That Weird Lunch Place By The Office: Mangi's Fast Foods
Steve Heisler
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Every day, on the way to your regular lunch spot, it's there. Taunting you, mysterious. And maybe you think, "Tomorrow. I'll eat there tomorrow." But it never happens. That weird lunch place by the office will forever fall to other, more familiar options. That's where this appropriately titled column comes in: The A.V. Club, unable to resist the allure of neglected restaurants any longer, sets out to expand its lunch horizons.
Mangi's Fast Foods (3801 N. Lincoln Ave., 773-477-0406)
Allure: Restaurants on corner spots always catch my attention. There's something about the definitiveness of the location, with two or more outside walls exposed, that leads me to believe the establishment has a reason for being there. A damn good reason. At least, that's the way I feel about Mangi's, which has been staring me down from across the Trader Joe's parking lot by my home office (okay, my apartment). It's the first storefront after a string of emptiness along Lincoln north of Addison—train tracks, tunnel, empty lot, post office, Joe's and CB2—and it seems to have been around for a while. And they seem to specialize in all sorts of meat-with-bread entrées (hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, etc.); it'd be great to find a place to get a non-chain junk food fix every now and then.
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Steve HeislerAtmosphere: This place is made to do one thing: Serve greasy food to as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. I walked in to find rows of orange booths, the slippery thin wooden kinds I remember from childhood hot dog stands all over the Chicagoland area. It was a little late for lunch, but the place was quiet; one guy in an orange hoodie was eating alone at a table, and the three staff mumbled to each other from the other side of the restaurant, then stopped to look up at me as I entered. They were already waiting for my order. I approached the long counter and admired the wall art, which clearly hadn't been updated in a long, long while—old beer and food posters, like a faded big-haired lady telling me to "Taste the High Life" and one of a gray-looking sandwiches that advertised "Meatballs worth meeting." There was a lottery machine by where you order, too, in case you wanted to invest your change in MILLIONS AND MILLIONS OF DOLLARS.
Service: I ordered up my Italian beef sandwich, with spicy giardiniera—seemed like a solid first try—from a guy who'd been eyeing me since I came in with a look that said, "We're ready for your order, whenever you want to place it. But dear lord, what's taking you so damn long?" He snapped into action, while another guy jumped out of a chair to ring me up. These two looked to be in their late-30s, and had been speaking to me in short, spare sentences: "Everything?"; "Here?"; "Hot?" The third gentleman looked to be older, maybe mid 50s, and he hung back. Staring at me. Stone-faced. I pretended not to notice, but man, was it ever happening. The food arrived quickly, though, and I took my seat by a window.
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Steve HeislerFood: Aside from the fact that the giardineira—mostly mini cauliflower stalks and hunks of carrot—wasn't all that spicy, damn, this was a good sandwich. The beef, thin-sliced and not overcooked, was clearly soaking au jus for a while, and the runoff that dribbled onto the bread made the whole thing a sloppy, savory mess. I was expecting to pick at the food (I'd eaten just before, was only going so I could report on the place), but I scarfed the thing down in seconds, the older staff person staring me down the entire time. Just before I finished, a worn-looking guy came in, wearing raggedy jeans and a dark coat, came in and immediately started chatting with the staff. He wanted a double cheeseburger, fries, and oh, "How bout a cold beer, too?" he asked rhetorically. He glanced over at a newspaper, and wondered, to no one in particular, how Obama was doing now that he'd won the Nobel Prize. The staff nodded in recognition, but not engagement. The orange-hoodie guy, though, chimed in with some thoughts, and soon he and the new guy were bantering back-and-forth from adjacent tables. I got up to clear my place, and the older gentleman, now standing and staring from in front of the counter, gave me a thank you, and looked away. He still wasn't smiling, but I could tell he was being sincere.
Is it really that weird? Nah. The coldness I experienced when I first walked in was probably just a kneejerk reaction—I was a stranger in a strange land, after all. But clearly the guy who arrived later felt comfortable enough to be chatty, and the older staff guy, presumably some sort of manager-owner, was probably staring because he wanted to see my reaction to the food, the service, the everything. If I give myself a few more visits, that coldness will surely melt away, to be replaced with plenty of hot, yummy, greasy food.
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Steve Heisler
