When Michael Sullivan bought Goldyburgers in 1981, he became only the second owner of this now century-old institution at 7316 Circle Ave. in Forest Park. The Goldstein family opened it in 1926, during Prohibition, when serving alcohol was illegal.
Michael & Mick Sullivan
“Everybody was paid off, I suppose, in those days,” Sullivan said.
Serve alcohol they did. Originally an ornate wooden bar ran down the wall in the front room. The back room, where the current bar is, was the Goldstein’s family home. A black and white photo shows Barney and Joe Goldstein waiting to serve customers. And if you look closely, you can see numbers on an awning behind them.
“This is a 26 game,” he said. Indicating a popular Chicago-created dice game that was played in bars from the 1910s through the 1950s. “You’ll see it in old TV shows, The Untouchables. They used to put a girl behind there and you’d roll dice and win drinks and food.”
Once the Volsted Act was repealed and Prohibition ended, things kept jumping at Goldyburgers.
“When beer came back, they tore the house out and they used to have bands and dancing. It was a big open room. It was quite the place in the day,” he said.
The Goldstein’s menu was more extensive than today, serving steaks and lobster, but the burgers have remained a constant. Their motto: “never had a bad one.” Those continue as the restaurant’s watchwords today.
Burgers are a big part of the menu, along with a dozen other sandwiches and a variety of salads. Fried food complements those entrees, including an “armadillo egg,” which is a breaded and fried jalapeno, wrapped in cheddar cheese. Shrimp baskets and a Friday fish fry round out the offerings.
The most often ordered appetizer is “probably the cheese balls,” Michael’s son, Mick Sullivan, said. “On a very rare occasion we run out of them. You tell a table that we’re out and it’s like you shot their dog.”
Original owners, the Goldstein family
Mick and Michael run the place together these days. Another family member, Bailey Sullivan, is also in the food biz. She is executive chef at Chicago’s Monteverde restaurant and also a contender for the 2026 James Beard award for emerging chef.
Back in the ‘80s Forest Park had a built-in customer base that extended beyond its borders. “When I bought this place, there were no bars in Oak Park,” Michael Sullivan said of the neighboring town’s dry legacy. “Forest Park has always been a great bar and restaurant town. It’s where you could get a drink.”
Soon after the purchase, Sullivan wanted to convert what was a vacant gas station next door into a beer garden, but Forest Park wasn’t ready to go that far.
“It was like maybe ’82. They wouldn’t let me serve alcohol out there, so I opened it anyhow. I cleaned it up and had a place for people to sit, but I was calling it my root beer garden,” he said. After about a year the village relented and “we were the first beer garden in Forest Park.”
Over the decades, Goldyburgers has burnished into a local institution. “It’s basically a family restaurant and sports bar. We get customers from people in their 90s down to newborn babies. We’ve got our good group of regulars. It keeps things lively,” he said. “The nicest people come in here. You get everybody, a lot of doctors, lawyers, trades people. We get the gamut. What’s really nice about this business is the people you get to meet along the way. I’s just a real nice community around here.”
Sullivan never imagined that he’d be carrying the Goldstein’s creation over the century mark.
“They were a wonderful family that had it for 55 years, which I thought was nuts that anybody was in this business for that long.,” he said. “And now I got 45 in it myself, so time flies when you’re having fun.”
A recent proclamation by the Village of Forest Park celebrated the century in business and suggested that this establishment is one of the oldest burger joints in the entire Chicago area. For more than a hundred years, it’s a comforting thought that there’s always Goldys and you’ll never get a bad burger.