Oak City – Bloomington, MN

D.Rough and I had to drop my car off at the Toyota dealership to get something worked on and thought we’d head to Oak City for lunch. I will tell you, I always thought Oak City was a furniture store, but oddly, it’s a restaurant in the lobby of an office building just off of I-494.

It’s pretty dark inside, I guess sometimes Oak is like that. The décor is a lot of famous quotes (and quotes that SHOULD be famous) by people like Benjamin Franklin and Homer Simpson. Seriously. Hilarious.

The awesome hostess (I believe her name was Tiffany) seated us at a nearby table and told the bartender that we were VIPs and he should treat us well, since he’d also be our server. I told you she was awesome. Tiffany told us about the soup and salad bar and what some of the best dishes on the menu were – including Cap’n Crunch Chicken Strips.

We opted for the salad bar, since D.Rough and I hadn’t been eating the healthiest the past week or two. (But then we decided to split a plate of the Cap’n Crunch Chicken Strips too… hahahaha) The salad bar seems small, but it really isn’t. Standard lettuce and cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions are available. But then there’s hardboiled eggs, a huge bowl of homemade croutons, some sunflower seeds, and a giant bowl of real bacon. Yes, I said a GIANT bowl of real bacon. I almost borrowed the whole bowl and snuck it back to our table. There’s also a basket full of these cheesy seasoned flatbread crisps, but they paled in comparison to the bowl of bacon (most things do).

The chicken strips came out later and were quite delicious. Very sweet breading (or crunching in this case) with a sort of sticky clingy texture that I’ve never experienced on chicken strips before. It was really good and worth getting, I think. D.Rough liked them dipped in the mustard they brought us, but I liked it better in the BBQ sauce. That’s just me though.

Overall, this place is much better than I would have expected. The soup and salad bar were pretty cheap and you can throw on a half sandwich for very cheap if you wanted to. We’ll be back to Oak City in the near future – it helps that it’s five minutes from where I work – and we’ll hope that Tiffany is working. She was the best hostess ever. Super friendly and talkative and really knew her stuff!

www.oakcitymn.com