Part 2 of my Eleven City Diner reviews. How many times have I found a restaurant with two different flavors of house root beer? ZERO! That’s how many. That’s how amazingly epic this place is. Additionally their food is very amazing, as my previous meal demonstrated, but in addition to classics, they also have some very original stuff as well. So I was back for lunch two days later with blonde brews on my mind. To be honest I’ve only heard of one other blonde root beer before so I had no idea what to expect.
This has a light Body with a very prominent vanilla flavor that is rich and creamy. It’s a lot like a cream soda and I do like cream sodas. It is very smooth in the Bite department though the carbonation level is good. The Head is medium-tall and frothy. The Aftertaste is more creamy vanilla.
So this is like a cross between a root beer and a cream soda with all of the darker colored ingredients axed. They do use a little bit of brown sugar in there though. Despite it being far from the center of the root beer spectrum, I really like it, a lot. If you drank it without looking at it, you’d still think it was a root beer. I give this a 4, though barely, with some originality bonus points putting it over. For my lunch I wanted to find a sandwich as different and good as a blonde root beer, and I found it in the #43. A double decker pastrami with a latke in the middle with fried onions and sour cream on a challah bun. Add some spicy brown mustard and … heaven in the form of a sandwich. This place is worth its own pilgrimage. Come for the root beer, stay for the food.
The #43 Sandwich. When it was delivered, everyone sitting around me asked the waitress what I had ordered. So, so delicious.
The diner and bar where I ate my meals both times.
The kitchen and deli section of the diner.
The root beer menu. It refers to their classic flavor as barrel aged though the servers refer to it as classic.
I was in Chicago for the IEEE T&D Conference and Expo and needed to find some new root beer. Since Chicago probably has more brands of gourmet root beer coming out of it than any other city I can think of, I was sure there had to be at least something. I was looking for 1919 but I couldn’t seem to find anyplace close by. I asked the hotel concierge and he began to search after learning that Goose Island was something I could get bottled. He searched and called places and finally found Eleven City Diner, which is one of their recommended spots anyways and found that they had not one, but two house root beers, a classic and a blonde. I immediately set on foot to get my root beer. And it started to snow, and I was only wearing a very flimsy jacket because it had been sunny and warm in Seattle the day I left. Soon it was snowing and blowing and I still had 15 minutes to walk. But root beer is worth the pain. Eleven City Diner itself is an old Jewish Deli that specializes in cured meats – corned beef and pastrami. They barrel age their root beer extracts and use real cane sugar and Madagascar vanilla. They have an awesome root beer soda mixer/dispenser that’s ice cube chilled and dispenses both flavors. I decided to start with the classic.
