The story about John’s Grill on W. Chicago near Wyoming in Detroit is both very uplifting and depressing.
John Carlisle of the Detroit Free Press, who reports about little gems in the city and beyond, writes that the zip code the retro diner is in -- 48204 — was named a few years ago by NeighborhoodScout.com as the single most dangerous neighborhood in the entire country.
Carlisle writes about the restaurant's owner and sole cook, Jovica Trpcevski, and how the neighborhood has "undergone a four-decade collapse into crime and abandonment" since he opened the joint.
Still, Carlisle writes:
There’s no bulletproof glass in his restaurant. Customers can reach out and touch him as he cooks. They eat in an open dining room in booths or at the long counter.
In an area like this, where the only places left to eat at are coney islands that are built like fortresses designed to barricade their workers from those they serve, and where several small-business owners have been shot and killed in their shops over the years, this is unheard of.
Carlisle goes on to write:
This cheerful, stocky Yugoslavian cook is utterly defenseless. Odds are, with the way things are out here, he should’ve been a victim many times over.
Yet the opposite has happened.
He’s never been robbed. His customers don’t get mugged. Their cars aren’t broken into or stolen.
Somehow, his vulnerability — and the trust in the residents that it implies — has left him protected.
“I’ve never felt like I needed not to trust people,” Trpcevski tells Carlisle. “When I go in a place that’s got bulletproof glass I feel like they’re distancing themselves, like you got some kind of a disease and they want to be behind the glass.
