Feed

2803 W Chicago Ave
Chicago, IL 60622
(773) 489-4600

Major annoyance directed at TOC this week. In an earnest effort to attack some of the less-anticipated burgers, Adam and I resolved to check out the---sigh---$13 "buffalo sliders" at Fixture. We parked the car, walked over to the restaurant, and found, to our surprise, this restaurant of no repute had ceased to be, despite any kind of notice on the website.

Did we wait too long? Or just long enough? It's all in the eye of the beholder...I must confess, I was less-than-excited to drop the kind of cash that I knew we would at a restaurant we didn't care about and probably wasn't great (suggested by middling reviews on LTH), and it would seem that the market took care of that for us. In honor of the pending recession, we turned the car around and headed south to investigate the burger at Feed, a eminently solid rotisserie chicken meat-and-three restaurant.

I've had plenty of fine meals at Feed, usually plates of perfectly roasted half-chickens and a few fine sides of the collards/mac and cheese/cornbread variety. Everything's been between somewhere between fine and really good. Were it not for the Project, I doubt I'd ever waste a trip to Feed on a hamburger any more than I'd have the chicken at Rosebud, but here we were.

As Adam noted, they take the chicken theme very seriously:

Both a Big Burger (1/3 lb.; $6.50) and a Really Big Burger (1/2 lb.; about a dollar more) are available. Cheese costs $.50; bleu cheese costs $1. We both placed orders for regular Bigs with the exceedingly friendly counter-guy (note: Feed is cash-only). By default, burgers come with fries and slaw as sides, but you can upgrade to any of the others for $.50.

After about ten minutes, our burgers were up.

Sadly, this wasn't a very impressive showing. The meat was grilled to our specifications, sufficiently juicy without being greasy, but the lettuce and tomato on the side were sadly representative of the late-winter season, and as Adam put it, "we've seen this bun before." It's a really common kaiser-style roll that's too soft to not soak up juice (even when toasted, as we saw it here). There wasn't really enough bleu cheese to make any sort of impression.

Fries, however, were much more impressive: crisp exterior, soft interior, indicative of a fryer knowledgeable in the proper two-stage cooking technique. Feed features an impressive assortment of condiments, including Adam's coveted yellow mustard, malt vinegar, sriracha, and El Yucateco habanero sauce. It's always a treat to find a place with slaw that's not soaked in mayo, and Feed's is a pleasantly vinegary variety.

Still irritated, I placated myself with a slice of Feed's homemade peach pie. All pie-relevant superlatives are applicable here. The filling was light and sweet, but not too sweet (far from the jellied crap in most commercially available pies). The crust was nothing relevatory, but crisp and flaky, and decidedly worth the calories.