Okay, so there are no Burn’s malts and no tap with a discernible pipe leading to The Rock, BUT…

If you’ve been wary of trying out new restaurants in Elgin, and have so far passed on the Elgin Public House (henceforth, to be known simply as The Pub), do yourself a favor, round up some generous friends (who’ll pay for your beer), get over to Chicago Street, Elgin’s famous entertainment strip consisting of The Mission, the tattoo parlor, the defunct but legendary Third Floor, and now, The Pub. Sit down and order a burger, just a burger–don’t get fancy, what’s the point?

You’ll be rewarded with a thick juicy angus patty–cooked to your specifications, with fresh green lettuce, tomatoes, etc., on a sturdy bun. Elgin’s best thick cut fries fill out the rest of the space in the shiny tin trough–nice touch by the way–in which the burger is served. Do it, and my guess is that you’ll have a new favorite place for burgers.

And if you’ve had fried pickles in the south, the ones at the pub are decidely not sotho style; they aren’t the same. They’re better! And they’ll also kill you faster. I won’t mention the deep-fried desserts on the menu.

Elgin got good food! La Quebrada is the other place to check out–hard to beat for an authentic Mexican experience, especially on mariachi nights…

Well, while we’re talking about food…instead of giving $15,000,000 to a condo developer, how about paying someone to open a decent Chinese restaurant? And places where you can get shawarmas, sushi, Korean barbecue, dim sum…gyros…pizza?

Funny thing is that the city will probably end up doing that anyway. I would have preferred that the order of incentives have been to pay people to open up restaurants first (something we could all immediately benefit from), and then pay the developers if they had to. Once the restaurants and shops were there, hypothetically speaking, the developers would have been likely to demand far less. Maybe, even, they would not have asked for anything.

In any case, the papers, or one of the papers, reported that a restaurant is currently seeking a six figure incentive from the city to open in the downtown. And officials quoted by the paper did not seem like they were rejecting the idea out of hand.

If they build the condos–as they are doing, and the restaurants and shops don’t come as promised, the condo strategy will be seen to have been a failure as far as downtown revitalization goes. It won’t look good for Mayor Schock, et al. at all. So the mayor and the majority of the council have a lot of reasons to do whatever they can to declare victory, even if it means paying restaurants and businesses to open in the downtown.

I think there’s a good chance this will happen. It will be a new phase of incentives–maybe they’ll even have a catchy name for the program, “Restaurant Row Revitalization,” “Elgin EATS!,” “E-Town, EAT Town,” or “Grub on Grove,” etc. :)

There are risks to this approach, of course. The city will need to be equitable–it can’t pick and choose what kind of restaurants it’ll subsidize. I wouldn’t trust it to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all sorts of opportunities for an aggressive litigator. Furthermore, existing restaurants, even if they’re getting along fine, will want their own subsidies.

Nevertheless, a restaurant subsidy program with a reasonable lifetime of, say, 1-3 years would be far cheaper than condo incentives. If you subsidize their rent, for example, and if the average restaurant in downtown Elgin pays $2,000 a month in rent–I don’t know what the actual figure is, but let’s say then that the annual rent is about $24,000. If this brings in twenty restaurants–enough to achieve the appearance of full first-floor occupancy, that’s less than half a million a year in subsidies. By comparison, the city is giving the Water Street developers, by some estimates, roughly $15,000,000. That’s enough to subsidize downtown restaurants and achieve full first-floor occupancy for 30 years!

I would prefer this brand of incentives over any more condo incentives, and I think the mayor can declare victory more quickly this way. If he’s lucky, maybe even his critics will quiet down, thinking that perhaps all their grumbling over developer incentives was really just the sound of their stomachs rumbling for lack of…Korean barbecue, lamb vindaloo, mooshoo pork, or… yes, a juicey angus burger, thick cut fries, and deep fried pickles.

Filed under: citycouncil, downtown, music, politics, restaurants.
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