19 May 2002

Debra Pickett
Chicago Sun-Times

Glenn Keefer's many influential contacts, classic Irish charm and legendary stories mark him as the classic Chicagoan--only it turns out he's not from here.

Glenn Keefer is trying to sit still. But our table is just off the main lobby of his new Kinzie Street restaurant, and he can't resist hopping up to shake the hand of everyone who calls out, "Hey, Keef," while heading out the door or into the men's room.

About half of the lunchtime crowd is here to see Keef: They're the burly guys, sitting at the bar, surprised--not entirely pleasantly--to find out that their lunches come with salads. They've known him since his days 20 years ago tending bar at the Palm. And they are all kinds of connected: the guys who keep Chicago running. Legitimate goodfellas who run businesses like building supply companies and high-class linen services, the sort of enterprises where people make a lot more money than you ever think they do. Just knowing who these guys are marks you as an insider, too.

Then there's the other half of the lunchtime crowd: the fashionable folks--mostly female--here because John Horan is running the kitchen. Horan, these foodies know, cut his culinary teeth at classic spots like Le Perroquet, Everest and Kiki's Bistro. His special of the day is an elaborate lobster salad, tossed with a citrus dressing and accented with slices of grapefruit. The sort of thing a woman can eat without worrying about popping a button on her size zero Armani suit.

It's hard to imagine any of the "Hey, Keef" guys enjoying grapefruit in any context. Or Keef himself, for that matter, or his main financial backer, radio mogul Jimmy de Castro.

"He had only a few requirements for this place," Keefer says of de Castro. "Chicken soup on the menu and flat screen TVs."

So how did two such avowedly regular guys wind up with such a haute cuisine chef for a partner?

Well, it's a funny story. It was about six years ago, when Keefer's daughter was 5, and he'd taken his family for a rare dinner out. They'd gone to Kiki's Bistro, a chic French eatery in River North, and were planning to keep the kids happy by feeding them french fries. Keefer asked the waiter for ketchup and was told there was none. He scribbled a note on the back of one of his business cards--by then he was running eight Ruth's Chris steakhouse locations--and sent it back to the kitchen to plead his case. His note came back marked, "Sorry, no ketchup."

Keefer didn't quit, writing back, "So what do you recommend for my five year old with her pommes frites?"

Chef John Hogan sent back his response: "An expensive red bordeaux."

Though he didn't like the answer, he loved the style. So Keefer marched back to the kitchen, bringing Hogan a beer.

Last year, Hogan officially decided that he was over the ketchup thing and joined Keefer's team. Here, his foie gras has become Hudson Valley duck liver. And his salad lyonnaise has become a country salad. And there is chicken soup on the menu.

Keefer suggests I try the soup but orders only a tossed salad and a grilled chicken sandwich for himself.

No steak? Isn't Keefer's, um, a steakhouse?

"I have too much iron in my blood," Keefer says, "and I'm not allowed to have foods with iron in them, so no red meat or red wine. I go to the doctor, and they take blood and throw it away; that's how they treat it."

This is the quintessential Keefer story: It shows his tough-guy side and how smart guys like doctors aren't always as smart as we think they are. It's got a certain "only in Chicago" quality to it. Where else would someone wind up with too much iron in his blood? It's also the sort of thing that might not be perfectly true but is such a great story you don't really care.

Keefer is a classic Irish charmer, and it's not just the stories, though they go a long way. He's almost comically chivalrous--when he notices I'm cold, he leaps from his seat to adjust the thermostat and then, on the way back to the table, takes off his jacket so he can offer it to me. And he's devoted to his family, though not in a way that would mark him as a softie or anything.

"My wife is unbelievable," says Keefer, who works 14 hours a day, six days a week, running the restaurant. "She's the kind of mother who, if one of the kids got hurt or sick, she'd call me after she went to the emergency room. Never called to ask me what to do, just to tell me where to meet them on my way home."

Talking with Keefer, you get the feeling that time has gone backward, that, surrounded by the noise of a lunchtime crowd that actually still drinks at midday and taking in the scent of thick, well-marbled steaks on the grill, you've stepped into a place where the original Mayor Daley still runs things. Keefer's hands do the laughing for him as he tells you how he almost became a priest. Sitting here, chewing the fat with you in the middle of the afternoon, he could be any Bridgeport native, keeping his old-boy status well-cloaked within a blue collar.

Except that he's not from here.

He was born in Massapequa, on the south shore of Long Island, N.Y., where they're famous for Jessica Hahn, Joey Buttafuoco and all the various and sundry Baldwin brothers. He worked his way through college on the fishing boats that sailed from Long Island. You could make almost $5,000 in a good summer, catching lobsters and oysters and swordfish.

Keefer tells me, with a certain amount of relish, that he got seasick every day on the boat, lost probably 40 pounds in a matter of a couple of months. He also tells me his favorite fishing story, the one everybody knows about him, the one that explains why he has spent most of his adult life selling steaks rather than fish.

It was the middle of the night on Friday the 13th--of course--in August of 1976. Keefer had set out with a small crew on a four-day trip, which, despite a few problems with an exhaust pipe, had been a smashing success. They had about 4,000 pounds of lobster on board, and there was a gentle following wind blowing them home. Keefer was at the wheel. As the youngest crew member, he'd been elected for all the glamorous jobs, like cooking, fastening the bands onto the lobsters' snapping claws and taking the overnight shift in the wheelhouse. Then, in the middle of the clear sky, he saw a cloud of smoke.

Opening the door to the engine room to investigate, he found flames that were waist high. "I couldn't get in there to shut the engine down, and the electrical system was shot, so that I couldn't get a mayday out," he says.

So he woke the rest of the crew, and they scrambled over the side of the boat and into an inflatable raft. The captain, who'd just bought the boat and was taking his first trip out as its captain, wanted to stay on board but was easily talked out of it. Keefer, who makes no claims to being a hero, was the first one overboard. "I had new boots that I'd spent $40 on, so I swam with them on," he says.

They were rescued hours later, still 16 miles off shore.

"I climbed aboard, drank some Johnnie Walker Black and ate some Fig Newtons," Keefer says, making sure I get the part about the Fig Newtons. He knows it's a great story.

So is the one about the one tour he spent on a Bush family-owned oil rig off the Louisiana coast. And the one about piling all of his worldly possessions--and those of his buddy Frank Stanley--in his Toyota pickup to head out to Chicago in 1980, after landing a job as a bartender at the Palm.

"When I got behind the bar, I couldn't believe how much drinking went on here," he says. "At lunchtime, the restaurant might be empty, but the guys were lined up four deep at the bar. They'd have three or four martinis, tell a few stories, and then head back to the office. Or home. I made a lot of friends really fast when I got here."

Turns out, he'd been a Chicagoan all his life.

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