The Bears may or may not make it to the playoffs this season, but they are All-Pro in one department: dining out.
It’s one thing to watch safety Mike Brown win games with miraculous interceptions. It’s quite another to watch the behemoths who toil around him gang-tackling porterhouse steaks, blitzing slabs of ribs or getting an Alaskan King Crab in the grasp.
These eating exploits are showing up at more than one Chicago area restaurant as various cliques among the 2001 Bears seek the joys and solidarity of male bonding. Their fraternal eating habits are beginning to resemble those of the Super Bowl champion Bears of the mid-1980s, who were almost as renowned for communal chowing down as they were for their gridiron successes.
The most organized of these brotherly bands are the team’s defensive linemen, who have been building their chemistry over the bread rolls all season long.
“We’ve been going out together on Thursdays,” says defensive end Bryan Robinson, “and I think it does a lot to make us closer when you socialize like that together. Everyone gets to know each other better. It has to help on the field. I do know this: If you’re a restaurant owner, you’d like to see us walk through your door.”
“Us” is a core group consisting of 330-pound Ted Washington, 304-pound Keith Traylor, 290-pound Robert Newkirk, 305-pound Alfonso Boone, 290-pound Phillip Daniels and the 300-pound Robinson. Others in this Thursday night diner’s club have included 265-pound Carl Powell, 250-pound Karon Riley and 260-pound Joe Tafoya.
The tab? Figure at least $1,200 if there’s perfect attendance and the restaurant doesn’t run out of food, which fortunately has yet to happen.
Not for coaches
Defensive line coach Rex Norris, 61, encourages the practice, but politely declines invitations to join the party. “I’m too old for that,” he says. “I just go home.”
Thursdays work best, Robinson says, because team practices are briefer on Fridays. “That’s when you’ll find some of us in the whirlpool or saunas after we go out the night before,” he says.
The most popular landing spot of late has been Bob Chinn’s Crabhouse in Wheeling (a place also favored by the ’85 Bears), where manager Frank D’Angelo says finding tables and chairs large enough to accommodate the players is his chief concern.
For three weeks in a row, the defensive linemen have piled into Chinn’s on late Thursday afternoons shortly after practice. It is a routine to which some of the more superstitious players attribute their incredible last-minute success of recent days.
“They’re meat eaters, with a little seafood mixed in, but they really like their steaks,” D’Angelo says. “They just start ordering entrees when they sit down and we start bringing it.”
Several Bears defensive linemen can be counted on to devour every bite of the restaurant’s 32-ounce Porterhouse steak at $36.95 a pop, he says. It’s also common for a few players to have two of the 14-ounce filet mignons on the menu ($28.95 apiece), sometimes with an order or two of fried shrimp ($16.95 per order, if they’re medium-size) on the side. The appetizers — typically seafood gumbo, ahi tuna sashimi, fried chicken fingers, Oysters Rockefeller, shrimp cocktail, crabcake nuggets and egg rolls — disappear faster than a football tossed into a Soldier Field crowd.
Desserts are not especially popular, however. “They’re big eaters, but they’re good eaters,” D’Angelo says.
Guava is tops
“They drink a lot of fruit juice,” he notes. Guava is the most popular choice and, though these Bears aren’t especially big imbibers compared to past teams, mai tais run neck-and-neck with beer as the preferred adult beverage.
“The place lights up when they come in in a group,” says manager Dan Erdman, who oversees the gatherings. “We always make room for them in a corner, but they’re really among our regular customers, since we don’t have private rooms as such. They’re polite, always very accommodating when people ask for autographs. The waiters like to get them. The players are very good at taking care of them.”
Chinn’s isn’t the only hangout for this year’s Bears. Other restaurants sampled by the defensive linemen have been Tsu Kasa in Vernon Hills, the Prime Minister in Northbrook and even Portillo’s in Vernon Hills, where there’s a rib special on Monday nights.
Typically, one player gets the bill, which at Chinn’s and other upscale spots can reach four figures in a hurry. But Phillip Daniels got off relatively easy when it was his turn, he confided on the air to WGN-Ch. 9’s Dan Roan. Daniels said his tab at Tsu Kasa, a Japanese spot where the players work in lots of sushi with the steak entrees, came to “only” $922 for five guys one recent night.
Robinson said the rotating system of picking up the tab grants the person who is paying the privilege of selecting the spot. “Nothing like McDonald’s or Taco Bell, though,” he said.
A movable feast
In addition to the Bears’ defensive line dining together on Thursdays, other units, such as the defensive backs and the offensive line, have gotten together to eat and socialize at various times this season. “It’s a movable feast,” says one Bear insider.
