It’s hard to believe, but not 20 years ago there were as many gallons of ink being spilled about Ed Debevic’s as there were this past year about Alinea. Local and national press fell over themselves trying to explain what exactly the restaurant was, where precisely its “fakeness” lay, how to pronounce the name, and where the resurgence of meat loaf fit into new American cuisine. Times have changed: Ed’s creator, wizard restaurateur Rich Melman of Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises, is not the biggest restaurant story in Chicago anymore. But he is a crucial part of a bigger story.
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Lettuce began in 1971, when Melman and his (now deceased) partner, Jerry Orzoff, opened R.J. Grunts, a Lincoln Park hippie/hamburger boite. (It’s still hanging in there, a corporate talisman like that yellowed first dollar bill taped behind the bar.) Grunts was the start of a new kind of restaurant chain: every eatery Melman invented would be radically different from the ones that came before. After hamburgers came a singles joint, then seafood, then Italian. “I didn’t just want to do prints,” Melman told Crain’s Chicago Business last year. “I wanted to do original artworks.” Even now, instead of putting its energy into duplication, Lettuce tends to sell off the cloning rights to its creations, as it did with Ed Debevic’s, Maggiano’s Little Italy, and Big Bowl (which the company recently bought back). Melman is often credited with inventing the “multiconcept” chain as well as with having a magical ability to know what the public wants before it does. Each successful Lettuce restaurant has packed in the diners but also pushed the industry and the city toward new ideas: one of the first salad bars was at Grunts, the first tapas were at Cafe Ba-Ba-Reeba!
There have been, of course, failures, and restaurants that have run their course. In the early years they were places with Simpsons-esque names like Lawrence of Oregano, Jonathan Livingston Seafood, and the Great Gritzbe’s Flying Food Show. But the company is big enough to easily take risks, ride out the vagaries of the industry, and ultimately shut down anything that doesn’t work.
Lettuce restaurants have played a role in bringing diners out and encouraging them to try new things, but they’ve also prepped us, with their rich theater and painstaking attention to detail, for the excesses of the new cuisine.
Melman is now only chairman of Lettuce, having relinquished the positions of CEO and president to his protege, Kevin Brown, in recent years. Melman is a “free radical,” according to Brown, able to explore new ideas more unencumbered in an era in which you could argue that Lettuce has started to lap itself in the exploitation of nostalgia: it recently purchased the Magic Pan, the chain of crepe restaurants from the 70s. Melman has often said that he doesn’t like “thinking big.” He makes his progress by “taking a small step, making sure the ground is firm, and then taking the next small step,” he told Crain’s in 1993. It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here.
