Jon K.'s Profile

This place is awesome, and the folks working there are cool as hell.  I came in on a slow Sunday and got a hand wash for $13.  Listened to some slow jams on the radio and hung out on a beautiful day while they did a very complete job.  Good stuff!

I put ten bucks (one of the new bills) into their coin changer, and it took it and promptly did NOTHING.  And of course, there's nobody actually working there, so I had no way to get a refund.  What a rip-off.

I don't know if it's the quality of their food, or the fact that I just spent a year in Denver, where there are almost no good Indian restaurants, but I love the food here!  The buffet is not huge, but it's a good mix of dishes, and I like all of them.  Service is fast and friendly, and I love the eclectic little setting.  It reminds me of when I was in college in the midwest, and all of the best restaurants were in little old houses, and not prefab strip malls.

The buffet is a good deal; I only ate dinner here once sofar, and I prefer getting a mix of a lot of things, rather than a full portion of just one thing, so I tend to stick to lunch.  It is not a big place, and if you have more than four people or kids in tow, forget it.  But if you live nearby and can walk over (we are in Archstone) then add this to your regular rotation.

If you're in Chicago, Uno is an old-school pizza joint that allegedly invented the Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.  Outside of Chicago, Uno is Uno is Uno, because it's all franchised, and if you walk into one in Lynwood, Washington or Tampa, Florida, it's the same deal.

It surprised me that an Uno went in at this location.  First of all, New Yorkers are absolutely fanatic about their brand of pizza, the wide-sliced, ultra thin, super-droopy, greasy as the Valdez pizza.  Also, it seems the "family-operated" pizza parlors of the neighborhood would drive this place out of business.  (Or maybe the owner would accidentally fall into the east river.  Who knows.)  So it was an interesting surprise to see this show up.

You come to Uno to get their deep-dish pan pizza.  Yes, you can get ribs, chicken, pasta, or a burger, but come on, get the pizza.  The crust is very thick and tall; the tomato sauce is chunky and has pieces of tomato, rather than tasting like it went through a blender for an hour.  The Chicago classic is sausage and cheese, but there are many other combinations available.

The restaurants in general have a bar-like feel to them, and all sorts of libations are offered.  This particular location is nice in that it's right across from the movie theater, and it's a great place to stop before or after a flick.  This is not authentic in any way, but after growing up in the shadow of Chicago, it was always nice to come here and get a taste of a different type of pizza.

I love hole-in-the-wall, no-frills places that serve one purpose, but do it well.  And I also love places that are stuck in time, and have been the same for decades.  And that is the beauty of Carbone's.

The inside of the shop is very unassuming - it's about as big as my living room, and consists of nothing more than a single glass deli case, a few shelves of dry goods, and a walk-in and meat slicer.  There are no glossy ads, flat-screen TVs tuned to ESPN, or even soda dispensers.  It's just sausages, olives, and a little board with a dozen sandwich choices.

The sandwiches - I got the Italian meatball, and it was the best damn sandwich I've ever had.  The sauce: amazing.  The bread: perfect.  The mozzarella: absolutely fresh.  The combination was absolutely perfect.  And it was $6, plus a 50-cent can of Coke.  Usually if I get a foot-long sandwich, I will stall out about halfway through the second half, but with this, I ate the entire thing and wanted to turn around and go back for another.

Rose is the woman who works there, and she will start talking to you, even if you try to avoid her.  If you watch the movie Goodfellas, Marty S's real mom plays the role of the mom cooking them dinner, and Rose is exactly like her: very old-school and sincere, yet she might ask you far more personal questions than if you bought a meatball sub at a Subway.  But it's cool, and it's always nice to see people rather than droids serve your food.

There's no place to sit, and there's just sandwiches, unless you want to buy a whole salami and gnaw on it in the car.  There are no vegan or gluten-free options.  There are no low-cal options.  There are no low-fat options.  It's just sandwiches, done right.  Good stuff.

Karma is a small cafe with great, fresh, good for you food.  It's all vegetarian, with sandwiches, salads, and lots of coffee, tea, and drink options.  The kitchen setup is not huge, and service can be slow, but it's always worth the wait.  It's also very much a place to sit around and wait, or do nothing.  Grab one of the sustainable living newspapers and sit outside (great patio) or lounge in the dining room.  I always get the FBLT, which is pretty damn good, even for a lifetime meat-eater.  It's a great little place to make a pit stop during the middle of your Saturday.