“The whole thing is good for camaraderie,” Norris says. “You work together and you play together.”
If there is one Bear player, offensive or defensive, that every restaurant covets, it has to be Jim “Big Cat” Williams — a 6-foot-7-inch, 330-pound offensive tackle who probably could eat any of the defensive linemen under the table.
At the Prime Minister, manager Patrick Harris says Williams’ standard order is the 24-ounce Porterhouse steak — after he has consumed the restaurant’s two-pound appetizer tray, which includes six Cajun-style shrimp, several slices of prime rib, spare ribs and cheese. Soup and salad get wedged in, too, and everything gets topped off by a dessert. “At least one,” he says.
At Ditka’s, Big Cat is fondly remembered for the night he ate three pot roast dinners — 10 ounces of beef in each order — at one sitting. This included generous servings of mashed potatoes, carrots, peas, corn and celery. He might have needed a designated driver, considering that, according to the menu, the meat is covered with a “bourbon-maple glaze.”
While a pork chop thrown in with a Washington or a Traylor has as much chance of survival as a quarterback without blocking, no one can say for sure how this newfound Bears togetherness will translate in Sunday’s showdown against Green Bay’s brilliant Brett Favre.
The Bears definitely rate a nod over the Packers in dining, however.
“Considering all the good restaurants in Chicago, and the one, maybe two in Green Bay, there aren’t that many places for the Packers to go to even if they did go out together, which they don’t,” says veteran Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sports columnist Bob Wolfley, who has covered the team for years. “There might be as many bars in Green Bay, though.”
How about those ’80s Bears?
One thing is sure. As the Bears become more successful this year, comparisons on and off the field with the Super Bowl champs of the ’80s become inevitable. In each case, it would be fair to say — ahem — that this team is in its salad days on both fronts.
Jim Covert, a star tackle with the ’80s club, recalls a night last season when he and his family were having a quiet dinner in Spazio DiLucca in Deerfield when several carloads of the current Bears poured into the restaurant.
“I saw a bunch of them there, went over and introduced myself and my family, and wished them well,” Covert says. “I think this was when they were just starting to revive going out together. They looked like they were having a good time and that was great to see. As much fun as we had? I doubt that.”
It was Covert, with the offensive line, who really got the Bears’ let’s-go-out-and-eat-together-in-a-restaurant tradition rolling in 1983 (at Two Guys From Italy restaurant in Highwood, incidentally). By the time the team had evolved into a championship unit under Coach Mike Ditka, the offensive line had dining out down to an art form.
Jackson Pollack, most likely.
Up the road to Highwood
The many restaurants in Highwood, only a few miles from Halas Hall, were popular with the offensive line for those outings of yesteryear.
Ichiban’s, a now-defunct Japanese restaurant in Northbrook, also was a favorite. “That’s where I first drank saki,” recalls Covert, who says the tabs generally would be $1,200 and higher.
“We’d allow (quarterback) Jim McMahon to go along, and that always livened things up,” says ex-Bear center Jay Hilgenberg, another All-Pro eater then. “We did it because he usually picked up the tab, but that wasn’t such a big deal. He’d have us go to a restaurant where he had an interest and he got comped.”
Adds Covert, “The tradition was that rookies usually got hit the most with the tabs and some of them got it pretty bad. The food bills would be high enough, but tossing the bar bills on top of that made them pretty outrageous.”
Hilgenberg recalls that Ditka would ride the offensive linemen hard during Friday practices, when it was obvious they had stayed out too late. Their revenge came during the championship season, when the coach promised dinner on a Thursday night if the entire offensive line would appear for a taping of his TV show in the city.
“He gave us his credit card and told us to go over to Lawry’s,” says Hilgenberg. “We really piled it on. The bill was something like $4,000.”
Quarterback controversy?
While the defensive line of the current Bears has picked up on the old traditions, the quarterbacks — Shane Matthews and Jim Miller — appear to lag far behind the off-the-field behavior of McMahon.
Miller’s idea of a big night out is dining with his wife at the Rosebud in Highland Park the night before a home game. Matthews? His culinary vice, he told reporters after the latest win, is eating chocolate chip cookies the night before a game.
What? No milk?
“The ’85 Bears, when they came in here, were classy, but they were like animals,” recalls D’Angelo of the Ditka-era outings at Chinn’s. “They were like feeding themselves so they could kill somebody on the field the next day.
“These guys, when they come in, don’t have the swagger yet. They’re a lot tamer. They’re really kids compared to ’85, but you can see their confidence growing and they’re a little more upbeat every time they come in.”
