Dell Rhea’s Chicken Basket: Let's Do the Time Warp Again

Dell Rhea’s is caught in a time-slip and a cul-de-sac off I55 on old Route 66.

I’ve been hearing about this place for years, and Sunday night I drove over for some fried chicken. It was old school, not your corporate lab-engineered Ultra-Mega-Crispy-Boneless Wing stuff, just lightly breaded, fried-the-moment-you-order, and pretty good. They seem to use a decent quality bird, and get this: real baking powder biscuits, which set me back a step (it reminded me of the exchange in Steve Martin’s L.A. movie when he touches a girl’s breast and, with a quizzical expression, remarks that they feel kind of funny; “They’re real,” she says).

While I waited for my chick to come up, I had an overpriced Manhattan (beer is definitely the way to go – plus, Sunday nights, they have two buck burger specials). In the bar, some guys played covers on Strats, which was nice.

They screwed up my order in several ways, but I didn’t care. It was a nice place to visit… so stop by, and see the famous Voodoo Chicken.



Dell Rhea Chicken Basket
645 Joliet Road
Willowbrook
(630)325-0780

I've never been able to find the place. I've run up and down old Route 66. Can you give us some directions. I'd like to try it just once when i'm out that way.

Will,

It was tough to find (and my guess is that it may not be "exactly on" old Rte 66).

One you get off of I55 at 83 going north, you head about half a mile to Midway (which may not be marked), go right and then right on Quincy (which I'm almost positive isn't marked, but there is a red "Chicken Basket" sign and arrow on some traffic sign); within about two blocks, you take a slight left (at that point, if you're traveling at night, you will see the sign clearly).

Hammond

Midway is the first stoplight north of I-55 on Ill83. Once you turn east onto Midway, resist the urge to continue right towards the Holiday Inn, stay on Midway. Turn right at the end of the road, then turn left onto Joliet Rd.

If you're driving westbound on I-55, you'll see the restaurant on the right just before you get to the Ill83 exit...

Mark

When you exit look for red and white signs stating "Chicken Basket" with an arrow pointing you in the right direction. When you turn on Midway you'll then make an immediate right onto a frontage road which will take you directly to it. Just east of the I-83 north exit you can see a 7-11 gas station down the embankment to the right, Dell Rhea's is next door to the 7-11. I'm often there for lunch and quite enjoy most of the items.

Flip

You learn something new every day...I never knew the frontage road that went past the Holiday Inn turned into Joliet Road!

Mark

So...2 Chicago area fried chicken "legends" are both on Joliet Road...Del Rhea's and White Fence Farm. I guess you don't have to ask why the chicken crossed the road...he just went a few miles further down it!

Here is a lovely previous post on Dell Rhea's: http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=16751#16751

After managing to avoid this place for close to 20 years, unintentionally I assure you, I have been three times over the last 6 months. The atmosphere is great. I do not like the chicken that much, though that is personal taste. As Flip has explained clearly to me, they use a different breading, less bread crumbs and more breading, that does a couple of things - first it can, and often does, pick up and hold more grease than most. If the fryer is working to perfection, that is not the case, but most of the time it is. On the other hand, it also holds the moisture in the chicken resulting in a bird that sometimes gushes juice at the first bite. It also seems to end up being earthier, and the breading itself does not seem to have much seasoning to my taste.

An interesting variation, but not one I like.

Still, I still keep going back for their lunch buffet, which is amazing given that I generally dislike buffets (no food improves with prolonged residence in a chafing dish), and am not that fond of the chicken. In addition to the atmosphere, which is a fairly genuine 60's roadhouse, all the way to the wall of fieldstone around the fireplace at one end of the dining room (quick quiz, which American architectural icon began this 50's and 60's fad of fieldstone around the fireplace? Double credit if you can name both the architect and the building, which was prominently featured everywhere when it was built), there are a few great items on that buffet.

The retro salad bar, which includes all the standards, pickled beets, more than one kind of macaroni salad, iceberg lettuce, etc, etc, is a mild draw, but the chicken dumpling soup is great. Nice broth, not too heavy, chunks of chicken, little dumplings, chunks of carrot, celery - this is a great soup. They also make mashed potatos, skin in, that are pretty darned good, and go well with the chicken gravy, which also adds a lot to the fried chicken. Which, in the end, may be the point about this chicken - it is the mashed potatos and gravy style, meant to be eaten with gravy, to my taste, not the more common french fries and finger food style, IMO.

The cookies or brownies with the buffet are usually pretty good; the Stouffer's lasagna or other main course selections are usually not. Worth a trip at least once, and you can eat well.

Quiz answers:

Frank Lloyd Wright, and Falling Water.

dicksond wrote:Quiz answers:

Frank Lloyd Wright, and Falling Water.

D,

I was SO looking forward to answering this, but then you have to go and ruin it by giving us the answers. Built during the 30's Falling Water is truly a masterpiece.

Flip

Flip wrote:

dicksond wrote:Quiz answers:

Frank Lloyd Wright, and Falling Water.

D,

I was SO looking forward to answering this, but then you have to go and ruin it by giving us the answers. Built during the 30's Falling Water is truly a masterpiece.

