Pockets – Aurora, IL
1330 Orchard RoadOne of the big things J and I miss about Lansing is its proximity to Howell. We frequented the Kensington Valley Outlets quite a bit. It’s pretty disappointing that the closest outlet to Kalamazoo is either Michigan City or Holland.
Since we were heading to Chicago, we stopped at Lighthouse Place in Michigan City yesterday, but today, we decided to make a trip out to the west suburbs to the Chicago Premium Outlets in Aurora. Before that though, lunch.
I, of course, scouted out a few places near the mall. One place I found was a bar/microbrewery that bears the late, great Walter Payton’s name. The other was a a regional sandwich chain.
P0ckets is on Orchard Road in Aurora south of I-88 in an area with a few strip malls and big box stores. The chain is local to Chicago right now, but they did recently open up some franchise opportunities. All but two of the stores are in the City of Chicago. Nearby Naperville is the city with the other store.
Like I mentioned, Pockets is in a strip mall with a number of other food options. There is a Pizza Hut Express next door and a Panera two doors down. In fact, I was picking up Panera’s wireless signal because the one at Pockets was locked. Read more…
Billy Boy’s Restaurant – Chicago Ridge, IL
6400 W. 95th StreetBack in Chicago. Let the feeding frenzy begin. J and I are always so bad when we go home. There’s just so many good restaurants and so much food we can’t get in Southwest Michigan that we kind of go overboard. I’m so much more worse than she is. If it were up to me, I’d eat Italian beef for every meal with a big bag of greasy, salty fries. My stomach would hate me, but I’d be sooooo happy.
One of the foods we really can’t get anywhere in Michigan it seems is BBQ. We’ve only found a couple restaurants in the entire state that do good BBQ. Heck, we were in Michigan City this afternoon and I’m pretty sure I saw more BBQ places in that town alone than I’ve ever seen in Michigan.
Seeing all those restaurants made me hungry for BBQ and J knew it. We really wanted to go a place out in Lockport, but that’s a pretty good drive from her parents house. Instead, we went to a place that doesn’t really specialize in BBQ, but does have award-winning ribs.
Billy Boy’s Restaurant is on the corner of 95th Street and Ridgeland Avenue just across the street from the Westfield-Chicago Ridge Mall. J said she had only been to the place once in her life. For a long time, she thought the place was just a liquor store, but it’s actually a restaurant with a liquor store attached. Read more…
UPDATED – Big Apple Bagels Offer Text Messaging Ordering
So, here’s a cool idea. Texting your order and have it waiting when you get there. Big Apple Bagles on South Westnedge in Kalamazoo of Kalamazoo and Battle Creek are the first restaurants in Michigan using a service called Zingle.
It works just like calling in your order, but you don’t have to talk to anyone….how convienent. You can text your order when you jump in the car, the order prints out in the restaurant and your order is waiting for you when you get there.
The number to text is 269-366-9599. You can also text “specials” to get the daily special and “coupon” for a free bagel. The unfortunate thing here is I don’t actually have the number to text….helluva a “reporter” ain’t I? Just thought you’d like to know anyway…..
Waffle House of America – Lawrence
60631 C.R. 365Since we moved to Mid-Michigan two years ago, I’ve wanted to stop at a little family restaurant just off I-94 in Van Buren County. The name is somewhat familiar, but it’s not part of the popular southern chain. That’s not what drew me in though. What drew me to this restaurant was the restroom.
A few years ago, I saw a story on the best restrooms in the country. At number five on that list was the women’s restroom at the Waffle House of America in Lawrence. Sure, I couldn’t actually go in, but if someone is going to take the time to paint a restroom and put that much effort into making it one of the best, surely they must put the same love and effort into the food.
The Waffle House of America is visible from I-94 just outside of Lawrence. When you get off the highway, the restaurant is directly across the street. The road actually splits in to two turn lanes, but if your ok willing to taunt the law, you could pull straight across the street into the parking lot.
The building is actually an old Horne’s. Not much remains of that chain except a few independent restaurants that still bear the name and a bunch of old buildings. The Lawrence location still looks like the old chain, still has the pad where the gas pumps used to be, and, the most defining feature, the yellow A-Frame roof.
