The grease and the grouse

For most restaurants, it’s usually bad for business to have poor service. But for a few places, it’s their bread and butter. Diners head to these grouchy places in droves, sometimes drunk, looking for a good fight as the night’s entertainment—and the food as a mere bonus. The A.V. Club investigated the city’s meaner spots and talked to Tal Liron, a Ph.D. candidate in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago, about the trend.

The place: Ed Debevic’s (640 N. Wells St.)
 The gimmick: It’s not just the rude service that’s made Ed Debevic’s a stop on the tourist circuit. This place does it all—’50s gear, paper hats, diner food, and, uh, dancing on tables. The spectacle outshines the food, which runs the fried-or-grilled gamut: mozzarella sticks, hot dogs, hamburgers. The rudeness the servers dish out is often more sassy than mean, but talk back at your own risk. The expert says: “The Midwest is considered more polite than New York, so it’s more shocking to be an asshole here. The appeal of these places in Chicago is that they can pretend to be in New York for a while. There’s some East Coast-mystique about it.”

The place: Dick’s Last Resort (435 E. Illinois St.)
 The gimmick: This national chain does away with the normal slick and shine of other chains, opting instead for giant picnic tables and buckets of food. Like Debevic’s, Dick’s doesn’t advertise its rudeness but has a great word-of-mouth reputation for it. The expert says: “All in all, I think it’s wonderful. I hope it becomes more fashionable for people to want to be treated like shit rather than treating other people like shit. You can also think about it from the other side, too—it provides us with cultural institutions for assholes. I would call it ‘institutionalized assholism.’”

The place: The Wiener’s Circle (2622 N. Clark St.) 
The gimmick: Watch out. This hot-dog place takes the sass of the above restaurants and cranks up the attitude. Nestled in the heart of Lakeview’s bar scene, The Wiener’s Circle is open until 5 a.m. and has a staff born to deal with droves of drunken assholes in the only possible way: with verbal abuse. Step up, motherfucker. The expert says: “In a way, [rudeness is] a gimmick to promise some experience outside of the humdrum norm. ‘Hey, have you been to the place where they’re dicks? Let’s try it out; we haven’t tried that before.’ I would tie it to a kind of social institution that I would call ‘hanging out in groups.’ Where people go together with friends to a place where a one-on-one conversation between a customer and the man at the counter becomes a subject of conversation for the group. The person who receives the brunt of the asshole can wear this as a badge of honor—something like, ‘Hey, look at me, I’m such a cool person, I’m so confident that I can take whatever’s thrown at me. I have a profound sense of humor.’” —Emily Withrow