Madame ZuZu’s will host a lighting ceremony to unveil the restoration of the iconic Orange Garden neon chop suey sign at its new home Dec. 17.
Billy Corgan originally opened Madame ZuZu’s, a plant-based tea cafe in Highland Park, in 2012 with personal and professional partner Chloé Mendel. Corgan is best known as the lead singer of The Smashing Pumpkins. The Pumpkins are an alternative rock band he cofounded in Chicago in 1988.
Mendel bought the sign for $17,000 at auction in April as a surprise birthday present for Corgan.
“When I lived on Irving Park Road, during the early halcyon days of the Pumpkins circa 1988, I walked past this iconic sign 1,000 times,” he told the Tribune in the spring. “And I would always take a moment to stop and admire its beauty and connection to a lost and gilded age.”
The sign hung over Orange Garden, the oldest Chinese restaurant in the city, in the North Center neighborhood. The restaurant’s history is disputed, but it’s believed to have been open since at least 1927, according to Matt Rutherford, Newberry Library curator of genealogy and local history.
It also remains unclear when the iconic sign was installed over the sidewalk out front. The curvaceous sign once read on three lines: “Orange Garden. Chop Suey. Chow Mein.”
In 2008, the Chinese restaurant’s current owner, Hui Ruan, took over from his brother, with help from his son and daughter. Two years later, they began requesting estimates to fix the famous sign from Flashtric, the company that made it. Some of the neon worked, some didn’t, and it was falling apart over the sidewalk.
“We were trying to see how we could refurbish it to keep its original aesthetic,” said Angela Demir, current owner of Flashtric. The last proposal in 2013, to fix falling rust and to get the neon back to fully working order, was for $4,100.
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The restored sign, shown as an illustration with the neon flickering and fully functional on social media, now reads on three lines, “Madame Zuzus. Chop Suey. Chow Mein.”
The lighting ceremony event is sold out, but you can join the waitlist linked at Madame ZuZu’s site.
Tickets for the event are $25 each and include a can of a limited beer by Hop Butcher For The World called ZuZu’s Winter Garden, made with tropical spiced clementine tea by Rare Tea Cellar; or a nonalcoholic special edition Winter Garden Tea.
Bowmanville, a swing band based in Chicago, will provide live music.
1876 First St., Highland Park; 847-926-7359; madamezuzus.com
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