golden Hawk.
This doesn`t sound like a German chef, you say?
Well, he certainly is that: a German-trained chef and pastry-maker. Wiener schnitzel, bratwurst and sauerbraten accompanied by red cabbage, dumplings and strudel emerge hot and hearty from his kitchen. To top off the Old World aura, oompah music courses through the two dining rooms and bar, and paintings of German scenes dress the walls.
Beckmann`s choice entrees, though, are surprisingly nouveau. They include five to eight fish specialties, premier among which are his famous sea scallops. All told, the Edelweiss Inn menu lists 56 items: soft-shell crabs to prime rib to kasseler ribs.
Wife Bernadette, 56, is hostess on weekends and tends the summer flowers hanging from the balcony above the restaurant, where they live.
”Ach, the flowers are hanging and standing,” Beckmann said, hitting his forehead with the heel of his hand. ”The water bill climbs 30 percent.”
Bernadette just rolled her eyes, threw her fists into the air and retreated, uttering some wishes that might improve Karl.
Daughter Dominique, 24, of Ingleside, who is married and has a daughter, works in the restaurant on weekends. ”I have worked for my Dad in the business since I was 7 years old,” she said. ”He`s taught me about the business and working hard. Both my mom and dad work hard. If you want a good life with adventures, you have to work for it. But at Christmas, when my brother (Karl Joseph, 26, a civil engineer in Berkeley, Calif.) and sister
(Francoise, 32, a student in San Francisco) come home, they help out, too. When we were kids, on Sundays, we would just get in the car and go have a good time, just to get away from the business.”
As for the patriarch of the clan, he just keeps moving at full speed, as do his dreams. ”I would like to fly, be a bird, if I wouldn`t be a human being,” he said. ”Para-boating is close. I`m also looking at bungee-jumping. But my real ambition, next to my car hobby, is later to be mayor of my hometown in Germany.”
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Chef Karl`s Edelweiss Inn is at 411 E. Park Ave. in Libertyville;
708-367-9696. It`s on Illinois Highway 137, just east of Illinois Highway 21. Hours are 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. for lunch Tuesday through Friday; 5-10 p.m. for dinner Tuesday through Friday; 5-11 p.m. for dinner on Saturday. The inn is closed Sunday and Monday.
