Pilot Pete's - Schaumburg, IL

Pilot Pete's is a cool airport restaurant.  It is in the terminal building at Schaumburg Regional Airport (06C) in Schaumburg, Illinois.  There is a bank of windows that overlook the airport and the only runway from the second story.  The restaurant is chock full of aviation memorabilia, signed photos of famous aviators and lots of model airplanes everywhere.

I dined under a real experimental airplane called a breezy because the two occupants sit out in the open wind in this airplane.  I've seen breezy's before but I never had the vantage point and the time to sit there and examine the quality of the welds and the design of the airframe.  I wonder how well this one worked in it's life in the air because the Continental O-200 engine looks like a pull-type that would be in the nose of Cessna or Piper but in this configuration it was in a pusher configuration whereby the engine faced backwards, pushing the air back.  The carburetor intake was also facing backwards.  hmm... Maybe it's better hanging from a restaurant ceiling.

The food was pretty good, too.  I got the Turbulence Salad and a Leinenkugel's Summer Shandy beer.  The shandy is a summer time beer.  It is a mix of beer and lemonade, I think.  Very light, sweet and citrusy.  The salad was a mix of lettuce, onion, cheese, chicken and peperoni all chopped and tossed.  It didn't need any dressing.  I think that there might have been some oil and vinegar added to give it some moisture.   It was all very good.

Service was fine.  They were very busy but the hostess and waitress were both very nice and efficient.  No complaints.  

This place had not been featured on the Food Network but, it had potential.  Just reading over the menu, it looked like they had some creative stuff. One thing that looked interesting was the Grilled Salmon Club.  They described it as "salmon, bacon, tomato, avocado and tomato-chive aioli on Italian Bread."  Guy might like it here.

The atmosphere was pretty lively for a Tuesday evening.  There was a bar area that looked pretty cool.  The only cooler airport bar that I can think of was at the US Navy Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida where they had shipped the old officer's club bar from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean back to Florida and completely reconstructed it.

I rated Pete's a 9.5.  This is a must for the aviation nerd in your family if you are in the Chicago area. 

Pilot Pete's Restaurant
905 West Irving Park Road
Schaumburg, IL 60193
(847) 891-5100
http://pilot-petes.com/

Tex Wasabi's Rock and Roll BBQ - Sushi - Sacramento, CA

Tex Wasabi's has never been featured on the Food Network's Diner's, Drive-Inns and Dives but, it is actually owned by none other than Guy Fiere himself.  Anyone slightly familiar with the program knows that Guy is a wild and creative guy with a love of really great food.  His restaurant definitely reflects that.

The concept behind Tex Wasabi's is to mix two completely different types of food into it's own class, an "infusion" of different influences to use the restaurant buzz-wordy name.  In this case it is sushi and BQQ.  It doesn't sound like it would work but, it really does.

When you first walk in past the bar area you notice a statue of a cowboy on a bucking fish, kind of like a bucking bronco.  So, you know right away that this is a whimsical place.  It is going to be fun and unpredictable.

As we walked in there was a couple who had ordered a drink from the bar.  The drinks that they serve were out of absurdly large goblets.  They looked like small fish tanks, in fact they very well could have been small gold fish bowls into which they stuck huge straws the size of the old pixie stix tubes.

It looks like they put a lot of imagination into the drink menu as well.  They were advertising a double apple mojito that sounded pretty good.

We got an order of the chicken wings to start off with.  They came with slices of fried jalapeno pepper on top.  The pepper had a nice even flavor and slightly crunchy tempura texture and it was not spicy-hot at all.  The wings were spicy-hot Buffalo wings.  They also had a selection of hot sauces that the waitress brought over.

They don't let you forget that this is Guy's place.  His picture is all over the place between the bbq sauce bottle lables, t-shirts, posters and the several large lcd screens showing DDD episodes in continuous loops.

The menu has two sushi sections: maki sushi and gringo sushi.  Off of the gringo menu, I had the Jackass Roll which was BBQ pork, avocado, french fries & garlic chili mayo sauce.  It had a real smokey BBQ flavor like you would expect of of BBQ but not sushi but it really did work well.

The baked beans side were some of the best beans that I have ever had.  They were black, white and red (I think) beans but the sauce was not too sweet and had a great slat-smokey flavor to it that is hard to describe.  I really enjoyed it.

The ribs and pulled pork were really good as well.  Coming from Texas, we get a lot of really good BBQ.  I would consider this to be Texas style BBQ and really good.  By the time I got through the BBQ sushi and all of the other experiences, the plain old BBQ seemed kind of boring because it was just BBQ.

I would rate Tex Wasabi's a 9.9 because of the imagination and awesome food.  Tex Wasabi's is definitely not a dive.  It is a nice restaurant, part of a corporation with a CEO and all of the other alphabet soup titles, multiple locations, etc. So, it lacks that kind of dive charm which is the only reason why it could not have been a 10.  Definitely worth checking out.

Tex Wasabi's
2243 Arden Way
Sacramento, CA 95825
(916) 927-8399
http://www.texwasabis.com/