After hosting a little breakfast for customers, we headed back down to chicago, proper, to grab some lunch. T decided to take us to Flat Top Grill, which happens to be smack dab across the street from Harpo Studios. I was sold! Flat Top Grill is a chain that is basically a create-your-own-stir-fry kind of joint (mongolian grill-like), only with tons more choices and options. Here’s what I ended up with at the  end.

So you grab a bowl and fill it up with whatever you want. There’s rice and various noodles. There’s veggies up the wazoo. Then you sauce it up. They recommend you to put in 5 ladles of sauces. Not only are there asian sauces (teriyaki, sesame garlic, pad thai, etc.) there are indian sauces as well so you can really create whatever type of crazy stir-fry you want. Just make it up! Then you take a little bowl and put in your meat of choice. They have beef, chicken, etc, and even calamari.

Here’s where it starts getting interesting. Next, you start sticking these colored wands into your bowl of what you want. If you want your bowl made into a soup, stick that stick in. If you want lettuce wraps, then use the green stick. If you want mu-shu, which is basically an asian burrito, then the stick is clear. Adding tofu requires a stick. So does a shrimp skewer, which costs extra. Start sticking!

I went with rice noodles, a bunch of veggies, calamari, random sauces, and added sticks for eggs and roti prata bread. By the way, the roti prata bread is like beyond awesome. More on how awesome later.

Then they’ll throw your bowls on the grill, stir-fry it up for you, and then deliver your bowl to your table. Whee!

They also have some random other items on the menu that do not involve you creating your own edible masterpiece. We got this shrimp spring roll appetizer. It was pretty good, but you could tell it was made awhile back, as the rice wrapper had gotten hard. Hard and crunchy rice wrapper on a spring roll is not pleasant! But the innards were quite fine.

J was still sick, so he decided to get his creation made into a soup. Look how great that looks! It’s a great big noodley soup bowl. Yum!

So if you want, you can get a piece of the roti bread with your food. It’s really freakin good. So good that I asked them if they could make me a roti grilled cheese, and they totally did! Two pieces of this delicious roti with ooey gooey cheese in between. I was lovin it! My arteries probably were not, but who cares! This was a fun lunch. It’s great for those people who are extremely picky and want complete control of what is in their food.

Also, after the lunch, we walked across the street to see if we could sneak into Harpo Studios. Well, we ended up being in the audience for the Nate Berkus show! No sneaking was necessary! I mean, that wouldn’t have been possible anyway. The place is like fort knox. Oprah wasn’t at the studio that day, but heck, I was still in the very studio where she tapes! It was glorious!

After eating out for pretty much four straight days, it was definitely time to cook at home. We stopped by Duc Loi (asian / mexican mini-mart in the mission) to grab some ingredients for a quick shrimp stir-fry dish. We picked up some brown rice too, so we could pretend to be healthy.

For the stir fry some garlic, shallots, and onions were browned in a pan with some olive oil. Add sliced bell peppers (we used yellow because that’s what looked the best at the store). Add shrimp, either raw or cooked. We went with cooked because we felt lazy. After these are all heated through, add broccoli, and cover so that the broccoli gets steamed through. Add whatever sauce you want to aid in the steaming process. We just added a little bit of teriyaki marinade. It’s truly that easy. Who says cooking has to be a pain?

While I avoid casual chain restaurants like the plague, sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do. When stuck at an airport, your choices are limited. It’s typically a case of “least of all evils”. At DTW, I was given the illustrious choices of tgi friday’s, ruby tuesday, mcdonald’s, champps (where they allow smoking!?!??), cheeburger cheeburger, and a few other sandwich type shops, most of which were starting to close by the time I showed up. While I like cheeburger, cheeburger, the one at the airport was like a stripped down version, and it scared me off a bit. And the sandwich shops, those are always the pre-made ones, where the sandwiches have been sitting there for who knows how long! So really, what was I supposed to do? At that point, it was just a toss up between tgi and ruby, and for whatever reason, tgi mcscratchy’s won out.

I started out with a house salad and a virgin strawberry daiquiri. The salad wasn’t half bad. I haven’t been to a tgi friday’s for at least ten years, and I didn’t remember anything from it. The salad is nothing special, but I did like their vinaigrette dressing. This little fruit slushy was pretty darn tasty and refreshing too.

This is an airport restaurant, so it’s a stripped down version of a regular tgi’s with a limited menu. I got the dragonfire chicken, which is a grilled chicken breast glazed with a kung pao sauce and topped with pineapple pico de gallo,served over stir–fried brown rice, along side mandarin oranges and broccoli. Really, this was pretty good! The chicken was quite good, although the sauce was a bit too much on the gingery side for my liking. I didn’t bite into any ginger hunks, thank goodness, but the ginger flavor was a bit too strong. The sauce and the pico added just enough spice. The rice was pretty good, even though it was on the overcooked and mushy side. The mandarin oranges were from a can, so they couldn’t really go wrong there, and the broccoli was great! They were steamed just right, and not mushy at all. They still had some firmness. All in all, this sure beat a big mac!