Jerry Kleiner is standing inside Loncar Liquors, an old-man bar on the corner of Brandon and 92nd Street. He motions at the chicken in the deep fryer behind the bar. “They use pure lard,” he says approvingly. The employees at the counter, a few of whom look like they’ve been around since the bar opened in 1924, have stopped working to stare at Kleiner. He’s wearing a red windbreaker over a blue Puma sweatshirt, brown Nike warm-up pants, and white wing tips. His steel blue architect glasses slope down his nose. “I’m just showing my friend this place,” Kleiner says, waving at his surroundings. The staff slowly nods.
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Kleiner’s made a career of turning up in unlikely places. Fifteen years ago his restaurant Vivo opened on a raw stretch of West Randolph in the meatpacking district. Dozens of restaurants followed, including the typically theatrical Kleiner productions Red Light and Marche. At the end of the 90s he led a similar parade into the South Loop, opening Gioco, then Opera, on South Wabash. Now Kleiner’s moving farther south. This June he plans to open a 160-seat “eclectic American” restaurant in a former Women’s Workout World off Harper and 52nd Street in Hyde Park. In the other half of the nondescript building, owned by the University of Chicago, is the generic new incarnation of the Checkerboard Lounge blues club.
Judging from his current workload, Kleiner wasn’t hurt by the split. Carnivale, his six-month-old pan-Latino restaurant on Fulton, is his biggest operation yet–it seats 420, and the staff numbers 150. Last summer he opened the Victor Hotel, a sleek grown-up lounge, in the West Loop. And he’s scouting for locations in Garfield Park, Lawndale, and Gary, Indiana, as well as on the south side.
Shortly after the Hyde Park space unlocks its mahogany doors, Kleiner will open his tenth restaurant, also still unnamed (“I always name everything afterwards,” he says), on 21st Street, in a turn-of-the-century power plant a mile south of his other South Loop restaurants. In the renovated banquet space iron columns stretch from floor to ceiling, a 35-foot span. Behind the bar there are 12 shelves ascending to the roof, unreachable bottles of Grey Goose on each. The color scheme is dichromatic, a chessboard of black and white. It looks like a superhero’s lair.
