My girl roommate was having a lot of folks come into town for the weekend, so while she was waiting for all of them to get in, we decided to take a group out to Willie’s Ice House, one of her favorite restaurants. We went to the one of the new locations on 1604 and NW Military, and the place was PACKED! It seems as though Willie really knows how to do the business!
Let me just get this out of the way immediately; I hate the ordering process at Willie’s. You have to wait in a long line just to put in your order and then you sit down at a table. You then get a waitress who waits on you for the remainder of your meal. So he/she basically does everything but take your order. This makes no sense to me and I think that is just flat out confusing…
That being said, the table got two appetizers, fried pickles/jalapeños and a large order of onion rings. Both of these appetizers were amazing! The pickles and jalapeños came with some ranch dressing and nacho cheese to dip in. The onion rings were probably overkill, but you get a huge mountain of them for $6 and they are the flakey type of onion rings that I like, so even though it was a bit much, it was still nice!
I ended up ordering a blackened tilapia dish that came with rice, green beans and a side salad (proving that you can indeed eat healthy at Willies if you leave out the fried appetizers!). The salad and green beans were both delicious as they were really fresh vegetables. I know that a lot of people love tilapia because it is not a “fishy” fish, but it had a great taste to it; I only wish that the blackened seasoning had a little more of a bite to it.
Overall a pleasant night out, with a very friendly waitress that put up with a lot of our joking and even dished out some of her own. Definitely worth a stop to try them out if you haven’t.
Value: 8/10 (the main courses are reasonable for dinner (sub $8), but the beer can be a little expensive)
Atmosphere: 9/10 (old signs, tons of beer, and a sandbox for the kiddos)
Service: 9/10 (great service by the manager to both get us a table inside due to the pending rainstorm and great service from our waitress throughout the night; the only reason they get dinged is because of that dumb ordering system)
Taste: 9.5/10 (great taste all the way around, from the appetizers to the main course)
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