Fountainhead

Absolutely love this place, maybe the best burger in the city!
The beer menu is extensive, almost more so than their whiskey (both are a huge plus). Their happy hour deals are also pretty good.
Food here is something to be treasured and savored, it is beyond reproach. Their Chefs really know what they are doing, and execute the rather small menu exquisitely. The Bob’s Burgers special is on point every week: i do not have a single bad thing to say about it.
I’ve only ever been inside, but i have heard that their patio is amazing. The interior is beautiful, and warm!

I’ve been here quite a few times and I always find myself a little disappointed. The place itself is cool, and the drink options are nice. What gets me the most are the servers. A few are a bit antisocial and one is straight up rude each time she serves us. They get pretty busy and you tend to feel it in their interactions with you. In the end I really judge a place that falls flat on hospitality.

They have fantastic local food options. The beer and whiskey list is amazing. Tons of new options for whiskey every time I am there. The service is great. I love this neighborhood gem!

I haven’t had the food. I stood the entire time I was there and I had an excellent experience there. A group of friends and I stopped by here for an after dinner drink which turned into drinkS. While Fountainhead has a great beer selection their bartenders make a pretty mean Old Fashioned, slightly sweet, a little citrus nose and then the nice mellowness of whiskey-​in this case a rye. I wish I could say that the food was great but that’s the only part of the picture I hadn’t seen yet.

Fountainhead is a tasty gastropub in Ravenswood. As a pub the drink selection is absolutely fantastic and there’s a wide range of beer and alcohol to satisfy your thirst.
The food is above average pub grub (hence the gastro). Last time there I had the Chicken Fried Chicken, which was good. The side potatoes were great, and the cole slaw, just like most cole slaws, was just ok.
Service was friendly, but a little slow, which was probably due to the fact that they were shortstaffed on a holiday.
But this is a nice place to grab a drink and a bite.

My first time dining was this past Monday and I was thrilled. I have heard good things and meant to come by for a year or so but just never made the time and I am so glad that I did. The ambience is warm and comfortable, menus are thorough and large providing options for ANYONE. I will definitely be returning and can’t wait to come by during patio season :) keep it up guys! I look forward to the new cider house opening Feb!

The food is good enough, if a touch over-​priced for what it is. But the star is the drink selection, both beer and brown. I’m glad I’m not within walking distance or I’d be significantly poorer.
A note on food: there are adequate and generally good vegetarian selections, but the roasted squash and farro dish is too sweet — almost dessert-​like. Go with something else unless sweet is your thing.

Awesome beer selection and ask for the rotating tap!

I’ve been coming here from the very beginning, and have no intention of stopping anytime soon! And incredible alcohol assortment which includes a substantial/​highly respectable great beer & cider selection. The food — wow. Cletus is an amazing & gifted chef — the gastropub-​like selection never disappoints. Smoked hummus, mussels, and whisky smoked bacon are great appetizers. A meat lover’s delight (great house burger and I’m LOVING the Bob’s Burgers weekly selections) that also offers great vegetarian, vegan, and gluten free options.

I found myself back in the city. I have always liked this place since it opened. I am finally getting around to a review!
First the interior is great. Dark and warm, has a pub feeling but is not claustrophobic. The bar is comfortable to sit at. Which, surprisingly is an issue I have found. I mean in as much as having a place to put your feet and not dangle there like a 3 year old in a booster chair. End of tangent.
The beer selection is adequate, in fact I prefer them not to be encyclopedic then I have too many options.
I had some stew and was it good! Warm and perfect with a malty beer. The bartenders are cheerful without being over the top. They are help full in beer and liqueur selection. Just attentive enough. Sort of the Goldilocks of attentiveness.
Every time I go back to the city, I ask myself; What new spot can I try, since I am an experience person and love new experiences. I must admit, that fountainhead always seems to crowd out those thoughts and I end up there.
Great place. Try it.

A quasi trendy staple in Lincoln Square. If you’re a fan of a massive scotch selection and an unpretentious crowd, you should check this place out. The food isn’t expensive and the staff is fairly attentive.
As other Unilocalers mentioned, before having your heart set on a particular menu option, ask the waiter if they have it available. I ordered the quinoa risotta for a starter and the steak medallions for an entre; both were good. But there was a bacon appetizer they were out of which made me sad.
I’d definitely come back

This rating only applies to the rooftop bar as I have not sampled Fountainhead’s other offerings. Interesting beer selection at reasonable prices and bartenders are very friendly. The Arlington cocktail was tasted as you would expect from its description but bourbon content was low — will probably stick to beers and whiskey neat from now on.

