Happier days: a photo of Wally's from their website

According to the stages of grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross outlined, I am still in the first stage: denial. I know this because when Jason told me that Wally’s Square Root Café had permanently closed, I asked him several times if he was sure and then, in my heart of hearts, decided that he must be wrong. I know this because I hopefully check their still-intact website and have several times dialed their phone number, even though it has clearly been disconnected. I know this because I can’t quite bring myself to walk by its shuttered storefront.

Wally’s was a diner near the Pratt campus in Clinton Hill. It was a little rough around the edges, with mismatched furniture and modern proverbs scrawled all over the walls and a slightly dazed-looking waitstaff and strange aging artifacts, like toy slot machines, sitting around.  But I, for one, found all of this rather charming, and the food was heavenly, making Wally’s one of those neighborhood ace-in-your-pocket places that you keep at the ready for guests or for a lazy Sunday morning. The pesto-laced Green Eggs and Ham was a wonder on a plate, and they could make it vegetarian in the blink of an eye. The potatoes were crisp little nuggets of pure joy. And the Dirty Mac—I can’t even describe it for fear that I might begin to weep. It might have just been a hole in the wall, but it was my hole in the wall.

There is a particular kind of restaurant grief that overtakes me in situations like these—situations in which not just an eating establishment but an entire series of unwritten future experiences are shut down forever. I know that things change and that neighborhoods evolve. I have been guilty of rolling my eyes when Jason speaks with a kind of nostalgia about the liquor stores and fleabag hotels that have all but disappeared from our neighborhood. But I would be lying if I really care about that at the moment. What I really care about is the lemon-ginger sweet tea at Wally’s and how I will never drink it again.

I can think, really, of only one semi-comparable experience: when I heard, long after I had moved far away from Evanston, Illinois, that Joy Yee’s had closed. I’m not exactly proud of this, but I dealt with that event only by allowing myself to stagnate in the first stage of grief. On a trip to Evanston, I studiously avoided that block, needing to believe that as long as I closed my eyes to reality, then the perfect egg rolls were still rolling out of the kitchen, the customers were still slurping noodles out of massive ceramic boats and the Yee-mobile, a rusty little Honda, was still rattling along making deliveries of joy. In fact, I held onto the fantasy until it became a reality. When I checked the website recently…eureka! I found that Joy Yee’s had reopened, and in fact expanded to several new locations in Chicago.

Can I work the same kind of voodoo magic for Wally’s? I’m not sure it will be as easy to avoid the corner of Myrtle and Classon as it was a block in Evanston, several states away. But for the Dirty Mac, I am willing to try. You can keep your Kübler-Ross-ian anger and bargaining and depression and, above all, acceptance. I am holding out hope.