Exchequer Restaurant & Pub
226 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60604
Time: In the door at 12:14 pm, food in 16 minutes; also needed to ask for check at end of the meal and wait for credit card slip to come back. Total: about 19 minutes waiting.
Meal: Hamburger, side of fruit, Coke = $12.74 + 2.50 tip = $15.24
There was no Loop Lunching yesterday because I made a really good pork roast over the weekend and had leftovers for lunch on Monday. It’s too bad, for this project, that I’m such a good cook.
Just north of Kramer’s, the health food store and vegetarian cafe, is the Exchequer Restaurant & Pub. As it’s just around the corner, my workplace has had pizza and wings catered from them, which were very serviceable examples of both of those foods, so I was expecting a good lunch. The Exchequer is a sit-down restaurant, which made me feel a little weird coming in alone. They have a pretty good draft beer selection, but I passed that up for both the aloneness-factor and the time of day.
Following the house-named rule, I got The Exchequer Burger from the section of the menu called Exchequer’s Famous Burgers, so it was double house-named. I was pleased to see that as a side I could skip the usual fries or potato salad and get fruit. I mean, I’m in training.
The fruit was good - ripe cantaloupe, nice strawberries, and… well, I guess you have to have grapes in a fruit cup. All of the toppings on the burger were nice, too: healthy-sized slices of tomato, crisp lettuce, a whole slice of raw onion (grilled was an option) so you can pick out however many rings you want. And the burger looked like it was nearly medium, like I ordered. It just… wasn’t very good. The meat was a little grainy or something. It wasn’t exactly dry, but it definitely wasn’t a juicy burger. I left feeling a bit disappointed, especially since the cost was higher than any other lunch place so far, and the wait time longer.
Leave a comment