Ladd, IL
There’s no menu at Rip’s. You order while standing in line: chicken strips or quarters of light or dark meat, hand-cut french fries, pickles or fried mushrooms; as an appetizer, there are “crumbs”–fried bits of batter. The chicken’s superb, moist and tender, with a delicate flaky crust.
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Later this year Rounds plans to hike the prices by a quarter: the light’s going up to $3.75, the dark to $3.50. When his aunt, Gina Ramey, began waitressing in 1957, it was 50 cents. Ramey was 16 then; a half century later, she’s still around. “I waited on people when they were young and when they were courting and when they came in with children,” she says.
Rounds has consulted for other restaurants and taken classes at DePaul’s business school–he worked as a Cook County public defender before returning to Ladd when his father became ill in the mid-80s. But he’s hesitant to analyze his restaurant’s success. “We’ve been at it a long time,” he says. “A loooong time.
Before fried chicken there was fried fish. “After they played baseball they would give away fish,” Rounds says. “Because when we got fish–back in the 30s, 40s, 50s, even into the 60s–it was local fish. A lot of people would catch carp, bring it in. My grandfather would clean it, fry it; they’d eat it.” Chicken was eventually added because, as Rounds says, “everybody raised chicken. We put farmers in business to raise our chickens.” Gualandri and his brother, Ramey’s father, who worked alongside him, “would go get them on Monday night alive,” Ramey says. “Then on Tuesday, they’d slaughter them and clean them. In the summertime, when it was hot–oh my God.”
Rip’s hasn’t modernized much since the 30s. Cash is collected in a duct-taped cigar box with the lid open. Time cards are handwritten on folded white sheets of paper; there aren’t any social security numbers or proper names on them, just nicknames–Yogi, Melonhead, Sky.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/A. Jackson.
