Layover at Lou's
A classic American diner that's well-worth the (14-hour) wait.
You have not lived until you are sitting 30,000 feet above the earth and realize, with a whispered cuss, that you have missed your next flight.
Due to the plague, blizzards or unexpected maintenance issues (my favorite), I have lived a great deal more than I used to in recent months. There is an art to the 14-hour delay, straddling a knife’s edge between disaster and adventure, patience and madness, and I have come to appreciate layovers for what they are: a forced vacation.
As our badly-delayed flight sauntered into Chicago, phones flicked to life and groans throughout the cabin confirmed the departures we all suspected had gone without us. There was little else to do for the sane traveler to do than book a night in the airport Hilton and pour out some solace at the mini bar. I have never prided myself on sanity and so I booked a room at one of the grand old hotels downtown. It was an hour’s ride by the Chicago L, which stretches out to O’Hare after snaking along between the two lanes of a freeway.
An hour in Chicago public transportation might seem dreadful, but to emerge from the subway station into the heart of any city at night is something you cannot put a price on. I love the root-bottoms of the great towns at night — the more deserted, the better; for then, you can really hear the echoes of past glories bouncing off these massive forests of steel and stone. Give me Chicago one blustery January night over Miami during spring break any day. There is intimacy with the great, teeming masses of other times, when it is just you in the middle of vast avenues that have had ticker tape parades. Every monument, every advertisement, every store window, seems calculated for its effect on you, and you can soak it in without the temptation of going in and buying something.
Still, Chicago in winter is as cold as they say it is. It is a cold you can see from the plexiglass windows of the L as you rattle deeper and deeper into town, hanging in the air between shivering brick apartment buildings. It sucks the life out of your lungs within a few breaths if you’re not acclimated, and numbs your fingers and ears even if you are. Only the large, stout, block-consuming buildings of downtown seem to have enough internal heat to stand the frigid breezes off Lake Michigan, and at night even the skyscrapers themselves all seem to be wearing unlit, boxy overcoats, as if there is a trimmer and more attractive building beneath waiting for the summer to show itself. But this sort of hefty architecture suits the town.
I wandered about the frigid streets, from hotel to restaurant to pub, paying homage to the death-place of the Blues Mobile (outside City Hall, according to the The Blues Brothers) until my fingers and ears could not stand it anymore. We got in at nine and I landed in bed at one, having made the most of a Friday night in Chicago, in search of a story. You can eat well and drink better and still not have anything to say — that is the difference between influencers and writers.
I woke up the next morning to find that the sun had not improved the frigid streets. I planned, out of touristic obligation, a jaunt in the still-abandoned streets to the famous reflective Bean in Millennium Park (dilettantes know it as Cloud Gate). But the trip seemed a bit empty besides the more pragmatic purpose of awaiting my 1PM flight to Ohio. On a whim, I asked the hotel concierge where he went for breakfast before work.
Without hesitation, he replied, “Oh, Lou’s. That’s where anyone downtown goes.”
He pointed me down West Adams, underneath the shadow of the former Sears Tower and across the South Branch of the Chicago River. I thanked him and first went to pay my respects at the Instagram-mecca of the Bean before doubling back in search of breakfast and something more Chicagoan. When I saw the glow of the neon script, Lou Mitchell’s, I knew I had found it.
Lou’s, to be plain, is worth laying over in Chicago O’Hare for a whole evening and possibly a whole month. It has been around longer than the Bean — 98 years — and will likely outlive it as it is more resistant to fingerprints. In previous decades, it might have been said the restaurant was worth driving the length of Route 66, which begins nearby and runs right outside on its way to the American West.
While you wait, you’re presented with a saucer containing a house-made doughnut hole and an orange slice to whet your appetite for the feast to come. A house of tiny portions, this ain’t. Every plate is magnificent, and gazing beyond your own table you see waiters holding aloft mountain ranges of biscuits, toast, eggs, hash, hash browns, omelettes, pastries and bacon. The place was wonderfully packed, a throng of morning-crowd humanity that I’d not seen since the beginning of the pandemic — old folk, young folk, infant folk, all hungry.
Coffee — “the world’s finest” — revived my numb fingers almost immediately after I sat down on a sturdy swivel stool at the zigzagging breakfast counter. Nibbling on the orange, I surveyed the menu and ordered corned beef hash with two scrambled eggs and potatoes. The doughnut hole — still warm — was delicious. If America ran on Lou’s instead of Dunkin’s, we would be in a never-ending golden age.
Lou’s boasts that they go through 15,000 eggs a week; this seems likely as their breakfast menu grossly underestimates the amount of eggs you actually receive. Within ten minutes, my scrambled eggs arrived as a geographical feature atop a half-pound of steaming corn beef hash and wonderfully greasy hash browns.
As I carved my way through through the plate, the head waitress — one Audrey Colone, something of a celebrity if you look up Lou's reviews — announced that one of the customers was celebrating their birthday. The entire restaurant launched into a raucous rendition of "Happy Birthday" that satisfactorily embarrassed the guest. It was astounding how something once dreadfully cliché had become as unique as a champagne cork popping. We were still two years into a pandemic — guests were showing waiters their vaccine cards, plastic barriers loomed over booths — yet somehow Lou’s had transported us to beyond it. If someone had shown me a newsfeed at that moment, I would have asked, “Covid-19 what?”
Audrey took advantage of our attention, thanking us for coming in what had been the largest morning crowd in some time. “Tell your friends, Lou Mitchell’s is open for business!” She cocked an eyebrow. “And someone tell the mayor, too!”
I left shortly after, though not before buying a mug from which I now drink my own inferior coffee. Sipping it now at my desk in sunny Virginia, I see that there is some snow and freezing rain forecast for the Great Lakes.
Maybe I should book a flight out to Chicago.
Photos by M. T. Eley.
