It must be a coastal thing, the salt air softening brain tissue and turning otherwise rational people into politically correct hothouse plants, protected from everything, including ourselves.

Suddenly, on both coasts, everyone has become terminally allergic to a whiff of smoke. Martinis have funny colors and taste of chocolate. New York City’s Smoking Police ticket bars for having an empty, clean ashtray on the premises. They’re suing in New Jersey to prohibit bars from having "ladies night" and charging women half price for their drinks because it discriminates against male patrons, poor things. In Santa Monica they now fine you for lighting up outdoors (but rev those engines, baby, and blanket those beaches with exhaust.)

Is there an antidote to this madness?

For me, it was a trip to Chicago to attend Book Expo where I signed copies of the reissue of a book I wrote 30 years ago, "Charlie and the Shawneetown Dame", published by Purdue University Press. I opted to stay in the Omni Ambassador East Hotel of which I had fond memories, including its famous Pump Room, a venerable, supremely comfortable watering hole that’s been a home away from home for the past 65 years to every celebrity on the planet, hundreds of their photos testifying to a good time having been had by all.

From the day it opened, celebs imbibed and dined along the Pump Room’s east wall, while Chicago’s social set enjoyed the show from the opposite side. Those seated in Booth One, arguably the most renowned dining table in the country, attracted the bulk of attention. Bogart and Bacall celebrated their wedding in Booth One. So did Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood. Liza Minelli almost grew up in that booth with her mother, Judy Garland, and Robert Redford and Paul Newman lunched on ham sandwiches and pilsners of beer there every day during the shooting of "The Sting", with Dr. Atkins nowhere in sight.

Ambassador Hotel

In 1938, the year the room opened, famed actress Gertrude Lawrence, appearing in a play in Chicago, held court for 90 consecutive nights in Booth One. Mel Brooks loves to greet guests when he’s ensconced there; Sinatra, whose music plays on the superb sound system, called Booth One his Chicago home whenever he was in town; Beverly Sills has hit a few high notes from the revered booth; and myriad memorable movie scenes have been filmed in the Pump Room and the hotel, including scenes with Cary Grant in "North By Northwest."

The beat goes on to this day. For years, beloved Chicago newsman Irv Kupcinet called Booth One his office until his death not long ago. A couple of regulars from the neighborhood have their names on plaques at the bar, and special stools with arms for their comfort. It’s a handsome room, renovated in 1998 to the tune of $2 million. Crystal chandeliers cast a flattering glow over the large room, its dark wood walls a perfect scrim for the series of large, comfortable beige fabric banquettes. The room’s founder, the great hotelier Ernie Byfield, prohibited the use of acoustical tiles on the ceiling: Everyone was to be seen and heard.

Yeah, it’s a great restaurant and bar, a throwback to a better, less contentious and persnickety time. Everyone I saw there—and I spent considerable time in the room—seemed blissfully happy, whether dining on Fire Roasted Lobster Consommé, Horseradish Roasted Filet Mignon, or Grilled Dayboat Hawaiian Wahoo, or strung around the large, scarred bar enjoying the best jazz trios and singers the city has to offer, sipping real Martinis (made with gin, not vodka, and not a chocolate concoction in sight), and chatting away about the Cubs, the tough winter it had been, and other topics du jour. But wait a minute. There are plenty of well-appointed bars and restaurants on both coasts serving up good drinks, good food, and good conversation. What’s different about the Pump Room?

Pump Room's elegant restaurant

It’s in Chicago, that’s what’s different. It’s in the city celebrated in the songs "My Kind of Town", and "Chicago", "that toddlin’ town that Billy Sunday could not put down"—"We’ll eat at the Pump Room/Ambassador East to say the least." It’s in a city with big shoulders, as they say, and where, remarkably, everyone seems to relegate political correctness to where it belongs along with tofu and granola, in a lock box. Even more remarkable is that everyone seems happy despite, egads, cigars and cigarettes being smoked at the bar. As the pundit Rodney King once said, "Why can’t everybody just get along?" Well, they do in Chicago, the way we used to in other places before the politicians on both coasts shifted their proper focus of fixing the roads, feeding and housing the poor, and making their cities otherwise more habitable to fining bar owners for having empty ashtrays on their back bars. By the way, it’s not about smoking. People can smoke or not smoke, their choice. And if any bar or restaurant chooses to not allow smoking, that’s fine. By the same token, a bar or restaurant that chooses to allow smoking in a designated area—read the bar at the Pump Room—that should be fine, too. You don’t like it? Don’t go there! That seems to be the way Chicagoans go about their lives, choosing how to enjoy them without wasting time worrying about how others choose to.

The Pump Room is, of course, only a part of the hotel itself, albeit a very important one. There once was an Ambassador West, but that’s gone the condo route. Ernie Byfield opened Ambassador East in 1926. It’s gone through two major renovations, a $12 million overhaul in 1986, and a $22 million dollar restoration in 1998. It features state-of-the-art business telecommunications systems in each of its 285 room, a spanking new fitness center, renewed banquet facilities, and Byfield’s Lobby Bar, a lovely, sedate room in which to enjoy a drink away from the Pump Room’s action. The Ambassador East, a true historic landmark located in a quiet, leafy neighborhood on the city’s North Side, has the feel and charm of a venerable London hotel. The rooms are tastefully decorated, the elevators swift, the carpeting plush, the atmosphere subdued, all the things you’d hope for from an upscale hotel. But like there being lots of nice bars and restaurants, there are plenty of nice hotels, too.

What causes the Ambassador East to stand out, at least for this traveler, is the staff. I’ve never encountered a better staff in all my travels, domestic or internationally. The concierge, Melinda Stell, treats guests as though they were in her home, and worked wonders for us, large and small, including a prime dinner table at the impossibly busy Hugo’s Frog Bar four blocks away. The dining room supervisor, Kim Revner, made sure we had a splendid booth in the Pump Room for dinner one night, not Booth One, but close. Virgil Zanders, who manages the Pump Room, is as welcoming and genuinely charming as he is movie-star handsome. But while I’m passing out accolades, I must mention one of the bellmen, a big, strapping man who is as much at home juggling luggage as he is with conversation. My wife had gone up to bed the night before we were to leave Chicago, and I was having a final drink downstairs in Byfield’s Lobby Bar. This particular bellman had just gotten off work and we ended up chatting about many pleasant things. He waxed poetic about the hotel and its management, and how satisfying it was to work there. I finished my drink, stood, and extended my hand to say goodnight. Instead of taking my hand, he wrapped me in a bear hug and said, "It’s people like you who make working here great."I’d never been hugged by a hotel employee before. But that very human, spontaneous touch capped off the best domestic hotel experience I can ever remember. The hotel’s general manager, Jim Marino, obviously hires smart, among other things.

I’ll be back at the Ambassador East Hotel and Pump Room, whether I have a reason to be in Chicago or not. It’s cheaper, and more effective than therapy, the beds more comfortable than an analyst’s couch, the conversation less pinched, paranoid and pretentious than in New York bars and restaurants, the spirit demonstrably freer and less judgmental than in my hometown. As the lyric goes in Chicago, "Bet your bottom dollar you’ll lose your blues in Chicago."I did for a weekend, and intend to do it again—soon.