Third-Generation McGann Talks Beverly Woods Restaurant

on Western Avenue has been a staple of the South Side, Beverly and Mt. Greenwood communities since opening in 1954, offering four banquet rooms, restaurant service, a buffet and a bar. Built on former forest preserve land, it notably features a menagerie of live doves and a banquet room built around a real tree.

The restaurant is a South Side family business in the purest sense. Founded by John “Jack” McGann in 1954, the restaurant has since been taken over by his son Bill and is currently managed by the founder’s grandson, also Jack, 22, born and raised in the Beverly Woods family tradition.

We sat down with Beverly Woods manager Jack McGann for a chat about the restaurant and its long family tradition:

Growing up, was it always inevitable you’d join the family restaurant business?

I didn’t know if I was going to do it originally. But then I kind of came around. I mean, I’ve been working here since I was 13, just busboy kitchen work and all that, so yeah I’ve been working here forever… I was here all the time with my family; the rest of my family is from the Beverly area. So we were always here; I just basically grew up in this building for the most part.

Pretty much your second home?

Absolutely, yeah. Definitely.

What makes Beverly Woods a unique local spot?

I think it’s much different from anywhere else. This was all forest preserve years ago, and that tree in [the banquet room] is still partly real, from the roots, from the forest. That’s why it’s called the Beverly Woods Restaurant. So like, that room… it’s kind of the staple of the whole place, our big selling point. And then the rolls too, as well. The rolls are kind of a neighborhood thing. We have lines out the door every holiday for the rolls.

It’s rather unique for a restaurant to be renowned for its rolls, of all things. How did that happen?

They just really took off… We just started realizing people were showing up on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve and they would ask for these large orders of the rolls and we wouldn’t have them ready, and it just kind of developed into that now we sell a few hundred dozen every holiday—big boxes, two, four dozen boxes [per customer.]

Have there been any particularly memorable events you remember at Beverly Woods?

We used to do these big New Year’s Eve parties when I was a kid. I barely remember them now. But when I was really young we’d have big blowouts, and they just rent out the whole place, basically the whole neighborhood would come over, it’s be like a South Side Irish parade thing. My dad hosted a wake for the parade when the parade went under… [when] it got cancelled because kids just started getting out of hand… All the neighborhood guys and city cops came over and they all waked the parade, radio stations and all.

The interior is surprisingly huge and diverse here; it’d be easy to not see all of it.

A lot of people come in, and they don’t even know that we have a buffet, don’t notice that we have a main bar, and so we just kind of get regulars in the buffet and the bar. But we have been trying to get that out there more.

How is Beverly Woods tied into the Beverly and Chicago communities?

My dad’s big on giving—he gives a lot to the CPD, all those city workers, he does a lot of that, he holds things—Rahm Emmanuel’s been here a few times, he comes in every once in a while. [My dad] met my mom here, got married here—The coatroom used to be an office, and they met there, and then they got married with the room in the tree in there.

So your whole life is intrinsically tied to this building.

“Yes, 100 percent. Absolutely… I just love this place. We all do.”