When your downstairs neighbor is a Chicago restaurant, there’s noise, wafting smells and ‘sweet, shared-building stuff’

Mariel “Mayo” Heinemann and Diana Murphy lived together above the kinetic Argentine steakhouse Folklore for almost a decade, starting in 2009. Throughout those nine-ish years, the music on rotation at the Wicker Park restaurant didn’t change as much as one might expect.

“It was, like, the same soundtrack,” says Heinemann, whose bedroom was directly above the bar. “Then we’d be out in public and one of the songs would come on, and Diana or my (now-husband) would be like, ‘That’s the song that’s always playing downstairs!’ I wouldn’t be able to tell you what song it was, but I’d know that beat anywhere.”

Urban dwelling comes with an unspoken pact that sensory intrusions will inevitably punctuate your life. Car alarms and the screeching, rumbling “L” pierce the air at all hours; neon signs rudely blink into apartment windows; rows of dumpsters assault passersby in the thick August heat, while sudden changes in the wind’s direction may bring friendlier wafts from the Blommer Chocolate Co. building.

If you’ve ever lived above a restaurant, these encroachments may even take on rhythms by which to set your days and nights.

Like clockwork, aromas of sizzling garlic wafted into Heinemann and Murphy’s apartment every afternoon at 4. When Danny Meloy and Dan Weyl lived above the Thai restaurant Me Dee Cafe in Ravenswood, they didn’t need a clock to know it was 1:15 a.m., because that was when kitchen staff would drag the metal garbage bin down the sidewalk to the alley dumpster. During summer, Tim Tierney falls asleep to the din of mellow chatter drifting into his open window from the back patio at fine-dining restaurant Smyth, below. Even Heinemann somehow drifted off to Folklore’s familiar, thumping beats.

At the bygone Lakeview Chicago’s Pizza location on Sheffield, the huge ventilation fans that kicked on late at night were anything but soothing to upstairs neighbor Nicole Prate. “The fans would make my bedroom wall vibrate, and it drove me so crazy that I usually slept on the couch,” said Prate, who lived there during college. Occasionally, she’d pad downstairs at 2 or 3 a.m., cursing the whole way, and ask the staff to shut them off, recalls her then-roommate Robert Lorsbach with a laugh. “They’d oblige and send her up with free pizza.”

Auditory assaults notwithstanding, Lorsbach and Prate look back affectionately on the two-ish years they lived in the slanted attic apartment above the 5 a.m. pizzeria — mostly because they never had to have food in the fridge when they threw parties into the wee hours.

In fact, fondness was a common theme among the more than half-dozen Chicagoans I interviewed who’ve lived above restaurants. It was a landmark, as in, “Look for the brown-and-white awning!” It was the downstairs neighbor whose lights reassuringly always stayed on. For some, it was “our place” or “the basement.”

“It became sort of a ‘Cheers’-like situation,” says Bill Kenealy, who lived above O’Shaughnessy’s Public House in Ravenswood for almost two years — part of that with now-wife Erica Olson.

While the daily cadence didn’t often reach their corner apartment a few stories up, “the basement,” as they called it, beckoned as an especially convenient third place on the way out or coming home. Olson even developed specific sign language with a bartender, which she deployed when the bar was crowded. Two taps on her chest indicated the usual: a Bell’s Two Hearted ale.

Proximity factored heavily, of course. Every time Weyl and Meloy went on their back porch, they’d get a whiff of fried rice and Weyl’s beloved crab rangoon — “I can smell it now,” he says wistfully — which contributed to their oft-multiple orders a week.

For Lorsbach and Prate, the aroma of pizza baking never got old. Same goes for Danielle Norris, who lived above Saba Italian Kitchen & Bar in Logan Square for four years.

“You’re coming home, the day’s over, you’re walking up the stairs, and you smell (expletive) pizza crust baking,” Norris says. “And you’re like, you know what? I think I will get a pizza!”

How might one calculate the effect of having a restaurant downstairs? Perhaps by the 10 pounds Lorsbach estimates he gained during those two years, or Kenealy’s countless missed gym visits when O’Shaughnessy’s open front door made a much stronger case on the way home from work. Me Dee is the only restaurant to have ever broached Weyl’s phone contact list; it’s also one of only three businesses Meloy ever felt compelled to review on Yelp in 2014 — earning five stars.

Heinemann and Murphy rarely ate at Folklore because it was the “basement,” Murphy says, “We’d see it every day, you know?” (Jason Vincent, chef/owner of acclaimed Logan Square restaurant Giant, once told me the previous upstairs tenants didn’t eat at his restaurant once, though he never found out why.) But Folklore owner Sergio DiSapio was known to send the women to sibling restaurants Barra Ñ or Tango Sur for a free meal if they had to wait a few days to get something fixed in the apartment. Staff also helped them haul furniture deliveries upstairs and dig out their cars after a snowstorm.

More importantly, they rarely felt unsafe coming home, since there was always someone at the restaurant until 3 or 4 a.m.

Tierney echoes that when he and his wife Shannon lived above the Ogden sports bar near the United Center, both felt safer coming home to a “lively bar” downstairs. He likewise feels comfort and familiarity when he waves at “the doorman” — a joking reference to Smyth’s general manager Christopher Gerber — on his way upstairs.

He points me to a now-deleted Twitter thread in which writer and comedian Vanessa Guerrero argues that a new taco stand “improved the morale and safety” of her Los Angeles neighborhood far better than the ubiquitous police helicopters circling above. “Street food vendors on a block means more pedestrian foot traffic round the clock,” Guerrero wrote. “If they’re open late, that’s more eyes in a neighborhood.”

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It’s a nod to “eyes on the street,” a phrase coined by the late New York author and journalist Jane Jacobs to describe the crucial importance of a vibrant street life to neighborhood safety and community in cities. Indeed, Lorsbach remembers yelling down at a carjacker he saw punching through a car window from his balcony, which prompted the restaurant staff to do the same, eventually chasing him away. When someone smashed the back windshield of Norris’ car in the parking lot behind Saba while she was gone, the chef threw a tarp over it. Each week, she’d drop off open wine samples for staff from her own work as a sales rep. “Just sweet, shared-building stuff,” she said.

In other words, when a restaurant’s your neighbor, someone’s always looking out for you, whether overtly or incidentally. Someone’s pouring your usual, sending you to sleep with a bustling soundtrack, or simply offering a comforting anchor in a sprawling, occasionally overwhelming metropolis.

“There was a consistency and comfort to our neighborhood, our corner, our alleyway, our porch,” Meloy says. “Me Dee was a huge part of that.”

It might even be enough to make you miss them on Mondays or major holidays, or whenever the place went quiet and dark for a time. “It was interesting when there was finally silence,” Heinemann says, admitting she loved hearing the bustle downstairs.

“I wouldn’t say I loved it,” Murphy quips. “But I never felt alone.”

Maggie Hennessy is a freelance writer.

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