Consider this the culinary last stand of a golden age of
American dining. Consider this the
fucking Alamo. Because almost nowhere
else do places like this any longer exist.
Places that effortlessly celebrate, with an unflappable—and
unwavering—generosity of portion size and heart, the convivial confluence and
comingling of a spectroscopic multiplicity of class and culture over the
once-sacrosanct shared experience of the deeply delicious, deeply affordable,
hot meal eaten at a square Formica table among fellow diners with whom we might
otherwise, in our own socially myopic lives, have precious little traffic. Black.
White. Rich. Poor. Students. Day laborers.
Windsor-knotted portfolio managers.
They’re all gathered here, in this shining last bastion of a soon-to-be
bygone era of American restaurantism, blithely unaware of anything approaching too-cool-for-school
gastronomic irony, and happily impervious to hirsute hipsters and the
douchbaggery of frat boys and popped-polo-collar bros now endemic—and with the
seeming ubiquity of a near-biblical pestilence—to most big city food
scenes. Not here. No way.
Not here on South Side of Chicago.
This place will suffer none of that.
Why? Because it doesn’t have
to. Because this place is the one, the
only, Valois.
Behold.
Opened in 1921, Valois (which the local South Side Chicago-ese
patois requires you to pronounce as Val-oiz)
is an ethnographic study in Eisenhower-era dining milieu and the-future-is-now gastronomy
of post-war America. Valois is also a cafeteria in the best—and truest—sense
of the word. Enter through the East 53rd
Street egress, join the s-shaped line (because there is always, always a line at Valois, yo), and
behold the menu board mounted above the service line. There, you’ll discover such hallowed dine-o-classics
as the chopped steak sandwich and the perennially-venerable patty melt on
rye. There are opened-faced sandwiches,
of course—hot turkey with mash [sic] potatoes, for one—and breakfast, always
breakfast, served all day; omelettes [sic] pancakes, and breakfast meats in
their forever-glorious and sundry forms, all at low, low Carter-era
prices.
[To wit: despite the undeniable scrumptiousness of its culinary offerings, spelling is evidently not Valois’ forte.]
[To wit: despite the undeniable scrumptiousness of its culinary offerings, spelling is evidently not Valois’ forte.]
And as dazzling in sentimental wonder as the selection on
the menu board might be, it’s the daily specials served up from the steam table
for which South Sider Chicagoans line up and clamor, enduringly. For there, behind the fogged-up glass of the age-old
metal pass, are piles of pre-seared T-bones and New York strips (and brought up
to serving temperature with a few, well-spent moments on an incendiary flat-top
grill). There, too, on the steam-heated line,
are heaps of baked chicken, pre-fried catfish, and barbeque ribs—all of it a bona
fide cornucopia of comfort food hall-of-fame classics.
For my meal at Valois last week, I ordered a time-honored
cafeteria favorite: I ordered the roast
beef. With my order came a side of
mashed potatoes and gravy, peas and carrots, and a roll. What I received after my order was served was
a platter of food the size of a small dog bed and weighing as much as a boat
anchor. And, yes, the baby-shit colored brown
gravy might have been straight from the jar; the mashed potatoes might very
well have been reconstituted from dystopian-resistant dried potato flakes; the peas
and carrots might have tasted, however vaguely, of a BPA-lined industrial-sized
can. With that said, however, I will
avow, with a preacher’s deep solemnity and a missionary’s mighty zeal, my meal at
Valois was—if not finest in culinary
accomplishment in recent memory—then certainly the happiest in many months well-crowded with gastronomic merry-making contenders. But
how, you ask. How could Valois—given
its limited culinary capability and scope—be so insistently popular with South
Side eaters, and—now—one of my all-time favorite places to eat in the
food-lovers Brigadoon that is the megalopolis of Chicago?
That’s easy.
Because the food of Valois attains a nirvana-like state of
deliciousness in ways that other contemporary restaurants sired amid the
zeitgeist of the post-post-modern culinary world of Food Network fetishism
simply can’t. Because Valois
occupies—nearly alone—the liminal space of middle distance in the gastronomic
world that is both unfettered by food trends (bone broth, anyone?), and purely undaunted
by that mirrored Orwellian funhouse of culinary doublespeak wherein diners
prattle on and on about “flavor profile” and “mouth feel” and “uniformity of
chew.” Because the food of Valois feeds
you—fills you up—in ways that are almost Aristotelian in their nourishment of
the soul so rarely—if ever—found beyond the four walls of your own mother’s
kitchen. Because the food of Valois is
served by a standing army of Greek men—young and old—outfitted in standard-issue
polyester snap-whites and peaked, paper hats.
And because—and this, perhaps, above all else—Valois is among the very
last of its kind: a final holdout of cafeteria-style communal dining, whose penultimate
mission, however tacit or implied, is driven by the provision of wonderfully
tasty, deeply comforting, food priced affordably for any who should crave an
open-faced sandwich smothered in gravy, or a slice of banana cream pie.
Go to Valois while it’s still there. I urge you.
I implore you. Because nothing this
good ever lasts forever.
Your link: Valois
Your link: Valois
