On a brilliantly sunny day in October, with the temperature in the 80s and a gentle rain playing the softest melody on a red storefront awning, a young businessman sitting beneath that awning is cursing the rotten weather.
“Eighty-two! That’s what they said on WGN,” lamented Jamie Taerbaum, who pays almost as much attention to the temperature as a TV meteorologist.
With all of Chicagoland rhapsodizing over this rare and cherished gift of unseasonably warm fall days, Taerbaum is hoping the temperature will plummet. The sooner the better.
In khaki shorts, Air Zoom Nikes and a T-shirt, Taerbaum says it’s not that he doesn’t enjoy the caressing sun. But strictly from a business standpoint, he can hardly wait for fall’s first freeze.
Taerbaum, 28, stands to make — or lose — all kinds of money depending on the temperature. He’s a restaurateur, an occupation not customarily linked to fluctuations in the mercury.
But in his niche market, temperature is all. In the storefront restaurant Taerbaum owns at 2943 N. Broadway, he serves only two kinds of food and never at the same time: soup in the cold months and icyfruit, a concoction like Italian ice, only better, when the weather warms up.
Because of the equipment involved, it’s either/or depending on the season. And it is in the iffy, unpredictable crossover time — like right now — that things get dicey.
“We have to play things by ear and then stick with it,” says restaurant manager Mike Mirabile.
Until late September, the restaurant was called “Icebox” and served up the chilled fruity stuff. But after studying the temperature charts with the slavish devotion of a Tom Skilling, on a recent Saturday the restaurant’s staff transformed the eatery into “Soupbox,” featuring a changing menu of a dozen hot soups.
When the restaurant changes menus and names, even the color of the wall trim is changed (from yellow to maroon in the fall), and the artwork goes from framed prints of fruits to framed prints of vegetables.
“We switched to soup on the 20th of September,” says Taerbaum. “If you remember — you probably don’t — the temperature was in the 60s. Everyone thought I had a crystal ball.”
Despite this odd linkage to the weather — in a place as unpredictable as Chicago — Taerbaum is so pleased with his seasonal restaurant concept that he’s working on franchising it.
But for the moment, with the temperature soaring at noontime, the walls already maroon, the artwork strictly vegetable, business is almost undetectable. A lone employee lounges by the cash register.
Enter Christina Van Pelt, who stopped to pick up some soup for lunch at the urging of her son, Eric Diskin, 5 1/2, who is crazy about the clam chowder.
“He even said, `I’ll wait in the car. It’s going to be too hot in there,’ ” said the mom, who made Eric come with her anyhow. And yes, with the dozen black soup kettles plugged in and bubbling away, even with a ceiling fan whirring on high, it is too hot in there.
“I was so looking forward to the soup that I don’t care if it’s hot out,” said D. J. Pflaum, a furniture salesman who ordered a broccoli and cheese to go.
Besides, said Pflaum, “I’ll be eating it in air-conditioned comfort.”
