Peoria Illinoisan

I enjoy reading impressions of Peoria by those who don’t live here, and this one is courtesy of “a single guy living in downtown Chicago.”

Soon, I’ll be dining on the fine cuisine of chain restaurants in the heartland. The Applebee’s in Peoria just rocks.

I make fun of these places just because I’m a snooty Chicagoan, which is precisely what people in the rest of Illinois don’t like about us.

Actually, Peoria is a pretty neat little city. There’s this huge river that runs through it (I don’t know which one it is), and you enter the city over this monster of a bridge (I don’t know the name of it). I really like big bridges, so I always look forward to that.

There are lots of riverboat casinos in Peoria which folks seem to enjoy. Frankly, I just don’t “get” gambling. I can honestly say that I’ve never gambled in my whole life. Not once. So, I probably won’t be on the riverboat casino.

I joke about the food in all these chain restaurants, but I have to admit there’s one food item that I really look forward to on these trips. And that’s getting a double Whopper at Burger King. (There aren’t any Burger Kings in downtown Chicago that I know of).

For all of you fellow chain lovers out there, I’ve got some good news. Not only is Sonic now open for business, but soon we will be graced with several new Dunkin’ Donuts.

Dunkin’ Donuts, a coffee and baked goods chain, has announced that Peoria and Bloomington, Illinois are now open for franchise sales. The food chain plans to open more than eight new restaurants in these areas over the next several years.

I can hardly contain my excitement! But if we are going to be serious about our chains town I think we need a few more nondescript steakhouses where we can throw peanut shells on the floor. I don’t think we’ve reached our saturation point of those yet.

Support your local Central Illinois businesses.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2008 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.