Saturday coffee.

This morning Anne and I headed over to Peets for coffee and a bagel. My Thanksgiving week off has begun.

The week before Thanksgiving must count as the longest week of the school year.  Monday was a twelve hour day that included a union meeting and a board meeting. Tuesday and Thursday were twelve hour days for parent conferences.  By Friday I was wiped.

“Let’s go to Lula,” I suggested to Anne yesterday.

Lula was our neighborhood’s first fine dining spot. It still gets mentioned in magazines like Travel and Leisure.

Before it became Lula about ten years ago, it was Logan Beach. Logan Beach was the neighborhood’s first coffee place.

The Beach was run by a perky woman named Virginia who filled it with a an easy smile, second-hand furniture and an upright piano. She served pastries and espresso drinks. My daughter, Leigh, worked there her last year in high school.  Virginia had a friend who cooked a special Indonesian dinner at The Beach on Monday nights. After a couple of years Virginia decided to move to Arizona and sold it to Jason and Amalea who turned it into Lula.

We run into Virginia at the Farmers Market every now and then when she visits. She still has that same smile and her face has a tanned and leathery look that I imagine Georgia O’Keefe might have gotten from her days in New Mexico.

Before Logan Beach it was Burt’s. Burt sold cigars, cigarettes, candy and soft-core porn magazines. Leigh and Jessica would spend their allowance on Archie comic books sold at Burt’s right next to the soft-core.

Long before there were punk concerts upstairs at the Logan Square Auditorium and a hipster bike shop next door, Burt would go east to find copies of the Chicago Reader to stock since they wouldn’t deliver it this far west. And he would get ten copies of the Sunday New York Times flown in. I had to reserve my copy in advance.

One day we heard that Burt had died. The store was then run by a rather sad and quiet Mexican lady who Burt left the store to. She had worked as Burt’s assistant.

The shelves started to get emptier and emptier and soon even the porn was gone.

Then Burt’s closed.

Jason and Amalea now have another restaurant, Nightwood, in Pilsen. And they just bought the cleaners next door to Lula for expansion. The new room opened last Monday. It has a communal table and a bar that is about a third larger than the old one. To their credit Jason and Amalea didn’t jam the new space with lots of tables. It’s roomy and warm. They left the word alterations on the window and Burt’s humidors are on the walls.

We told Jason that we liked it that Burt was in the new place. Jason smiled. He said they have another humidor, but they don’t quite know where to put it. “It’s still a work in progress,” he said.

After the longest week, I ordered a Manhattan with home-sugared cherries and then a glass of organic white that the bartender recommended. Anne and I split the house salad. Even the frisee, which I normally hate, tasted good. And we split a dish of celery root risotto.

And yes, Virginia, we ended with a cup of espresso.

Advertisement