Flip

Yeah, but that wall of fieldstone thing was not a good phase in American home decor.

If I really made it a quiz without answers, I might have been obliged to offer a prize

dicksond wrote:After managing to avoid this place for close to 20 years, unintentionally I assure you, I have been three times over the last 6 months. The atmosphere is great. I do not like the chicken that much, though that is personal taste. As Flip has explained clearly to me, they use a different breading, less bread crumbs and more breading, that does a couple of things - first it can, and often does, pick up and hold more grease than most. If the fryer is working to perfection, that is not the case, but most of the time it is. On the other hand, it also holds the moisture in the chicken resulting in a bird that sometimes gushes juice at the first bite. It also seems to end up being earthier, and the breading itself does not seem to have much seasoning to my taste.

Yes, eating Dell Rhea's (and more recently the fried chick at the southside Chicago Rib House and Thai Avenue), I realized how much my expectations about the "coating" had been conditioned by KFC, Brown's and other purveyors of somewhat heavily breaded varieties. I really prefer the more minimal approach to breading (as at Dell Rhea's) or the zero-tolerance approach to breading practiced by most Thai places.

For whatever reason, Dell Rhea's chicken is like a water balloon filled with grease; I was driving home in the dark, wearing a white shirt, when I bit into a particularly plump leg...

David "Sometimes I'm so dense it's painful" Hammond

Today after picking up Mrs. JiLS at Midway, I asked if she'd like "something nearby or something of an adventure." She chose adventure, so we ended up at Dell Rhea's, a first for both of us. Let me say it is an utterly charming building, and I'd love to spend some time in the "Tap Room," which is a quintessential Midwest roadhouse. But, I can't find much favor with the food. Sure, it's probably the best of its kind in the area (haven't tried White Fence Farms yet; that's next), but really it's the kind of food that would've been a fine meal cruising Route 66 with Jack and Neal, but not worth a special trip. The good parts: The chicken & dumpling soup is, as dickson says, a remarkably good soup, and I was glad they had it there for the taking by the salad bar. The biscuits are also passing good, not great, but certainly fresh, warm from the oven (not reheated) and palatable. The corn on the cob was also strikingly good, especially for February. But there's where the problems start. Although the chicken meat is moist and not under- or overcooked, the breading is like the Mark Rothko of fried chicken -- thin, flavorless, yet somehow (as David notes) a real grease sponge. And the chicken is deep fried. That's just a problem in itself; you'll never get above a B-minus if you deep fry your chicken. Truly good fried chicken requires pan frying, but for whatever reason, the convenience of deep fat frying has overtaken the (horrendously) labor-intensive pan frying method in and around Chicago. Which is why most (native) Chicagoans just don't seem to know or care what really good fried chicken looks or tastes like. Exiting the soapbox, let me add that the chicken wasn't bad, just not great, or even good enough to warrant a trip. The mashed potatoes were also rather punk (dry, inadequately mashed and, in my opinion, ruined by the inclusion of the peels). And the gravy was a joke, tasting like Knorr reconstituted with whole pieces of sage thrown in there, for no evident purpose than to get lodged in your gums. The green beans were undercooked (and I don't just mean that they failed to reach the mushy Hoosier perfection of Hollyhock Hill or a really good cafeteria -- these were sorta crunchy and tasteless). One last (minor) quibble -- fake bacon bits on the salad bar. 'Nuff said there. The service was friendly and efficient, the food was not BAD, but just not great or deserving a reputation. (I also have a potential issue with the little "history" of the place in the menu. The story is that, in the late '30s, two farmer women offered to teach the owner of the then-gas station cum lunch counter how to fry chicken, if he would buy all his chickens from them. I seriously doubt these farm ladies used a deep fryer for their chicken. So I equally doubt that the chicken produced at Rhea's is even close to what made it famous.)

WFF is better, though still within the same genre and, I think, pressure-fried. I don't think of these places as having, or trying to have, Southern Fried Chicken. They are doing a Midwestern fried chicken that seems to exist in a place of its own up here. The sleeper is the fish at WFF. Really good, particulalrly from the take out place(s). Del Rhea's I mostly admire from the outside, same as Orange Garden on Irving.

JeffB wrote:WFF is better, though still within the same genre and, I think, pressure-fried. I don't think of these places as having, or trying to have, Southern Fried Chicken. They are doing a Midwestern fried chicken that seems to exist in a place of its own up here. The sleeper is the fish at WFF. Really good, particulalrly from the take out place(s). Del Rhea's I mostly admire from the outside, same as Orange Garden on Irving.

As I play a bit of catch up here, I do agree with Jeff (just this once ) that White Fence is the better chicken, and aside from the soup at DR, probably the better food in general. I always end up dosing DR chicken with something - gravy or a lot of salt n pepper - to eat it.

But a lot of this is just about nostalgia, isn't it? Hammy is right on that almost any Asian place can make a fried chicken that puts these places to shame. Fabulous Noodles crispy skin chicken is a decent version, for instance. And KFC, please forgive me Lords of LTH for saying this, makes as good an American-style of fried chicken as most of these other places.

Now we just need to append a thread on "The Best Broasted Chicken in town" to this, and we will have it all covered.