Bono's - Real Chicago Food?

Although I've been referred to as a food or restaurant critic by friends and acquaintances (usually with a smirk), I shy away from the term and would never use it to describe myself.  After all, someone with the word "critic" in their description usually gets paid for their output.  I consider myself a food enthusiast, and as such I try to focus more on the positive.  If I find a restaurant's food to be mediocre or otherwise not suiting my particular tastes, but not really bad, I usually won't bother writing them up at all.  If I think the prices are a wee bit high, I usually keep my mouth shut.  Atrocious customer service is more likely to get a public mention from me, if only on Urbanspoon or my Facebook page.  But if you stack up two or three of these kinds of issues, I'm probably going to be tempted to let people know that their money would be better spent elsewhere.  You can probably tell where I'm going with this, but if you're the kind of person who likes details, click the link and allow me to elaborate...


Joe Momma's Breakfast (and Lunch) Eatery

I'm a big fan of aggregate review sites.  My favorite food-related one is Urbanspoon, and I will check reviews on Yelp on occasion, though I take them with a grain of salt.  The information I've found has been very beneficial, especially when researching places to eat while traveling.  However, they can steer you wrong on occasion.  People can be spiteful, and all it takes is one table with a little internet knowledge and an over-inflated sense of entitlement to skew a restaurant's rating.  If an eatery is relatively new and has only been rated by a handful of people, a group of three or four vindictive types can really impact a star or percentage rating.

When my roommate suggested Joe Momma's for breakfast one day, I shot her down pretty quickly.  The restaurant had a very good score on Yelp, but only due to a number of extremely negative reviews being "filtered" (translate: not counted against their overall score), and their Urbanspoon rating was, and still is, low.  Some time later, she finally ended up going with her father and came back determined to get me to try the place.  Now I don't always agree with this woman's tastes, but one of the few things we agree on is our love of breakfast.  So far we've seen eye to eye on every place we've gone to eat it, from our love of Goldy's to our outright hatred of The Griddle.  Needless to say, her insistence finally won me over.  As usual.