By: Heather Higgins (Loyola Student)
The Little Corner Restaurant (5937 N. Broadway) is a small establishment nestled, as the name states, on the corner of Broadway and Thorndale. The wood-paneled interior and brown leather booths create the perfect cozy diner atmosphere. Sitting at the counter of the Little Corner Restaurant and staring into a cup of hot coffee, the walls of time and space begin to break down.
Sitting in a booth, I am reminded of my teenage years camping out in the 24-hour diners of my hometown. There are no obvious signs denoting the restaurant’s location in Chicago, so while in its confines I am back home in North Carolina, or in a random diner on the side of the highway, or in any place I can imagine myself to be.
There is a quality of history in the walls of The Little Corner Restaurant, it allows me to feel nostalgic for an age I didn’t live. American culture is saturated with depictions of the classic American diner. Being born after the
new millennium, I‘ve been steeped in American mythology I will never access. I will never know a time before mobile phones or what it was like to smoke cigarettes indoors. Yet, in the nondescript walls of The Little Corner Restaurant, I can imagine myself to be anyone at any time, without the signs of modernity encroaching on my fantasy.
The Little Corner Restaurant does not have screens. The only visible technology is little speakers tucked in the corners that look like they may have been white at one point but have turned a dark yellow with age. If I had to guess I would say they were installed sometime around the Bush administration. The speakers blast out the radio, which is an amazing touch, they don’t play a Spotify playlist or a Pandora station, but actual real radio.
Sitting for a morning in the Little Corner Restaurant one can observe a wide spectrum of the human experience, from two college students attempting to eat off a hangover and gossip about the night before to a father trying and failing to hush his kids in their excitement over pancakes. If you are a connoisseur in the art of people-watching, a window seat at The Little Corner Restaurant is the prime time.
The menu features all of the classic diner fare, deep dish apple pie smothered in whipped cream, a NY strip steak, french toast, a BLT, and as many pancakes as you can stuff into your mouth are just some of the offerings. And most crucially of all, the coffee is good.
If you are a member of the Edgewater community and you wake up with a craving for the classics it can be hard to beat The Little Corner Restaurant. The quality of the food, much like everything in life, is debatable. Can I say that it is the best pancake I have ever had? No, I cannot. But I will assert that when I wake up late on a Sunday there is nothing I crave more than a heap of carbs served to me by a nice but indifferent waitress on a white plate.
