Little Chef — Restaurant in McHenry

Kills me to write a bad review on this place because it’s been a long time favorite local location due to the nostalgia that my grandmother used to be a waitress there in the mid to late 90’s into the early 2000’s but we had a bad experience all around.

The location does not apparently accept phone orders on the weekends. Inconvenient to have someone have to physically drive to a location to place an order, wait; and then leave. The goal is convenience so we can get on with our busy lives.

Food quality. - ordered a biscuit and gravy combo with eggs sunny side up, hash browns; sausage and bacon. The eggs were undercooked and snotty. Any quality chef would know how to cook sunny side up to the proper consistency throughout. Bacon - brown and serve out of a microwave maybe? Sausage? Rubbery… doesn’t look like breakfast sausage, suspect some brown and serve like brand here too.

Biscuits and gravy - imagine taking some sort of flat biscuit that looks like a mini pancake and pouring Campbells mushroom soup over it and calling it biscuits and gravy, because that’s what it both looked and tasted like. NO THANKS - from someone that actually enjoys campbells mushroom soup in recipes.

The unseasoned bland hash browns were probably the best part. Definitely not worth 15.00. I’m starting to feel like due to poor economic conditions people are losing site of what a reasonable expectation to eat quality/tasteful food is.

Would have rather had Burger King for breakfast. Would have been better and cheaper...

Little Chef is my family's favorite breakfast joint. I, myself will sometimes even go for lunch but they are not open for dinner. It's a cozy little nook downtown McHenry. Dressed in red and white checkered table cloths and red stools to sit at the counter there's not very much seating but the service moves really quick so there's never been a wait longer than 10 minutes. The food is American diner style food. They do it fast, hot, and well! I've been here a million times, tried different things for both breakfast and lunch and I've never had a bad meal. I highly recommend my husband's favorite 2 eggs over medium and bacon done crispy. It comes with a generous portion of hashbrowns in which you can ask to add onion and toast for breakfast and the grilled cheese with cheddar add bacon and tomato with a side of onion strings and ranch to dip them in and a cup of their homemade soup of the day. If you're lucky it will be split pea. Since we've been coming to Little Chef for many years now we know the servers by name. Each and every one of them are the kindest, sweetest, best waitresses we've ever had. Lastly, on top of the excellent food and super service it's reasonable priced! I'm sure we all can appreciate that. For instance when my husband and my 10 year old daughter and myself eat there for breakfast it's typically...

Just wanted to let anyone interested in coming to sit on the patio and bring their pet that this is probably not the place for a dog that may bark or whine.

Someone walked by with their dog and my dog barked for maybe 30 seconds. After which she stopped and began to whine (she’s training on being overexcited to meet other dogs / people and we are working on it). At which point a man living above this place screamed out the window some obscenities and told us to “shut the dog up”. It was incredibly uncomfortable and we left immediately as to not further upset him. He sounded angry enough to come down and maybe create an altercation so we wanted to be on the safe side. Just a heads up to anyone who may want to bring a pet. It honestly ruined our day and experience.

We were really excited to go and sit down and have a nice l little breakfast on the first day of spring. The prices are great, the people are friendly and nice, the food looked good but we unfortunately didn’t stick around to try it. Really sad but hoping we can come back to when our dog has worked on being a bit quieter. I would give it a 1 star for obvious reasons but I would hate to take away from a seemingly nice business that probably has no control over who...