At Berwyn’s Czech Plaza, when someone orders dumplings with the breaded pork tenderloin, the waitresses don’t bat an eye. “We’re like, ‘Sure, of course!’” says Zdenka Manetti. “But that is absolutely not the way you eat it.”
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Zdenka was four years old when the family fled Czechoslovakia, seven months after the Soviets tanks rolled over it in 1968. After another half a year in an Austrian refugee camp, they joined a distant great-aunt they’d never met before, who sponsored their immigration here. Zdenka grew up among the Mexican kids whose parents were beginning to settle in Berwyn in greater numbers, and who taught her Spanish words before she’d even picked up Czech.
She says the restaurant was serving this peculiar Czech-Ameri-Chinese mutation long before her parents bought it in 1989, and prior to that her Aunt Dorothy was cooking up the mix of pork, mushrooms, bean sprouts, water chestnuts, red peppers, and other vegetables in a thick brown goulashlike gravy at home.
A good number of Czech Plaza’s oldest, most loyal, and regular customers have passed away in the 21 years the Drozdas have owned the place. “A lot of our customers are seniors,” says Zdenka. “But not as much now as it used to be.” Their children who’ve left Berwyn might come in for lunch if they’re back in the neighborhood for a doctor’s appointment or a funeral party like the one that took up a 12-top in the second dining room on a recent Monday afternoon. But the previous Saturday night there was a lively crowd lingering over plentiful dumplings and plates like veal heart or rabbit in sour cream gravy. At around 7:30, a half hour before closing, an older gent finished his roasted lamb shank with barley dressing, picked up his cane, and passed out dollar bills to a few children on his way out the door, heralding a gradual exodus as the remaining adults took their last swigs of Pilsner Urquel.
