With every table in its massive 650-seat restaurant crammed with hungry diners and hundreds more clustered around the hostess desk in a wait stretching more than two hours, management actually locked the front door at Bob Chinn’s Crab House one recent Saturday evening.
To prove the crowd was no fluke, the same thing happened the next Saturday night.
Want to try an off night for a seat at the monumentally popular Bob Chinn’s in Wheeling?
On Mondays, a day when many competing restaurants close in the face of lackluster business, the wait for a table is merely reduced to an hour or so at dinnertime. Even lunch is standing-room-only many days. Undaunted, the crowds keep coming back.
“We’ve had to lock our doors around 6 p.m. on Saturdays more than once because there was literally no way to wedge more people in here,” explains a bemused Bob Chinn, the tireless, detail-minded proprietor of the 11-year-old Milwaukee Avenue landmark. “I know it sounds crazy to have so many customers that you actually have to lock the doors to keep them out, but we don’t want to get into trouble with the fire department.”
The 70-year-old Chinn presides over an establishment that has evolved beyond mere restaurant or dining hall or seafood house. Equal parts theater and carnival, it has become a local Wheeling institution, mixing casual neighborhood residents along with seafood purists from Lake Forest and tourists from Iowa into a happy melange of humanity each day.
The dress is decidedly informal, the prices are reasonable, and the conversational din equal in volume to a big convention at McCormick Place. The mood is always upbeat-complaints about food and service are exceedingly rare-while the atmosphere is unrelentingly festive at all hours.
“I like lots of energy, lots of excitement. At our restaurant people like to watch people,” says Chinn, who also likes to be surrounded by family as he works long 75-hour weeks.
While he is owner and chief executive officer, daughter Marilyn Chinn, 43, who lives in Chicago, is a partner, and son Michael, 37, of Long Grove is the fish buyer. Another daughter, Barbara Maung, 45, of Buffalo Grove, works in the office, and various nephews and nieces also work as waiters and office help; only wife Jeanne, overseeing affairs at the Chinn family home in Northbrook, stands apart from the fray.
The sheer volume of traffic moving through Chinn’s Crab House is hard to fathom. The place is rated the fifth-largest restaurant in the nation as measured by dollar volume, reporting $16.3 million in sales last year, by Restaurants & Institutions magazine, a trade journal headquartered in Des Plaines. The restaurants ahead of Chinn’s on the list include such high-profile venues as Tavern on the Green and the Rainbow Room, both in New York and featuring average dinner checks above $70. An average check at Bob Chinn’s runs about $25 for one person, liquor and tax included.
Bob Chinn himself is a great lover of statistics. He doesn’t mind revealing that his gross sales will top $18 million this year, still far behind No. 1-rated Tavern on the Green’s approximate $27 million total. But the New York restaurant served 548,000 people in 1992. Chinn’s total surpasses 1.2 million yearly.
In the entire nation, only a place called Jerry’s Famous Deli in Studio City, Calif., which served 1.3 million diners last year, probably caters to more people from a single location.
Chinn is clearly devoted to the idea of volume and sniffs at high-priced, white tablecloth competitors. “They charge way too much for what you get,” he claims. “We do more volume than all the four-star restaurants in Chicago put together. That tells you what kind of food people want.”
He hardly draws a breath before spinning out more numbers. On a single Saturday Chinn’s serves more than 4,000 people who spend roughly $100,000. Each week the restaurant sells close to 5,000 potent mai-tais (see accompanying story), 1,500 pounds of shrimp and about 5,000 pounds of its signature dish, king crab legs.
A typical restaurant is usually content to do two sittings at each table per night. Chinn’s, however, does a mind-boggling six table turns per night, abetted by swift service that can have an entree in front of you just 15 minutes after sitting down.
Bob Chinn didn’t always cater to the masses. He was born in Chicago of Chinese descent, and for many years, beginning before World War II, his parents owned a popular Uptown eatery called New Wilson Village.
