Methods
About this project, its sources and its corrections policy
What this is
A record of Klas Restaurant, which operated at 5734 West Cermak Road in Cicero, Illinois from 1922 until 2016, and of the Czech and Bohemian cooking it served.
Where the material comes from
Three kinds of source, kept distinct:
- The restaurant's own printed matter. Six menus survive as files, the earliest recorded in 2006 and the latest in 2015. They are transcribed here; the original files are not reproduced, and a recording date is given as a recording date, never as a date of printing.
- Published reporting and institutional records. Chicago press coverage of the closure and the demolition, an architectural survey, and Czech diplomatic and community sources for the events they describe.
- General culinary knowledge. Dumplings, gravies and sauerkraut are not proprietary to one kitchen. Where this site describes how a dish works it is describing the tradition, and it says so rather than implying a house recipe.
How claims are graded
A date or a fact stated plainly is one we could source. Where sources disagree — the year the building went up, the exact day demolition finished — the disagreement is described instead of resolved. Where a story is a story, it is introduced as one.
On the illustrations
The editorial images on this site are AI-generated and visibly labelled. Rooms and still lifes are artistic interpretations, not archival photographs or documented reconstructions. Food images illustrate culinary traditions; they do not authenticate an original Klas recipe. Original menu scans, where available in the local research preview, are identified separately as documents.
How the transcriptions were made
Each menu was read off the surviving file and typed out in the order the document prints it, section by section, keeping the house's own wording. Where the restaurant wrote compliments for side dishes, the pages say compliments. Where it wrote pickled beef for svíčková, that translation stands in the transcription and is corrected in the commentary rather than in the document. A transcription that silently improves its source stops being a transcription.
Prices are reproduced exactly as printed, decimal point and all, and are historical figures with no present-day meaning. Nothing has been converted, rounded or adjusted for inflation. Where part of a page cannot be read, the unreadable part is left out and the page is allowed to end short; no line has been carried across from a neighbouring edition to make a document look complete. Six menus with holes in them are worth more than six menus with guesses in them.
On dates
Two different dates attach to every one of these files and they are kept apart throughout. A capture date is the day a copy of the file was saved. A printing date is the day the menu was produced, which is almost never recorded. Only one document in the set carries its own date: the five-page dinner menu, which has a 2003 copyright line and was still being saved in 2009. Everywhere else the printing date is given as undated, because that is what is known.
What is deliberately not published
The original files are not reproduced. Neither are the telephone numbers and addresses printed on them, because a restaurant that closed in 2016 should not appear to be contactable. Published photographs of the interior exist in press coverage of the closure and the demolition; they are not reproduced here, because the rights belong to the people who made them.
On the Czech pages
The Czech half of this site was written rather than translated. A reader who grew up with houskový knedlík does not need it described and does need the difference from bramborový knedlík treated seriously, so the Czech pages spend their words differently from the English ones and occasionally cover different ground entirely. Dish names on the Czech pages are written with full diacritics, as they are written at home.
What this cannot tell you
No company records were consulted, so nothing here should be read as an account of the finances. No recipe is attributed to the kitchen: where a method is described it is the tradition the dish belongs to, which is common property and not anyone's intellectual property. And six documents spanning nine years are a sample, not a complete run. Menus that were never put online are simply absent, and their absence is not evidence that the dishes on them did not exist.
Corrections
If something here is wrong — a date, a dish, a name, an attribution — it should be fixed. If you ate there, cooked there, played there or have material from the building, that is worth more than anything a document can carry.