Barack Obama came up to me at a party a couple of years ago,” says Chicago restaurateur Rich Melman, “and said, ‘Hey, I’ve enjoyed your restaurants’.” The Obamas have celebrated special occasions (anniversaries, birthdays, that victory thing) at Spiaggia, which is not one of Melman’s places, and have expressed a fondness for Rick Bayless’s Topolobampo—but no serious Chicago restaurantgoer can avoid Melman’s establishments for long. “One place of ours he used to go to a lot was Petterino’s, in the theatre district,” says Melman, “which is sort of our Sardi’s. We have caricatures of customers on the walls, and we did one of him. He got a big kick out of it and asked for a copy to give to his wife.”
Rumor has it Obama also likes the burgers and ribs at Grunts, meaning R. J. Grunts, across the street from the Lincoln Park Zoo, the first restaurant Melman opened—and it was there that I sat down with Melman not long ago to find out more about how he achieved his own kind of executive prominence. “This is a nothing little place,” he says as we settle in. “It certainly doesn’t look like anything revolutionary. But thirty-seven years ago, it was an absolute breakthrough.” It was also the progenitor of what is quite possibly the most diverse and remarkable restaurant empire in America today. Melman—who looks at least a decade younger than his 66 years, an effect accentuated by his jeans and sneakers and his almost boyish enthusiasm—was a baseball-loving college dropout with vague entrepreneurial tendencies when he opened Grunts in 1971, in partnership with a real-estate agent and haberdasher named Jerry Orzoff. He wasn’t exactly a restaurant novice, as he explains over lunch—a Mr. Chicken sandwich (“sort of a chicken French dip”) and an exceptionally juicy cheeseburger. He started working in his family’s deli business when he was 14. “Restaurants were really all I knew,” he tells me. “Sometimes I think people who are brighter than me have a disadvantage because they can do so many different things. I wasn’t that smart, so I had to focus.”
Orzoff, who died in 1981, helped keep Melman on track. “When people asked Jerry what he did in the company, he’d say, ‘Rich takes care of the restaurants, and I take care of Rich.’ We had a pretty amazing relationship.”
The two opened R. J. Grunts—the name marries their first initials with a word that was once described as representing “the noise made by a girlfriend of Jerry’s when she ate”—with an initial investment of $17,000. The look was (and remains) funky: walls of stucco and unfinished wood, mismatched furniture, a miscellany of art on the walls, hanging plants. It was very much a restaurant of its time. “I have a copy of our first menu,” says Melman, “and we had an organic meal of the day, a macrobiotic meal of the day. People wrote political messages on the checks. I probably shouldn’t say this, but we had a menu after nine p.m. designed for stoners.” Grunts also played music that “was from Woodstock, not the elevator music you had in most restaurants,” and let servers wear street clothes instead of uniforms.
Then there was the salad bar. “People have written that we invented the salad bar,” says Melman, “but that’s not true. What we did was redefine it. Instead of just a few kinds of greens and some dressings, we put up forty or fifty items. I knew how to make potato salad, coleslaw, egg salad, chopped liver, all those things, from my parents’ deli, and we added them. I even put caviar on the salad bar—the kind that cost five bucks for a big jar.”
Before long, the Grunts format was being widely copied in Chicago and elsewhere. “When we started making money and I started thinking about opening a second place,” says Melman, “I decided that I had to do something different. Also, I don’t like to travel very much, and I figured if I wanted to stay around Chicago, I couldn’t keep opening the same place over and over.” In 1973, he and Orzoff launched Fritz That’s It!, in suburban Evanston, which Melman calls “a step up” from Grunts, followed by the Great Gritzbe’s Flying Food Show, back in Chicago. Melman’s then girlfriend, Martha Whittemore—later to become his wife—suggested that he call his fledgling company Lettuce Entertain You, in honor of the salad bar at Grunts. In the same punning spirit, Melman gave his next two places the groan-inducing monikers Jonathan Livingston Seafood and Lawrence of Oregano. “One thing I regret today,” he says, “is the silly names, because people didn’t take us seriously.”
That was certainly the case when he tried to acquire his first dress-up restaurant, the venerable Pump Room, in the historic Ambassador East hotel, on Chicago’s Gold Coast. “I left a message for the owner, explaining who I was and asking if he’d be interested in selling,” Melman recalls, “and he never called me back.”
About a year and a half later, though, the place came on the market, and Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises—now widely known as LEYE—snagged it. “The first night I ever ate in the Pump Room,” he confesses, “was the night I bought it.”
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