After serving in the Army in the war, Chinn decided he would try something different, embarking on a career as a salesman for Albert Pick & Co., the original institutional restaurant supply house in Chicago. New Wilson Village suffered a bad fire in 1955, and Chinn, itching for fresh opportunities, rescued damaged equipment from the place and set himself up in a modest storefront near the Coronet Theatre in Evanston under the name Golden Pagoda.
Three years later, doing all his own cooking, he moved to Wilmette, where he established himself as something of a Hawaiian luau specialist, catering parties up and down the North Shore. The Wilmette facility, called the House of Chinn, is still owned today by brother-in-law John Eng. But Chinn left the business in 1973 to open another Polynesian palace, the Kahala Terrace in Northbrook, which was an immediate hit.
With just 120 seats and $1.5 million in annual sales, however, it still wasn’t enough to satisfy Chinn, who admits that “I’ve always kept looking around for something new to do.”
So the search began for a bigger facility. Chinn and daughter Marilyn were looking for empty restaurants on Lincoln Avenue in Chicago in the early ’80s when they detoured by a shuttered pizza and spaghetti house called Tolitano’s in Wheeling. It was listed at $800,000, but the hard-bargaining Chinn got it for $500,000 and then invested $300,000 more in remodeling. With 200 seats, Bob Chinn’s Crab House opened Dec. 23, 1982.
The restaurant found a ready audience immediately, though its initial planning was somewhat scattershot. Chinn decided on a seafood menu, then forgot to look for recipes until the 11th hour. He scrawled the menu in longhand just hours before opening, starting a tradition that continues.
“I had to run down to a local copy shop to reproduce the menu that first day,” says daughter Marilyn. “We hoped to do $1 million in revenues the first year, but we ended up doing $2.5 million.”
The restaurant would later be expanded to its current size, about 25,000 square feet, in 1987, and is in the midst of still more construction now that will add a bakery and new refrigeration equipment to the basement. Both should be in place by Christmas.
Why has Chinn’s been so successful? Start with the seafood itself. Initially Chinn acquired his products from local wholesalers.
“It just wasn’t fresh enough. Some of it had been at the wholesaler for several days before it ever reached me,” says Chinn, who in short order began traveling to both coasts to establish ties with fishing boats themselves. Today he brings in everything himself, picking it up at O’Hare International Airport daily.
“I don’t think anybody else brings in fish as often as he does,” says Phil Vettel, the Tribune’s restaurant critic. “He’s shown he can get consistently fresh seafood.”
Through the years Chinn has largely eschewed fancy sauces and complicated preparations. Most of the fish is simply and quickly grilled; odd pieces are deep-fat fried and served as appetizers.
“Really fresh fish doesn’t need a sauce. It just kills the flavor,” asserts Chinn, who has developed a lot of unrelated dishes, ranging from barbecued ribs to pizza, over the years to suit landlubbers among his patrons.
A system of simple dishes in high volume allows Chinn’s to work on narrow profit margins. Most seafood restaurants calculate that the raw ingredients of a dish should represent about 35 percent of the total price on the menu. Thus you order a $20 chunk of salmon, and figure the fish itself cost the restaurant $7. At Chinn’s, however, the raw ingredients represent 48 percent of the menu price.
“If I can net $1.50 per person in profit after paying my overhead and employees, I’m happy,” says Chinn. “I’m afraid to raise prices.”
Afraid of what? Chinn’s admirers are legion.
Leonard H. Lavin, the chairman and chief executive officer of Alberto-Culver Co. in Melrose Park, is a regular visitor with both family and business associates. “Being in business and traveling all over the world, you develop an appetite for the best,” says Lavin, who lives in Glencoe. “Regardless of where I’ve been I’ve yet to find the combination of good food and service that I consistently find at Bob Chinn’s.”
Cathy Babington, a public relations executive from Riverwoods who is a frequent customer, said: “The food is very good, the prices are very reasonable. You know you won’t be seated in two minutes, but you expect that before you walk in.
