The Local Chains: A story of small-time restaurants

Jacob K
walking chicago: a windy city atlas
6 min readOct 24, 2018

For my map, I decided to walk around the Lincoln Park area and map all of the smaller, local restaurants in the area. I started off my mapping east down Fullerton. There, Chicago Dog house and Aloha Poké are established. I kept going east until I hit Bourgeois Pig Cafe, and Philly bros. After getting off of the train from one of my classes, I was walking distance from Chicago Doghouse, so I went there for lunch, and had a great hotdog with cheese and bacon. Even down this small stretch of land, there is a wide variety of things to eat, and you don’t have to go to a universally known chain.

We have a lot of variety of places to go in terms of food. I tried to capture that in my map without adding the big, well-known chain. Overall I was going for a very exploratory mood for my map, I know where all of the common places are, but I don’t know where the local places are. So, I set off on a journey around my area in Lincoln park to find these places and mark them to let people know where they are so that they may try them out for themselves. The things that influenced my map were the sidewalks, because I knew if I kept walking down them and looking to my left, or across the street to my right, I would see obscure restaurants that I had never even heard of before. In the article Downtown is for the People by Jane Jacobs, he says “But the street works harder than any other part of downtown. It is the nervous system; it communicates the flavor, the feel, and the sights.” I can really see where he is coming from because as I was walking around Lincoln Park, it felt like each sidewalk had a way that it felt. For example, when I was walking around a street with houses, it was quiet and peaceful, so I would describe its flavor as plain, and not very flavorful. But while walking on a street with many restaurants, it feels like you have a lot of options and you get overwhelmed, if I had to describe its flavor, it would be spicy, or another flavor that is very prominent or strong.

I learned something about the Lincoln Park area around me, and the food that it has to offer, and that’s that the closer you get to the highway down Fullerton, the less local establishments there are, and I made sure to show this on my map. This makes sense because there are usually more hungry people coming off the highway looking for fast food from a reliable place they know. I know in the suburbs, we would usually go to places we already knew were good, so we never got the chance to try any real local stuff if there was any at all. many family-owned businesses get overshadowed by the bigger guys, so they try their hardest to advertise and show off, but it is usually to no avail. This is why I chose to use signs as markers for restaurants. While I was walking around Lincoln Park I noticed another thing: there are more family-owned businesses where there are more residential areas. On my map, if you look east, you can see that there is a bigger mass of restaurants, and that also happens to be where a lot of small suburbs lie. In the article Cities Belong to us by Leo Hollins, he says that “By 1.30am, we had found our way to Chinatown, radiant with neon glare, and still thronged with strings of bodies weaving through the streets.” I picked this quote because it describes the signage of Chinatown and how it glows. While I was walking, there were no neon lights not because it was daytime, but because around Lincoln Park, there isn’t as much aggressive, bright advertising like there is in a place like Chinatown, or even downtown for that matter.

My map says a lot about the Lincoln Park area. it says that if you don’t want to eat at a universally known place, you can still find something good to eat, but you just have to know where to look, that is, if you’re willing to try something new. it says that some areas are more popular for families to have restaurants than others. It reflects how the area is built and laid out as evidence by the lack of shops closer to the highway. My map also reflects the influence of where we walk, for instance, where I live (Seton Hall); a lot of restaurants are right by my dorm, so I am more likely to walk to those places to eat. If I was living in a place where food was not walking distance, I would probably order in more (depending on if I had a car). A lot of time, food, and it’s subsequent distance can have a big influence on whether or not we walk, and it basically comes down to how far it is, because if it’s too far, then you might as well just drive. In the article The End of Walking by Antonia Malchik, it says that “ever since towns began removing streetcars, we’ve undermined transit systems that would support the walker and planned instead for the car.” This is pretty relevant to me because when I was in the suburbs, when my Mom, Dad, and I wanted to go out to eat, we *always* took the car because everything was too far to walk to besides a McDonald’s which was 5 minutes away by walking.

In conclusion, I walked around Lincoln Park, saw a lot of the local, family-owned restaurants that aren’t really well know, and put them on a map to show where they are, how many there were, and to prove that you can still get good food. Food, and walking and synonymous with the city because everything is really packed together to the point where you could be living is the same building as, or at least near a food establishment. But these restaurants that dot the sidewalks are all well known places like Subway, or McDonald’s. It’s sometimes nice to try something new, maybe some food that you have never tried before. They say it’s about the journey, not the destination, and I definitely enjoyed walking around Lincoln Park, looking at all the restaurants, and trying some of the food that it has to offer. My recommendations are Chicago Dog House, Bacci Pizzeria, and Piquod’s Pizza. I’m really glad that I got to inform some people about all of these great restaurants, and now that I have marked them, it really opened my eyes to the wide array of local places that Lincoln Park has to offer. I learned that it’s hard to keep a local place going when there’s a McDonald’s right next door, and you shouldn’t take a local place for granted, because at anytime, they could go out of business. If you are ever in a place where you have a widely known chain versus a small family shop, I recommend eating at the family restaurant because it supports them, and you might also find a new favorite place to eat.

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