The Old Suburban Food Wonderland

Welcome to Wheeling, Illinois in the 1980s

I made a hamburger recently and it made me realize I missed an opportunity. It surprised me because usually making a nice burger brings me nothing but joy and contentment, but it was the research I did before making the meal in question that threw me.

The Hackney’s burger is the first patty I ever recall adults talking about as something that was more than just a hamburger. It was the You gotta try it item of my first decade, the first time I recall a classic having an elevated take, and something that was just out of my reach until I went to a very classy birthday party at the restaurant for a kid named Bobby when I was 10. Before that, Hackney’s was just a place we’d sometimes pass in the car, and it’s burger was simply a legend. And although my tastes weren’t exactly refined at that age, the first time I tried it I knew it was a damn good burger. But the thing I learned after making it is that you just have to go to the source to eat it. It’s like J.G. Melon or White Manna (Jersey City or Hackensack version, take your pick) burger in that you can’t recreate the flavor or the atmosphere in your home kitchen no matter how hard you try. And the other thing I didn’t have was the special house Hackney’s Dark Rye bread they serve them on. The recipe I found in a 1985 article got me close, and the pumpernickel rye I picked up from a Russian market was perfectly nice, but it was hardly close.

But the missed opportunity in question wasn’t that I could have maybe told my wife I was going out for milk and instead hopped in my car and drove the 13 and change straight hours to the Chicagoland area all hopped up on 5-Hour Energy and blasting Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” on repeat just to have a burger the way God intended. It was that I didn’t write about Hackney’s in my book The Sprawl. I screwed up on that one.

I swear I didn’t mention my book that came out in 2020 just so I could convince people to buy copies so my next royalty check goes from seven bucks to eight next quarter. The reason I brought up the little essay collection with the subtitle “Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs” is because it was places like Hackney’s that made me initially think that the suburbs were not only interesting, but full of cool people and things you couldn’t get anywhere else. Maybe now that’s not always the case, with so many suburban places looking very similar to one another, but as I searched for the Hackney’s burger recipe, I was reminded that there was a time when people actually made their way to the suburbs if they wanted a good meal. At least they did in the Chicagoland area when I was a kid, and the culinary epicenter of the region was Wheeling, Illinois, a place that I think you only know about if you lived in the suburbs north of the city and/or you went to the Camp Ramah there.

“It is a small area, relatively remote in location and a dining out paradise,” Sid Smith wrote for the Chicago Tribune in 1985. “Within a 5- mile stretch, there’s one of the most highly-rated restaurants in the country, surrounded by a potpourri of kitchens that serves up just about every ethnic and culinary variety to be found.”

Chef Jean Banchet and his highly successful French spot Le Francais was the reason—at least according to him. He told the Tribune that his spot was so successful that people just started following suit and opening up nearby, and it was hard to argue (even though the article had a local historian point out that the stretch of road the restaurant was near had always been a popular strip since the late-19th century) after La Francais was named the America’s best restaurant by Bon Appetit and set the tone for American fine dining for the rest of the decade. And in some ways, the place has a lot in common with the restaurant as rich guy status symbols of our era. According to Banchet’s 2013 obituary:

Deep-pocketed guests from other cities would land their private planes at nearby Palwaukee Airport, flying in just to experience Banchet’s food.

Sure, that sort of behavior is terrible for the environment, but there’s something so wild to me that there wasn’t just a single place in this one suburb that diners made their way to for a meal. Smith’s article reminded me of a few places I recall from my childhood (94th Aero Squadron, a cozy place I went to a few times that was located right by the municipal airport mentioned in Banchet’s obit and a drive-in theater) and others I’d never heard of. One that I was very familiar with, and have made the point of stopping into the few times I’ve driven through Wheeling over the last decade, is Bob Chinn’s Crab House. If La Francais introducing many Americans to fine dining was a surprise, Chinn’s place located nowhere near a body of salt water being the top grossing restaurant in the country in 2012 is absolutely nuts to me. I like to think part of the reason Crab House made so much money was because of the shirts, which was one of the OG thrift store grail finds in the 1990s:

Bob Chinn’s is thankfully still there. And whenever I’ve been, it’s always bumping. And while I’m sure it’s some of the best coastal seafood you can get anywhere in the middle of the country, I’ve always seen the shellfish as a side item to the real show: the garlic rolls.

If you take any sort of bread, ball it up and cook it with a bunch of olive oil and garlic, I’m probably going to be happy. Sure, there are bad garlic rolls, but just ask for a side of marinara sauce and go about your business. But in my very humble opinion, the Bob Chinn’s garlic rolls are elevated. They arrive at your table hot and glistening, a vampire-killing amount of garlic on them. I’ve never been able to quite put my finger on what sets them apart from other garlic knots, save for the fact that the bread is fresher than whatever I might find at any given NYC slice shop. They’re so good that if I’m in Chicago and I’ve got a day to myself, I’ll drive to Wheeling order a basket and eat them while drinking a beer at the bar, then go about my day totally happy with my choices.

And that’s the gist of the missed opportunity I mentioned earlier. I love a destination restaurant so much and find myself wondering if and where the next suburban dining renaissance will take place. I’m almost certain it’s going to happen, especially since Covid accelerated my claim that people were going to start moving back to the suburbs from the cities. I wrote The Sprawl in 2018-19, and it came out in August of 2020. Almost every interview I did for the book had a question about what’s going to happen and what I’d like to see more of, and since I wasn’t exactly ready for a world-shifting pandemic, I didn’t have tons of time to think it over. If I had another chance, I’d say that people should start opening great restaurants in the suburbs again. From what I recall, the vibes were pretty great, it’s always nice to take a little trip, and I’m still craving some of the food even today.