This is some of what was found at Found:
"Don’t let a world of darkness stifle your inner light."
"I have never felt love. I sat here and people stared at me."
"Be the change you wish to see in the world."
"A day in the sun is better than a week in the shade."
These are not tweets but an older and more intimate form of communication, one that appears in increasing danger of vanishing as we text and tweet our lives into the cyberspace void.
These messages — here are two more: "After so many years, it is good to fiddle around," and "Our duet continues to evolve, my sweet!" — are in the form of hundreds of notes handwritten on scraps of paper, on cocktail napkins or credit card receipts. Most are written in pen, a few in pencil. Some are embellished by drawings (a lot of hearts) and some contain words borrowed from famous writers. The majority however are, encouragingly, original thoughts.
They were left by people of all ages and all colors (and, needless to say, literary styles) in a couple of drawers in a couple of tables in a restaurant called the Found Kitchen and Social House at 1631 Chicago Ave. in Evanston
"It all happened so organically," says Amy Morton, who owns the restaurant. "We knew nothing about them until we had been open for about a year and a half. We were rearranging the tables and opened the drawers and, well, there they were. We were amazed and enchanted."
Amy Morton Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune
Amy Morton, owner of Found in Evanston, with some of the notes left by customers in the drawers of restaurant tables.
Amy Morton, owner of Found in Evanston, with some of the notes left by customers in the drawers of restaurant tables.
(Chris Walker / Chicago Tribune)
Morton opened Found in autumn 2012, part of the ever-burgeoning Evanston dining scene. She was certainly not new to the precarious restaurant business but had been out of the game for nearly two decades. She once ran a couple of Old Town restaurants, the Blue Room and Mirador, the latter closing in 1993. She worked in the business for a short time doing consulting until meeting her husband, attorney Neal Levin, and starting a family that now includes three girls, two in high school and one soon to be.
"But I always knew I would try this again," she says.
It’s in her blood. She is the daughter of Arnie Morton, a man who is to the local restaurant scene what George Halas was to our sports landscape.
He started working young in his father’s two restaurants in Hyde Park and then, after serving in World War II, began to make his mark. He, along with late Victor Lownes and the still lively Hugh Hefner, started the chain of Playboy Clubs and resorts; opened in the early 1970s Arnie’s, a stylish restaurant that helped reinvigorate the Rush Street area which had gotten seriously down at the heels; started the private disco-era club, Zorine’s, named for his wife and Amy’s mother, who is alive and quite well; created Taste of Chicago, that gustatorial extravaganza, in 1980; and opened the first Morton’s The Steakhouse, which has grown into a chain of more than 70 big meat oases.
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He was energetic and charming and when Arnie died in 2005, Grant DePorter, CEO of the Harry Caray’s Restaurant Group, said, "He’s a restaurant legend. A lot of restaurateurs in the Chicago area started with Arnie."
In addition to Amy, some of his other children by his two marriages are in the business as well: Peter is the founder of the Hard Rock Cafe chain and Las Vegas’ Hard Rock Hotel & Casino; David is co-owner of such places as DMK Burger Bar and Ada Street; and Michael runs a number of restaurants in Las Vegas.
Arnie would have loved Found. It resembles a fascinating living room — described by Amy as "Gertrude Stein meets Jack Kerouac" — with wing chairs and settees, free-standing tables, benches and banquette seating. There is artwork — framed photos, paintings, rugs and mirrors — all over the place, as well as a bookcase-lined librarylike space and a loungelike back room. It is warm and cozy, with many things for the eye to catch.
Morton thinks that perhaps these notes might have been inspired by the quotations on the chalkboard ceiling above the bar. "I thought the quotes might help spur conversation," she says. "But the notes? Who knew? They are like letters in a bottle."
Morton, who looks a couple of decades younger than her 54 years, is an ebullient person, smart and lively and thoughtful. And she has always displayed a genuine social consciousness, something reflected at Found in her renting the entire restaurant at cost one Monday a month to nonprofits for meetings and fundraisers, and working with Connections for the Homeless to hire and nurture restaurant staffers.
"My personal mission has always been to make a difference," she says. "I like to think of this restaurant as community. We have a mission."
She recently added another restaurant to her life. It is called The Barn and opened in the fall in a 19th-century brick building that was a former horse barn. The address is 1016 Church St. but one enters through an alley for its self-proclaimed "meat-centric dining experience."
The Barn John Konstantaras / Chicago Tribune
Entrance of The Barn in Evanston.
Entrance of The Barn in Evanston.
(John Konstantaras / Chicago Tribune)
"That is, of course, a nod to my dad," she says, though she is too young to have vivid memories of her father’s first restaurant, the enter-through-an-alley place called the Walton Walk.
"I think about him all the time," she says. "One of the great things here is that people who come in will tell me stories about my dad. This lovely 95-year-old man came in for dinner and when he found out who I was told he told me about playing craps with my father after school at Hyde Park High School."
Memory is important to Morton and she recently refreshed hers by rereading all of the notes and messages that had been left by diners.
"I didn’t realize until reading them again that so many of them are about love," she says. "Some funny, some poignant, some so tender. And I started to get very introspective about it all, remembering how important it is to tell people you love that you love them."
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
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