The life, death and lasting impact of Glenn's Diner - Chicago Tribune

I first stepped into Glenn’s Diner nearly 15 years ago looking to earn beer money as a student at DePaul University. My friend was washing dishes there and said he could get me in.

The eponymous Glenn Fahlstrom, towering over me in his signature jeans and white T-shirt, a pair of dish towels stuffed into either side of his waistband, barely acknowledged me as he patted himself down for something to light the Marlboro Red dangling from his mouth.

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“Got a light?” he asked.

I did.

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“When can you start?” He pointed to the white linen shirts hanging near the kitchen where I would, not knowing it at the time, spend the next decade of my life.

Glenn’s was a North Side institution drawing the likes of onetime Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who lived just down the street, and disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich. I used to bus the latter’s tables, sweeping up flakes of mahi-mahi or crusts from a BLT. I ended up, years later, with a producer credit for Blagojevich’s first televised interview from prison. (Thanks, WMAQ-Ch.5′s Phil Rogers.)

Aside from the occasional embattled politician and accompanying security detail, Glenn’s fed a relentless tide of locals and visitors from around the world for nearly 20 years. All the while the private dramas of its incorrigible staff — a colorful cast of rogues, college kids and sweethearts — played out on that quiet stretch of Montrose Avenue in the charming Ravenswood neighborhood.

Squatting over a red plastic milk crate while in one of those white kitchen shirts, I was smoking a cigarette (and reeking of fish, no doubt) when my son’s mother and I first met. I had a mohawk, and she was covered in tattoos and wearing a leopard print pencil skirt as she carried the trash out from the neighboring hair salon.

Later on, thanks to that fateful encounter, our son would nap in his car seat on the restaurant counter while I waited tables or helped run plates of hollandaise-smothered catfish and cornbread to tourists. Undoubtedly, they saw us on “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” “The Hungry Hound” or “Check, Please!” They helped pay my rent while I figured out life and eventually went back to college for journalism, which led to an ill-fated but illustrious career in Chicago’s newsrooms.

But not all the stories are good and happy ones. Not all of them victories.

At a recent toast at the 4 a.m. dive down the street where we would regularly gather after dinner service, we memorialized a talented cook and friend who, like many in this business, lived roughly at times. We raised a glass and uttered his favorite four-letter word before remembrances led to an astonishing realization that more than a dozen former employees of Glenn’s have moved on to the great seafood joint in the sky. Whether it was from drugs, disease, old age or some other calamity, it sunk in that life had gone on — and even ended — for some members of our beloved and bedraggled troupe.

Before it closed this summer, I meant to eat at Glenn’s one last time. I hadn’t been there in years. By the time I left the restaurant to start my first in a string of newspaper jobs, Glenn had lost the diner in a drawn-out legal battle. (Legend has it that it started with a performative asking price scribbled on a napkin.) He went on to open a restaurant on Belmont Avenue, and many of the original cast went with him. It was a kind of retaliatory success, but COVID-19 claimed it like many others in the end.

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I asked one of my old regulars, who had a bombastic laugh you could hear all the way back in the kitchen while he ate his jambalaya at the counter, if he’d like to have one last meal with me there. But when we showed up, Glenn’s had already closed for good, so we sauntered over to the bar next door (there have been many iterations of that bar over the years) for a drink and to talk about the business, diner friends and how the neighborhood is changing.

As we sipped our drinks next to the shuttered restaurant that claimed my 20s, we talked a bit about the passing of time and changing of life. Sometimes it’s so subtle you’re not even aware until abruptly you’re laughing hysterically at how you can still remember that the Monday special was all filets for $14.95. Or how Henry the prep cook, God rest his soul, taught you how to julienne onions with a chef’s knife one Sunday morning when you were so hungover it was all you could do not to yak all over your stainless steel station. Or what it sounds like to hear tickets for dinner service start rolling in as the chef plays AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” on repeat for three hours straight.

Chicago loves its food scene. And it’s a vibrant, bizarre, sometimes dangerous and other times glorious life that comes with it. Glenn’s is one little sliver of that rich history, that tangled tapestry of successes and failures so easily forgotten by the ever-changing face of this city. But it was truly special because of us — those who lived, worked and ate there. It’s because of us that it’s worth remembering at all.

I won’t forget that.

Richard Ray is a writer and media professional in Chicago. He formerly was an editor for WMAQ-Ch. 5, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and a dishwasher at Glenn’s Diner.

Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.

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The life, death and lasting impact of Glenn's Diner - Chicago Tribune
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