The table-side salad bowls at Don Roth's Blackhawk Restaurant in Wheeling will stop spinning at the end of the year.

After 40 years, Blackhawk Restaurant is closing.

No more 21 secret ingredients in the restaurant's Blackhawk Dressing. No more tossing the salad only six times, gently, "so as not to bruise the tender greens."

The last day the Blackhawk, on Milwaukee Avenue just north of Dundee Road, will operate is New Year's Eve, said Maddie Gaucius, a manager.

The Blackhawk is closing, Gaucius said, because owner Ann Roth is approaching 90 and none of her children want to take over the restaurant.

Ann Roth is the wife of the late Don Roth.

The Blackhawk restaurant in downtown Chicago was started by Don Roth's father, Otto, in 1926. It closed several years ago. Mel Torme made his singing debut at the age of four at the downtown Blackhawk at Wabash and Randolph steeets.