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[Read Part One here.]
Saturday at noon or so, Chicago, flicking around OpenTable. Brunch anywhere with availables was going to be wrong. Brunch was going to be wrong. Nevertheless we drove from East Village south to Fulton Market, teeming with brunch, with hangover bros, with cars inching on city streets to avoid the Kennedy. As we creep south on Ada, Perry has an idea: the Palace Grill diner in the West Loop. We ate there in the 1990s, when we lived here. “For old times’ sake. Nostalgia, I guess.”
The Palace is an old cop diner with a Blackhawks theme, the long-past expiration Indian profile pasted everywhere. Perry used to work nearby, when Oprah’s Harpo Studios was a harbinger of the redevelopment to come, long before the upscale feedlot known as the West Loop swarmed with concept restaurants and little black iron balcony–fronted condos. Back in ’94 and ’95 Perry and I lived around here in a big raw loft of brick and wood truss ceilings—the only other resident we knew, a Samoan percussionist for a local band, I remember leaning out a hall window on a summer night so humid time seemed suspended, in a lavalava wrap skirt, arm around his girlfriend, watching the thickening rainclouds with blissed-out wonder.
There was only one restaurant I knew nearby that wasn’t a lunch diner for sturdy wholesalers and smoky Polish sausage workers in white coats, hairnets, and hardhats. Late nights after my restaurant shift, I’d park the de-lustered old Ford Taurus Perry’s mom gave us on the same stretch of open curb, until one day some produce company jagoff told me his boss wanted daily use of my spot for his car, and how it would be a shame if one of their a.m. delivery trucks should happen accidentally to sideswipe mine if I continued to park there. A shame.
We turn into the Palace parking lot on West Madison but it’s not the Palace we used to turn into. Outdoor tables at lot’s edge (are these new?): Two white sort of fratty twenty-five year-old boys manspread before mimosa flutes—at the cop diner! One looks back at me like, You lose something over here?
The Palace interior feels preserved in grease and disinfectant. We take the counter: swarm of mostly Latino servers: young women in black tops; boy bussers, alternately distracted and laser on top of it with waters and coffee, in black tees. Middle-aged manager showing pictures on his phone to a couple of servers who open their eyes wide and go Ooooh. Three sweating line cooks—cold station cook getting his setups ready for the clubs and BLTs; slaps two romaine square cuts per sandwich onto his stained HPDE board—smack…smack—waiting on the toaster. He calls to the older baseball-cap prep cook behind the passthrough. Necesito hongos, Papá. Panqueques, Papá!
No disrespect to the cooks just doing their jobs, but our breakfast is sad. My omelet’s a stiff sheath rolled around a fat clutch of lukewarm tomato chunks, wilted spinach, clods of feta. The hashbrowns have a fine scouring crust but the taste of oxidized metal is bizarre. (Perry: “Lawry’s Season Salt.”) We yield to a fatal impulse and get the chicken fried steak special: breaded fat and tossed in the deep-fryer, the flesh inside tenderized to gray mush. The server ladles the white clotted gravy, which our instincts have pressured us to get on the side, into a plastic salsa cup. The pancakes tastes weirdly masala-ish, until it dawns that the syrup owes its “maple” flavor to an intensity of fenugreek
.
The West Loop’s crazy gentrification has made the Palace feel out of sync, or out of place, or out of time. A few old-type Palace customers are here: a Black guy who looks like he came from the gym, a woman in slashed jeans with her young boy. She has a diamond nose chip and declares she’s from Gary, stopping for eggs on the way to drop the kid off with his father in Chicago. But they’re the exceptions.
A sandy-blond young bro from I don’t know, Hinsdale, in flip-flops and a logo cap, takes a seat at the counter with a young woman. Before their food arrives they move several stools down, probably because they were facing the griddle and it’s hot, or because it smells like griddle. The dining room I can see is packed with flush-looking white kids—they must live in the nearby condos, with the dinky useless balconies.
Oh well. We tried. “We went with nostalgia,” Perry says in a voice like a shrug. “It was the wrong choice.” I notice one of the servers—blond, with a long ponytail—in tears. Two other servers have taken her aside. “Girl, I don’t know you deep down,” our server says. She’s taken the blond server by the wrists. “But don’t let nobody do this to you. Find your self-respect, girl. Read a book.” The Palace had Perry and me by the wrists. Deep down, the past no longer knew us.