The $100 Burger at Pilot Pete's

With a free afternoon before my accounting final, the temps pushing 85F and a need for an early dinner I pulled up my handy list of places I want to check out and picked Pilot Pete's.

On my way south on 31 I got stuck in construction traffic around  Algonquin.  Idling an air cooled bike for 20 minutes on an 85 degree day left me seeking a way to cool down so I shot across the Fox and followed the river into East Dundee.

 

Oil temp was 225F when I stopped to snap this pic at a picnic area on the Fox.

40 minutes later I arrived at Pilot Pete's hot and hungry.

 When you walk in there is a cool lobby hallway with seat rows out of old airliners.  I checked out one set and it had the old style headphone jack that used little tubes that plugged into a stethoscope-like headset that took me back to when flying was a neat experience.

 The walls and display cases were filled with all kinds of cool flying memorabilia.

There was even an ultralight set up in the rafters of the ceiling.

I sat at the expansive bar.

The bar had all sorts of neat old manuals and pictures sealed into the top.

After perusing the menu and the additional insert of 15 theme burgers for the month of May I settled on the 100 dollar burger which is the restaurant's claim to fame and it listed on the 100 dollar cheeseburger website.

The burger was large and pretty good, the only thing was the meat had a bit of a metallic taste that I couldn’t pin down.  Not sure if it was seasoned with something or picked up some hints of liver or something off the grill but it was a bit odd.  I’ll chalk it up as a fluke and would still order a burger again and see if it was a one off issue.  The fries were pretty limp and tasteless I tried adding salt but it was useless, I think next time I would try to sub in a salad or something instead.  Overall definitely worth checking out but you may want to try to figure out a better time when the airport would be busy so you could watch the planes takeoff and land.

After Pete's I realized I was going to be late if I dallied so I booked it back to randall road and back home.

It was about 55mi round trip.


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