Restaurant Review: The Claim Company

Posted on June 5, 2012 by Kelly

Full Disclosure: I paid for this meal with my own money and I was in no way reimbursed for this blog post. The opinions are completely my own.

Last weekend while I was down in Chicago for The Color Run we stayed in Northbrook, a northern suburb of the city. I had a hard time deciding what I wanted for dinner the night before the race. I had been traveling all day and was definitely hungry but I wanted to make sure that whatever I had was “normal” food for me so I wouldn’t have to deal with stomach issues the next morning. After a quick search I found The Claim Company. It was only a couple miles away from our hotel, and seemed to have a good variety of food. While they are known for their Motherlode Burger, that wasn’t something that I was drawn to since I don’t eat burgers, but I did like that they had a build-your-own option for chicken, veggie, turkey and tuna burgers as well.

I was also interested in their salad bar which is the other thing that they are known for. Not many restaurants that I go to have an actual salad bar (except maybe somewhere serving brunch) so I figured that would be a healthy choice before the race and something different. I started my meal with a 1 trip salad. At first glance the salad bar was not as large and amazing as I thought it would be, but once I got up there and actually looked at what was on it I was pretty impressed. There were your standard varieties of greens – iceberg lettuce, baby greens, and spinach – but there were many other things that I don’t normally see on salad bars including asparagus, hearts of palm, teryaki tofu, feta cheese, and more. The salad bar also had some pre-made pasta salads that looked pretty good, but since I had a full meal ahead I didn’t try any of them. My salad included baby greens, spinach, asparagus, and mushrooms with ranch dressing. It definitely was what I was looking for in a salad.

For my entree I got a chicken breast sandwich on ciabatta bread with mozzarella cheese. For my side I opted for fruit – with this hot weather fruit is always such a good choice. The sandwich was just ok, the bread was good but the chicken was pretty dry. I was surprised at how fresh tasting the fruit was! Restaurant fruit is not usually the best, especially when they just offer it as a side, but this tasted delicious.

Overall the meal was good, but not awesome. I really liked the salad bar, and I think maybe next time I’d just stick with that and skip the meat.

Taste: B, some of it was delicious, some of it was not.
Cost: B, my meal as a whole was about $14. Not so bad for the area, but not everything was that good either.

Would I go there again? Probably not. There are many other options pretty close by and since the chicken sandwich was really the only thing on the menu that looked good to me (other than the salad bar) I don’t think it would be my first choice.