The Melting Pot

FYI…
THIS LOCATION IS CLOSED AS OF 9÷27÷2015!!!
EMAIL FROM MELTING POT ON 9÷27÷2015:
From: The Melting Pot
Subject: Thank you Fondue Fans!
Date: Sun 9÷27÷15 3:06 PM
We regret to announce…
Dear Valued Club Fondue Member:
We regret to announce that The Melting Pot of downtown Chicago has closed for business indefinitely as of September 27. The Melting Pot Restaurants, Inc. appreciates all of the patronage in its downtown Chicago franchise location since 2004. While there are no plans to re-​open the downtown Chicago location, we hope to return to the market in the future.
As a thank you for your patronage, we invite Club Fondue members to experience fondue at our nearby Downers Grove, Schaumburg and Naperville locations with a $ 20 fondue credit toward your dining experience for a limited time. This offer is valid for up to four people. No purchase necessary. Redeemable at The Melting Pot of Downers Grove, The Melting Pot of Schaumburg and The Melting Pot of Naperville*. Please mention «Chicago Special» when booking your reservation.
We appreciate your patronage and apologize for any inconvenience. Thank you for your continued support of The Melting Pot.
Fonduely,
The Melting Pot of Downtown Chicago
*Offer not valid on Saturday. Offer cannot be combined with any other discount, deal or promotion.

Fantastic! I had my date here and we enjoyed succulent meat and fresh veggies, great wine list, reasonable price, and great service.
Keep it up and we will be back.

My wife and I had one of the best experiences here the food was amazing and the service was exceptional we ordered off of recommended courses from our waiter. The owner stopped by our table this place has an owner that really cares about his customers. Not only did he give us glasses of wine on the house but he recommended a restaurant for breakfast the next morning. The melting pot will always be a have to stop when I come to Chicago from now on.

I love The Melting Pot. I wish I could give this location a better review, but we honestly had a pretty mediocre time.
The restaurant seemed to have only one server for all tables last night — though, some members of our party claimed to have seen a second. We’re still not sure. What I can say, however, is that we ended up waiting extraordinarily long times (2 hours from the time we sat until the main course) for our meal. Drinks took forever. Asking for water took forever. Dishes stacked up. No utensils. I could go on. Bottom line? This restaurant was horribly understaffed for a Sunday night. There wasn’t even a bartender on duty — we had to go ask the host if we could spend money on a drink at the bar while we waited to be seated! Talk about leaving easy money on the table…
Additionally, the restaurant was HOT. Like I was dripping sweat. I was told the the a/​c was out and had been for several days. I mean… wtf? Get it fixed? This is a Chicago summer for crying out loud. At least go buy some fans from Target and put them in the aisles? That would have helped a ton.
This restaurant just kinda reeks of mismanagement. I’m truly disappointed. The one saving grace was that the overworked staff was extremely pleasant and bought us a few rounds of shots to make up for the experience. I appreciated that and the booze did help pave over the problems. Also, food was good (even if my order wasn’t right). I don’t think I can recommend this location nor will I go back — there are other fondue restaurants in the area that don’t have these problems. :-(

My mouth is literally watering even thinking of this place. LOVE.
The cheese is fantastic and you always get a lot of bread and veggies. I love the house salad and would (almost) drink it if possible. The main course is also always fantastic and had so many great dipping sauces available (curry for the win, trust me). Finally, the deserts complete the meal and even if you’re stuffed, always do your best to get a few strawberries dipped in chocolate, I promise you won’t regret it.
Finally, I really like the ambiance of this place. I’ve come here with close friends for birthdays and have had a few awesome dates here — cozy booths and lots of opportunity to talk and bond over some amazing food and some great drunks.
Don’t be shy about asking for more bread, extra veggies or more dipping sauces either, these guys aim to please. Love this place and can not wait to go back ASAP.

3 stars missing due to 3 hours of service.
Made reservations at 9:30pm and walked in at 9:10pm. Early is how my fiancée and I roll. They get us a corner table, secluded, away from the other 6 guests in the restaurant. It took at least 15 minutes to order our only drink of the night… due to the slow service. We ordered the whole deal, cheese fondu, meat entrees, and chocolate fondu. It was all really good but we left the restaurant at 12:02 am. It took forever and we will only go back for chocolate fondu. A portillos is nearby so grab some food there and then grab dessert at the pot if you’d like.

