The Red Apple Buffet weekend buffet, which claims to be the nation’s largest Polish buffet, which sees an annual migration of Chicago Polish to the Northwest Side around Casimir Pulaski Day (March 2), is so vast, homey and engorging you must, must wear your stretchy pants.
Go buy some if you don’t own some — you’ll thank me, somewhere after you’ve passed on a “mini meat croissant” for another Angus beef roll (stuffed with additional beef), but not before you’ve set aside the green pea salad (with apple, red onion and cheese) for creamy beet salad, not to be confused with the spinach and beet salad, red bean and celery salad, beets in horseradish or the sweet carrot slaw.
“Daddy,” my daughter said at one point, dragging back another plate of food as if she were towing a brontosaurus, “I couldn’t tell if this was a desert so I just took it anyway.”
My instructions to her about the buffet at Red Apple Buffet were thus: Just sample, do not get bogged down on any one dish (that’s madness), and save room for dessert at the end. The problem is cheese blintzes (lemony, covered in powdered sugar), the dish she wasn’t certain about, is one of those Eastern European staples that blurs decorum.
But then so does everything about the weekend buffet at Red Apple Buffet, which generally offers about 84 different options for $33, and which changes seasonally, a meal so large and endlessly tempting that I heard not one but two strangers discreetly fart.
I like to think Anna Hebal, owner of this Norwood Park institution, would have been pleased. In 2019, after 30 years, she and husband Ferdynand closed the original Red Apple in Avondale to focus on their unassuming Northwest Side location. Three years ago, Ferdynand died.
He was “really the author of the whole buffet, the crazy guy with a crazy idea to make it this so gigantic,” said Anna, who considered herself “the PR” of the business. Now she’s in charge. But other than two life-altering events, little else about the Red Apple Buffet has changed since it first began overstuffing Chicagoans in 1989.
There are still large metal apples atop wooden booths.
There are still paintings of country landscapes.
The crowd still speaks with an Eastern European accent, and every other table appears occupied by a quiet dinner between an elderly couple and their elderly children. Alongside the dining room, on the restaurant’s outdoor wall, there is still a striking portrait of Gen. Casimir Pulaski, Polish-born hero of the American Revolution, recruited to the cause by Ben Franklin himself, looking rakish and more than a little like Prince. He is often thought to be buried in coastal Georgia, though some say he was buried at sea. Fittingly, a burial at sea is also what you pray for after a Red Apple buffet.
That’s a compliment.
The meal begins before you can even step up to long, crowded food stations warming beneath peaked roofs. A waitress offers a cup of Ukrainian borscht, served warm here and full of cabbage and root veggies. It may be the lightest thing in the room, or at least the soupiest, other than the beef tripe soup, which itself is hard to notice being so close to mountains of plum-filled roast pork, and meat pierogi, and cheese and potato pierogi, and stacks of breaded pork cutlets, which are across from perfectly fried gold footballs of chicken Kiev and an ocean of pork stew and apple-stuffed chunks of roasted duck.
A few logistical points: You eat by filling a plate, then pushing it aside like aristocracy, then waddling back to the food stations to fill a new plate. As far as I can tell from my experience, other than the smoked salmon — which I found cold and dry — nothing sits in this buffet long before being replaced and freshened with more and More and MORE.
Also, to be frank, I hate buffets — they gross me out, they’re gloppy, watery.
But this one, oh boy, is way closer to grazing in a relative’s dining room. Homey, it is. Anna told me that “other than the mustard and ketchup,” everything is made in-house.
It’s so charming, I experienced at least four or five madeleine moments. The crinkly golden fry on the schnitzel leapt nations and returned me to my grandmother’s eggplant. A buttery scoop of carrots and peas was a doppelganger for those tiny side dishes from 1970s frozen dinners, the kind I would beg for, but my Italian family usually refused to buy. (Again, a compliment.) But also: The char on those cookies has the just-blackened smokiness of a home batch! The shock of old-school ambrosia, pink marshmallows soaking in a mash of citrus and pineapple blocks! Dear god, a quarry of Jell-O cubes!
Steadily, you feel your blood pressure rising, which is also just like home.
Buffets, in general, as snobby as it sounds, long associated with low-quality strip-mall troughs and overpriced cruises, are held in low esteem for good reasons. But a thoughtful buffet, at its heart, resurrects the family gatherings we miss. My own family is getting older and dying off; there are fewer aging Italians left to fill St. Joseph Day tables; the last few Christmas Eves were less Night of Seven Fishes and more Night of Three or Four Fishes.
But here at Red Apple, a guy sits across from me on a subzero day wearing a tank top and a fanny pack, bulking up after the gym. The Beatles’ “Please Mister Postman” plays faintly, as if wafting in from a kitchen radio never turned off. A waitress calls my daughter “Honey” and brings her a scoop of vanilla ice cream.
History is alive and unremarked upon here, not the self-conscious nostalgia of yearning but just another Saturday night. Those little gnocchi-like kopytka dumplings, beside yellow pyzy potato dumplings elongated into dense spheroids, beside fire-red stuffed cabbages. And kielbasa. And a downed forest of the shiny green beans.
But the present is here, too. The way everyone in the room looks like they could be a distant aunt or an uncle. The moistness of rum balls. The way meatballs in dill sauce remind a kid of Ikea.
An argument against such unchecked, encouraged gluttony can be found just down the street, three blocks away, stretching along Milwaukee Avenue, in the rows of snowy tombstones at St. Adalbert Cemetery. The upside, though, is that if you do grasp the glory of such memories, you will slide into a food coma. You will be in bed by 7:30 p.m.
Either way, a pretty full day.
Red Apple Buffet, 6474 N. Milwaukee Ave., 773-763-3407, restaurantredapple.com
