Wanda Kurek was six months old when her mother started taking her to work at the bar. That was back in 1924. Her father, Stanley, had quit his job in the pickling division of the meatpacker Wilson & Co. to open his own tavern on the 4100 block of South Ashland. Back then Whiskey Row was lined with saloons servicing the slaughterhouse workers from the stockyards across the street.
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Today you have to look hard at the two-story brick structure to notice there’s a business inside. You might catch a glimpse of a neon beer sign through the dark narrow windows, or see small groups of workers disappearing into the side door in the late morning. There’s no sign outside indicating that this is a place where you can get a cheap draft and a hot, hearty lunch. But every workday you can find truck drivers, managers from Tyson or Edsal Manufacturing, or guys from the bricklayers union bellied up to the bar or squeezed behind tables, powering down Wanda’s daily special—and maybe a cold one. Some of them have been coming for decades.
She wakes at six each morning and reads her Trib and Sun-Times before she starts the day’s cooking, all done on an O’Keefe & Merritt porcelain stove that’s almost 60 years old. She might make baked ham with raisin sauce, or roast pork with dumplings, stuffed cabbage and potato salad, or breaded chicken breast on buttered noodles, or Cornish hens. For six bucks you get a heaping plate with a vegetable or two, but on days when Wanda decides to make prime rib she charges seven. Soups—split pea, oxtail with barley, chicken noodle—run about a buck and a half a bowl. There are Vitner’s potato chips behind the bar, and if you want a root beer it’s Filbert’s, bottled right up the street.
Vanek attributes the bar’s longevity to the force of Wanda’s personality. She knows everyone who comes in and everything that’s going on in the neighborhood. “It’s the world according to Wanda,” he says. “Right is right, wrong is wrong. You’re an asshole? Get out!”
