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Clarke's Bar and Grille
Rating Details »
Category: Restaurants [Edit]
Neighborhoods: Lincoln Park, DePaul2445 N Lincoln Ave
(between Fullerton Ave & Halsted St)
Chicago, IL 60614
(773) 472-8306
- Nearest Transit:
-
Fullerton (Purple Express, Brown, Red)
- Good for Groups:
- Yes
- Accepts Credit Cards:
- Yes
- Parking:
- Street
- Attire:
- Casual
- Price Range:
-
$$
- Good for Kids:
- Yes
- Takes Reservations:
- No
- Delivery:
- No
- Take-out:
- Yes
- Waiter Service:
- Yes
- Wheelchair Accessible:
- Yes
- Outdoor Seating:
- No
- Good for:
- Late Night
- Alcohol:
- Full Bar
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19 reviews for Clarke's Bar and Grille
Not the greatest service here, but I love their food!
I'm a huge fan of sweet potato/sweet potato fries and have not been to another place with anything as good as Clarke's! Their turkey burger is delicious also. The flavoring with the sprouts and avocado makes it worth. They have great breakfast food!
In general this is a great hang out place. However, go during busy hours and their service falls short.
This place even makes diners look bad. OK so me and a few girlfriend's go on Sunday for breakfast because one of the girls I was meeting lives right around the corner. We walk in and this dude with a sleeve and dark hair ignores us for a few minutes as he is wiping menus I guess. Then his cell phone rings, answers the phone, then seats us while having a conversation. Seriously!
Then the waitress comes over, frazzled as can be! The computers are down and we have to write everything by hand and add up the prices and and and..... OK what would she ever have done had she waited tables back when I did. This staff is so so so bad. The food was typical diner but the slow and frantic and you are a bother service makes me run for my life! You should too!
I don't honestly think I could give a 'diner' more than 3 stars...just not possible.
Came here sunday with two friends, service was quick but not overly pleasant. Just kinda was there, doing his job, thats all, kinda day. There were maybe 2 other tables full there at the time, it was just before dinner, and they place up at a table where the sun is blinding. really? come on now.
Good thing was that they let us split the checks, even though there is a sign that clearly says "nope, no splitting checks"
Fix your damn bar. Drinks keep sliding off on to the floor.
I was taken here as a tourist at 3 am after a whole night of partying. Nothing barely satisfies me at that time of the night, but it was great to see that they did had a veggie burger and sweet potato fries. Everything that we order was great anyways and the waiter serving drunk obnoxious customers (just like us) was pretty freaking awesome and did not give us any attitude but good food and a HUGE pancake. I am definitely a fan and thankful for a great night out on the town topped with a great diner meal.
I was surprised that this place existed here on this stretch of Lincoln. I must have overlooked it a dozen times - it just sort of popped in to our view last night and we stopped in. We wanted some food and this seemed like a good enough place to get it AND they had a sign right outside the door that said they had $2 Miller pints, $3 well cocktails, $3 SoCo Lime shots and $5 bombs - count me in!!
We all ordered food and we were kind of turned off by the prices. Their menu isn't very large, they don't even have a club sandwich and everything was $10. I thought it was weird to get an order of appetizer nachos for $9 but boy was I wrong. Two of my friends ordered turkey burgers and I ordered nachos - the portions were humongous. Like seriously gigantic. That's why everything cost $9 or $10. The turkey burger was huge and it came with avocado and sprouts. I love sprouts... I regret not getting that burger. Clarke's also has sweet potato fries, which I always find interesting. They're always good and I'm always surprised when a restaurant serves them. The food was super yummy and I was very happy with my choice. There were so many nachos I couldn't even finish with the entire table helping me. Yummy.
The drink specials were good and the bar was pretty empty for a Saturday night. There had probably been more people around earlier for the NCAA tourney games but I was kind of surprised there weren't that many people in a bar that advertised $3 shots and $3 well cocktails on a Saturday night in Lincoln Park. That's a steal. I hope it got busier later in the night. We had no problem finding a seat and there are 6-8 person booths in the back of the place which is nice if you're coming in with a large group (which I was!).
If you're more in the mood for just eating, half of Clarke's is just a restaurant. There were actually older people and a group with some kids eating on the other side so it had a nice, family, sit-down restaurant kind of vibe. Very bright, kind of decorated like a diner, nothing too fancy or special. The bar side was a bit more modern, nice flatscreen TVs everywhere (yay basketball!) and the booths were very, very comfortable. I hope to come back here the next time I find myself on this stretch of Lincoln - every other bar around Clarke's within a one mile radius charges outrageous prices for drinks. Why pay more when you can come here?
I come here when I have an unstoppable craving for a turkey burger and sweet potato fries. Or tomato soup.
The turkey burger (sub out avocado for guac!) and SP fries are really, really good.
The tomato soup is probably the best I have ever tasted.
However, everything else on the menu ranges from decent to shitty. A little pricey. Generally rude service (would you be psyched to serve food getting paid $2/hr with shitty college student tips?)
A few real standouts on the menu....but generally meh.
And beware...it becomes a madhouse at weekend brunch.
Okay food, okay prices. We drove over here one late Sunday night when we needed some grub but were hoping for something a little better than Golden Apple (I love you, but nothing is really -great- tasting).
The food was decent - solid diner fare at reasonable prices. I'd rate them as a bit tastier than Golden Apple.
It's GREAT if you're with a group and want to have a fun meal. but if you're looking for some late-night grub and want to relax a little, try another diner. Even late on Sunday night it was chock full of tabled crammed with a dozen loud, rowdy college kids each. (Not that there's anything wrong with that - besides making me feel olllllld.)
