By James Banakis
August 22nd, 2025
I’ve always been a city boy. I got together with a group of friends recently and the conversation settled into the early 1970’s. We wistfully talked of dating and the restaurants and clubs we frequented. Jobs we held. We didn’t know each other then, yet we all had similar coming of age experiences, and frequented the same places.
During those years, I was going to school and working the weekend 11PM – 7AM shift at my uncle’s restaurant, Mitchell’s at State and Division. Truth be told, it was there, hosting and working the register that my love affair with the city really took hold. If I ever finish my memoir, Mitchell’s will for sure occupy a chapter. You’ll need to buy my book to read about the colorful details beginning with the most popular hangover cure, 16oz. hanging over the plate skirt steak and eggs breakfast.
Mitchell’s was a stopping off point for politicians, minor celebrities, Gold Coast matrons, mobsters, Division Street bar hoppers, hookers, and any other local character strait out a Mike Royko piece in the still mourned by me, Chicago Daily News. Each of the characters I interacted with became part of the tapestry of my life. During the 30 years span beginning in late 1970’s, the restaurant business became my focus and passion.
To understand food and its evolution you must constantly travel and discover what the world has to offer. So, I willingly traveled searching for the most perfect meal. I found plenty. The other thing I found was that the United States had 3 bright shining stars.
Like Orion’s Belt from east to west, those three stars shined brighter than all the others in the national constellation. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles formed the axis of not only hospitality and commerce, but of every other essential national enterprise.
All of us who live in and around a city contribute to its growth and character. Our great cities provide something for everyone.
New York is that part of a reoccurring dream where I find myself somewhere that feels familiar yet unfamiliar at the same time. It always only takes me about 15 minutes of entering Manhattan to feel like a native.
Even though many of us are generations removed for our descendants arriving at Ellis Island, our subconscious memory reminds us that this town was our first home away from home. That welcoming place that first gave our ancestors shelter. It was their culture shock to becoming American.
During the years I traveled there, it was the safest big city in the country. That was because of brilliant policing which targeted minor offenses to prevent more serious crimes. It worked, and it drove liberals to distraction.
New York always has been the nerve center of the country. Foodwise it’s the international outlet mall of cuisines. It’s the home of America’s most talented, inventive, and more often than not, egoistical chefs.
Chicago, my hometown has always been the heart of the nation, not just location wise, but emotionally. Located at the faucet of the largest freshwater depository in the world. It’s the agricultural capital of the country with the richest farmland in the world surrounding it and nurturing it like an overly protective grandparent.
If you were able to start from scratch, and locate a great city in North America, the logical choice would be where Chicago is located. Since the beginning of the 20th century, it’s been the crossroads of the country.
Nelson Algren famously wrote, “Loving Chicago is like loving a woman with a broken nose. She may not be beautiful, but she’s real.” To me she has always been flat-out beautiful, especially at dusk returning to the city over the lake on your approach to O’Hare.
Returning there always felt like going back home as a kid after the streetlights come on. Everyone was glad to see you. The city has always been a welcoming stopover for visitors.
I will always feel fortunate that I was involved in so many aspects of the growth of the city’s restaurant ethos.
Los Angeles has always represented the most persistent American yearning, the search for Emeral City. The land over the rainbow, of endless summer, affluence, convertibles, beautiful tan girls, and Hollywood. It was the place where we all wanted to go to even if we had to settle for the shore of Lake Michigan on Hollywood Ave. beach.
To me it has always been all that along with the goofy creativity that developed fusion restaurants, agrarian chefs with purple hair, and self-absorbed people giving themselves countless awards. Liberal yes, but in a once harmless way that anchored the other end of the American universe.
Creating wealth, Botox, soy and kale diets, and entertainment in a city of dreams. Now I realize that these observations are my own and not universal, yet even if you’re not a fan of cities most of us want them to remain dynamic centers of commerce, innovation, and individual freedom.
What happened? Presently these 3 shining stars are on their way to becoming dystopian nightmarish burned-out wastelands.
It began with the Obama administration scolding and degrading half the country as systemic racists. He ushered in and blessed the faith of wokeness. He was the first to identify the police as responsible for all the unfairness in his perceived cosmos. He insisted on DEI hiring and recruitment, pitting one group against another while relegating white males to insignificance.
What could go wrong? Everything.
Business and corporate leaders cowered self-flagellating themselves. The George Floyd riots, defunding police, and the pandemic created a perfect storm, flushing down the toilet years of freedom and progress.