Once again, J and I were headed to Chicago for a long weekend. We left when she got off work at noon and usually by the time we hit Paw Paw, she asks to stop for lunch. This time, I was the one asking. She saw the sign about the time I asked and knew what I wanted to do. She was on board, so we pulled off at Exit 52 and pulled in for lunch. Read more…
2010 USA Curling Nationals
J and I really got in to Curling last month during the Vancouver Olympics. It seemed like it was the only sport that wasn’t pre-taped and there was always an American team participating. J’s just a fan of the Olympics in general. I’m a sports fans, but I was so freaking annoyed at NBC’s coverage. Everyday we were treated to cross-country skiing. How frickin’ boring is that to watch?
With curling, you got to know the players and it’s easier to care about a sport when you have some sort of name recognition. J would get home from work around 1:00 and before even saying “hi”, she’d ask if curling was on.
I’ve watched curling since the Salt Lake Olympics. I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination and if it wasn’t for the Nationals being in town this week, it would probably be another four years before I watched another curling match and I’d have to relearn the rules was the games in Sochi start.
So, J comes home from work today and realizes that a men’s draw at the USA Curling Nationals that starts at 2:30. We wanted to go to one draw this week just to see the game live. Neither of us has ever had access to a curling match before let alone the national championships.
During the week, all the draw are general admission. The early draws are only $7 for an adult. The evening draws are $10. I assumed that when you paid for the draw, you got both the men’s and women’s draw, but that’s not the case. Each draw is a separate ticket, so if you wanted to watch all three draws today, it would set you back $24. Not horrible for nine hours of curling.
We picked a couple seats close to Sheet 1. No reason. It just happened to be where we walked in to the arena. J started to head right down to the boards, but I stopped her a few rows up. We’d have a great view of the sheet in front of us, but only the one end and it’d be hard to see the other four games going on. Read more…
Derks Restaurant
3610 Sprinkle Road- Kalamazoo, MI 49001
- (269) 978-3400
- No Known Website
- No Online Menu
Ever since the Olympics, J and I have been looking forward to the USA Curling Nationals at Wings Stadium. We didn’t know which day we would go, but we wanted to go to one draw. Today turned out to be the day. There was an afternoon draw at 2:30 so that gave us time to grab lunch and go watching some curling.
The initial plan was to eat lunch at The Icehouse, but once we got to Wings Stadium, we couldn’t actually find it. We went into the Annex, but that’s where the signs for it stopped. It was dark in there, so we assumed it was closed. We headed around to the box office, got our tickets and figured we’d just eat concession stand food again, but as we tried to walk in to the arena, we were stopped and told gates didn’t open until 2:00. It was a little before 1:30, so we just left and went to eat.
From Wings Stadium, I headed down the road back towards Sprinkle. Right on the corner of Sprinkle and Vanrick Drive is Derks Restaurant. Seemed a logical choice. We were just looking for a quick, cheap meal and what better place to find one that an old family restaurant that has been in business since the 1950’s.
This is actually one of what used to be two Derks locations. There was a second Derks in Portage, but that was torn down some time ago to make room for a the Main Street Pub on Westnedge.
The entrance to the building is on the Vanrick Drive side, but parking is along the side. I noticed quite a few other people with USA Curling credentials around there neck, so we weren’t the only ones to come up with this idea. Read more…
Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken – South Westnedge
4441 S. Westnedge AvenueI had our whole day planned out. I was going to make brunch at home. We’d watch the race then I’d make dinner. No more dining out this weekend. That is, until the waffle disaster.
I was setting up my George Forman to make waffles when J found a recipe for Ginger Spiced Waffles. I don’t really like Gingerbread Cookies, so this recipe did nothing for me, but I always feel bad making J eat what I want to eat, so I was going to make those for her and make regular waffles for myself. I didn’t want to make the whole recipe of either because that would have been way too much food. I started with J’s and it quickly became obvious why I was a Journalism major in college.
