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The owner of Glenn's Diner gets ready for his close-up.

Monday Aug 25, 2008.     By Karl Klockars

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Glenn Fahlstrom knows his fish. Ask him what he loves about seafood, and you get a menu off the top of his head. "You take an Idaho brook trout with a little brown sugar and pecan butter on it; that stuff melts in your mouth! Or halibut with a little blue cheese horseradish sauce on it? These are great, wonderful flavors that you don't get with other kinds of meat."

Seafood certainly has a complexity to it that isn't as accessible as a big steak or a juicy hamburger, but Glenn's Diner on Montrose Avenue is out to challenge that convention. "We don't put a lot of sauces or anything on our fish, and seasoning. Just like lamb, and steak and ribs and chicken have different flavors, so do all these different fishes. I like selling [seafood], and I like how we cook it—clean and simple."

While Glenn's has maintained a relatively low profile since its opening in September of 2005, that's likely to change with an upcoming appearance on the Food Network's "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives." We caught up with Fahlstrom before the inevitable wave of new customers.

When you enter your restaurant, you're literally surrounded on three sides by food and menu, from a wall of cereal to the gargantuan blackboards featuring all your fish. How did that come about?
[It was] very specific, actually. I have a strong background in seafood, I've owned four or five different seafood restaurants in my life. I like eating at diners. I wanted to serve cereal like I did at home in the big boxes, poured at the table with chilled bowls and really cold milk like I like it at home. That prompted the cereal wall because I wanted to have a lot of different cereals and then the big boxes.

The seafood on the walls...I don't know if you remember the Davis Street Fishmarket or the Belmont Harbor Fishmarket. These are restaurants I used to own or was part-owner in. We featured lots of fresh fish and we used blackboards. It's really a combination of everything that I like in restaurants, that I've done. The food on the menu is all sandwiches and food that I enjoy on a regular basis.

On your menu, you claim to have the "best shrimp cocktail in the world." How much research went into making that statement?
A fair amount, actually. I used to go to Twin Anchors, and they have a great salad bar there and a shrimp appetizer. And they had some pretty big shrimp on the plate they used to offer. When I started my restaurant, I went to my purveyors and I asked, "what's the biggest shrimp I could get?" One of our purveyors called and said [he could get me] two to four to a pound. That's four ounces on the low end, and six to eight ounces on the high end! I said, "Let me see 'em."

They sent me over some, we cooked them up, and they were huge. Just huge. I said, "Guys, we've got to do this. Steam them to order, and let's serve them warm with cocktail sauce and garlic butter." And to me, that's the best shrimp cocktail in the world. You know, a five- or six-ounce shrimp arrives on your plate, instead of what you always see—smaller, chilled shrimp hanging out the side of a martini glass—and most of the time, most of these restaurants cook the [hell] out of the shrimp! You steam it just til' the translucence is gone, [and] that guy is done. If it's done right, it's soft and chewy like lobster...To me, those are the elements that make it the best shrimp cocktail in the world.

You feature cereal pretty prominently on your breakfast menu. What's your go-to bowl of cereal?
Oh, man. For me, it's Frosted Flakes. And Maple Mini Shredded Wheat. And always fresh fruit. Right now, we're doing strawberries, sometimes we do blackberries, it depends on the season and what we can get in. Bananas, strawberries and blueberries are what we offer most.

How did you get on the radar of the Food Network and "Diners, Drive-ins and Dives?"
About four months ago, I hired a waiter who was a roadie from Las Vegas. And it turns out that he belongs to the same college fraternity that Guy [Fieri, host of D,D&D] belonged to. Not the same years, but the same fraternity. And he just happened to write a letter to him, saying "hey guys, I work for this crazy little restaurant in Chicago called Glenn's Diner and it's right up your alley."

And from that letter, it started the whole process. They started calling us, and emailing back and forth recipes, and they checked us out on the internet and we sent them pictures. And they decided that we were going to be one of the restaurants they were going to feature.

How long did filming take?
Two days. Two 13-hour days. [Guy] was only there for 4 hours to do his segment, and then the rest of the time was filming all the preparations, the shooting of food, the shooting of the ingredients.

Fieri doesn't strike me as much of a seafood guy. How did he react to your place?
Just like everybody that sees our restaurant, they see the board with 16 different pieces of fish—they wonder, how can we handle that? How do we do that? They were amazed by our variety, and while they didn't get a flavor for that in the emails, once they got in the door and saw the restaurant, they said "hey, we've got to do a thing on all this fresh fish."

And on the show they're going to do a montage where they show each fish, the name of it, and by the end it's all 16 pieces on the screen. They loved the weird mixing of cereal and fish; this weird adjoining of two different types of food, and how it seems to work just fine.