One of my favorite poems about Chicago is The Golden Angel Pancake House by Campbell McGrath, which says, amongst so many other wonderful words,

… then there’s one
at which I never ate though it looked absolutely
irreplaceable, the Golden Angel Pancake House,
which is a poem by Rilke I’ve never read
though I’ve used its restroom, seen its dim
celestial figures like alien life-forms
in a goldfish bowl, tasted its lonely nectar
in every stack of silver dollar buttermilk flapjacks,
though the food, for all I know, is unutterably
awful, …

I, like, Campbell, never ate there, but treasured the Golden Angel Pancake House every time I passed by it on Lincoln Avenue. Treasured it for the poem, but also for its old-school Chicago-ness. And it’s part of the (imaginary) Chicago Golden Diners Club.

I went with friends today to the closing weekend of Homegrown Cafe (formerly Chalkboard) a delightful modern diner across the street from the Golden Angel and saw that it was no more. Now all of us will never eat there.