The story starts in 1945, when a career woman named Ann Sather quit her job of 22 years, pooled her savings and bought a Swedish diner on Belmont from owners who were retiring. She ran it for 35 years before selling in 1981 to Tom Tunney, a 24-year-old Cornell hotel school graduate who apprenticed with her for a year to learn every Scandinavian recipe in the building. Ann passed away in 1996, but the house motto, good food, good friends and good conversation, still holds. This Division Street location, the newest of the three, is where the restaurant serves its Swedish specials, and it sits in the thick of Wicker Park's restaurant row.
The order is simple: any egg plate lets you pick two homemade cinnamon rolls as a side, so you should. From there it's Swedish pancakes with lingonberries, Swedish meatballs and potato sausage, bacon cheddar potato pancakes, a French toast fantasy made from mascarpone-filled cinnamon rolls, Benedicts, jumbo omelets and breakfast wraps, with fresh-squeezed juice and hot Swedish coffee. It's BYOB, with the fixings for Bloody Marys and mimosas on hand, and the restaurant notes a 3 percent credit card charge. Call ahead for hours, since the family's cafes keep their own schedules.
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