Shortly before noon
on Tuesday a bicyclist walked into The Red Cup Cafe & Deli, 115 Broadway in
Chesterton, and something about the man made owner Laura Verheaghe wonder.
“You look
familiar,” she told him. “You look like Chicago,” she told him. Then he took
off his helmet. “Holy cow, you are Chicago,” she told him.
As deep-dish,
big-shouldered, Windy-City Chicago as they get.
Turns out, Former
Mayor of Chicago, former Chief of Staff in the Obama White House, former
U.S. Representative Rahm Emanuel was hungry.
Emanuel--on the
first leg of a two-week bike trip around Lake Michigan, having left Chi
earlier Tuesday morning with two friends--had originally been planning to
lunch at Tate’s Place in Portage but as luck would have it the trio overshot
Willowcreek Road. “So they asked a woman on the bike trail about a good
place to eat and she said The Red Cup,” Verheaghe told the Chesterton
Tribune. “Thank you, woman on the bike trail.”
The first order of
business was to order. “He asked me what was good,” sandwich maker Rachel
Becker told the Trib. “I recommended the chicken pesto because it’s
my favorite.”
And that’s what
Emanuel had, followed by cookies and coffee. And then--after Emanuel’s wife,
Amy Merritt Rule, following the bicyclists in a car, joined him at The Red
Cup--he had a slice of pecan pie too, freshly made by Verheaghe. “His wife
told me that pecan pie is his favorite and asked who makes the best in town.
I said I do and then I baked him one. I said I’d bake him a pecan pie to
celebrate his being out of a job. Rahm Emanuel ate my pecan pie. How cool is
that?”
Emanuel, in no
hurry to leave either, spent the better part of two hours at the cafe. “He
was very nice,” Verheaghe said. “He took a lot of photos with my staff. And
he’s really funny too. I complimented him on his retirement. ‘More like a
divorce from my constituents,’ is the way he put it. And he liked my Sex
Pistols tee-shirt.”
Even so, Verheaghe
said, “Had I known he was coming, I would have washed my hair. And maybe not
worn my Sex Pistols tee-shirt.”
One customer
surprised to be hobnobbing with the former Mayor of Chicago was CHS
sophomore Kate Nevers, who was studying for finals at The Red Cup and not
goldbricking at all. “He walked up and asked me why I wasn’t in school. I
said it’s finals week and I just finished my final early. ‘What homework are
you doing?’ and I said I was studying physics. ‘Oh, can I help? My daughter
goes to a small school in New Haven, you might have heard of it, it’s called
Yale.’ And I said ‘Oh good!’ Then he went to talk to somebody else. They
were there for a long time and as they were leaving he gave me a fist bump
and wished me good luck. And I said ‘Good luck on your bike ride!’
“I hung out with a
guy who hung out every day with President Obama,” Nevers added. “How cool is
that?”