Sunshine Cafe

5449 N. Clark St.
773.334.6214
Japanese

This is a small Japanese restaurant in Andersonville that offers homestyle Japanese cooking. I ordered the beef udon soup and it was big, flavorful and satisfying! If you are looking for sushi, this is not the place to go. They don't have raw fish and only have one kind of roll. They have the dishes like udon soup, tonkatsu, and rice dishes. The food is fresh and well-prepared. The decor is lacking, but it is the food that have the loyal customers coming back here. It is BYOB and the prices are reasonable.

Grizzly's Lodge

3832 N. Lincoln Ave.
773.281.5112
Bar/Restaurant

I had high hopes for this place since I like the "Northern Woodsy" feel--just like being in a rustic log cabin in Northern MN or WI. We went on Friday night for the "special $7.95 all-you-can-eat fish fry." The place is smaller so it was fairly crowded, but we were still able to get seated right away. The decor is interesting: northern cabin meets the Chicago Cubs.. on every screen. Kind of different for it to be a sportsbar when it clearly is trying to be "Cabin-like." So I was super excited when I saw that they had $1 drafts of Point Beer... what a deal! So we ordered a round and ordered a round of the fish fry deals. The beer took awhile. The fish took awhile. We sat there... and sat there... waiting for the waiter to come back to our table. We kept on watching him go to another table, go to the kitchen, come back out to another table, go back to the kitchen... This went on for a good 45 minutes. By this time we wanted another round of beer AND one of us wanted more fish. So one of my dining companions finally went up to the bar and talked to the waiter, saying we wanted to order more. He said that he would be right there to get our order. About 15 minutes go by, nothing. He finally comes over (we had to flag him down again) and apologizes for the wait and says that he will be right back. We say, we want the check! Took him another 5 minutes for that! We got there at around 7:30 pm.. left at around 9:45. Had only 1 round of beer, wanted more. Had only 1 small plate of fish fry each, wanted more. Another table that had bad service said to us, "If I were you, I would just leave..." I think that is what they did. It would be one thing if we were a table of 10: we were a table of 3. It would be one thing if he had all the tables: he had maybe 8, tops... the place isn't huge. The service was just BAD! And honestly, the fish fry was not much better than getting those frozen fish fillets and frying them yourself. And the fries weren't good either. The only redeeming thing was the cheap beer... and we couldn't even get more than one of those!

Aloha Grill

2534 N. Clark St.
773.935.6828
Asian/Hawaiian

This place is a small, casual restaurant that tries to be like a restaurant in Hawaii. I guess it is as close as it is going to be in Chi-town. They have different rice plates like Hawaiian BBQ chicken or Chicken Katsu that come with rice and macaroni salad. The food was good and the price is cheap! The drawbacks of the place is there is no bathroom and it is a little stale inside since it is more like a fast food set-up...order at the counter and eat out of styrofoam containers. The only thing it is missing that is truly Hawaiian is poi, which is gross anyway!