No item on the lunch menu at in the nice restaurant in the South Loop would do.
“Do you have any non-cream-based soups?” Roland Burris asked the waitress, a blonde woman in her early 20s.
She wasn’t sure how to answer. Burris determined that none of the soups on the menu that day was healthy enough.
“I’ll just have a turkey sandwich then,” Burris said.
He panicked, though, when the turkey sandwich arrived along with my salmon salad and the lunches ordered by his two media handlers. The patron whom everyone had glanced at and whispered about clearly was dissatisfied, even before the plate touched the table.
“No, no,” Burris said, shaking his head and smiling tightly.
Burris got a turkey sandwich all right–virtually covered with a massive mound of french fries. Not the greasy fries you would get with gyros on Milwaukee Avenue, but potatoes cut and fried nonetheless. They cascaded off the sandwich and all but fell from the plate.
Before Burris arrived, 30 minutes late, his aides told endearing stories about how the candidate was so health-conscious that he clutched brown lunch bags of vegetables as he hit the campaign trail each day. He has kept to a strict diet since an angioplasty some 13 years ago.
“I said just a turkey sandwich,” Burris told the mortified waitress. “Not a turkey sandwich with anything else. Just a turkey sandwich.”
Stories of Burris’ finicky eating habits and otherwise meticulous personality are legion. There was the spaghetti and cranberry juice that he ordered in a Rush Street steak-and-martini joint during an interview with Tribune columnist John Kass. And then there was the mausoleum he built for himself in a South Side cemetery, with his accomplishments carved resumelike in stone, with space left to add “first black governor of Illinois.”
Burris also has a reputation for being affable and unrelentingly cheery. Flashing a broad smile, he appears to enjoy meeting people, asking them about their lives and for their votes.
His longtime friend and campaign manager, Fred Lebed, recalls how Burris, during a trip to Poland while state comptroller, stood in a hotel lobby shaking hands and trying a few Polish phrases on people.
If he didn’t like people, then why else would he keep going out again and again, smiling at strangers long after most rivals would have given up hope? This is his third consecutive run for governor and 10th campaign in 26 years.
Sensing that he rattled the waitress–or mollified by her quick re-emergence with another turkey sandwich, alone on its plate–Burris made amends. He asked her about the college she attended and her major.
When her mother or friends asked that evening about her day, the waitress might have mentioned she served a man running for governor. She could say he was not the easiest customer to please. She could add he was a pretty nice guy.
