The story · Cicero, Illinois
Klas Restaurant History: from 1922 in Cicero to the 2022 Demolition
A Bohemian and American restaurant that outlived the neighbourhood that built it, by about thirty years.
Klas Restaurant history starts on West Cermak Road in 1922, in a Cicero that was still filling up with families from Bohemia and Moravia. It closed in 2016. The building came down in 2022. Between those dates it did the ordinary work of a neighbourhood restaurant for ninety-four years, and accumulated the kind of Klas Restaurant history that only shows up once the thing itself is gone.
The address was 5734 West Cermak Road, Cicero, Illinois. That is worth stating plainly, because almost everything else about the place has been retold enough times to have picked up decoration along the way.
Klas Restaurant history begins in Cicero in 1922
Klas was not designed and then opened. It grew. By the time the last menus were printed the building held a Fountain Room, a Crystal Room, a Moravian Room, a room named after Doctor Zhivago, a set of banquet rooms and a garden at the back — a list the kitchen printed on the back of its own dinner menu, next to the phone number, as if reminding regulars how much of the building they had never actually seen.
The exterior did the same thing. A stepped and scrolled Bohemian-revival gable sat over a corner entrance, with arched windows along Cermak and decorative brickwork that had no functional reason to exist. It was a piece of Central Europe built in Illinois by people who had recently stopped living in Central Europe, and it read that way from across the street.
What the Czech kitchen actually cooked
The menu is the most reliable witness we have. Five of them survive, and the fullest runs to five pages: roast loin of pork, roast duckling, svíčková under a sour-cream gravy, koprová in a dill gravy the colour of paper, Pilsner beef goulash, breaded pork tenderloin, chicken paprika. Every entrée arrived with soup or salad and two Bohemian sides, and the choice of side was the real question: bread dumplings or potato dumplings.
Alongside it ran a continental list — three kinds of Wiener schnitzel — and an American one, with a T-bone and a slab of ribs. That combination is not a compromise. It is the record of a dining room that fed the same families for three generations while those families' idea of dinner slowly changed.
Enjoy yourself! It may be later than you think.
Printed on the menu, above the opening hours
There was also a counter trade that tells you more than the entrées do. You could buy a loaf of homemade rye bread, a foot and a half of dumpling loaf, a quart of Czech gravy or a baker's dozen of kolacky, and walk out. People did that for decades. The restaurant was partly a shop.
Closing in 2016, and the 2022 demolition
Klas served its last dinners in late 2016. Accounts of the closure point at the ordinary arithmetic of a very large building, a shrinking base of regulars and a menu that took a long time to cook. We have not seen company records, and this site does not pretend to know the finances.
The building was listed as endangered in 2021. Demolition followed in 2022 and went in stages rather than in one day, which is why accounts of exactly when it came down disagree. Some of the interior — including painted work from the Russian room — was removed before the machines arrived.
Why Klas Restaurant history keeps being retold
For a restaurant that has not served a meal since 2016, Klas Restaurant history keeps reappearing: in Czech community newsletters, in Chicago food writing, in threads where somebody is trying to reproduce a dumpling. The kitchen turned out to be the durable part. That is the thread this site follows.
Part of the reason is mechanical, not sentimental. For most of two decades the restaurant kept its menu on its own website as a PDF, and search engines indexed that file as a document in its own right. Anyone looking for a dumpling, a dill gravy or a way to cook pork ended up at a card from Cicero, because a menu names dishes precisely and very little else on the web did. The food outlived the dining room partly because the dining room had written it down.
Questions people ask
When did Klas Restaurant open?
The restaurant gives 1922 as its founding year, and printed it on its own menus. A later architectural survey dates parts of the structure to the 1930s, which is consistent with a building extended repeatedly over ninety years. 1922 refers to the restaurant, not to every part of the fabric.
Why did Klas Restaurant close?
Accounts of the 2016 closure point to the arithmetic of a very large building, a shrinking base of regular customers and a kitchen whose dishes took a long time to cook. We have not seen company records and this site does not claim to know the finances.
When was the Klas building demolished?
In 2022. The work went in stages, not in one day, which is why published accounts of the exact date disagree. Some of the interior — including painted work from the Russian room — was removed before demolition began.
How many rooms did Klas have?
Six were named on the back of the dinner menu: the Fountain Room, the Crystal Room, the Moravian Room, the Dr. Zhivago Room, the banquet rooms and Klas’ Garden at the back.
Was Al Capone a customer?
It is a story, and it attaches itself to most Cicero businesses old enough to have existed in the 1920s. The sources that repeat it say “supposedly”. This site treats it as a legend rather than a fact, because that is what the evidence supports.
What happened to the murals and the interior?
Painted work from the Russian room was removed before the building came down. The virtual tours the restaurant hosted on its own site were built in Flash and did not survive; no browser has run them since 2020 and the files are gone.
The menu archive The dishes explained Inside the rooms Klas and Czech Chicago