The Melting Pot is my favorite restaurant, by far. I have probably eaten there at least 50 times.
I highly recommend:
–Wisconsin Trio (cheese) (I love the pumpernickel bread)
–House Salad (ranch and house dressings are both delicious)
–The Classic (meat) (I always add salmon and a lobster tail) (GET LOTS OF CURRY SAUCE!!! It’s not spicy)
–Milk Chocolate Turtle and Toffee Crunch (I love the blondies, Rice Krispies, and pound cake for dipping) (Tell them to bring back the cheesecake!!!)
If you haven’t been there, you haven’t lived.

I honestly don’t even know where to begin.
We had a reservation for an early seating at 5:30pm on a Sunday (thinking there might be a crowd). We get there at 5:25 and it takes them over 15 minutes to seat us — once in the dining room, there are only 2 occupied tables in the entire restaurant. Baffled.
There were 5 of us in total — 3 adults, a 4yr old, 2yr old and an infant. Before we chose to come to Melting Pot for dinner, I checked online to see if they had a children’s menu and saw there was a variety of child-​friendly meals. Once we’re seated, I had to shout at some other server to ask if we had a waiter as we didn’t have so much as water at our tables for another 10 minutes.
The menu clearly states in writing «Kids’s menu available upon request» — we requested a menu and turns out they do NOT have a kids menu and all you can do is order from the normal menu but just in smaller portions.
Our waiter, despite probably having an IQ of an 8yr old, would NOT STOP TALKING. There are the kind of guests who are receptacle to banter before a meal, and then there are patrons with 3 kids under 5 who just want to order food. I literally had to tell our waiter to stop asking us asinine questions so we could place our order.
I won’t even get into how utterly unorganized and confusing the menu is, it’s just not worth my time. You’d think the waiter could explain/​recommend what would be appropriate to order for 3 adults, but that was clearly asking too much.
Long story short, it took almost 3 hours to get our meal (we had our dessert that was part of our set meal boxed to go since that probably would have taken another hour to be served). It’s FONDUE. All the kitchen has to do is slice a place of raw meat and have a waiter place it on our table. What they do in that kitchen is beyond me. They had 3 waiters on the floor and a mere 3 tables to serve in the entire restaurant, yet we had to flag down a different waiter each time to ask for service.
We all left still hungry — the kids weren’t able to eat anything they provided — we asked for just a plain cheese sandwich — which consisted of HALF a stale roll of bread and maybe a table spoon of shredded cheese on top. AWESOME.
Lastly, if you insist on giving this restaurant a try, avoid their bathrooms at all cost. I wish I had taken a photo just to share the crème de la crème. EVERY toilet had a thick layer of mold around the rim — I’m talking thick black nasty mold so abundant it was probably growing hair. I can only imagine what the toilet that was «Out of Service» was hiding — probably a creature they feed all the leftovers.
This is just a reflection on THIS particular franchise location. I went to the Melting Pot in Miami and had a fantastic experience.

Went for an anniversary, we had a private little booth and they brought us a card and toast at the end of our meal. Great service but I wish they would have explained how to cook the meat, we had no idea what we were doing so everything was tough and chewy

This was the worst dining experience I have ever been a part of. We had a 7:00 reservation and did not leave until 10:45. Our 3 person table seemed to be invisible and was ignored most of the night even though we let the staff know a couple times that we needed to speed up the meal. We had to skip a course because we only paid for parking until 11:00 which would normally be more than enough time for a meal.
Also, we left feedback on the website and were ignored. (hence the Unilocal review)
It gets one star because I like chocolate and zero was not an option.

There are a few times in life the food is not just food but an experience. The melting pot is one of those times. Ive been to several locations and have been coming to this fine restaurant for over a decade. If you havent tried the melting pot please fon-​do!
This past time i was here i had the 4 course dining experience accompanied by the 4 course white wine flight. What a great choice. The wines paired perfectly with the dish.
The first course is the cheese. Chedder is what our group chose. Cant go wrong there. Apple, veggies, and bread dipped in melted cheese. So good.
The 2^nd course i had the california salad. Ive had the house salad, which is what is recommended but they have their own blackberry dressing that is really fantastic.
The entrée course, oh my. Ive done 3 of the 4 cooking styles but all you really need is the simple standard option. I ordered the lobster, filet, teriyaki sirloin, the duck and the jalapeño filet. Oh my. The lobster is always excellent and the meat is too but this was my first time trying the jalapeño filet. It was so good, a little kick, very tender, all in all a great choice.
The last course, the chocolate fondue! We ordered the bananas foster and it was epic! They provide you with strawberry, banana, rice crispy treats, marshmellows, cake, blondies and brownies. My favorite is the brownies. Nothing better than dipping a lucious brownie in gobs of chocolate fondue to end the meal!
Only good things to say about the melting pot and the staff was excellent, entertaining and to top it off i joined the fondue club and was treated to complementary chocolate covered strawberries upon leaving.
You must try the melting pot experience!

