In its more than eight decades on the Near West Side, the Palace Grill has seen its share of history — from hosting then-Vice President Al Gore and Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin in 1997 to surviving the riots after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
On Friday, owner George Lemperis said the popular restaurant near the United Center would survive the fire that caused extensive damage the night before.
“They rebuilt the World Trade Center. I can certainly rebuild this,” Lemperis told reporters Friday outside the restaurant at 1408 W. Madison St. “But it’s not good. Eighty-six years, we were here.”
The Chicago Fire Department initially said the cause of the fire Thursday night appeared to be a grease fire that began in the kitchen at about 10 p.m. — hours after employees left for the day.
But on Friday investigators were less sure of the cause.
“The problem with a grease fire [theory] is that the restaurant closed at 2 p.m.,” fire department spokesperson Larry Langford said. “For a restaurant burning with no one in it, that’s kinda hard” to believe.
Investigators were gathering surveillance video from inside and outside the restaurant to rule out possible causes, he said.
Some have speculated that it could have been caused by a lightning strike, Langford said.
Though firefighters extinguished the flames quickly, Langford said, there was still extensive damage to the kitchen.
Most of the dining room was spared, Lemperis said.
He was unsure of the total amount of damage.
‘Oh my God.’ I never would have expected this.’
The restaurant opened in 1938 as De Mar’s Grill and has been in the Lemperis family since 1955. George and his father Peter, who died in 1992, took over in 1979.
During the riots of 1968, when much of the West Side went up in flames, Lemperis said his two uncles protected the restaurant.
“There were two Molotov cocktails thrown on the roof that they put out,” he said. “The whole neighborhood was on fire. They stayed here for six days, feeding the firefighters and the police.”
Lemperis said he was in bed Thursday night when he got a call about the fire from the mayor’s chief of staff, Richard Guidice. Guidice used to lead the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications, headquarters across the street from the restaurant.
Lemperis said he wasn’t expecting the damage to be so bad.
“Kind of silly of me. I thought I’d come here, a little fire here, I’ll clean things up and maybe we’ll open tomorrow. Until I got here. There were dozens of fire apparatuses all over. I looked and said, ‘Oh my God.’ I never would have expected this. What are you going to do?”
The restaurant was a favorite of police officers and firefighters. It is a block from the police academy and five blocks from the United Center.
“I’ve got the greatest customers in the world,” Lemperis said.
‘Because of the memories’
The walls of the restaurant were covered with sports memorabilia he had collected over the years.
“People say ‘Where did you get these pictures?’ I get them from all the people. They come here and eat. They’re my friends,” he said.
After this fire, he moved the memorabilia to storage.
“I don’t know if it was the right thing to do, but I don’t want to leave it here. My jerseys are worth thousands of dollars,” he said.
His sister, Lynn Lemperis, said she was upset “because of the memories. So many family memories are linked to this place.”
She remembers when the neighborhood around the restaurant was a less desirable place to visit. The area was seriously damaged during the 1968 riots, and that didn’t improve until the beautification efforts on Madison Street by then-Mayor Richard M. Daley for the 1996 Democratic National Convention at the United Center.
“There were still a lot of burned-out buildings along Madison,” she said. “The roads, everything was cleaned up. ... Prior to that, in the ’80’s, my father did not want me down here. It wasn’t a great area.”
She was surprised when Oprah Winfrey built her studio down the street. An autographed photo of Winfrey dining at the counter later hung on the restaurant wall.
With the 2024 Democratic National Convention scheduled to take over the United Center again in August, George Lemperis was looking forward to a bump in business. But now it’s unclear if he’ll be able to reopen by then.
“The timing is very bad for the convention,” he said. “I was expecting to be very, very busy for the convention.”
Retired police officer Debbie Woldeit, who regularly ate at the restaurant, visited Friday and asked Lemperis if there was any way she could help.
“He’s so good to the police, the community and, of course, the Blackhawks. It’s a very sad situation,” she said. “I think a fire is one of the worst things people go through. Especially when you lose so much.”
