• Michael Gebert
  • Kevin Hickey at the Duck Inn in Bridgeport

The Duck Inn, a tavern and restaurant in Bridgeport that opened last week, is the latest place from Rockit Ranch, the restaurant and bar group led by TV personality and symbol-of-the-party-lifestyle Billy Dec. The Duck Inn is also the culmination of some lifelong dreams and ambitions for chef Kevin Hickey: owning a restaurant on the very street where he grew up in Bridgeport, named for a place his great-grandmother owned during the Depression, that’s rooted in his family’s history in one of Chicago’s most insular enclaves, the ancient power base of our Irish rulers. I met with Hickey, the former Michelin-starred chef who spent almost 20 years with the company that owns the Four Seasons Hotels in places all around the world, to find out more about how his desire to return to his roots was accomplished through what seems like unlikely partners. And tomorrow, he and I will talk about that.

My great-grandfather, James Hickey, in the Depression, he was the third generation in the family business. They had a trucking and car business that had sort of become a funeral business. And he died, and he was pretty young, and they had seven kids. So when he died my great-grandmother Grace lost the business—she couldn’t run it because she didn’t have the license. So she sold it and the only thing she knew how to do was cook. So they owned property at 35th and Ashland, and she opened a bus stop diner and called it the Duck Inn.

It was always some reference to the family name which was Gembara. So it was Gembara’s Lounge, then it became Herman’s, and at some point it morphed into the Gem-Bar. That was after me, in the last 15 years. But it was always owned by that family, going back to 1916 or 1918. They opened pre-Prohibition, because there’s a trap door behind the bar. The owner, his name wasn’t Herman, it was Eugene, but they called him Herman the German because he killed a lot of Germans in the war or something.

It was very industrial. We had a wrecking company across the street, we had Holsum Bread at the end of the street, we had semis going up and down the street all day and night. It was rough. It was more like an alley or a throughway for trucks up until the Depression, when the WPA put in gravel to make it a shortcut to . . . there used to be a massive coal pile, probably five or six stories high, on the river. My grandfather used to have the job at one point of just shoveling coal with a wheelbarrow there, all day long.

And you’ve got Chinatown right next to us, Greektown, Little Italy—all that had a big effect on me growing up as far as how I cook and the flavors I look for. I’ve been classified as modern American, new American, which is great because to me, what American is about these days is Chinese, Greek, Italian—all those things I grew up with.

You know, I made a movie about the last Lithuanian restaurant, Healthy Foods, when it was closing . . .