time for city number three, the second city, Chicago!

i've never been, so beyond wikipedia and word of mouth i don't know much about the city. i'm sure there are tons of chicgao residents/people that have been to chicago on this forum, so lets hear it. what are your favorite things to do? places to go? good eats? places/things to avoid?

from what i've read on wiki, the magnificent mile and the navy pier look like must stops for the trip. thoughts? anything else?

thanks for contributing

I've probably posted this stuff before, but here are a few thoughts:

Touristy stuff:
- Navy pier is kind of lame - a big shopping center w/o much to do
- Art Institute is good
- Of the museums, science & industry was my favorite if you can still do the submarine tour
- Field museum is pretty standard
- Shedd Aquarium is good if you've never been to a large aquarium

Nightlife:
- Wrigleyville: young, lots of nightlife near wrigley field
- Lincoln Park: plenty of cool places near Depaul university
- Rush & Division area: less interesting IMO - more touristy

All of these areas areas are a good start because there are dozens of bars nearby which you can wander between.

Food:
- Steak: Chicago Chop House
- Pizza: Giordano's or Lou Malnatis
- Signature Room @ John Hancock for a good view

Summer is a great time there - check out North Beach, etc.

Good resources:
www.metromix.com
www.chicagobarproject.com

I thought Gibson's was pretty much the steakhouse in Chicago.

Loved Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) when I was a kid. According to their website the U-505 is still open, as is the coal mine which was another favorite of mine.

is there still a restaurant called Greek Isles or something like that? Its been about 7 years since i was there but i remember that place being pretty good. fried cheese FTW.

z28, I'm not totally with you on Navy Pier. The Seadog is a fun speedboat ride, the IMAX is pretty cool if they are playing something cool and you're in to that kind of thing, and they have some decent artists play the stage there. Also, watching the fireworks (twice every week) from the Seadog or any of the other boats on the pier is very cool.

Steaks: Others may disagree, and I might be being a little extreme here, but IMO there are zero excellent steak places in Chicago, and its really disappointing. Many places that get raves, like Ruth's Chris, are downright horrible and pretty much the rest are either just OK or waaaay overrated. For my birthday last year I went to David Burke's Primehouse and got Kobe NY Strip on the bone. It was overcooked and not well-seasoned, and as you can imagine since it was Kobe it cost a lot. Right now actually my favorite steak in Chicago is Captal Grille, which is kinda sad.

Pizza: There are literally hundreds of excellent pizza places all over the city, and while there are some really bad ones too, there's pretty much no excuse for eating bad pizza in this town no matter what your tastes. Some options:

Uno's or Due's for old-school pan. Local's tip: go to Due's. The pizza is exactly the same, and its right accross the street. But because all the tourists have heard of Uno's, the wait at Due's is far shorter. The pesto pie is my favorite.

Gino's for the ambiance and a different take on old-school pan. Personally I hate Gino's, but the suburbans seem to love it.

Connie's or any of a hundred one-shop delivery places.

There's also a restaurant on the North side called Calo's that I love. Italian with great pizza (thin & pan are excellent), pretty much the best BBQ ribs I've ever had, and enough selection to please anyone. If you're going to go to Calo's, be sure to also walk down to the Hop Leaf to sample their amazing beer selection. (Other excellent bars for beer are the Map Room and Bar on Buena just 2 blocks from my house!) For desert, go to Sweet Occasions. All three of these places are in Andersenville within 3 blocks of each other. The neighborhood is ultra safe (for the city, don't be a moron) and you can't swing a dead cat without hitting a cab.

Yikes, I forgot about stuffed pizza. Giordano's is pretty much the nuts here but again Calo's is really good too.

Cubs games are a ton of fun

grunch,

while i agree there are a handful of good things about navy pier (notably imax and the Shakespeare theater), i have to disagree with you about steaks. people who come to chicago and eat at ruth's chris should be smacked around a bit. i haven't been to capital grill or primehouse, and my faith has been shaken a bit in lawry's chicago (not steak anyway, whatev), but mortons, gibsons, sullivans, chophouse, keifers, custom house all prepare a really good steak.

i do totally agree on ginos. i can't ****ing stand the stuff but i think it's entirely rooted in hating the crust. others like it a ton, and they do have a great lunch special (personal pan, salad, and a soda (or beer i think!) for $5?). my personal favorite non-thin pizza is pequods pan (pepperoni and jalapeno ftw!)

i've never heard of calo's really, but an italian place with the best bbq ribs you've ever had is intriguing.

hopleaf is great, but crowded, quenchers (200+ beers) is great if you're a beer nut, but is crowded with hipsters drinking pbr most nights, and obviously the map room is great. (bars owned by millionaires who open the bar just for fun and serve free food on the weekends? how can that be beat?)

i'll probably make a post in here at some point, but i might just track down my post about chicago in the thread about "guides to your home city" and respond to other people in this thread.

