Klas Restaurant and the Communities of Cicero, Illinois

Cicero in 1922 was one of the densest Czech-speaking places outside Europe. The town had Czech newspapers, Czech building-and-loan societies, Czech gymnastic halls, and enough Czech customers to keep a Bohemian kitchen busy without ever explaining itself. Klas opened into that, and the surprising part is not that it succeeded. It is that it kept going for ninety-four years after the conditions that produced it had gone.

The first audience

The community that built Klas thinned out in the ordinary way — a generation moved west to Berwyn and Riverside, then further. What replaced it in Cicero was largely Mexican-American, and by the 2000s the restaurant sat in a town where most of its neighbours had no particular reason to know what svíčková was.

You can watch the kitchen notice. The later menus carry a CzechMex goulash taco, on the house's own tortilla — three dollars, listed among the appetizers as though it had always been there. It is a small item and it says more about the last twenty years of the business than any obituary did.

A consulate in a dining room

On 19 May 2012 the restaurant hosted a reception attended by the Czech prime minister Petr Nečas, the foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg, and the deputy prime minister Alexandr Vondra. Madeleine Albright was present. For one evening, a banquet room on Cermak Road was the venue for a piece of actual Czech state business.

The other use of a banquet hall

A room built for weddings is also a room with a stage-sized floor, a bar, and nobody living upstairs. Klas was used for live music, including by bands well outside the Czech-supper-club tradition, and for people who were teenagers in Cicero in the 1990s and 2000s that is what the building was: somewhere a show could happen.

Two entirely separate crowds therefore remember the same address, and they rarely overlap. That is the ordinary fate of a building with six rooms in it.

What stayed

The restaurant also worked as a shop. Rye bread by the loaf, dumpling loaf by the foot and a half, Czech gravy by the quart, kolacky by the baker's dozen. People who had not sat down in the dining room in years still came for those. A takeaway counter is a good measure of how deep a place is embedded in a neighbourhood, and this one ran until the end.

Food connects people and places.

The premise of this archive

Two towns in one address

Cicero has been a byword for one thing in American popular memory since the 1920s, and that reputation has very little to do with what the town actually was for most of the century: a dense, working, immigrant suburb with its own institutions. Klas belonged to the second version. It fed the people who worked at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works, it catered their weddings, and it stayed open through the decades when the national story about the town was about somebody else entirely.

Czech institutional interest in the address outlasted the Czech population of the neighbourhood. By the 2010s the restaurant's regulars were as likely to drive in from Berwyn, Brookfield or further west as to walk, and the building had become a destination rather than a local. That is a harder business to run than a neighbourhood restaurant, and it is the shape most ethnic dining rooms take shortly before they close.

Why any of this is recoverable

Almost none of it comes from one place. The diplomatic reception is documented by Czech institutional sources; the closure and the demolition by Chicago press; the food by the restaurant's own printed matter; the music by the people who were there. A neighbourhood restaurant leaves a scattered record, and the scattering is the reason it is worth collecting in one place.

The history of the building The rooms The menu archive