“What a sad day the closing will be. I remember going there when it first opened. The menu was unlike anything the city had ever seen. My mother loved it back then and my 12-year-old son loves it now. No longer hip? Nonsense. A place like this never goes out of style.” — Hotel executive Bill Randall
R.J. Grunt’s will serve its last meal on Sept. 30, and if that information just made you think about a long-lost love or, better, your spouse, you’re not alone.
Chances are good that if you were of courting age any time during the ’70s, you spent some time–maybe a lot of time–in a funky, noisy little restaurant at Dickens Avenue and Lincoln Park West.
Indeed, there are lots of kids in the suburbs who probably can attribute their very existence to a magical dinner at Grunt’s between their Dads- and Moms-to-be.
R.J. Grunt’s was perhaps the quintessential date restaurant of its time. The prices were within reach of a college student’s budget–you could ingest a week’s worth of calories at its all-you-can-eat salad bar, one of the first in Chicago–but the food was sophisticated and the atmosphere was gloriously, intoxicatingly youth-oriented.
The restaurant was steeped in post-hippie culture. The R. Crumb-esque menu, with its wisecracking food descriptions, had a substantial vegetarian component along with its meaty cheeseburgers. Young adults who still had sandalwood incense sticks in the back of their dresser drawers could walk into Grunt’s and think, `This is my kind of place.’
But R.J. Grunt’s was more than just a popular restaurant. It was the restaurant that, 26 years ago, launched the Lettuce Entertain You empire, which redefined–and continues to define–Chicago’s restaurant scene.
Rich Melman and his partner, the late Jerry Orzoff, opened the restaurant in 1971. The R stood for Rich, the J stood for Jerry. Jerry’s girlfriend at the time was nicknamed Piggy. “Beautiful girl, blond, terrific figure,” Melman recalls. Although she had a bad habit of grunting while she ate.
R.J. Grunt’s.
Melman and Orzoff went on to open more restaurants, with sillier names. Lawrence of Oregano. The Great Gritzby’s Flying Food Show. Fritz That’s It! Jonathan Livingston Seafood.
All had successful runs, but when the time came, Melman and his partners at Lettuce closed them down without much sentimentality.
“Truth be known, I’m very sentimental,” Melman says, “but my partners provide good balance. But it’s fair to say that our decisions have been very business-oriented. When the leases were up at Great Gritzby’s and Fritz That’s It!, we decided we were better off putting our money elsewhere, and that’s what we did.”
And that is what Melman and Lettuce are doing at Grunt’s.
“(Grunt’s) has not been a very profitable restaurant the last couple of years,” Melman says, “and we’d come to the time when we had to decide whether to sign another lease. I sat down with my partners and they said, `Don’t sign unless you’re willing to change it.’
“I’m very open to change at any of the restaurants I have–except for that one,” Melman says.
The waitresses got the word about a week ago. News of the closing spread rapidly, and the reaction–helped along by waitress-distributed flyers imploring customers to try and talk Melman out of it–was swift.
“I got 50 calls (the first day),” Melman says. “One customer sent me a letter saying he wanted to buy it. But I’d never sell R.J. Grunt’s.”
Nor, Melman says, will he re-establish the restaurant elsewhere.
“I will not try to do another Grunt’s,” he says. “My partners suggested opening in a different location. I said no, no, it’s not Grunt’s to me then.”
Indeed, what would anyone make of an R.J. Grunt’s if it were to debut in the ’90s? The wisecracking menu? Too busy. The salad bar? Wendy’s does a salad bar, not serious restaurants. And you can forget about the Grunt’s Girls display, the photo gallery of pretty waitresses that would be deemed hopelessly un-PC today. (Melman says the photos will decorate the corporate offices.)
But the bottom line–and this is a bottom-line decision–is that the people who made R.J. Grunt’s a success have grown up and left their college-age hangout behind. Grunt’s time, apparently, has passed.
And so Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, which marked its 25th anniversary last year, heads into its next quarter-century without a flagship restaurant.
“It was a hard decision, one I wanted to postpone,” Melman says. “(My partners) have been after me for three months to make a decision on this. But then I’d go in and have a great burger and think, `Who cares if you don’t make money?’ “
Partners, for one. Which is why Melman, who more than any restaurateur in town could afford to keep a marginally profitable restaurant afloat for purely sentimental reasons, is doing the business-smart thing.
But the sentimental side of Melman is removing his favorite booth and installing it in his office, along with the first cooking pot he bought for the place–and the burger grill.
“The cheddar burger we make at Grunt’s, the medium-rare cheddar burger, is outrageous,” Melman says. “So whenever I have a taste for it, I can make it.”
And after that? If some nostalgic 40-year-old has a sudden craving for an R.J. Grunt’s cheddar burger, medium rare?
“Give me a call,” Melman says. “I’ll make it here in the office.”
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