Went to Fountainhead with a couple friends on a Friday night for dinner. I was looking forward to sitting up in their rooftop garden, so I made sure we got there early to beat the rush. Tip: the rooftop is SLAMMED essentially all summer long so be prepared to wait if you’re going on a weekend night. Fortunately for us we only waited about 10 min for a table since we were on the early side (~6:30 pm).
Fountainhead has an amazingly extensive drink menu, with more beers and liquors than you can shake a stick at (even like a Teddy Roosevelt sized stick!). Take the time to read through a few pages and I assure you you’ll find something you like. The staff is usually pretty helpful if you have questions. Foodwise: we ordered the mushroom quinoa risotto, red curry with chicken and the sloppy joe plus a couple orders of cornbread. Everything was pretty good but not spectacular. Sloppy Joe was probably the best value while the others weren’t quite as good as their price tag would indicate.
Fountainhead gets 4 stars from me solely from the drinks and ambiance alone. Food is alright, but I will probably just keep coming back for that huge drink menu!

Where can two gray-​haired vegetarians who like a little vino with their plant-​based meals go to satisfy their cravings? I perused menus of several local restaurants online, and we chose Fountainhead.
It’s been a few years since I ate at Fountainhead. Not out of any desire to avoid it, but because Lincoln Square and Ravenswood are filled with wonderful restaurants. Even us old farts like trying new places.
Wish I could talk about the rooftop deck, because I’ve been wanting to eat and drink there, but we chose a Friday that featured heavy downpours in the evening, so we stayed downstairs.
The alcohol menu is huge — intimidating, even. My friend wondered, do they really have all this in stock? I asked the waitress, and she said, yes, they really did. Amazing. This list is almost beyond my comprehension. It’s pages and pages long, categorizing all sorts of different kinds of beers and scotches and spirits. The one thing they don’t have much of is wine. Definitely not a wine bar. The waitress told me that the staff attends classes regularly on the alcohol lists, so they are informed and can help you with your choices. God knows I needed help. I had a Dogfish Brown Ale that I wasn’t crazy about. I actually got a glass of chianti for my second drink, and I liked that very much.
The menu has apparently been changed and improved by Cletus Somebody who, if I recall correctly, has made his career on Montrose Avenue. He owned an organic goods shop on Montrose near Ravenswood. He worked for Troquet, a restaurant at Montrose and Wolcott that has since closed. Now he’s at Montrose and Damen. This menu has a wide variety of selections that include several vegetarian, vegan and gluten-​free items. Carnivores need not worry; they can still choose among items ranging from beef to chicken to duck to octopus.
We each ordered the falafel entrée. It was very good and very filling. Had it not been so loud in the restaurant, with the usual Friday night crowd and all the people who skedaddled from the rooftop when the rain started, I might have heard her order and chosen a different entrée, just so we could share and try. But hey. We had to lean in and shout a little bit to each other. younger people probably don’t mind that. We managed just fine.
In short, we had a good experience, and I would go again.

My friend and I went for Sunday brunch. We both ordered the old fashioned donuts, which were vegan and delicious. We also both ordered the buttermilk marinated chicken fried chicken. It was a large buttermilk chicken fried chicken breast on a bed of duck fat fries and smothered with apple sausage gravy and two fried eggs. It was a-​mazing. I highly recommend this if you go for brunch.
I had a mimosa and my friend ordered the Cleetus Heatus Bloody Mary which we’d heard was the best in Chicago. She agreed that it was, and she would know because she’s had many, many, many, many Bloody Mary’s.

I don’t exactly feel qualified to review this place. It seems like it’s striving to be the local option for folks who live at Montrose and Damen, which I don’t. And who needs somebody coming into your neighborhood and eating once at your local and then reviewing it on the internet?
At the same time, I do feel compelled to comment that I can’t quite figure out what this place is trying to be. The menu is a little long, a little involved, and has the chef’s name sprinkled throughout, suggesting some pretensions of being an actual restaurant, rather than a very nice bar with food. But the food I had wasn’t so unusually good as to justify that focus, or to justify the way our waitress was pushing it on us.
To add to the confusion, if you want to eat on the nice patio upstairs, you get a different more limited menu. And rather than being limited, as you might hope, to classic bar food like burgers, fries, or macaroni & cheese, all of those items are taken *off* the menu upstairs. As my dining companion said, I would probably have given up every item off the upstairs menu for some french fries with horseradish sauce.
So I don’t really understand why this place is trying to be something other than a very nice bar with food. Or maybe I do understand, and don’t approve.

