Sunrise Restaurant Opens In Mt. Greenwood

CHICAGO — Residents of Mount Greenwood and nearby Oak Lawn have a new option for breakfast and lunch. Sunrise Restaurant opened this past weekend at 106th and Pulaski. The family-owned business seats 120 in a three-storefront space and opens after more than a years worth of plans.

"This is your typical American breakfast and lunch restaurant," said Alberto Huerta, manager of the restaurant. Scroll through the photos at the top of the article for an inside look at the new place.

Huerta, a resident of Worth, is good friends with the restaurant owner, Isaias Gasca. Huerta says this is the first restaurant Gasca has owned but that he's been in the restaurant business for decades since moving to the United States from Mexico.

"It's a family-owned business," Huerta said. "(Gasca) has been working in different restaurants, but never a breakfast place. This will be a new adventure."

The menu offers traditional items for breakfast like omelettes and skillets and sandwiches and other common items for lunch. There's a "Mexican station" on the menu with a number of Mexican fare options as well.

Huerta says Gasca did not want to make owning a restaurant an around-the-clock endeavor, so the place will only offer breakfast and lunch. No dinner, as it closes daily at 3 p.m.

An initial look at the menu shows reasonable prices. The ham and cheese omelette was delicious and the service even better when I was offered a preview of the food a few days before the grand opening.

At the time of opening, Huerta said Sunrise employs three cooks, two dishwashers, one busboy and seven servers.

"We plan to be very popular," Huerta said. "We focus on good food, and are training our service to be service-oriented. How we treat our customers will set us apart from the others."

Sunrise Restaurant is in a smallish retail space just north of Bar 106. There's ample parking in the back, with customers able to access that area just to the north of the restaurant. Longtime neighborhood residents may remember Carl's Barber Shop at that location several years ago.

After a long planning process that turned what was originally an idea for a Mexican restaurant into one of the neighborhood's largest spots for breakfast and lunch, Gasca is excited to finally be able to share this with the community.

"We've been working on this for a long time," he said. "We hope to be able to provide a good service to the neighborhood."

Photos by Tim Moran / Patch