I've never been to custom house, and there's a brand new place called Fleming's that I may go to this Friday. But the other ones listed here are at the (relative) top of my list. Sullivan's is especially cool for the jazz club atmosphere of the bar.

Really? I'm surprised people are saying this, I love Gino's. The lunch special is $5.95 I believe, but beer is NOT included, at least not when I went in mid-March to the one on Ontario in River North. BTW I also think, among the big chains, that Lou Malnati's >>> Giordano's, but maybe I'm alone on that one.

If you want to get away from the Chicago-style pizza a great spot is Piece (W. North Ave. in Bucktown). Great thin-crust pizza and they brew their own beer.

I'll post more stuff later when I have time to think of it--just wanted to share a few thoughts on pizza.

I guess I didn't realize Custom House was such a big place for steak. When I went there last August I found the menu pretty eclectic and New American--I forget what I ordered but it definitely was not a steak. Don't get me wrong, it's a very cool restaurant, I'm just not sure it fits in with the rest of the "classic" steakhouses named above.

Joe,

I too like Lou's better than Giordanos. Re: Ginos, I just don't like the crust. I know many that do.

Piece is great because they brew their own beers (which you can take home by the growler) and a good # of them are pretty good. I just tried out Coal Fire, a coal oven pizza place, which was pretty good.

Custom House is definitely not a "typical" or "classic" steakhouse, but I do think that the idea is steakhouse. I don't think it should be disqualified simply because they serve other food and that food is good

A non-food place I've just recently tried and enjoyed was Violet Hour. Violet Hour is a cocktail lounge. They don't let in more people than there are seats available, so there's never some ******* bumping in to you every minute. The drinks are really great, and at $11 for a drink + roughly half an extra drink in a sidecar, pretty well priced I think. The drinks are almost all spins on old classic cocktails. While it's a rough line to wait in to get in on weekends, weeknights are easy, and it's a great way to unwind after work.

yup

Cool way to spend an afternoon is on tour put on by the Chicago Architectural Society - get in a boat just off Michigan Ave. and cruise up and down the Chicago River while they tell you the history of all the buildings.

Sounds boring, but just a really nice day - weather permitting.

MM MD

Since I work for United, I go to the Chicago area a lot (our HQ are there). mostly, it's a couple of nights in Elk Grove Village, but my wife and I spent a weekend there last year and had a great time. it helped that it was indian summer and the weather was absolutely gorgeous. most of the time i go there for meetings, it's ten degrees with a negative five wind chill and forty mph winds.
during that weekend, we hung out downtown a bunch and hit up a lot of the museums (corporate discounts making most of them free for me and my family). here's the highlights:

Grunch had the pizza thing pretty well nailed. Go to Due. same as Uno, but shorter line (and right across the street). Giordannos was good, but i liked Due better.

the art museum was way cool. lots of old masters there.
Shedd was cool because I like fish, but it was a huge letdown after Monterey (anything would be).
Natural History was interesting as well, but I'm a nature nerd, so i think I liked it more than my wife did.

Navy Pier was kinda meh. cool setting, but, once you get inside, it's pretty much like any other touristy area. I could have been at Pier 39 in SF or Waikiki and it would have been pretty much the same thing.
I did really like the ferry boat ride to the Navy Pier from the Shedd, though. that was kind of cool.

Brazzaz was the first churrascaria that I'd ever heard of and, since the wife and I are both red meat eaters, we had to check it out (found it by walking by, looking for Due, so we came back the next night). Damned good meat on a stick. Have since gone to Texas de Brazil in Woodfield Mall (with coworkers) and found it a bit lacking comparatively. still, all you can eat meat on a stick is good.

Woodfield Mall is a big ass mall, and my wife enjoyed spending the day there while I was at a meeting on Monday. If I'm in town for work (alone), I'll head there, since it's pretty close to the hotels I stay at, and hang out at Borders or Dick's Sporting Goods. I've even shopped there a couple of times when the weather was colder than i expected and I needed an emergency sweater (like a couple of weeks ago when I stepped off the plane at one in the afternoon and it was thirty seven degrees and falling).

special note: the broasted chicken at Boston Blackies in Arlington Heights is really really good. not sure why a edf-er would find him/herself in arlington heights (it's a favorite of my coworkers, so we always seem to end up there after work), but if you are, the chicken is a winner.