“Flying in fish from as far away as Hawaii every day is not the easiest or cheapest way to acquire seafood. Air travel is expensive,” says Giancarlo Turano, vice president of sales for Turano Baking Co. in Berwyn, which supplies rolls and bread to Chinn’s. “But the quality makes it worthwhile. Bob Chinn uses fresh garlic and grinds his own pepper. There aren’t very many restaurants doing that. Bob is an astute businessman who pays attention to details.”
For a noisy place, Chinn’s does an impressive corporate business. Such north and northwest suburban companies as Allstate Insurance Co., Abbott Laboratories, Baxter International Inc. and Kraft Foods maintain corporate accounts at Chinn’s. In addition, there is a constant flow of tourists.
“They’re like a monument around here,” says Jim Lederer, general manager of Don Roth’s of Wheeling, located nearby on Milwaukee Avenue. “If you come into town, you have to visit Bob Chinn’s. It’s one of the best-run businesses in the area.”
Chinn himself relishes such accolades, for he really does bring the strict discipline and systems of a business to the restaurant. The sprawling kitchen is run like a well-oiled machine, with a beehive of 60 cooks and support staff, almost all of them Hispanic, churning out a plateful of food every 6 seconds.
“If somebody sits down to order, we generally have an appetizer ready for them in five minutes and the main course in 15 or 20 minutes,” says Deno Roumanidakis, the kitchen manager (Chinn lists himself as executive chef, though he spends most of his time out front managing the flow of customers). “I bring in cooks from someplace else and they freak out. They’re overwhelmed by the volume here.”
But the system ensures calm amid the storm each night. Chinn’s waitresses, some of whom earn $300 and more a day, never set foot in the kitchen. They move from table to table, taking orders and relaying them back to the kitchen via either computer or walkie-talkie. So-called runners bring the food from the kitchen to tableside, where it’s served by the waitresses. Chinn’s takes reservations only for the largest groups-those of 10 or more-and for good reason, according to the owner.
“If you take reservations, 40 percent never show up, and another 40 percent arrive late and still expect their table to be ready right away,” Chinn says.
He tries to ease the inevitable long waits with an efficient numbering system accompanied by constant updates over loudspeakers. There are two separate bars for pre-dinner cocktails.
For all his success, Chinn is rarely content. He’s been known to browbeat his employees, though his generosity is legendary.
“He doesn’t give out many compliments, and there is frequently some screaming behind the scenes here,” Marilyn says. “Yet last year we took all our senior kitchen staff and their families-46 people-to Disneyland for an all-expenses-paid vacation for a week. We feel we owe them a lot for their loyalty to us.”
One final element explains the success of Chinn’s, and that’s momentum. With dark wood, bare tables and walls festooned with posters and industry awards and not much else, Chinn’s is nothing special to look at. Yet the crowds seem to feed on each other. The wait, in fact, has become an integral part of the experience.
“Bob Chinn is a born party giver,” Vettel says. “And the more people who come to your party, the better it is. People are walking around, waiters are rushing back and forth and there is lots of loud conversation and happy laughter. It really is a shared communal experience.”
Indeed, even after a long wait for a table, patrons hardly ever leave dissatisfied-the food and prices are so good that everything else is forgiven.
Bob Chinn spends much of each winter at a second home in Honolulu and devotes many weeks traveling the world for new ideas and sources. He currently flies his key-lime pies in from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami Beach, and the luau cake comes all the way from Hawaii. The formula is obviously working well, for sales have been rising about 12 percent a year.
“Every year we say this will be the year we level off,” says Frank D’Angelo, a resident of Buffalo Grove who has been the restaurant’s manager for the last decade. “But then we keep growing.”
Bob Chinn is nevertheless restless. He’s experimenting with ways of getting rolls and butter to each table faster after customers first sit down. He’s tinkering with new menu items and recipes for the bakery. He’s even pondered the possibility of adding breakfast. In his expansive office above the restaurant, a ceaseless striving is evident. “I know we’re good right now,” Chinn says. “But I also know that we can still be a lot better in the future.”
