CULTURE
The Last Strudel
When I heard that the Berghoff Restaurant was going to close, it felt like
the loss of one more piece of a downtown Chicago that will exist only in memory
from now on.
Growing up in the suburbs in the 60s and 70s, jaunts to the city were a regular ritual for our family. My mom would drive in on empty expressways, offering a quarter to the kid who first spotted the “new” John Hancock Center in the distance. Before that, I remember taking the elevator up to my grandpa’s office in the Prudential Building, when it was the tallest skyscraper in Chicago. My ears would pop as we soared to the topmost of its 41 floors.
At five or six, I had my first taste of beer with my dad at a White Sox game. In junior high, my sister and I boarded the train in Geneva – alone – and my mom asked the conductor to “keep an eye on the girls” until the end of the line. We got off at Northwestern Station and wandered through the Loop to Marshall Field’s, using Mom’s charge plate to pay for ice cream sundaes in the Walnut Room. My mother dragged us to stuffy exhibits at the Art Institute, interminable plays at the old Goodman Theatre and a Pete Seeger concert at the Auditorium Theatre. What a thrill it was to escape into the open air and walk down windy streets to the Berghoff for lunch.
My mom and her father loved the Berghoff, though I’m not sure why exactly. What I liked best and still do were the no-nonsense waiters in their starched shirts, barely acknowledging our arrival as they dropped a white plate stacked with fresh rye bread on the table. I remember the brats and kraut, the root beer in heavy steins (not mugs), and the apple strudel. It’s all coming back to me now that I realize it will soon be gone forever.
Especially the strudel – ah, the strudel. It set the standard for every apple dessert to follow in my lifetime. As a little kid I would order it even after the heavy German lunch had filled me to bursting. It would arrive on its own white plate, a plump little package sprinkled with just enough powdered sugar to make the whole thing melt in my mouth.
For the strudel alone I knew, like many Chicagoans, that I’d have to make a pilgrimage back to the Berghoff for a final farewell. I hadn’t been there for years, and I was actually a little nervous before the sentimental journey last week. Would I get past the throngs of tourists and find my way to a table? Was the strudel still on the menu, and would it – could it – taste the same?
It was a Monday and the lunch crowd had dwindled. My aunt and I stepped off the windy street into a warm, wood-paneled dining room that was filled with empty tables. A waiter still in black waistcoat, faded and unlikely to be refurbished, nodded us to a spot. We sat down under the murals, waved away the rye bread and went straight to the dessert menu.
The strudel arrived much as I remembered it. I dug my fork into the tissue paper-thin sheets of dough and closed my eyes to the taste of sweet, tangy apples mellowed by cinnamon, walnuts, and golden raisins. For one last time, the powdered sugar melted in my mouth. In a matter of minutes, we were done.
And that was the end of the Berghoff, at least for me. The owners have promised to print a cookbook with recipes from the restaurant, so I guess I can make the apple strudel at home. But of course it won’t be the same.
The Loop will never be the same either, despite the dark overhang of El tracks that seem to shade it permanently from time. Nothing is as good as the memory of what it was. Sure, Millennium Park is amazing – except for the garish tributes to today’s corporate sponsors etched permanently into its neoclassic façade. The Field Museum has a McDonald’s in the lobby, US Cellular Field has the feel of a vertical Wal-Mart (except for the prices) and street culture has been sanitized to the point where kid drummers can no longer make a buck entertaining tourists on the Magnificent Mile.
Back at the Berghoff, the bill for our strudel came to $16. If my aunt and I had driven downtown we’d have paid more than that for our parking. But we left the restaurant with a good feeling, a memory revisited. That’s the definition of nostalgia, isn’t it? Something you love mixed with a taste of something you’ve lost.