So earlier I posted about a neighborhood restaurant that was causing ongoing noise and nuisance complaints, to the point where our local alderman and the city's legal office were holding community meetings about it. Well there have been DEVELOPMENTS.
I've been attending the meetings out of curiosity; I hear the restaurant's music sometimes, but I'm far enough away that it doesn't actually bother me. I rarely go out at night, so I hadn't encountered the "nuisance" aspects of it, which include lots of loitering drunk people, mysterious box trucks with no license plates blocking bike lanes while unloading, and bouncers swearing and trying to stop and frisk people walking past the restaurant.
("Why does a restaurant have bouncers?" you ask. Well, one of the complaints was "He's operating a nightclub but just using a restaurant license to do it.")
Anyway, I was intrigued to attend the latest video call because last time ONE DERANGED PERSON got on the line and spent ten minutes telling everyone else that the place is fine and if it isn't nobody cares and if you do you're a narc. I wanted to see if they were gonna come back to rant again and they did, but they got stymied by the moderator, who insisted that if you wanted to talk you had to "raise your hand" in the video call and they clearly couldn't figure out how to do that.
But then. After the airing of grievances and the owner's lawyer apologizing for no-showing at the last meeting, the alderman's spokesperson got on the line. FIFTY MINUTES into a one hour meeting, she said, "Before you inform the owner about the steps he needs to take to prevent this from becoming a legal issue, the Alderman has a question. He understands that the building landlord has served the owner with an eviction notice for the business, and we'd like to know if you and your client are aware of this?"
Every visible face on the video call did a jaw drop. It was awesome. I was muted and I still went "OooooohOOOOOOHHHHH!"
So yeah turns out the owner is "a little behind on the rent" but is confident he can bounce back, and then the moderator gave him a list of twenty things he needed to do (or not do) to fix the non-rent-related problems, two of which were "Stop doing unlicensed bottle service" and "No sparklers indoors".
The next meeting is the second week in July. I've already put it on my calendar.
Oh my god oh my god
I knew the one deranged person defending the restaurant's activities had to be known to the owner and they are.
We (people on the first call, and discussing it after) started to refer to them as Caller 17 because that was the number the virtual meeting assigned their account. Turns out Caller 17 is a part-owner in the business, a relative of the owner, and famous in Chicago. I can't really say more while respecting the city's policies around not reporting on these meetings but they're an incredibly well-known person in the entertainment space in Chicago and politically connected, which I assume is why we're in endless Community Meetings instead of the restaurant just having its papers pulled.
The community meeting was wild. The person from the BACP is not great at time management; it took an hour just to get through "did you fix this shit." (They now use LED sparklers, for those of you concerned about fire hazards, but illegal bottle service is ongoing as a "drinks package" where you order a bottle's worth of drinks at once.) The meeting was supposed to be an hour; it ran two and a quarter. I was shocked the owner or his lawyer didn't protest. Towards the end, the alderman on the call had to go to a city council meeting but stayed on the line and accidentally unmuted himself, and we got to hear about thirty seconds of a city council roll call before he muted it again.
At the start of the call I was disconcerted to find that while I tried to go to the CAPS meeting yesterday and nobody showed, it's clear from the call today that it did happen and the situation did get discussed. Presumably they just changed location, but I can't find a time or location for that specific beat meeting on any of the municipal calendars, including the Ward calendar, the CPD calendar, or the City calendar, so I'm still very confused.
A lot of the problem in the call today is that the owner kept asserting certain rights per his permits and plan -- what the tabletop RPG community would call Rules Lawyering. He's been asked to close at 10pm (so that the loud music will stop), but he's licensed to be open until 2am, so why can't he host private events from 10 to 2, that sort of thing. Which...I mean he's not wrong. It is unfair to make him close if he has the legal right to be open and the BACP could request that he just keep the music down. But he's going to get his permits yanked and lose those rights if he keeps pissing off the community. (OR SO I THOUGHT before I found out who Caller 17 was. Now I have no idea.) And a new problem is that people are parking in a privately-owned lot nearby and then afterpartying there past 2am. The police can't do a ton because it's not "drinking on the public way", they're on private property, and the BACP hasn't been able to make the lot's owner do anything about it. It sounds like they haven't been able to reach the lot's owner, to be honest.
One of the major complaints the community has had is that it's technically a restaurant but it's realistically operating as a nightclub; Caller 17 actually called it a club during this meeting, and some of the angrier community members jumped on that during the Airing of Grievances, saying "Look, even this person involved with the restaurant is calling it a club, and it's not licensed to be a club and we also don't want a nightclub in the middle of our neighborhood." There was much frustrated amusement when Caller 17 eventually responded that they don't go to nightclubs and they were referring to it as a club because they consider it a supper club.
I feel for the people who are genuinely suffering from this misbehavior, like there are people who just leave their homes on the weekends because the music at night is so loud it shakes their building. This process is likely going to drag on for a while and that's really rough for them. But at the same time, it's such a fascinating spectacle.
I may miss the next meeting -- while Hodag has also been attending the meetings, we'll be together and on the road at that point, and neither of us like distractions while we're driving. But I've looped Friend A into the madness now so possibly she can take notes.
Supper club. Wild.
Scupper Club
