The Diner That Was Here First

You're standing on West Jackson Boulevard in the Loop, a short walk from Union Station, outside Lou Mitchell's. Look up at the front of the building. Running the whole length of the upper facade is a neon sign, the original from 1949, and it makes a modest little promise: Serving the World's Best Coffee. Hold onto that sign. It's the last thing a lot of people saw before Chicago fell away behind them.

Route 66 began a few blocks east of here, near the lake. Generations of travelers stopped at Lou Mitchell's for one more proper breakfast before the long drive southwest, and the diner earned a nickname it still wears: the first stop on the Mother Road.

But here's the thing most people get backwards. Lou Mitchell's didn't open because of Route 66. It was already here. When the diner marked its hundredth birthday in 2023, Route 66 was still three years short of its own. The highway wasn't designated until November 11, 1926.

And Route 66 wasn't really built so much as named. The planners wanted the whole route open fast, so they stitched it together mostly from roads that already existed. Illinois had paved nearly all of its stretch by 1924, under the old name Illinois Route 4. That made Illinois the first of the eight states to finish its share, while long stretches out west were still gravel and dirt. Even that road had an older life: the earliest route from Chicago to St. Louis followed a Native American trail, later a stagecoach road. So a diner already serving coffee in the Loop simply woke up one day on the edge of America's most famous highway.

The road made the reputation. The novelist John Steinbeck called it the Mother Road in 1939, and drivers had a darker name for the narrow, dangerous Illinois stretch: Bloody 66. In 1949 the diner moved into the building you're looking at, neon and all. Then the interstates came, and Interstate 55 largely replaced the old road.

When people set out to rescue what was left, they came back here. In May 2002, the nationwide Route 66 restoration program was launched at Lou Mitchell's, and in 2006 the diner joined the National Register of Historic Places.

One more detail for the road. When the TV competition Top Chef came here, the challenge was twenty minutes at the egg station, which the staff call the hull. Some of the best cooks in the country, humbled by breakfast. Get some coffee, and look at that sign one more time before you go.

When you're ready, drive southwest, mostly on I-55, about 38 miles to Old Joliet Prison, a limestone fortress that opened before the Civil War.