If there’s one well-known Chicago restaurant that neither I nor any food writer I can think of has ever written about, it would have to be Lou Mitchell’s. Why would we need to when it’s been a recommendation in every guidebook ever published about Chicago for the last 60 years? It’s the quintessential Greek coffee shop, located just beyond the southwest corner of the Loop, the beginning of Route 66 for those who don’t feel a bunch of stoplights in the Loop quite counts as the great American open road. For decades Lou himself kept the place’s mythology alive by handing out Milk Duds and doughnut holes, and sweet-talking the tourists in line. One out-of-towner who was welcomed to Chicago by it was a woman who would make her own name in breakfast in Chicago for 30 years before retiring in 2013: Ina Pinkney of Ina’s.
Michael Gebert
Back to front: Ina Pinkney, potatoes, and eggs.
Michael Gebert
We looked over the menu. Ina, who served fried chicken and waffles for years, zeroed in on the fried chicken. I was curious to see if they had Roumanian skirt steak, a classic cheap-eats dish now pretty much extinct in Chicago of skirt steak marinated in some combination of Italian dressing and/or soy sauce. Back in the era when Lou Mitchell’s began in 1923, it was served in the cluster of Jewish restaurants near Maxwell Street (“Roumanian” being a euphemism then for “Jewish”). They didn’t have it by that name, but I suspected the skirt steak and eggs would come awfully close.
Michael Gebert
Lou Mitchell’s fried chicken
The one thing I think they will go for is the one thing that’s always been artisanal at Lou Mitchell’s—the Greek toast, baked in-house (figuratively; the bakery is no longer in the basement) and accompanied by the freshly made orange marmalade . . . and a splat of butter, the thing that fascinated Ina in the first place. It arrives last, pulling up the rear of our order a few minutes later.
Michael Gebert
Toast with splat
MIchael Gebert
Nick Thanas
