This restaurant didn’t always serve Pinoy food, but since introducing the expanded menu in 2008, Filipino breakfast has vaulted Uncle Mike’s from an ordinary greasy spoon to a Chicago institution.
a corner in Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, is usually bustling with folks enjoying pancakes, eggs, bacon, and coffee — typical diner fare. But a second glance reveals more: fried silog on atop a bed of garlicky fried rice, plump red loganisa, and juicy bistek tagalog. It’s a Filipino breakfast spread that might seem out of place for a diner in a Chicago neighborhood that’s densely populated with Ukrainian and Polish immigrants.
“That would be a leftover meal for us when we got home from school, so we always had plenty of food,” Lucie Grajewski says. “For me, that’s sort of how it started.”Filipino food and restaurant life was ingrained in Lucie’s DNA when she moved to Chicago to attend Loyola University in 1974. One night, at a party, she met Mike Grajewski, the son of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants and a native of Chicago’s Ukrainian Village.
During this time, Mike worked as a foreman for the Illinois Department of Transportation while Lucie worked at the University of Chicago Hospital as a clinical lab technologist. But on the weekends, Mike Grajewski could regularly be found helping out the elderly owners of a local diner. After it was put up for sale, the two decided to make the jump and buy it — and thus, Uncle Mike’s Place was born.
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