Hummus fans, check out the smoked hummus here!
I’m a huge fan of hummus, I truly am, so when I heard that Fountainhead has smoked hummus, I had to try it. It’s now near the top of the list for me.
That said, the rooftop at Fountainhead is not to be missed, especially on a beautiful day before the ice, dark, and cold arrive in Chicago — so get there while you can!
The hosts, server, and kitchen staff are all fun and polite as well as efficient, and the layout of the place leaves plenty of room to hang out while still feeling cozy.
There are several seasonal local brews on tap, for which I was grateful, and two different menus to choose from, (one for the roof and one for the main dining room downstairs), which means you can have your choice of style.
I opted for the chef salad, which I had made as a wrap, with house-​made chips and pickle. I also tasted the hummus wrap after having the hummus starter, and it had a little bit of a spicy kick to it! (So now I’ll get that next time I visit.)
If you want lunch on a nice rooftop, Fountainhead is a good bet!
Cheers!

They refused to provide an estimate of how long the wait will be. They would tell me «there are 20 parties» but not how long it would take to seat us. Not even a very rough estimate such as 5 minutes or 5 hours. There are no buzzers or text alerts, either. I refuse to participate in such stupidity and will never visit this place again. I will also encourage my friends to stay away.
Seriously, the arrogance of this move is unreal. Who do they think they are, Charlie Trotter? It’s a freaking neighborhood pub. There are too many good restaurants around here to put up with this bullcrap. Try Fork, Gather, or just about anywhere else. We went down the street to Glen’s Diner and had a great meal on their patio with fantastic service.

A friend of mine suggested this as a meeting spot with good food and a good beer list, and I was happy to oblige.
Trekking in from the ‘burbs I tend to think about parking but she assured me that it wouldn’t be too bad. Sure enough, I found a spot on a side street, about two blocks away, and since the horrendous cold had temporarily abated, it was not a bad walk.
I was a bit early (overprepared for city traffic) so I sat at the bar for a little while to wait. I was served promptly and sat chilling with my beer, listening to the guy next to me prattle on and reading over the beer list.
One note, if you’re at the bar and later move to the table, they won’t transfer your tab over — so if you’re one drink and moving, don’t start a tab.
We then moved to a table, tucked in the back near the kitchen. The waitress was friendly, knowledgeable and professional.
We split the hummus appetizer — the smoked hummus was REALLY good. I had falafel and my friend had the mac n cheese. I tried a bite and it was yummy.
The falafel was warm, crunchy and tasty; the fries were outstanding (Old Bay seasoning, I think).
A note on the beer list: they had maybe a dozen taps? Not a huge amount but very solid, and the bottle list was very long. They seem to have a lot of unusual bottles, especially large format — great if you want to share.
While I don’t get to this neighborhood a ton, having a friend nearby to explore with means I just mind end up here again.

Foutainhead, I had such high expectations for you, but you seriously left me disappointed. We headed out to Fountainhead on a Saturday evening for a dinner and drinks with a couple of friends. We arrived early, knowing there would probably be a wait for the patio on a beautiful early summer evening. We put our name and made our way to the bar for some drinks while we waited. The beer selection is pretty amazing and that was one of our reasons for waiting to check it out.
We enjoyed two beers at the bar before our table was ready. It didn’t seem to take as long as we thought it would, which was a pleasant surprise. As soon as we got upstairs to be seated, we were informed the menu upstairs was incredibly different from the menu downstairs. They had a special BBQ menu, and two of our party, including myself, are vegetarians, who eat fish. The only item on the menu other than a salad for us to eat was a fried catfish dish. No problem, right? Well, they were out of the catfish, and completely unwilling to serve anything from the downstairs menu upstairs. The server went to check with his manager and told us that they absolutely would not do that. That was a poor decision on their part, but I decided to let it go, and ended up ordering a salad in wrap form, specifying not to include the bacon on my wrap.
We began our meal with an order of the deviled eggs and pub cheese. Neither of these items were particularly mind-​blowing, but at this point, we were starving. Our food took a unusually long amount of time to make it to the table, but we continued to enjoy another round of beers, which also kept taking forever to arrive to our table.
Everything pretty much went even further downhill from this point forward. Once our meals finally arrived, we all were pretty much ready to eat anything. I bit into the salad turned wrap that I ordered and discovered they had included bacon on it. Ridiculous, after the whole debate about what to order there without eating meat. They sent it back, and I was left staring at everyone else eating while they attempted to fix the mistake. Another bacon-​free wrap came out, and it was sub par at best. This is definitely not a place where you can expect quality food.
We were sitting finishing up our beers when a busser came by to clear our plates. He spilled a half full beer all over my lap. Awesome, especially since I had to bike home, and the evening by this point had turned rather chilly. The server came over and said they’d bring me another beer at no charge. They should have also comped the beer that was spilled all over my lap, but this place clearly doesn’t know how to treat customers well.
I don’t care how nice their rooftop patio and beer list are, Fountainhead sorely misses the customer service mark. I would not return, nor would I recommend anyone to give this business their money.