Dining at The Berghoff in downtown Chicago seems to remain comfortably the same, whether you ate there last week, ten years ago, or even a century ago.
Tim loves German cuisine, and we stumbled over The Berghoff one cold winter day about ten years ago. We had fond memories of our meal there a decade ago, and made sure we revisited the venerable restaurant when we were in Chicago this past year.
The dining room with its stained glass windows, dark wood beams, and vintage brass pendant lamps looked much the same as we remembered from our first visit. I even spotted the same lamps in several pictures of The Berghoff's early days at their Web site.
We don't have a lot of German restaurants near our home, so tucking into a mid-afternoon dinner of sauerbraten, accompanied by a Berghoff beer, was a special treat. It was a decision I made after considering several menu options that included potato pierogies, big iceberg lettuce wedge salads, and classic German entrees like wiener schnitzel and sausage plates.
As great as the ambience and the food is, the thing that always intrigues me about places like The Berghoff is the sense of history and tradition carried on in businesses like this restaurant with roots in the late 1800s.
Herman Joseph Berghoff immigrated to America in 1870 from Dortmund, German, and began brewing Berghoff Beer in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his three brothers by 1887.
The Berghoffs brought their brew to Chicago during the famous Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and received such a warm reception that they opened the original Berghoff Cafe in 1898 at the corner of State and Adams Streets in downtown Chicago.
The Berghoff's present-day employees know the restaurant's history well. We met a Berghoff manager on our way out as we stopped to look at a large framed Berghoff menu from 1932 in the lobby, and he told us how the restaurant built a steady clientele by selling beer for a nickel and giving away sandwiches for free when it first opened in 1898.
The Berghoff even weathered Prohibition by selling near beer, Bergo Soda Pop, and expanding into a full-service restaurant. In 1933, at Prohibition's end, Chicago issued the city's liquor license No. 1 to The Berghoff.
Chicago diners mourned in 2006 as the third generation of Berghoffs to operate the restaurant decided to close it. They didn't stay in mourning long, though, as Carlyn Berghoff became the fourth generation of the family to carry on The Berghoff tradition by re-opening in the building that same year with the classic ground-level restaurant serving many of the family favorites, as well as a more casual downstairs cafe, a catering company, and a cafe at O'Hare International Airport.
Carlyn Berghoff describes her approach as "tradition with a twist", adding more modern fare while still serving her family's long-time classics. She and her mother, Jan, co-authored"The Berghoff Family Cookbook". Carlyn Berghoff's second cookbook, "The Berghoff Cafe Cookbook: Berghoff Family Recipes for Simple Satisfying Food", includes more classic recipes from the restaurant founded by her great-grandfather Herman Joseph Berghoff.
I guess we were lucky to be blissfully ignorant of the 2006 restaurant closing, arriving back in Chicago several years after the restaurant's rebirth at the hands of Carlyn Berghoff to come in for an early dinner of traditional sauerbraten and beer!
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
Do they have apfelstrüdel? I never knew how good that could be until I moved to Berlin.
Posted by: gypsyscarlett | January 28, 2010 at 09:28 PM
Gypsy-They do have apple strudel, but we were too stuffed to do dessert when we went...lots of food. We had a huge lunch and didn't need any dinner later that evening.
Posted by: Dominique King | January 29, 2010 at 08:18 AM