The last time we went to The Melting Pot was for my sister’s 23^rd birthday dinner. In the past, at other locations as well as this one, The Melting Pot has been her favorite place. This experience was terrible and we will not be returning.
When we got there we had to wait a little while but not too long.
Here starts the problems — we were seated at a table far in the back with little to no ventilation. At the beginning we were a little cramped but it was not too bad. When the burners turned on my sister, who was on the inner most seat, began to feel nauseous from the heat. We moved her to the outside seat and she felt a little better but still could not enjoy the food. Soon after my step father, mother and I all began to feel sick as well. We told the waitress multiple times that it was too hot and we needed more water at the least. She never filled our water glasses She did not offer to move us to a better ventilated table. We told her we needed to be moved and she disappeared for roughly 10 minutes while she was «asking». We ended up standing up and walking to the front of the restaurant ourselves to find another table where we could attempt to finish our meal. We got through the cheese and meat courses but barely could eat because we all felt too hot and nauseous.
When we finally were moved to a cooler table, the managers were very apologetic but made no effort to discount our tab. My mom told them she believed we should not have to pay for the food that we could not enjoy — not to mention 4 of the 5 people in our group now feel sick because of the table we were seated at. They took of 10%. 10% off of our tab for a meal we did not enjoy and now we are sick? no. My mom went and spoke when them again and they took some more off but at that point, in my opinion they should have comped our entire bill and given us a gift certificate to try another time.
We have had such great experiences at other locations. Unfortunately, we will not be returning to this location.

I have eaten at the melting pot in Schaumburg and the service there was just fine.
My two star rating applies specifically to the Chicago location. My boyfriend and I ate here this past Valentine’s Day and I must say it was by far the worst dining experience he and I have ever had. For starters everyone in the restaurant was seated an hour or more after their reservation time. Please tell me what the point of making a reservation is if you’re going to wait over an hour anyway?
Our reservation was for 7:45 and we were seated at 8:50 after arriving an hour earlier than our reservation in order to get nicer seating. So in total, we were at the restaurant in the waiting room for 2 hours. This however was not the worst of it. Once seated, we realized that there were TONS AND TONS of empty tables. So, what was everyone waiting for? I suppose it’s because they overbooked and under staffed. There was one bartender in the entire restaurant. There were maybe five severs in total. I don’t know why they would think understaffing on the busiest day of the year would be acceptable. Due to the understaffing issue we waited an additional 20 minutes before we were even served our salad.
To make matters even worse, they ran out of food. The couple next to us were not given bread or apples with their cheese dish. Our entrée was supposed to come with certain items and we were not given them.
Throughout the whole experience, no one once stopped by and apologized for the terrible service and lack of food. Fondue is not the cheapest meal by any means. It would’ve been nice if a manger expressed their apologies or even took a bit off the total of the bill. Anything to show their appreciation for their customers would’ve made the night a little less awful.
Safe to say I will never eat at The Melting Pot in Chicago again. Upper management should really think about how they treat their customers and especially their staff.

I hate being the bad guy but this review is necessary.
first off, the 2^nd star is ONLY because our waiter Marshall was very nice, despite the circumstances.
We had 11:15PM reservations for Valentine’s Day. Arrived at 11… got seated at 12.
Finally got water at about 12:20. Our waiter came and apologized many times.
Since it was a holiday, it was also a set 5 course menu. That being said, each and every person would be eating the same thing. So HOW IN THE WORLD do you run out of so many things. Especially BREAD! And at a place where the customer is cooking the food themselves, how could the kitchen be so behind? YOU AREN’T EVEN COOKING! iT’S JUST PREP WORK!
1^st Course– Not quite sure what it was supposed to consist of, but we were given a bowl of broken Tostitos. That isn’t a joke or exaggeration.
Our salads were good…
Main course had all the meats it was supposed to. I don’t eat meat, only fish, so I was excited about the Lobster tail & the Ahi Tuna. Our plate was missing the Ahi, the mushrooms, we were only given some of the dipping sauces, as they ran out of the others, and I really don’t know what else since we had no menus to look it. As a non meat eater it was pretty disappointing.
Since we had to wait a good 20 minutes between each course, we finally finished around 2am… as I was dozing off into my pot of steaming chocolate, he finally came with the bill.
Not only did they have to nerve to charge us full price after this painful experience, but they accidentally put a bottle of wine on our bill that we didn’t order. We waited 10 minutes for him to return, told him the wine wasn’t ours, and asked how we could possibly be expected to pay full price. I mean, come on… BROKEN TOSTITOS!!!
He arrived back offering us 25% off. This should have been offered in the first place to each and every couple that was there suffering through this.
I’d really like to give them another chance, just because the idea of it is so fun. But that’s just it, it’s the IDEA. So I will definitely be trying another fondue place in my future endeavors.
THANKS FOR RUINING VALENTINE’S DAY!!!

