Live from Pekin, Illinois, it’s Saturday Night, starring this week’s host, Maquet’s Rail House with special guest star, Erik Reader and featuring The Ready For Prime Beef Player, Marty Wombacher. And now, please welcome, all the way from Court Street in Pekin, Illinois, Maquet’s Rail House!
Here we are on Court Street, a main drag in Pekin and there’s Maquet’s Rail House, which is located here right down the street from the Pekin Daily Times. This is a fairly new place, it just opened up a couple years ago in 2014. I love the vintage bikes in the windows!
Let’s go in and let this Saturday Night in Pekin begin!
There’s a decent crowd in here, but I see a few seats in the middle of the bar, so let’s go there and meet the friendly bartender on duty, Josh! Here he is displaying just two of the many varieties of beer available here at Maquet’s Rail House. I’m meeting my friend and founder and publisher of PEN, Erik Reader here tonight, but as usual, I”m early, so let’s take some photos before he arrives.
There’s a shot of the massive cooler filled with hundreds of different cans and bottles of beer and below that is my view of the back of the bar and as you can see big screen TV’s line the upper wall back there. They have lots of beer on tap, this is just one set of taps at the end of the bar, I took a shot of the other set of taps, but the MBIP camera fuzzed it out. Hate the MBIP camera...HATE HATE HATE it! Oh and the beer of the month is Ballast Point Grapefruit Sculpin, IPA, and that is a such a relief to know!
Suddenly...lemons appear! And we all know what happens now, we must slowly back away from the bar and take a look around in here at the rest of the place.
The top is a shot from the back of the room and then you can see the wooden tables that sit opposite the bar next to the brick wall which has lots of lit up beer signs hanging from it. Below you can see the gaming machines here and in the last shot a woman is picking songs on the state-of-the-art jukebox, located in the middle of the room. I hope she plays a Joan Jett song!
That’s what she said! Sorry, I just couldn’t resist that one!
Here’s the specials for the evening. Isn’t that special?
I love this Maquet’s lit up sign hanging on this partial wooden wall.
If you want to take a piece of the Maquet’s Rail House home with you, there’s a gift section here behind the bar.
This door leads to the beer garden outside, let’s go take a look!
This is really a nice beer garden/patio out here. The tables and chairs are black wrought iron and the first half has a roof over it and if you want the total outdoor feeling, further out is totally exposed with large patio umbrellas on the tables. This is a nice summer destination for eating and drinking. But let’s get back inside because I have a feeling that our guest star for the evening, Erik Reader is probably here by now.
And here he is performing his patent-pending Erik Reader open-mouthed wave, the special guest star for the evening, Erik Reader! I always enjoy chatting with Erik, we both have a love/hate feeling for the internet and social media and people in general and it’s always a lively conversation. Erik, as I mentioned earlier, is the Founder and Publisher of PEN (Prairie Entrepreneurship Notes) and it’s a digital publication updated daily that seeks to inspire and stimulate creativity by increasing the visibility of current entrepreneurs and the local workforce by creating a platform to share ideas, stories, as well as educating and connecting the community both on and offline. If you have a business and are looking to be more visible and have your mission statement told to an audience in terms that they can understand, Erik can do this for you by using his resources at PEN. You can contact him here to talk about marketing and multi-media ideas via PEN. Oh and Sunday was the sixth anniversary of Erik and his wife Danielle’s marriage! Happy anniversary! (Click here for an inside joke alert!)
Okay, time to order dinner! They have a decent menu here featuring a nice variety of appetizers and salads and wraps, plus a half dozen sandwiches and seven different styles of burgers. Erik and I decided to order from the burger menu and keep on scrolling to see what we each ordered.
We have not one, but two pretty waitresses for the evening, that’s Scarlett on the left and Karla on the right. Wonderful to meet both of them!
And before we can blink our eyes seven times, dinner is served, what spectacular service! Erik got the Jalapeno Burger which is a burger topped with Pepper Jack Cheese and, of course, Jalapenos, hence the name, “Jalapeno Burger.” It’s all starting to make sense now...well, not really, but let’s just act like it is, that’s how I’ve lived my whole life! He got fries with the burger and as you can see, they serve you a generous potatoey mountain of them!
I got the Adult Sliders with a side of homemade pasta. I ordered the sliders “Rail House” style which means they’re topped with Pepper Jack Cheese, BBQ sauce, bacon and last but not least, the special house-made Haystack onion rings. And they’re served in soft Hawaiian style rolls. They look fantastic!
Erik’s attacking his Jalapeno Burger and he said the burger and fries were really tasty!
I added a dollop of mustard and pepper to the top of the sliders and these tiny burgers are packed with flavor and are oh so delicious! The pasta was really a show-stopper too and you can read more about the meal in the review directly below. Thanks to Erik for joining me for dinner and to everyone at The Maquet’s Rail House for the wonderful food and hospitality!
I got the Adult Sliders done Rail House style, which means they come topped with Pepper Jack Cheese, BBQ sauce, bacon and Haystack onion rings. The burger itself is almost an afterthought with all these tastes coming together, but it’s a solid little tasty patty and the combination of the tangy BBQ sauce, rich and spicy melted Pepper Jack cheese, smoky bacon and crispy and salty onion rings is like a savory and tasty buffet exploding in your mouth and these are really top-notch sliders. They’re housed in ultra-fresh and soft Hawaiian rolls that really take this trio of delicious sliders over the top. The pasta salad was a nice surprise, as I wasn’t expecting much from it, but it’s a homemade pasta salad dressed in a somewhat tangy dressing and the pasta was cooked perfectly and it was a nice and cool compliment to the trio of super-tasty mini burgers. It was a wonderful Saturday Night pub meal in Pekin!
SN Rating
Three Galloping Gourmets—The Maquet’s Rail House is definitely a notch above your standard pub grub and I suggest you check it out next time you’re in Pekin!
Maquet’s Rail House
221 Court Street
Pekin, Illinois
309-620-8072
Related Posts: Saturday Night @ Donnelly’s Irish Pub, Erin Feis 2015 and Peoria Speedway.