Bob Chinn's Crab House

I had a meeting in Buffalo Grove, a flight home out of O'Hare five hours later, and a gap in between that needed a lunch. Bob Chinn's was ten minutes from the meeting and about half an hour back to the airport, and it has been a family operation since 1982. Bob opened it, his daughter Marilyn runs it now with her daughters, and Bob himself made it to 99 before he passed in 2022. That is the kind of ownership story I go looking for, and a guy at the meeting said it was good, so I went.

What I did not fully account for is what kind of restaurant it is. Bob Chinn's is one of the highest-volume restaurants in the country, with a dining room built to move hundreds of people through a lunch service. It is not a chef's table. It is a machine, and a well-run one, and the meal I had was a lesson in ordering for the room you're in.

The Vibe

You can feel the scale from the moment you walk in, the place goes on and on. The Mai Tai comes in a plastic house-branded cup like something from a county fair, the tables carry a shaker of Bob Chinn's own seasoned sea salt, and the whole system is tuned to get food in front of you quickly. None of that reads as a shortcut. It reads as a place that knows exactly what it is.

My server was Ashlie, and she was the best part of the visit. She handed me the house salt and told me to try it on the buns, suggested Tabasco on the ceviche, and when my Mai Tai came up too sweet she took it back and brought me a blackberry bourbon bramble without a word of pushback. At the end she had taken both the Mai Tai and the scallops off the bill before I said anything because she knew I didn’t like them.

The Food

Start with the garlic buns, because that is what everyone should start with. They come out warm, sitting in a solid eighth of an inch of butter with pressed garlic sunk into it and the seasoned salt on top. That is what garlic bread should be, and the salt tip was right.

The swordfish ceviche was good, clean and bright, and Ashlie was right again about the Tabasco. It knocked the acid back to where I wanted it.

For the entree I went with the Hawaiian onaga, blackened, no skin. Cooked correctly, which to me means it held together on the fork instead of collapsing. The red potatoes alongside were a nice complement, very nice in fact. The coleslaw is tasty but ground finer than I like and not quite as tangy as the slaw I'm used to from the South.

The Mai Tai is sweet. Not cocktail sweet, mixer sweet, and it was too much for me. The bourbon bramble Ashlie swapped in was more my speed.

I was stuffed, but I could not leave a seafood house without testing the scallops, so I ordered a few. Not a fan at all. Tiny and they came piled in butter, flour, and I think they were overcooked. Ashlie confirmed the kitchen “lightly” flours them, which explains the texture. That's just trying too hard. Scallops should stand on their own.

Here is what I think happened. I ordered two dishes that need a cook's full attention, the ceviche and the scallops, at a restaurant built to feed a stadium. The ceviche survived because it's assembled cold. The scallops didn't, because they need someone standing over the pan. The onaga and the buns, which are execution at scale, were the dishes that fit the house, and those were the ones that worked. I ordered against the room, and the room won on its own terms.

The Bottom Line

Bob Chinn's is If You're Nearby, and nearby is exactly how I got there. It is a volume seafood house that does volume seafood well, with a family behind it going on five decades and a server who took better care of me than the kitchen did. Order the buns, order a whole fish, a pile of crab legs, or something straightforward off the grill, skip the scallops, and let your server steer you.

I might go back someday, but it would be years. There are probably fifty restaurants between O'Hare and Wheeling I would try first, and that is the tier talking, not a grudge.