The Yard House

Heidi's new job is in Glenview, and she's near The Glen, an outdoor shopping center something like Old Orchard but for the even more affluent. As it happens, there's a Metra stop a block away from her workplace, so I can take the train up after work and we can go have a lovely meal or whatever.

In any case, we chose last night to go to the Yard House. It's a chain restaurant, but it's a new chain restaurant, and I remember going there back before it was a chain. This was in Long Beach, mind you, but it was good there, it's pretty good here, too.

The Yard House's big claim to fame is that they have 250 beers on tap. Some of them are Budweiser and it's various American kin, but most of them are either microbrews or foreign or both. This makes each trip to the Yard House a lovely little experiment. The food is good, too.

In any case, I came in and asked if they had anything like Goose Island's MBA (Masters of Beer Appreciation), where you drink so many beers, you get something free. They didn't (I kind of already knew the answer; the one in Long Beach didn't, but I wasn't sure if they had initiated something like that). The manager told me no, but then he subsequently bought me a beer (a Spatten Optimal, I believe... oaky and a little sharp, but sort of complex). Yes, the manager of the restaurant gave me a beer on the house. For no reason than that he was in a good mood.

Speaking with him later, I mentioned that I just started homebrewing, and he said, "Hey, I'm a homebrewer, too!" Just from speaking with him, it was obvious that he was much more experienced than I am, but it opened a pretty cool door for us to talk brew stuff (as a result of that conversation, I have ideas about how to proceed with this Hefeweisen... could end up being very very good).

The Spaaten was stronger than I expected it to be, and I'm still a bit of a lightweight, so I ended up being less enthused about the rest of the night. Still, I know from experience that this is a good place to go, and now I know from experience that this particular Yard House is that much more worthy of my patronage.