Somewhere along the way, I screwed up and when I put the batter on the waffle iron, it oozed out the sides. It was way too thin. I ended up with a mess all over my cutting board and the waffle iron needed to cool down before I could get the destroyed waffle remnants off of it. Brunch was a bust
J somehow connected waffles to chicken and asked about the place on the corner of Westnedge and Kilgore. I had stopped at Lee’s Famous Recipe Chicken once before long before we moved to Kalamazoo. On one of my solo trips back to Illinois, I pulled off the highway at Westnedge look for food. Read more…
Thunder Hog Saloon
31011 M-60As you can probably guess, I put a lot of stock in user reviews of restaurants. Websites like Urbanspoon, Yelp, and Google play a huge role in where I pick to eat. Bad reviews don’t turn me off as much as glowing reviews turn me on and that’s exactly what I found when I logged on to Urbanspoon this morning.
The headline read, “Find Burger Heaven At….” That sounded to good to be true! There’s a burger heaven somewhere in Kalamazoo? Well, not quite. It’s in the Kalamazoo Urbanspoon directory, but it’s a little bit of a drive from the city. Still, the rest of that review made my mouth water. Lucky for me, J’s always up for an adventure.
So, we hopped in the car and started heading towards Leonidas in St. Joseph County. The bar we were looking for is the Thunder Hog Saloon on M-60 and near Fulton Road in tiny Leonidas. There ain’t much there, folks. Just the bar, a general store, the township offices and a few houses. We learned the hardway that if you follow Google Maps or the GPS, there isn’t even a gas station along the way. Fortunately for us, Mendon is just five miles to the west, so we didn’t have to call AAA.
When we made our way in to the bar, we had no idea what we were getting in to. The Thunder Hog’s sign probably boasts “Where Cultures Collide” and collide they do.
The Thunder Hog is a dive bar in every sense of the word. After you make your way in, the bar and dining area is to your right. To the left is a pool table and a stripper pole. Yup. A stripper pole. There’s a juke box tucked away in the corner and the only TV was turned to SPEED. There was a large group sitting at a table by the door, so we headed to an empty table on the other side of the room closer to the kitchen. There were a few guys at the bar shootin the bull with the bartender who yelled over and asked what we wanted. J asked if he had a menu. He said he’d have to look, but a few minutes later, he did produce one. I knew they were doing food because I could see into the small kitchen where there were a number of burgers on the grill. Read more…
KFC – Portage
5822 S. Westnedge AvenueThe last couple days have been very unlike us. J has been feeling pretty under the weather so we weren’t able to do our weekend thang eating out. Yesterday, our meals were Culvers and McDonalds. For lunch, J’s throat hurt and all she wanted was ice cream. For dinner, she didn’t have a taste for anything, so a bland McDonalds cheeseburger did the trick.
Today, J is judging a speech contest at Portage Northern, so I was left home alone. Our kitchen is a mess and I didn’t even want to attempt to cook until I got it cleaned up. I was watching TV and saw a commercial for KFC’s Fiery Buffalo wings. It’s been a while since I’ve been to KFC and I heard those were good, so why not make it lunch.
There are three KFC locations in the Greater Kalamazoo area, but the Portage location on Westnedge and Boston Avenue is the closest to me. Like everything else on Westnedge, when I left, I couldn’t actually picture where it was. All the signs just run together. I knew it was there, but I couldn’t remember how far down.
Turns out, it’s not very far past I-94. It’s part of a stretch dominated by chain restaurants. It sits right next to Wendy’s and not far past Red Robin and Carrabba’s.
Like I mentioned, it’s been a while since I’ve been to a KFC. The last time was almost six months ago. J and I stopped at a KFC on our honeymoon. Wierd, right? Well, not really. The KFC we stopped at was in Corbin, KY….the Original KFC. We were on our way to the Smoky Mountains and Corbin is on the way, so we made it lunch on Day 2 of our honeymoon excursion. Read more…
Bake-Cation’s at Zingerman’s
I LOVE Zingerman’s. It’s’ one of my favorite reasons to go to Ann Arbor. The deli, the Roadhouse, the bakery. Love it!
My mother-in-law called this afternoon after watching the news in Chicago. WLS’s “Hungry Hound” Steve Dolinsky did a story about Zingerman’s doing a “bake-cation” which he calls “essentially fantasy camps for home bakers, ranging from a day to a full week.”
Even better, there are a few recipe’s on ABC 7’s website!
SW Michigan Dining 