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R.I.P. Aaron Stek
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I am not the person qualified to fully eulogize Aaron. We were great friends, both in Ann Arbor and particularly in Chicago but geography and let’s just say it, Cancer Treatment for both of us, limited our visits the past 10 years.
Still, he always checked in when he visited the Restaurant Show or brought the boys and Elizabeth to town. Many times we heard the Chimes at Midnight together.
There are anecdotes. When we were teamed at Panozzo’s he would once in a while nod off on the Green Line coming in from Oak Park and text me, ‘Sorry D. I’m down at 47th Street, I’ll be back soon’.
We had a going away party at the Pre-Penthouse when they moved and I had put down a big piece of canvas with a pile of markers and crayons for the kids to obliterate it, which they enthusiastically did.
Aaron walked over with a large red crayon I had got out of a warehouse in Rouge and held it up.
‘D, can you read that?
It was ‘labeled ‘Lead Crayon’ and Aaron gestured towards his youngest, still a toddler prone to eat such things and arched his eyebrows.
‘Oops?’
Aaron and I were closest during the Weird Year between ‘Diners, Drive-ins and Dives’ filming an episode on us, which I had to vigorously campaign for after the owner’s wife blew off their first call and, because of a lawsuit between Guy Fieri and the original production company did not air for over a year.
So, I had ‘Saved’ Panozzo’s and then had to wait with Jitters hoping we didn’t go out of business before the show.
Aaron during that stretch was working full time and many, many of those somnambulant days we worked Coast-to-Coast alone and had some of the greatest, endless, always digressing conversations.
He was profoundly wide read, curious and empathetic but we’d taken very different avenues through History, Philosophy. He was scholarly, bottomlessly optimistic and I was on the other side of the street with Baudelaire and Nietzsche. It was good Contrast for Civil Debate.
Ellen, the aforementioned oblivious wife, was also there, standing at the cash register, never joining the conversation, grinding her teeth, occasionally chiming out – “Hearing a lot of Chit-Chat’, as if we were not working hard enough.
Towards the End, when I knew I was leaving even after the show came out and doubled our business, I replied to her, ‘This isn’t Chit-Chat and if you didn’t have us here working, you’d be sitting at home alone watching ‘Days of Our Lives’.
Anyhow.
This picture of Aaron is from those incredible portraits Josie Anne made for ‘Z 1/2’.
Aaron zinged me really good once about the Deli Movies.
‘D, do we just make these because you couldn’t make a Real Movie?’
And I replied, ‘Fuck You Aaron’.
I loved him. Elizabeth and his sons, whom I nicknamed the ‘3 Thors’ and encouraged musical training but their jam was being Spinally Outdoorsy, like their papa. They will Soldier on.
Besides Military Service, I don’t think there is any more fundamentally, intensely-humanely, bonding experience than working in a Restaurant. You hit every day at an appointed time, you get your Flowers or Raspberries immediately, clean up and Do it Again.
It was a Privilege to know Aaron and his Family.
I formally request the rest of you just stay alive until I am not. I’m tired of writing these things.
Darin Latimer
