A couple years after Joel and Julie Nickson opened the Southern-inflected Wishbone restaurant at 1800 W. Grand Ave. in 1990, Bill Grant came in for the first time on a friend’s suggestion and ordered the Cajun-style shrimp with cheesy grits.
He’s been ordering them for breakfast ever since, usually twice a month.
“I’ve had shrimp and grits at 100 places across America, and these are still the absolute best to me,” said Grant.
On a muggy, gray Thursday morning, he sat across from his sister, Jacqui Grant, herself a Wishbone regular since 1998, as he tucked into this creamy, gently spicy bowl of comfort for one of the last times. On Aug. 3 this West Loop fixture for Southern cooking and warm hospitality announced that it’s closing for good at the end of August. No new tenant has been announced yet.
“By the way, I’m going to need that recipe,” Grant told Joel Nickson with a laugh.
Since last week’s announcement, Joel, the chef and longtime friendly face of this relaxed brunch spot, has felt a little like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn might have while watching their own funeral service.
“It’s been kind of overwhelming with people coming by and kids you used to get high chairs for are grown up bringing their kids,” Joel Nickson said. “Honestly, it tears me up a little, all the people coming in and writing messages. I’ve only made it through half the posts on Instagram and Facebook. It’s bittersweet.”
The Nicksons opened their restaurant 36 years ago in July on a shoestring budget. Over the years, they added dinner and lunch and expanded to Roscoe Village and Berwyn (both since closed). They moved locations a handful of times — notably to 1001 W. Washington Blvd., near Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, where it operated for 26 years and became a linchpin in a neighborhood going from gritty to gourmet. Then it moved to its current location at 161 N. Jefferson St., which the Nicksons have leased since 2018.
The constant throughout has been customers and staff, many of whom have tenures here exceeding two decades. Even now that the West Loop has become a dining destination, there’s no place quite like this one, they say.
“It’s like there’s going to be a hole,” said Ken Koehn, who has been coming to Wishbone since he moved to the West Loop in 2003. “The minute I moved into the neighborhood, it’s always been here. It’s going to feel very strange.”
Koehn playfully credits his godmother with persuading him to buy his condo once she glimpsed the Wishbone sign from the balcony. He soon became a regular after work.
“I didn’t feel like cooking dinner, so I’d walk the three extra blocks and sit at the counter. After a while, you get to know all the staff. Joel was always there, and he’d always send out dessert for me. If they had split pea soup, the manager would text me that day and let me know. It just became such a welcoming place, like a family.”
That morning, he was in with a couple of co-workers for another favorite: the cornflake-coated crunchy French toast drizzled with maple syrup.
Wishbone has endured a lot of changes since the early days when the beat cops called it a “yuppie place” and Joel couldn’t give the shrimp and grits away. When it moved to Washington, it benefited from “the Oprah factor,” drawing celebrities and athletes alike thanks to the TV star’s frequent endorsements and its proximity to her studio.
“Oprah was a godsend,” Joel recalled. “Everybody thought she owned [Wishbone]. We’d get all the guests and celebrities coming in. We had a lot of good times.”
There was fame of the salacious ilk as well, as Wishbone was uncovered among the restaurants where city officials purportedly accepted bribes in the 1990s. The restaurant’s name became part of a corruption scandal uncovered in the dramatic FBI probe known as Operation Silver Shovel.
“I think the line was, ‘At Wishbone nobody noticed a bad suit, and it was noisy,’” Joel recalled of the coverage. “We definitely had a variety here, the cops and the robbers.”
They mostly came for the comforting, scratch-made food — red eggs soused in ancho chile sauce with black beans and corn tortillas; blackened catfish, collard greens cooked down with smoked turkey wings; and gently sweet, corn-studded muffins made by 30-year kitchen vet Oswaldo. They’d take it to go or stay and eat beneath the bright, surrealist paintings of chickens and barnyard scenes by Lia Nickson, Joel’s mother.
“Just this week I said I’m gonna get something different, and I still never have,” said Adrienne Banks, a regular who works at the Chicago Transit Authority next door. She, along with co-workers Nancy Sanchez and Tresa Mann had stopped by for their usual two-eggs breakfast special, which they order for carryout at least once a week. “We were sad to hear it was closing, so we’re just going to keep coming,” Banks added.
“It’s where we eat; It’s the only place we eat!” added Sanchez. “It’s affordable; you get more than what you pay for. It’s not just a meal. It’s the customer service, the smiles, looking forward to seeing people we know. They make you feel like family.”
In recent years, Wishbone has struggled to adapt to changes in Downtown traffic, as fewer people commute to offices for work and folks don’t go out for weekday meals as often. Since COVID, breakfast and lunch never fully recovered. It doesn’t help that competitors now crowd the streets around Wishbone, a far cry from the early days.
“Fridays used to be our busiest day; now they’re our slowest,” Joel said.
The Nicksons first talked about closing the restaurant about a year ago, when they stopped serving dinner but hung on mainly for the staff. The week before posting the announcement on social media, Joel gathered the 30-plus staff together and told them.
“That was the hard part,” Joel said. Now, the Nicksons are focused on getting as many as possible placed in new jobs. A handful have already taken positions at Sweet Maple Cafe on Taylor Street.
“It’s so sad!” said Omar Alonso, a server who’s worked at Wishbone for 25 years. “It really is like a family.”
“A dysfunctional family,” Joel piped up.
“They all like that, you know?” laughed fellow server Rigo Roberto, who started at Wishbone 26 years ago. “We’ve had our moments.”
Joel, meanwhile, mentioned for the second time that he was behind on his buttermilk pies. They’re Lia’s recipe, though he likes to sub in graham cracker crust. Yet every time he’d make his way back toward the kitchen, another customer would call his name from their table or wrap him into a hug.
“How are you? I can’t believe it!” one said, tearing up as he embraced Nickson.
“They love you when you’re leaving, you know?” Joel said with a wry laugh.
“Except we keep coming!” Jacqui Grant said between bites of buttermilk-brined Southern catfish with crunchy cornmeal crust. Unlike her “creature of habit” brother Bill, Jacqui was eating her way through her all-time Wishbone favorites: On Monday, the day of the announcement, she’d ordered Cajun shrimp and grits. She planned to have the red eggs that Sunday at brunch with her niece, who’d seen the announcement on Instagram and insisted they come.
“Anyway, it’s not a funeral; it’s a celebration,” she said, turning to Joel. “Thirty-six years is amazing.”