It’s not a coincidence that the 3 major urban centers in America all are in very blue states run by clueless socialist governors who defy their oaths of office and defy federal law and shelter criminals.
They use finite state resources to coddle criminals and illegal immigrants. They pass out EBT cards like they’re free samples at Costco. They don’t even attempt to balance the state budget. Taxing everything they can, while championing legalizing drugs, reducing and defunding police, and releasing dangerous criminals.
Then after leaving their state in financial ruin, they run for president without the least bit of shame. These cities are led by Marxist mayors who don’t give a damn about the safety and economic well-being of the citizens they were elected to protect.
Mayors who blame all their problems on capitalism, racism, police and the business community. They all champion state run businesses and taxing and punishing the successful.
They work in tandem with Soros sponsored prosecutors who are committed to emptying the jails and prisons. Their legal systems are populated by feckless judges who are controlled by a mindless, dangerous ideology of ignoring the victims and championing the criminals.
Now we’re on the brink of a communist takeover of what has always been known as the financial and capitalistic capital of the world. Zohran Mamdani, a 33-year-old is set to become the mayor of New York.
Mamdani a Uganda-born Muslim labels himself a socialist, but he is in fact an outright communist. He intends to eliminate ALL police and replace them with social workers.
He plans to make all public transportation free and run government owned grocery stores and pharmacies.
He vows to redistribute the wealth. He plans to eliminate the nuclear family, and private property.
There’s much more, the piece de resistance, he’s belligerently antisemitic and that’s just for starters.
Despite all of this we have Washington elites like George Will who say he’s rooting for Mamdani’s election because it will remind us all how bad communism really is. This is exactly the type of dreamy above the fray mentality that got us into this mess. We all need to wake-up from our apathetic stupor and protect our metropolitan inheritance.
The Biden/Obama debacle of open boarders was the final cataclysm to these 3 cities, turning all financial resources to billion-dollar deficits. Remember Brandon Johnson and Karen Bass cannot print money. Not yet at least.
We know all this can be fixed. It’s a matter of will, not George Will.
Never again should we accept leaders who see themselves as victims. Leaders take responsibility and fix the problems.
We only need enlightened managers instead of unabashed Marxists. Brandon Johnson, a guy who didn’t pay his personal utility bills, claims, “Chicago finances have reached the point of no return.” How pathetic and shameful for any leader of a great metropolis. What a loser.
Our cities are resilient. Chicago rebuilt from the ground up in 1871. Los Angeles is facing similar fire cataclysms. New York rallied after 9/11. Rudy Giuliani and even Old Richard J. were never perfect, but they knew how to lead and run cities.
First, they made them safe with enlightened policing.
Second, they always protected business, commerce, and transportation.
Third, they understood the importance of a tough judicial system that protected the citizens not the criminals.
Lastly, and most important, hire the best and the brightest. It’s always been true in business and it’s true in the administration of any endeavor.
Since antiquity cities have survived if they were safe, vibrant, authentic, resilient, and sustainable. Cities like all of us must keep reinventing themselves or they become irrelevant.
They are the anchors of distribution for all interstate commerce. They are laboratories of innovation. Cities must endure, or we go down with them.
Recently I was flying home to Chicago, and for the first time ever, I couldn’t shake a feeling of dread I felt approaching Ohare from the lake on a beautiful evening.
The once incomparable Ohare airport has become third world. The city is rudderless. The infrastructure is crumbling.
Living with this type of leadership in our major cities is like waking up from a disturbing nightmare. I remember in the past always feeling my heartstrings tug as I knew I was coming home to a safe, exciting destination that for me held limitless opportunities. It was a city we all in our own individual ways have helped to build and make better.
For those of us from Chicago it was always where we loved to return. I want my grandchildren to always feel the same way. I want them to inherit a place to grow and pursue their dreams.
I want them to appreciate all our major urban centers as part of the American fabric. I want them to be safe and cheered to be back among Chicagoans, where a common bond exists.
It’s more apparent when you travel and return. Traveling is thrilling but being able to return to a place you love is a blessing.
When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.
– Hugh Newell Jacobsen
-30-
Jimmy Banakis is a life-long restaurateur. He was an honorary batboy for the White Sox in 1964. He attended Oak Park River Forest High School, Nebraska Wesleyan University, and Chicago-Kent Law School. He claims the kitchen is the room he’s most comfortable in anywhere in the world. He published an extremely limited-edition family cookbook. He’s a father and grandfather, and lives in Downers Grove Il.
The post The Tale of Three Cities appeared first on John Kass.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: johnkass
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://johnkassnews.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.