“When you care about something so much that you put your name on it, you’re very protective of what happens and who uses it,” Carly Le Tourneau says. (Another nephew, Stanley, was allowed to continue with his own Chinn’s 34th Street restaurant in Naperville, which lasted 20 years before closing in 2020 due to the pandemic.) Shortly afterward, the developer canceled the deal. He could be ruthless: in 2001, he took his nephew Jimmy to federal court when Jimmy planned to open a new restaurant called Jimmy Chinn’s Crab and Chop House in suburban Lombard. ![]() Servers would scatter when they saw him coming in case he reprimanded them for breaking his “no CH and L-ing” rule (congregating, gossiping, and listening). Aimee Levitt/Eater ChicagoĬhinn was always determined that things should be a certain way, and if he felt the restaurant’s reputation was being compromised in any way, he would crack down. Souvenirs from nearly 40 years of Bob Chinn’s Crab House the plastic cups on top hold the signature mai tais. Over the years, many family members worked there in various capacities, usually in the dining room or kitchen, though one nephew, Jimmy Chinn, ran a plant to mix and distribute the restaurant’s famous mai tais. Bob Chinn’s Crab House was Chinn’s 14th restaurant and he was 59 when it opened he’d had no formal training as a restaurateur and had learned everything through trial and error - mostly error, his granddaughters say. Chinn grew up working in restaurants with his father and uncles, and Marilyn began helping his various enterprises when she was still in grammar school. “There’s something that doesn’t translate.”īob Chinn’s has always been a family enterprise. “It’s like, ‘Who is this strange girl?’” Carly Le Tourneau says. Her daughters also visit the dining room, but customers don’t recognize them they way they recognized their grandfather. Marilyn has always been a more introverted presence, content to stay behind the scenes while her father made the rounds of the dining room, chatting up customers and teaching them the correct way to eat shrimp cocktail (with a slice of cantaloupe). The Le Tourneau women don’t run the restaurant in the same way Chinn did. Me, my mom, and my sister, we love this place just as much as he did.” I think maybe he didn’t see what was right in front of him. “I don’t think it was so much his physical presence, but if his passion and vision were to go, then the success of the restaurant would be over. (Their one rebellion: none of them is fond of crab legs, Chinn’s signature dish.)Ĭarly Le Tourneau now thinks Chinn was referring to more intangible qualities, like his ambition. By then, of course, his ways had been drilled into their brains: Marilyn had cofounded the restaurant with Chinn in 1982 and Carly and Maile had grown up there. ![]() And although he never really stopped bombarding Le Tourneau, her sister Maile, and their mother Marilyn Chinn Le Tourneau with phone calls and faxes - “You could call it micromanaging,” Marilyn says drily - he did ease up slightly in his later years. But she doesn’t think Chinn hadn’t meant it literally.įor one thing, once he turned 90, he stopped coming into the Wheeling restaurant every day. When Chinn died last month at the age of 99, his granddaughter Carly Le Tourneau suspects that quote was on people’s minds. “If I stop,” Bob Chinn, owner of Bob Chinn’s Crab House, one of the nation’s busiest and most profitable restaurants, told Forbes 10 years ago, “the restaurant will collapse in a few years.”
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