It was a cold walk cutting through Federal Plaza under Calder’s Flamingo. The bond market closed at 2:00pm and a group of us were heading to The Berghoff. A half a dozen boisterous kids in their mid twenties.
The Stand Up bar at The Berghoff isn’t an official Chicago Board of Trade Bar. There are five or six trader bars in the shadow of the iconic Art Deco building. Occasionally our group liked to venture away from the people we worked with all week. The comfort of a mug of beer, a shot of bourbon and a carving station was perfect for a Friday afternoon in January of 1991.
Back then they didn’t have stools in the bar. The Berghoff had their beers on tap and their bourbon on the bar. They had a Old German guy that worked the sandwich station. A perk that closed at 3:00pm so we had to get over there quickly after the close.
We started at 7:20 in the morning and finished at 2:00 in the afternoon. These hours gave us ample time to get wrecked before the 9-5ers showed up.
Back to the sandwich line at the Berghoff. Bratwurst, carved ham, carved beef, corn beef and the Halibut. On Friday afternoons they offered boiled shrimp with horseradish cocktail sauce.
All of this is gone, but that’s a story for another time.
We had a good group of guys. A mix from all sides of Chicago and a couple transplants from here and there. A couple Jewish guys, a couple Catholic guys, a Protestant, a Redwings fan, a Hawkeye and a Cheesehead.
We grabbed the table between the front door and the carving station. One by one we ordered our sandwiches and grabbed beers from the bar. Our beers were getting low so Neil who was about a year out of graduating from Cal went to get the next round. The bar was eight feet away and not very crowded that late afternoon.
Neil turned from the bar and had three mugs of beer in each hand. He looked like a Munich Oktoberfest girl, but without the boobs and gorgeous blonde locks.
As he walked back to our table he stepped on a mustard pack that had fallen on the floor. In that split second that I can still see in slow motion, mustard squirted from underneath Neil’s shoe.
Mustard sprayed through the air and splattered onto an older gentleman. This man was having a late lunch by himself. Standing near the front door in a tweed overcoat, a tweed sport coat, wool pants and Allen Edmund dress shoes. He had a bratwurst in one hand, a beer in the other and an umbrella on the fold of his elbow. He was sprayed with bright yellow mustard from his knees to his neck. Brown tweed and yellow mustard.
The group of us stood still as Neil put the beers down on our table. This gentleman was standing there with his hands full and couldn’t move. Neil grabbed a stack of napkins from the sandwich line and started cleaning the mustard off the tweed outfit.
But Neil wasn’t removing the mustard, he was smearing it in. He was making it worse and the businessman was starting to tremble.
Our work day was done, but this poor bastard had to go back to his fancy tweed office…. With mustard smeared across his outfit and on his chin.
He asked Neil to stop, put his sandwich and beer down on the bar, grabbed his hat off the rack and stormed to the door. I never saw the man again.
In a matter of 3.5 seconds this poor man went from a happy place to an angry place. All because a group of loud mouthed trading floor guys sprayed him with mustard and laughed at him.
Nothing ever ended well when a group of khaki pants, golf shirts and gym shoe punks ran into the suit and tie crowd.
We ruined that man’s late afternoon lunch, but added to our memories another funny story from the early days of our career.
Every once and awhile I see one of these guys. The second or third subject we mention is the mustard pack at a the Berghoff story.
I’m not sure how that mustard packet ended on the floor. It sounds like a typical CBOT stunt, but on that Friday afternoon we didn’t plan on pranking a banker guy. We just wanted to be twenty four year old kids drinking beers in a famous Chicago bar.
I probably shouldn’t have laughed. That was someone’s dad. Though the only thing I’d change is my lunch order. I would have gotten the halibut instead of the bratwurst.
