GoodTimes Brewery + Kitchen — Restaurant in Lake View Township

My honest impression of GoodTimes is that yet another soulless, corporate, restaurant group is trying to milk profits from a “craft brewery” concept without respecting the craft beer market in Chicago.

Our decision to have lunch at GoodTimes was motivated by the fact that they advertised being dog friendly on social media, and via food and beverage news outlets. Upon our arrival the chalkboard sign out front had been revised to read “service dog friendly” while the vinyl text on the door reads “dog friendly”. There is no reason to advertise service dog friendly, as no business is legally allowed to refuse a service dog, and saying you are dog friendly implies that you allow pets not just service animals. When I asked the hostess about the dog policy, we were instructed to lie about my dog, and tell them she was a service animal. This made my wife and I very uncomfortable, and we refused to lie about her, telling them that she was just a well behaved pet. We were still seated without issue, but it was not a strong start to our experience and GoodTimes is clearly, blatantly, violating health code with this policy.

The vibe is instagram trap meets trendy chain restaurant, and despite the multiple bar spaces having approximately 30-50 taps, there were only 8 beers and 2 seltzers on draft, with one house made brew unavailable, and two of the others as Goose Island guest taps.

The menu was renamed Pridefest Menu for the weekend, and prices had been increased by a dollar on all the beers from what we saw online a week ago. On top of the price increase, we were informed they had “discontinued” a beer on the menu. How can a brand new brewery have already discontinued a beer that was listed on an event specific menu?

The average cost for a pint of beer, before tax and tip, was $9-10 dollars. That is really steep, even for Chicago. $7-8 for good craft beer is reasonable, with $9+ coming into play when the ABV is high or the beer is heavily fruited. We ordered a marginal gold ale and a sub-par NEIPA which cost us 19.50 before tax or tip.

The food was fine but nothing exciting. Our single appetizer, sandwich, and wings came out to $44.

The bottom line is that GoodTimes is not dog friendly as advertised, the beer is marginal and wildly overpriced, and the food is nothing special. If they find a way to take advantage of the massive number of taps, knock a minimum of $2 dollars off of their beer pricing, and refine or remove their dog friendly policy we may be back, but until then I recommend you save your money and enjoy one of the other fantastic...

My husband and I visited Good Times for the first time yesterday and was pretty underwhelmed. When we got in, it took several minutes for someone to greet us at the front (to the point where we thought maybe we just sat ourselves?). There were a few tables filled and there seemed to be an event in the backroom, but we saw a few employees just walking around. After a few minutes, the bartender came over and brought us to a booth. It didn't feel welcoming--he just dropped the silverware on a table and walked off. After a few more minutes, our server came over. She was pretty friendly.

We got a beer (the Bachelorette), a pretzel and split a fried chicken sandwich. The pretzel was okay (it was clearly something frozen from Sysco), but the cheese that came with it was just off. It was not good. We didn't eat the cheese sauce it we came to Good Times because they had a pretzel with cheese. My husband said the beer was okay, he just expected more. He drinks a lot of beer, so maybe his standards are just higher, but it led us to not order any other drinks. We got our sandwich and we had ordered without a lot of the add-ons like lettuce, tomato, etc, so what came out looked a little limp, but we expected that after taking a lot off. What we didn't expect was for the chicken to literally just be a breaded cutlet. I wish I'd taken a photo because again, we had higher expectations.

The server was really friendly, but it did take a long time in between orders to have her come back by. Again, it wasn't super busy and it was hard to track her down, especially when we wanted to check out. I've worked in the service industry for a long time and I understand just because I don't see something doesn't mean it isn't happening in the back of house, but the overall experience left us feeling extremely overwhelmed. There are so many other great, and even mediocre, places doing the exact same thing that I would rather go...

I stopped in with a few friends Saturday night for what I believe was the third day this restaurant has been opened. I was really happy to see this new place open up in my neighborhood. We liked the atmosphere and the drinks and had a great time. I will say, though, there were some things that I think could have gone better with our visit. I think some of this has to do with the restaurant being newly opened, so I want to throw them a bone.

First, it was really cold inside. I think it was probably about 66 degrees where we sat, and when you show up in summer clothes, that can get really cold. We asked someone if they could adjust it but nothing really happened.

Second, our service was a bit slow. We didn't get served for probably about 1520 minutes. Our server was really hard to hear, almost whispering at us. We also waited a solid 2030 minutes to cash out, getting to the point where we brought our card up to the server so we could leave.

Third, our food was missing some items. Our server didn't quite have the bandwidth to help us when our food came out. I think it may have been the food runner, but he was very attentive in getting us some of the missing things. Our chicken sandwiches were missing pickles and cheese (we were told the sandwich doesn't have pickles, but it's very obviously a topping listed on the menu), not everyone at our table had silverware, we didn't get requested sides of ranch, and my friend who ordered pizza didn't get a plate.

These are very fixable things that would easily turn my review into a 5-star review. I will come back to try the pizza, and I hope to see some happy...