For more than 50 years, Buffalonians on their way through midtown made New Chicago Lunch a favorite destination for folks all around the city.
For years, the restaurant’s proximity to what was cool and hip with young people helped add to the place’s popularity. In the late '40s through the '50s, WEBR’s Hi-Teen show with Bob Wells – live from the Dellwood Ballroom a few doors down – introduced the neighborhood lunch counter to masses of teens hungry from dancing and teenage dreams.
A few doors past the Dellwood was WKBW Radio – and when the rock ’n’ roll era was ushered in on KB, the New Chicago Lunch was one of the nearby places the big-name WKBW disc jockeys like Danny Neaverth, Tommy Shannon, Joey Reynolds or Fred Klestine might mention on the air.
Four years after leaving his native Greece as a sailor, Anthony Callis was 19 years old when he bought the New Chicago Lunch restaurant on Main near Utica in 1924. “The kitchen is small,” it was written in the Buffalo Express when the place opened, “but the equipment has been specifically designed to secure the greatest efficiency and it will be possible to cook enough food to feed a tremendous number of people.”
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For the next 52 years, Callis ran the New Chicago Lunch, working 12 hours a day, seven days a week, serving coffee and appreciation to the millions who walked though his door.
Among the first customers was Tony Sisti – the world-famous “Fighting Artist” who boxed professionally to earn enough money to live his true calling as a painter and sculptor. Sisti had a studio in the apartment above the New Chicago Lunch for decades.
And then there were those famous KB DJs – but for the most part, it was everyday people eating everyday meals at New Chicago Lunch. At the high point of business, during World War II, when Main and Utica was among the most-traveled intersections in the city – the restaurant had two dozen employees serving 17,000 customers a week.
Callis closed up the business on Christmas Eve, 1976. Artist Sisti was there on the last day, sharing his disbelief about the closing of the landmark.
"Tony, it’s too much,” said Callis, as recorded in a story by Greg Faherty in the Courier-Express, who also recorded some stories of the good old days mixing in as “loud guffaws emanated from one of the booths where some employees and longtime customers (were) sipping coffee in the waning hours of business.”
“Sisti recalled he was painting a picture of Jack Johnson the black fighter, when his studio was over the restaurant,” reported Faherty.
“Johnson was hesitant when Sisti invited him downstairs for lunch, the artist remembered. ‘Do you think I ought to go in?,’ Sisti recalls Johnson asking. If prejudices were stronger in those days, Callis played no part of it. Johnson ate with no untoward incident.”
The name “New Chicago Lunch” came from William George, who opened three restaurants in Buffalo with that name in the early 1920s. Callis bought the Main and Utica location after it was opened less than a year.
Just a few blocks away, at Main and Allen, another New Chicago Lunch location was bought by the Spanos family in 1925. For 47 years, the two New Chicago Lunch locations operated completely independently of one another.
The Main and Allen location closed in 1972. The site is currently occupied by a Metro Rail station. The Main and Utica spot is now occupied by Burger King.