Anyone who’s lived near Lincoln and Diversey this year has a story about the construction. Mine is that I stopped even trying to drive that stretch back in July and just started walking it instead, past the same three orange barrels for what feels like months now. So when I heard a brand-new restaurant was opening right in the thick of it, on Sept. 16, my first thought wasn’t excitement. It was: are they serious?
Turns out, yeah. Gunny’s Pub, 2642 N. Lincoln Ave., next to Juno Sushi. Opening day, cones and all.
Mary Nedbalski, who owns the place with her husband Marty O’Connor, found out about the closure the same way most of us did — by just running into it. She walked up to the building one morning in August and the street wasn’t there anymore. No flyer, no email, nothing. Just gone.
“It sounds like no one was really kept in the loop with the city, including the alderman’s office,” she told me. What got her wasn’t even the construction itself — it was how quietly it happened. Even a piece of paper taped to a few doors would’ve been something, she said. “Any level of, ‘Hey, by the way, we’re cutting off your entire customer base for three whole city blocks.’”
She actually went and checked the damage instead of just guessing at it. Pulled foot traffic numbers off a tool called Pacer.ai. Down 5,000 to 6,000 visits a week along the corridor. That number’s not shrinking either, as far as she can tell.
Marty’s taken a different approach — mostly just laughing about it in public, because honestly what else do you do. He posted a video not long ago, half joking: “The City of Chicago decided to give us a massive twist. Just because the city shut down the road doesn’t mean we can’t open.”
And that’s really it. That’s the whole plan. Open the doors, hope people are willing to walk a block or two out of their way, and trust that this is still a neighborhood that shows up for its own.
It’s not like they haven’t already been through enough to get here. The building’s 145 years old — used to be Racine Plumbing Bar & Grill, if anyone remembers that. Marty and Mary started gutting it back in August of last year. Marty’s tended bar around here for years, at Lucky Dorr, then Mordecai, and he says the second he walked into the back room of this place and saw the skylight, that was it. Decision made. He told me the room “yearned” for a real dinner service — which, sure, is a weird thing to say about a room, but stand under that skylight and you get it.
The dog thing is my favorite part, honestly. Gunny was Marty’s hunting dog — pheasant, duck, the whole deal — and that’s where the whole menu direction came from. “That kind of helped us inspire the menu for an American bistro with that Midwest hunter-gatherer flair,” he said.
Their chef, Mike McKinnell, almost wasn’t the chef. He came on just to consult and ended up staying for good. He and Marty go back to Mordecai. Before that McKinnell was cooking in New York, at Oceana and Root & Bone. He’s not trying to overthink the food, he told me — “somewhere on that high-end, but the lowest level of the high-end, is really what I’d love to see for it.” No pretense. Just technique that actually holds up.
What’s on the menu: a bavette steak with salsa verde and wedge fries. An Italian beef with their own giardiniera. A smashburger — griddled onion, shaved pickles, American cheese, bacon mayo, the works. There’s a duck confit poutine. And there’s a stuffed cheese bread with Hook’s yellow and Laubscher white cheddar and duck cracklings done up chicharrón-style, which I’d bet money becomes the thing everyone’s Instagram story about it within a week.
Front of the place is just a bar. Simple, loud, the kind of spot you duck into. The back room’s where they’re trying for something a little more — casual fine dining, Marty called it — and eventually McKinnell wants to bring in quail, maybe venison, rabbit once spring rolls around.
They were still tinkering with things last week. Someone on staff was working on a goat cheese foam for one of the cocktails. Mary’s philosophy on the drinks is basically the same as the food: keep it real. “We want to make the recipes approachable, but still have the technique so people can fall in love with cocktail culture and actual craft cocktails versus the show and dance.”
Nobody’s pretending the street’s going to magically clear up before opening night. It’s not. That’s just where things stand right now, and no one seems totally sure when the city will actually finish. Marty and Mary have been pointing people toward Delilah’s and Rose’s Lounge too — same block, same cones, same problem.
“The road might be closed,” Marty told me. “But the neighborhood certainly isn’t.”
I believe him. I’ve lived here long enough to know that’s usually how it goes.