Stopped in here for a sandwich to stave off my growing buzz a bit after making a sales call at a bar up the street.
Had a really fun time for the half-hour or so that I was there joking around with the staff.
Had a chicken breast sandwich with fries ($10) that was tasty and just as filling as my needs required.
I'll come back here again since I had such a fun time.
Stopped in for an afternoon snack and a beer with the girls here after leaving the dirty and disgusting "The Spread" across the street. We were hoping this place would be awesome - too bad it was just awesome because it was slightly better than The Spread.
The good news is, Blue Moon's on Sunday are $3. But the food isn't very good. I ordered the potato skins that are decked out with bacon, chives cheese and sour cream. What I received were over cooked, deep fried potato skins that had absolutely no flavor left in them. Ever cooked a potato so much that it lost flavor?
I guess I'll just have to continue my mission to find a decent place to grab a bite in LP.
A diner where you don't have to settle for diner food.
Seriously, go for the veggie quesadillas, or veggie burger, or even the pizza! The food is above and beyond most places let alone a typical diner.
The style adheres to its location--unique and refreshing, a twist on 50's classic. This is really a fun place to eat when you really just want to chow down.
Whenever I'm around Lincoln Park on a Sunday, chances are I'll be here.
If you're drunk or high, this is the place to be. Greasy generic diner food on a busy street that's always open and always has seating, yayyyy Clarke's.
Nothing spectacular... I'd eat here to put food in my system, not to tantalize my palate. The sweet potato fries aren't bad though...
I've had good and bad service here, but then again, I've gone with polite and rude groups, so the service could be related to that.
Clarke's serves mediocre food for relatively inexpensive prices.
This place surprised me. I figured it was going to be like every other crappy bar on this stretch of Lincoln. It wasn't though. It was really nice. My friends and I sat in the bar area, because there is also a diner area, but we wanted to drink. There are really comfy, booths , one of which we sat in.
Food:
When we started looking over the bars menu (some of us wanted dinner) we all groaned about how expensive everything was, "ten bucks for a turkey burger?!?!?! F**king Lincoln Park" We ordered anyway, and when it came, it was definitely a $10 turkey burger. First of all, it was huge, like world's largest turkey patty huge, I could barely finish half of it and I barely touched my fries. It came with everything you would expect to find on a burger, and SPROUTS! I love sprouts, on everything and anything. So good. I ordered regular fries because I don't like sweet potatoes, they were good, not especially "come here for the fries good" but I liked them. Another one of my friends ordered the onion rings, it was an order big enough for about 4 hungry people to share and be full. Overall good, and worth the price because of the portion sizes.
Booze:
We were there on a Saturday night, and they still had awesome specials. $2 (or 2.5) Miller Drafts and $3 Corona's for people who like that. Shots were on special too, this would be an awesome place to come get ridiculous if that's what you were looking for. The service was okay, I little slow at times, but it's not like it's going to kill you to walk your ass to the bar once and a while.
(I guess I'm kind of weird about bathrooms, I've been noticing that I mention them a lot, but they're important to me) Anyway, the bathroom was clean, but really weird, it was kind of dark in the stalls and at least the non-handicapped one didn't have a garbage can in it. That just struck me as odd.
All in all, I try not to hang out in LP too much, but when I have to I'll probably make this a regular stop.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Grilled Cheese!!! What more can you want?
I stopped in for the end of the Manny Pacquaio-Oscar de la Hoya fight Dec. 6. It wasn't Clarke's fault the fight went so badly for Oscar! Clarke's charged a $10 cover to watch the fight, which I thought was fair considering it was $54.95 to order it for home viewing. Very full--a diverse, SRO crowd very much into the fight despite the fact it was pretty much over by the time I arrived--around 10:40pm, after Round 6. I would return to Clarke's to watch Pacquaio-Hatton in the spring but would try to arrive on time to snag a booth or a better vantage point.
After the Barack Obama rally I was trying to find a place open and this was it. I ordered the gyro and the steak fries. The gyros were pretty good but they put a lot of onions on it, but that's OK because I just removed them. The fries were amazing and really fill you up. The service was alright it wasn't amazing since they were so busy so I'll give them some leniency, but the staff was really friendly.
I don't know what that guy was taking about with paying for water because when I asked for a glass of water they gave it to us.
The only problem I had was that the glasses were those brown sorta plastic ones and they seemed sorta dirty. But hey I could care less because the food made up for it.
Good place for late night food.
This bar represents all that is wrong with America: Greed. The bar does very well, the place is usually bustling with customers and they aren't shy with their food prices. That's fine. Guess what they don't have available? Free water! Correct - no free water. They want you to pay $3 for a 25-cent bottle of water! Our table of 4 was flabbergasted when someone in our party requested a beer and a glass of water. The waitress was slightly embarrassed and said, "We have no glasses of water available, just bottles of water". Wow, what a great owner who tells his employees that even though the customers can SEE water spigots, water isn't available. I hope the owner reconsiders this awful decision and once again starts offering free water. It's no skin off his back.
What can be better than $2 drafts of Miller Lite daily? I guess maybe $1 drafts, but we live in Chicago. The place is right next to Clarkes, the diner, and by the name I am guessing by the same owners. Right in the heart of Lincoln Park.
This place rocks! The owner Tom knows how to run a business! He is always friendly and courteous! Great place to watch boxing matches! Food and drinks are out of this world!
