Joe Arguellas strolled into the Planet Cafe, readjusted his black lace nightie, and ordered the mixed fruit pancake.
Saturday morning. Roscoe Village, the Near Northwest Side. Not exactly a part of the city that looks the other way when a stubble-jowled man comes down the sidewalk in combat boots, negligee and Marilyn Monroe hair. (You should have seen the eyebrows at the Black Forest Market when Arguellas passed the plate glass, where only platinum wig and knee-high boots appeared above and below the sign urging Gooseliver Sausage Order Now.)
No one in the Planet takes a second look.
This, after all, is the place that`s putting the public display of pj`s on the globe. The proprietors are making it fiscally advisable to do so. Show up in your jammies, shave 10 percent off the price of your pancakes (a savings of 47 cents). Or your peanut butter `n` jelly sandwich (save 32 cents). Or your 2 eggs, breakfast steak, hash browns `n` toast (save 55 cents).
This January morning, inside the turquoise storefront at 3406 N. Damen Ave., waiter Brent Wisniewski sported a peach crepe AmVets robe, one of 30 robes that hang in his closet. He pulled a pencil from his fly-away hair. He did not botch a letter as he took Arguella`s mixed-fruit order. Not even when a woman wearing long johns, flannel pajama top, frayed bedroom slippers and blanket called out to Arguellas (who had painted a beauty mark above his lip): ”I like the mole, the mole is awesome. You are totally divine, Joe!”
Two vinyl banquettes away, Stuart Clayton, commodities broker, sopped up the last of his maple syrup with French toast. He explained why he was sitting there in his blueberry terrycloth robe and pajama bottoms. ”I got up this morning and was getting ready and I just didn`t feel like getting ready. The sole motivation: I rolled out of bed, came here and didn`t have to do anything.”
Just the other side of the warming counter, above which dangles a globe on a string, short-order cook Cheryl Harris nudged flapjacks around the griddle. She was wearing the same thing she slept in the night before: an old, long-sleeve T-shirt. Said she: ”Here you don`t have to worry about getting dressed, putting on nylons, those nasty pantyhose.”
Getting away
Needn`t worry, either, about showing up in nothing but your boxer shorts. Or tucking your toothbrush in your pajama pocket. Or shuffling in with your big fuzzy slippers. Or knocking about in your see-through negligee (as did one well-endowed customer who so distracted a male short-order cook that one spinach omelette showed up without spinach).
”It`s like being a little kid again,” said owner Todd Revesz, who had just returned from the hurly burly of the Randolph Street markets, opting, for the sake of his continued entrepreneurial health, to leave the pj`s on the bathroom hook that morning. ”People come here for a getaway from the norm.” The Planet got away from the norm in breakfast attire shortly after it opened a year and a half ago.
(The breakfast wear, by the way, is not the only alien thing about the Planet. Before your first cup of caffeine, you might think you`ve stepped into some kind of extraterrestrial Rand McNally store: Dozens of globes hang from the ceiling; walls are aqua and aluminum-papered; the floor is done in black and white tiles. Outer space is a concept here. A whole set of upside-down Melmac dinnerware and plastic food dangles from the rafters, and the menu is peppered with astronaut facts and questions.)
”When you`re working seven days a week, you`re kind of dragging on the weekends,” explains Revesz. ”One morning we got here, and we just started talking about how we should wear our pajamas to work.
”At first, the customers really thought we were off the wall,” he says, pausing. ”We might be.”
A little chicken
The neighbors never doubted it.
Wisniewski, a longtime collector of second-hand sleepwear (of 50 pairs of pajamas, his favorites are the ones with the poker-card print), remembers the early days of pajamas, when he`d be running next door to the currency exchange or down the block to the grocery store for more eggs or sausage at 10 or 11 a.m.
”They`d look at me like I was an escapee from the hospital,” he said.
”Then they started laughing, `Oh, they wear pajamas over there.` I thought it`d be great if they wore them at all the businesses in the neighborhood. But I think they`re a little chicken yet. But I do think they`re jealous. We have a lot of fun in here.
”It feels like family here. If you come here long enough, you end up working here. Start out getting your own coffee, then you`re taking orders, running to the store when we run out of something. Then when somebody quits, you`re hired.”
Stopping traffic
Harris, the cook, works weekends at the Planet simply because she has so much fun. In her other life, Monday through Friday, she`s a collection agent. Arguellas is the Planet`s early-morning dishwasher. Midmorning he slips off his rubber gloves and rounds the corner to Big Hair, the beauty salon on West Roscoe that is his fulltime place of business.
Deborah Craig, sipping coffee in her black-and-red smoking jacket, with black pajama bottoms and four American flags planted in her sticky platinum hair (”definitely don`t light a match near me,” she warns), will begin working as a waitress on Monday nights.
The Planet definitely does weird things to anyone who hangs around long enough to find out how the NoraDunnBurger got its name.
Not only do you find yourself going for coffee, you find yourself squirming inside your conspicuously ordinary turtleneck and jeans. You yearn for the roominess of your flannel nightie. You`d positively die to curl up inside your blanket. At the counter.
But don`t think such counterculture inclinations come without a cost.
”I think we did stop some traffic during our walk down the block,” said Craig, of the combustible hair. ”I think they thought it was a parade they were missing out there.”
Arguellas, who lives in Logan Square, noted that his home turf is not exactly a safe place for flouncing around in nightwear. ”If I were to dress like this there, I`d be shot down. Dead.”
Thus, he rides the bus to Roscoe Village without wig, makeup and nightie. He changes at Big Hair, and walks over. Still, he rarely makes the trip around the corner without ruffling the passersby. ”I was coming here one time dressed in a red wig, and I hate to say it but all the rednecks honked and honked until I turned around.” He seems perturbed.
Revesz, who sports a U.S. Marine Corps tattoo on his left forearm, happened to be coming around that same corner that morning. He remembers wishing he were going the other way. ”I didn`t want to say it at the time,” Revesz confides to his friend, ”but it was broad daylight. And you were looking rather, how we say, voluptuous. I remember thinking, `Oh this is classic, all the people in the neighborhood are going to see me with my, ahem, date.`
”Just what the Chamber of Commerce needs to see.”
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The Planet Cafe is open 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday through Saturday and 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Sunday. Call 312-404-6933.
