It’s a cool, rainy afternoon — the kind of day that makes Chicago’s Lawndale neighborhood look even more forlorn than usual.
Rain tumbles off roofs and falls into empty lots. Cars speed along Roosevelt Road with their wipers and headlights on.
In the middle of this run-down neighborhood of storefront churches, fried chicken franchises and boarded-up businesses is New Life Vegetarian Restaurant. On the window, a neon sign promises, “Health Foods. Juice Bar.” A banner advises, “Jump Start Fall/Winter. Cleaning Your Colon Now!”
Walk inside, and you’re confronted with shelves of supplements and health foods, and counters bearing literature promoting meatless eating and better nutrition. Continue to the back, and you’ll find yourself in a small, brightly lighted restaurant filled with the comforting smells of cornbread baking and stews simmering.
New Life is anything but fancy. There’s a chipped laminate counter with three bar stools, and four tables with blue-and-white checkered plastic tablecloths. On each table, plastic flowers rest in a small bud vase. Soft music plays from what sounds like a transistor radio.
But the food that comes out of the small, open kitchen is remarkable. For breakfast, there are whole-wheat biscuits, vegetarian sausages, brown rice, smothered potatoes, grits and scrambled tofu ($4.50). For lunch and dinner there is a huge range of hearty main dishes and sides: beans, greens, stews, chili, dinner loaf, sweet potato pie, cheesecake and more, and all of it is made without meat, dairy, eggs or highly processed ingredients.
This is a neighborhood spot. Many of the people who come here are regulars, and most seem to know one another. They sit at the counter and tables, chatting, eating, reading newspapers and discussing the fine points of staying healthy.
Jermaine Johns, who eats lunch here six days a week, first heard about New Life from colleagues at work. “They said he’s got good, nutritious food, so I decided to stop by,” says Johns, who says he is a vegetarian.
Other customers, such as Ald. Michael Chandler (24th), aren’t vegetarian, but still appreciate the food. “He has healthy food. He has lots of vegetables,” Chandler says. “When you eat there, you leave with energy.”
There’s nothing remotely like this anywhere else in Lawndale. “This is one of the more socioeconomically distressed neighborhoods on the West Side,” says John Cabral, neighborhood business development director for the Westside Health Authority. “Even a sit-in place is rare. Most places around here are takeout and fast food.”
Here, speed is not the point. At the counter, Paul Mial, pastor of New Hope Christian Learning Center on the city’s South Side, is eating a plate of beans, greens and cornbread, drawing a diagram on a napkin and explaining something about the relationship among God, Jesus and man.
A solidly built, gregarious man, Mial engages other customers in conversation and banter, and frequently bursts out laughing.
“Not only do I like the food,” says Mial, who says he is not a vegetarian but eats lunch here four times a week. “I like the wholesome neighborhood atmosphere. And I like Mr. Barney.”
Willie Barney, 75, the owner of New Life, spends most of his time behind the counter, where he talks with his customers, works the cash register and answers the phone. A tall, thin man, he moves a bit slowly these days; he’s still recovering from an incident three months ago when a burglar entered his house, beat him up and made off with $300.
Barney has operated New Life at this location for seven years, but he’s been a businessman in this area for half a century. In 1953, he opened Barney’s Records at 3400 W. Ogden Ave. He owned the building and rented space to a group of African Hebrews, who ran a small vegetarian restaurant until 1982, when they moved to 75th Street.
“We had to take it over because nobody was using it,” he says of the restaurant.
Handed over record business
At about the same time, one of his sons returned from college. “He wanted to run the store,” Barney says. “He was into house music and rap. That started to get a little too fast for me, so I started to devote more time to the restaurant.”
And so he relinquished the record business and began to cook.
At first, he mainly served food to employees and their families, but when customers began asking whether they could buy meals, he obliged.
Over the years and through the move to his current Roosevelt Road location, he developed and maintained a following in a neighborhood where “vegetarian” is hardly a selling point.
“One of the fears people have when you say `vegetarian’ is that it’ll be something they’re not used to,” Barney says. “The thing is, everything else is pretty much the same. We have greens, peas, beans, macaroni, spaghetti. Some people never stop to realize it!”
That’s where his regular customers come in. Chandler keeps fliers for New Life in his ward office and advises his visitors to try it. “Some people don’t understand that you don’t have to eat meat every day,” he says. “Some days you really need to do the vegetables.”
Since his move to Roosevelt Road (Why? “Something didn’t go right, and we decided to move” is all he will say.) Barney has added employees. He found his current cook, Cassie Bates, two years ago at Heal Thyself, a vegetarian restaurant on the South Side.
In June, he hired Percie Jackson, a retired insurance agent, to sell supplements and offer nutrition education.
Jackson is a spry, extraordinarily fit man with an aura of good health who looks at least 15 years younger than his 68 years. He works out for 90 minutes, six days a week, and has eaten only raw foods for the past four years.
“I’ve been encouraging people to eat better and do a detox of their bodies,” he explains. “Many people are sick. They eat the wrong foods. They don’t take any supplements.”
Ad for healthy eating
So while Barney tries to improve his customers’ health by feeding them nutritious foods, Jackson encourages them to augment their diets with herbs and colonics. His own extraordinary good health is an advertisement for his regimen, and he knows it.
“I am an example,” he says. “People buy people. People don’t buy products. You have to sell yourself.”
Chandler wishes there were more places like New Life in Lawndale.
“I’d like to have at least four restaurants like his in my ward,” he says. “I think it’s a tremendous service to the community.”
But for all of this word-of-mouth success, Barney isn’t getting rich. He’s managing to pay his expenses and his employees, but he doesn’t even earn a salary.
“My main concern is to see things happen and help people in this community, rather than make money,” he says. “I care about other people’s health, so even if [New Life] doesn’t make any money — which it doesn’t — I’ll still be here. It’s a civic duty.”
“It has a very solid community base,” Mial says of New Life. “It’s the food, a meeting place. It’s a combined physical and spiritual diet that’s being served. We come, and we draw from it.”
“Willie Barney’s been here a long time,” Chandler says. “He’s a pillar in the community. People look up to him. I respect him and learn from him. He has a reservoir of wisdom.”
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New Life Vegetarian Restaurant is located at 3141 W. Roosevelt Rd. in Chicago. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Phone: 773-762-1090.
