At 4:30 AM, as the evening’s most tenacious partyers stagger home, waitresses and bartenders at the Ukrainian Village bar Darkroom wipe down the counters and close up. On their way out the door they nod weary hellos to Kevin Ritter and Brian Jacobsen, whose day is just getting started. Ritter and Jacobsen will spend the next seven or eight hours making quiche, turnovers, coffee, and other breakfast standbys in the bar’s kitchen and delivering them to homes in Lincoln Park, Bucktown, Wicker Park, Logan Square, Ukrainian Village, and the West Loop.
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Ritter’s Breakfast Delivery, which opened three months ago, operates this way every Saturday and Sunday morning. Jacobsen is his chef; Ritter’s fiancee, Caitlin McKay, answers the phone and dispatches drivers. Ritter developed the idea in Loyola’s business-administration master’s program, as an assignment for a class called “Strategy and Organization,” the same class where Bill Rancic, first-season winner of the TV show The Apprentice, had several years earlier come up with his Cigars Around the World company. After graduating, Ritter enlisted McKay’s help. The two developed a list of dishes that would travel well–“Hash browns just wouldn’t work,” McKay says–and started hunting for a space to work in. At first they worked out of Pizza Metro II on Ashland, but the kitchen there wasn’t available late enough into the morning. After five weeks they switched to Darkroom, which stopped serving food early this year.
“Aw, thanks,” says McKay, chewing a mouthful of French toast. She and Ritter are looking a bit sleepy. “I get a little persnickety sometimes, though,” she says. “I’m not a morning person.”
When Ritter hurries out of the kitchen with an order, McKay jumps up to check that it’s complete: quiche lorraine, tomato quiche, French toast, breakfast pizza (with bacon, eggs, and cheese), and a single red rose. The driver, a chatty, amiable man named Fred whose minivan smells like toast, drives the food to a large apartment building near Pierce and Hoyne. The young, buff, shirtless guy who answers the bell is wearing rumpled jeans with white Ralph Lauren boxers visible over the waistband. He says, “Thanks, man,” grabs his food and the flower, and doesn’t wait for his change before racing back upstairs. On the way back to Darkroom, Fred turns on an R & B station. A woman’s voice floats out: “You should be in bed with me, taking advantage of a real good thing.”
