On January 10 Jovan Trboyevic, a good friend and longtime supporter of The Rockford Institute, died at his home in Chicago at the age of 89.  He will be remembered in his adopted city as a restaurateur extraordinaire who set uncompromising standards for fine dining and customer behavior.  As the Chicago Tribune obituarist recalled, “The sort of casual incivility that we regard as a fact of life today would get you thrown out of a Trboyevic restaurant, whether it was Jovan, the restaurant he opened in 1967; the legendary Le Perroquet, which from 1973 through 1984 was arguably Chicago’s finest restaurant; or Les Nomades, which he opened as a private club in 1978. . . . Tables of loud diners who couldn’t rein in their exuberance were asked to leave. . . . In a famous incident involving architects who spread their blueprints across a Le Perroquet table, Trboyevic comped the meal but ordered the offenders to pack up and never return.”

To establish some of the best restaurants in the Western Hemisphere was a singular feat, but Jovo’s previous life story is equally worthy of a full-fledged biography.  As a subaltern in the Royal Yugoslav Army, in April 1941 he evaded capture by the invading Axis forces by joining the crew of a submarine that slipped out of the Bay of Cattaro and sailed for Crete.  He was transferred to Egypt, where the British—impressed by the intelligence, cool poise, and polyglot eloquence of the 21-year-old—sent him back to Yugoslavia in September 1942 to establish contact with Gen. Mihailovic’s Cetniks.

Jovo arrived just as the Serbs’ civil war was flaring up, triggered by the Communists’ attempt to exploit national resistance for revolutionary goals.  After a long and hazardous trek through his native country that took him from Montenegro to Serbia, Croatia, and Italian-held Dalmatia, he managed to reach Switzerland via Italy.  His report to the British in Berne was potentially important: He knew better than anyone in the outside world the score on Tito’s true motives and on the Ustaša extermination of Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.  Trboyevic was powerless to impact the drift of British policy, however: It came to favor the Partisans, mainly thanks to strategically placed Communist agents in British intelligence who twisted field reports to benefit their side.

During the first decade of the Cold War, Jovan Trboyevic was a Western intelligence operative operating under a variety of covers behind the Iron Curtain.  When he grew tired of what he came to see as a game for game’s sake, Jovo’s languages and cooking skills enabled him to live the life of a culinary nomad at top-tier hotels and on cruise lines around the world.  He finally settled in Chicago, the city he loved, and married Meggie Abbott, his wife of 42 years, who outlives him.

We spoke just before Christmas, and he asked me to lunch the following week.  I told him I’d be out of town but took a rain check for mid-January.  We agreed that it would be high time for us to start recording his life story on tape—something we had planned to do for years.  It was not to be.

That story is worthy of a Hollywood script.  Its protagonist was a witty and generous man who loved life, even though he took a dim view of the ways of the modern world.  Above all Jovo Trboyevic was a gentleman par excellence, perhaps the last of his kind.  May God rest his soul.