Sunday did not, it turned out, represent the top of a long steady slide into the miseries of winter. Still too early for that. Monday was cool, today warmer, and 80s are predicted for the coming days. Many of our meals are still being taken on the deck.

Except for the late lunch-early dinner (linner?) we had recently in honor of Yuriko’s birthday. We went to Bob Chinn’s Crab House in Wheeling and had delightful plates of fish, but no crab.

This is just one room of the enormous Chinn’s, which has 736 seats and claims to feed a million patrons a year. We arrived before it got too busy, which I hear is often.

Volume, for sure, but high-quality food as well, and a solicitous wait staff. That will keep you in business for 40 years.

I had the opakapaka, an Hawaiian snapper. Those are potatoes, not apples, on the side.

Yuriko had the macadamia sauteed basa, a fish native to Southeast Asia. We opted for a dessert that the menu called “Bob’s Slice of Heaven,” made from purple Okinawan sweet potatoes. Oh, yes.I learned while at the restaurant that old Bob Chinn died in April at 99. Born in 1923 in Duluth to Chinese immigrants, he’d been in the restaurant business since he was a teenager, founding Bob Chinn’s in 1982. A daughter and granddaughter run it now.

“The Crab House was modeled, according to various sources, either after fresh seafood restaurants in Hong Kong or Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, which Chinn had long admired,” the Chicago Eater says.

“But unlike Hong Kong or Miami, Chicago had no access to fresh seafood. Chinn solved that problem by getting up early every morning and driving to O’Hare to pick up shipments that had been flown in from the coasts, some of which were still alive. (He invested in special tanks in the restaurant basement to hold the crabs and lobsters.)

“He kept costs low by buying in volume from wholesalers — he had a separate business in Honolulu to scout the fish markets — and by using only the cheapest dishes and silverware.”

Bob Chinn’s isn’t precisely cheap, but I did get the sense that we would have paid more for the same in other high-end fish houses. Good for you, Bob. RIP.