Maybe you had the TV-commercial-perfect Labor Day: a racially diverse group of neighbors barbecuing in a lush backyard, everyone with a frosty can of [insert beer brand here] in hand. But I had the organizing-stuff-before-school-starts kind, lived vicariously through social media. And from those channels, it seemed like there was a lot of transitioning going on. According to Facebook, a lot of people got married—Boka chef Lee Wolen did; so did La Sirena Clandestina chef John Manion and food writer Matt Kirouac. Greg Hall sold another business (Virtue Cider) to Anheuser-Busch. And several places closed. Hoppin’ Hots, the Hot Doug’s-like place in the old Great Lake space where I interviewed hot dog author Rich Bowen, closed. Jack’s, a one-time 24-hour coffee shop in Skokie where machers and pishers went to kibitz, closed, a victim—to its ownership’s minds anyway—of the smoking ban that killed the hanging-out-in-a-booth-at-2 AM part of its business. And there’s some news that I’ve been expecting for a long time about a place that back in the LTHForum day was a favorite and everything we loved about quirky dining out of the mainstream.
Anyway, some 20,000 of them came here during the war, and though many moved back to the west coast when it was over, Chicago was left with a significant Japanese-American population along the lakefront from Belmont to Andersonville in particular, with a number of Japanese businesses—restaurants, gift shops, an art supply store, and so on— lasting well into the 90s or longer. That’s the world that Sunshine Cafe came out of, though I don’t know how old it really is or even the names of its proprietors.
