Work started Friday at LiFE Restaurant as it has most mornings since Joe Black opened the place in West Garfield Park six years ago. Black cued up a gospel song on his speaker and his wife, Tonya, stepped to the grill.
“You have to set the energy,” Black said after selecting a soulful rendition of “Yahweh” as his wife buttoned her chef’s jacket.
“God keeps like a forcefield around here,” he said of the restaurant, an assessment he doesn’t hedge even after he’s reminded that a car crashed through the front of the restaurant over Labor Day weekend and came to rest just a few feet from where he was standing.
A steady stream of customers began a few minutes after Black rolled up the security gates on the repaired front of the business. The gate shielding the door needs a little finesse since the crash.
The name of the restaurant is spelled out in 3-feet-high letters on the replacement windows, a first for LiFE, as Black had wanted the restaurant to build business by word of mouth in its early years.
“Business is back like we never closed,” Black said. “We are here to feed people, to nourish the people.”
Tonya Black, chef and co-owner of LiFE, prepares food at the West Garfield Park restaurant.
Heidi Zeiger / Sun-Times
Forcefield notwithstanding, LiFE had been shut down by the Labor Day crash and the COVID-19 pandemic since it opened in 2017. Its original launch date was pushed back when another car smashed through the front windows as the driver fled a gunfight on Madison Street.
Before plowing into the Blacks’ restaurant, the driver in the Sept. 2 crash was fatally shot by a pedestrian he’d struck. The driver sped onto the sidewalk, through the roll-down gates and into the front of the restaurant, which had been closed for the holiday weekend.
Joe Black and Tonya Black wait for police to clear things so they can get into their restaurant after a car smashed into the front of the business. The driver had been shot after striking a pedestrian.
Andy Grimm / Sun-Times
Hours after the crash, Joe Black looked at the bullet-pocked car wedged in the front of his business from behind police tape. He called his insurance company and started planning his reopening.
“It’s all good. LiFE is resilient. LiFE is love,” Black said in September. “We will open back up. We’d be open today if we could get the front door open. People count on us, on our food.”
The slaying had been the 24th of the year in West Garfield Park, which has seen more shootings — over 900, or roughly one every other day — than all but two of Chicago’s 77 designated community areas, according to Chicago police data.
With only about 17,000 residents, the rate of shootings in West Garfield Park is by far the highest in the city, nearly three times that of Austin, the adjacent neighborhood of 96,000 that most years leads the city in total shootings.
Joe Black grew up in the neighborhood, and the sheer volume of violence in such a small community made it no surprise that he knew the victim — a cousin.
The level of violence owes much to the clutches of men selling drugs along Madison Street near the Blacks’ restaurant and others working on blocks around the neighborhood. Drug dealers were waving baggies at passing cars within about an hour of police clearing the shooting scene in September, and drive-through drug transactions continued Friday.
“Those guys don’t want to be out there 12 hours a day, maybe getting shot,” Black said, noting his business is hiring additional staff for the first time since the pandemic.
Joe Black, owner of LiFE restaurant, greets customer Kyle Kirby.
Heidi Zeiger / Sun-Times
The Blacks chose to open in the 3800 block of West Madison Street specifically for the symbolism of locating a restaurant that serves nutritious food alongside one of the few open-air drug markets in America. As a child, Black and his mother had rented an apartment upstairs over an old bar — “a really bad one,” Joe Black said.
Black says he plans to open LiFE restaurants in other locations, pointing to a chain grocery store across Madison Street that was demolished a few weeks ago to make way for a multimillion-dollar retail and housing development.
“This is what it takes to make a change. You have to have people invest in the community,” Black said. “I want to have a place like this in every neighborhood.”
