A gigantic step closer to the end of our world

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steinberg/cst-nws-stein30.html

Someday you will be dead and I will be dead and everyone we have ever known or loved will be gone. Nothing will remain. The city will crumble into dust and the planet, reduced to a cold and lifeless cinder, will tumble eternally through the dark, endless and indifferent tracts of space.

That inevitable day came an elephant step closer this week, as the Berghoff restaurant announced that it will close at the end of February.

The Berghoff is not just any eatery. What other restaurant's closing would dominate the front pages of both Chicago newspapers? The Berghoff was the first restaurant of Chicago, a unique treasure. If you had an out-of-town visitor to impress, and he would be eating one meal in Chicago, you took him to the Berghoff. I'm not even sure why -- the food wasn't the best, the service, perfunctory. But somehow the combination of the elegant room and the surly waiters, the fresh beer and the fresher rye bread, the hot wiener schnitzel and the creamed spinach that you just had to have -- like it was a law, or something. "You have to order the creamed spinach," you'd say. You took your guests there because it was the soul of the city. Because the Berghoff never disappointed, unless it was so crowded you couldn't get in and had to go around the corner and settle for Miller's Pub.

Never disappointed. Until now.

Damn the Berghoff family. Damn them. I know that's harsh, but what a selfish act. Close the Berghoff? For a catering business? That's like Marshall Field V's halfbrother, Ted, selling the Sun-Times so he could produce "Revenge of the Nerds."

There was always something odd about the Berghoffs, standoffish, strange and secretive. They kept to themselves. You can't set foot in a Lettuce Entertain You restaurant without running into Rich Melman cleaning out a grease trap or propping up a wobbly table with a matchbook. But the Berghoffs. You could eat there for a quarter of the restaurant's 107-year run -- as I did -- and never knowingly meet one.


This is the only restaurant I have ever been in that I have bribed the maitre de with a $50 dollar bill to get a table and he looked at me like I just insulted him.