Spinning J

Spinning J opened in Chicago's Humboldt Park in 2015, founded by chef and baker Dinah Grossman. It grew out of Cheap Tart Bakery, a pie-delivery business Grossman had run out of a commissary kitchen since 2010, before she found a Humboldt Park storefront to open a full soda fountain and bakery.

The shop's centerpiece is a 1928 marble soda-fountain bar, complete with its original stools and brass foot rail, which Grossman found and bought while equipment-hunting at a Masonic lodge outside Milwaukee slated for demolition. She later realized the bar had come from Sangor Drug in Milwaukee — the same drugstore counter where her grandmother, Ethel, used to spend time. The shop's name, 'Spinning J,' is a double reference: to 'spinning jenny,' the folk name for winged maple-tree seeds, and to a spinning-jenny silver necklace that was her grandmother's signature piece of jewelry.

The menu centers on house-made sodas and phosphates served at the vintage counter alongside seasonal pies and pastries carried over from the Cheap Tart days — giving the shop a documented personal and object history behind what would otherwise read as a generic soda-fountain description.