Klas Restaurant in Cicero,
Illinois — the Bohemian
and Czech Table

Why a dining room leaves a record at all

A restaurant that shuts does not leave an archive behind it. It leaves fragments: a few press reports written at the end, whatever the local institutions happened to file, and the paper it printed itself. In the Klas case the printed matter turned out to be the substantial part. Six menus survive as files, spanning 2006 to 2015, and between them they name several hundred dishes, prices, sides, soups and beers with a precision no reminiscence can match.

A menu is an unusually honest document. It is written to be used rather than to be remembered, it is revised whenever the kitchen changes, and it has no incentive to flatter. Put six of them in date order and you can watch a business make decisions: dropping a section, adding a dish, printing a second price column, keeping one part of the list untouched for nine years while everything around it contracts.

That is why a Klas Restaurant page can be written at all. The record of Klas Restaurant is thin in the places one would expect it to be thick, and unexpectedly detailed in the one place nobody thinks to look, which is the paper the kitchen handed to its guests.

The four threads

The history follows the building itself, from West Cermak Road in 1922 through the closure in 2016 to the demolition in 2022, and it separates what is documented from what is repeated. The rooms page takes the six names the restaurant printed on the back of its own card and asks what kind of building ends up with six of them. The menu archive holds the transcriptions. The dishes pages explain what the Czech names on those menus actually mean, in the kitchen rather than in translation.

Half of the site exists in Czech as well, and not as a mechanical copy. The Czech pages were written for readers who do not need houskový knedlík explained and do need the difference from bramborový knedlík taken seriously, which is a different article rather than the same one in another language.

The Czech kitchen itself is the reason any of this is still legible. Roasts, braises and dumplings are not fashion food; the methods have been written down for two centuries and the dishes are made the same way in Brno as in Berwyn. Reading a Cicero menu from 2003 therefore tells you something real about what arrived on the plate, in a way that a menu of invented dishes from the same decade would not.

What the record rests on

Three kinds of material, kept apart. The restaurant's own printed matter, which is where the dishes, prices, sides and beers come from. Published reporting and institutional records, for the closure, the building and the diplomatic visit of 2012. And general culinary knowledge, for the question of how a dumpling or a dill gravy is actually made, which belongs to the tradition rather than to any one kitchen and is described that way.

The images throughout are drawn, not photographed, and each one says so. That was a deliberate choice over stock photography of somebody else's food, which would look more authoritative and be less true. Where a date or a figure is uncertain, the uncertainty is described instead of resolved, and where a story is a story it is introduced as one.