After World War II, Jack bought a Roosevelt Road restaurant called Sunny's and renamed it Manny's -- after his son Emanuel, which only required changing two letters on the sign. The cafeteria moved to its current University Village address on South Jefferson Street in 1964, and it's now run by the fourth generation of the family (Manny's son Ken, and Ken's son Dan). The corned beef sandwich -- hand-carved to order, piled embarrassingly high -- is the thing everyone orders, alongside potato pancakes and matzo ball soup, cafeteria-style down a line with a tray.
It's famously a political hangout: Barack Obama is a known regular, former governor George Ryan wrote that it was one of his favorite lunch spots (he once took a phone call from Nelson Mandela there mid-sandwich), and Governor J.B. Pritzker showed up for the restaurant's 80th-anniversary celebration in 2022. One writer called it the second-most-likely place in the city to run into a politician, after City Hall itself.
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