Dining at 'the View'

This week, I invited my friend, Karen, and her family to dine with me and my family at , located at 1320 S. Main Street, in Algonquin.

RiverView Restaurant & Tavern has been an Algonquin landmark for more than 100 years.  It was once located just a stone’s throw away from the river in downtown Algonquin, which is how it got the name RiverView. If you try really hard, you can probably see the river from its new location.

We dined on Friday night and there were nine of us eating and we had one with us who was not eating. (I sometimes feel sorry for the people who are at tables around us when our families dine together. We laugh a lot and sometimes we can get loud...)

We were seated within 10 minutes of our arrival, even though the restaurant was packed. I had forgotten there was a fish fry on Friday nights and the Friday night we visited just happened to be Good Friday.

We ordered our drinks, a pitcher of lemonade and a pitcher of Pepsi and a couple adult beverages. The drinks arrived pretty quickly along with a basket of Beer Nuggets.  Beer Nuggets are nuggets of fried pizza dough sprinkled with Parmesan cheese. They are a fantastic way to start any meal! Yum! The lemonade smelled musty, like it had been sitting in a basement for too long, but the waitress had no problem bringing us a new pitcher of something else.

The menu at RiverView is huge so even the pickiest eater will not find it hard to find something they like. The adults ordered a roast beef dinner, a Rueben, a Deliwich Foldover and a cheeseburger. We also ordered a pizza for a couple of the kids to share. Two of the kids ordered hot dogs and one of the kids ordered the chicken strips.

While we waited for our food, the waitress brought out raw pizza dough for the kids to play with. The kids enjoyed playing with it and it gave the adults some time to talk without having to answer the ever constant kid question “Is the food done yet?”

All of our meals were great. The serving sizes are huge. I brought more than half of my Deliwich Foldover home and ate it for two days.  Karen said the Rueben was fantastic, but a bit messy and the kids ate all of the food on their plates. 

After we finished eating, I took a quick poll asking everyone at the table how they would rate their food on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being the best.

After adding the scores and attempting to do some math, I came up with the final number. We give RiverView 4.6 out of 5 stars!