They aren't the cheapest, and they aren't the best, but they pretty much are the face of pizza in Bloomington, and they will probably still have stores running after all of us are dead and gone.  (Probably from heart failure due to too much pepperoni and cheese.)

This locally-owned chain does a take-out/delivery pizza similar in style to Domino's, but with (arguably) fresher ingredients and a better crust.  Their breadsticks are pretty damn good (more bread than flattened oregano-encrusted Pizza Hut planks of lumber.)  It's not a complicated setup, and you'll mostly get into this place if you live in the dorms on 10th and walk over, or if you're in a delivery zone.  It's not sit-down fine dining, but if you're into that and want to give your money to a local business, you can always walk next door to Lennie's, which is run by the same folks.

I'm sure I fondly remember Pizza Express a lot more for the times I got together with friends in the dorms or after way too much drinking to get a few pizzas and keep watching movies or whatever the hell I did back then instead of studying.  What I also remember most is that their drinks were served in plastic cups with their logos on them, and twelve years after leaving Bloomington, I've still got a couple of them in the cabinets.  And a few years back, when I was in New York, I went to an art-house screening of this documentary on the white supremacist that shot and killed those people a ways back.  That is not funny at all, of course.  What *is* funny is that there's a scene where these skinheads are sitting around babbling about their aryan beliefs or whatever, and everyone is eating pizza and drinking out of Pizza Express cups!  I just about lost it when I saw that, and I had a lot of trouble explaining to my date what I thought was so damn funny during this movie on hate groups.

Yeah, I know the Un-Safeway joke.  But seriously, the absolute best grocery store in New York is about three stars below this place, which makes it heaven.

This place is a rev behind a lot of the newer Safeways, but they still have a lot of stock, and it's close to my apartment.  There are good deals to be had (I think I bought 96 cases of Coke for the price of 3 over the holiday weekend) and the staff are generally okay.

I never saw armed guards outside; I've never had anyone ask me for money; I've never had any problem with the homeless; I've never seen someone smoking crack there; and I've never felt threatened.  Yeah, the place could use a coat of paint, but I've never seen rats eating the food there, I've never seen homeless people bagging your groceries for you; I've never seen cashiers ask for tips; I've never seen cashiers talking on their cell phones during the entire transaction; I've never had to pay extra to get my 2-liters refrigerated versus warm; and I've never had to deal with six-packs of Cokes being the only size they carried because the store is the size of my living room.  All of these happened to me regularly at my neighborhood grocery in New York.  Count your blessings.

I went to my first MLB game ever here in 2006.  (I'm from Indiana, they play another ball-oriented game there.)  I really liked this park, because there's a mix of old school tradition and brand new facility.

Old school?  I hung out with some die-hard Brewer fans just a few blocks away, with many beers and a giant pot of bratwurst steaming away on the grill.  People here like their teams, they like their beer, and they like their cased meat products.  And you normally don't see that at stadiums that were just dropped in place ten minutes ago, but the parking lot here was filled to the brim with people chugging the Beast and talking shit about the Cardinals.

As far as new, this park was designed well, and it shows.  The seats are nice, the roof helps when the weather sucks, the sightlines are decent, and the restrooms did not look like they had been marinated in a hundred years of urine.

You might say the Brewers are not the greatest.  But there are also so many little extras, that you can overlook that.  Great food is everywhere.  Bernie Brewer had his slide.  The sausages had their race.  And while it was a ho-hum game, it was a great time.  This is baseball how I like it.

This isn't a diner as much as a cowboy-esque chunks-of-meat place, with a token buffalo head on the wall, like something you'd find up in Alaska.  But it's not that extreme, and has a simple menu, mixing up burgers and cuts with some Mex fare.  There are plenty of wooden booths to kick back in, and there's a bar up front if you're just in for a drink.  They also have a couple of tables out on a patio when the weather's good.

Every time we go to this place, there's a waiter that looks like a young Ed Harris, and he's always incredibly nice.  My main problem is that the plates are so damn huge, I can never, ever finish.  Plus they have a lot of decent appetizers, and if I order an app and an entree, that's like a week's worth of food.  But their blue-plate specials give me enough variety that I can just order that, and always get something great.

I told an old roommate from college back in Indiana that I moved to Denver, and the first thing he asked was if I'd ever eaten at this place.  It's funny that it's that ubiquitous to people who like a good chicken fried steak.