Andi (Z) was the best! She actually left the restaurant to get me a red bull because I was tired during my wife’s birthday dinner. She had great drink recommendations, (Moscow mule, and some bourbon drink) and made a special birthday desert for the wife.
Food was excellent. I’m going to dream about that chocolate.

I expected better service for the price I paid for. I didn’t get what I paid for. So what was good, what was bad?
Bad: service was not good. Our server did not pay us much attention, but when she did she kept apologizing for being «slow». Not kidding, every time she came she said sorry sorry, I do appreciate your patience. I shouldn’t have to wait to be served when I’m already sitting down. She kept forgetting what we requested (more vegetables and drinks). We also had a pile of plates that no one collected, and it was sitting there for about 15 min. Yes 15 min, because we didn’t get much attention.
Good: we didn’t like our cooking still we got, so they did change it at our request. That was nice of them. The food was good as usual.
It is a good place to eat, but I expected a little more effort from the staff.

Pros: The food. C’mon, what’s not to like about cooking your own lobster tail and filet minion in a fondue pot with an option of 8 dipping sauces? With our Groupon, we were served a plethora of meaty treats from the land and sea at a great price tag.
Cons: Just about everything else. First, there’s something that feels dingy about eating a nice dinner in a basement. The entrance, shared with a tanning salon, really gives the restaurant a mini-​mall feel. After giving our names to the host at the entrance, we were ushered into a side-​bar to wait for our table as the hosts attended to their other reservations, giving no mention of how long we would wait. Not a fantastic start.
Our server was one of those nice waitresses that you feel bad to criticize, but was not very good at her job. She was an obvious college student, young, inexperienced, and inattentive, but very nice and friendly. All in all we were at the restaurant around 2.5 hours, with a good hour spent waiting for the table to be cleared.
Our table had an extension cord (which powered the fondue pot) hanging below our table so that it was barely grazing the top of our legs. It’s off-​putting to have the feeling of impending electrocution looming during dinner, especially as the table across from us was experiencing fondue pot malfunctions.
Also, I think this is a necessary evil of all fondue restaurants, but the fondue oil really sticks to your clothes and makes you stink like meat, even after you leave the restaurant. That issue seemed intensified by Melting Pot’s basement location.
The above being said, it was actually a fun experience! It’s up to you to make it fun, but if you get into it and just accept the basement location and poor service, cooking fancy food in a table-​top fondue pot with a couple of cocktails can make for a damn fun date-​night.

came here with a group. The waiter recommended that we allow him to place the order for the meal for us and we chose the items we would like. He recommeded the 4 course experience and the call outs are– the spinach artichoke– excellent! the french quarter and the steak lovers. We tried the flaming turtle and the cookies and cream and the flaming turtle is vastly superior.
The ambience is dim with low lights and there are booths on the 2^nd floor which is nice for smaller parties. The service was good and informative, the waiters accommodated some changes and are happy to take you through fondue etiquette for the uninitiated.

My friend and I were in town to celebrate her birthday. On our way to another restaurant for her b-​day dinner, we both spotted Melting Pot and screamed simultaneously to the cab driver «Halt !!!» (or something like that). Even with no reservation, we were seated quickly. The restaurant wasn’t crowded, maybe because it was raining. The food, drinks, and service were good. We were seated in an upstairs type area. The restaurant had an overall calm & quiet feel: great combo for two gal pals to sit, talk, and laugh.

After hesitantly going down the staircase and being wound around to the back, I sat down in the booth and listened to the server’s explanation of the groupon deal and menu options. There was a mushroom on the floor, which was distracting. The delivery of the speech was fine, but it seemed like she included a lot of options that she didn’t make clear were extras. Oh go ahead and choose this and this if you want. Oh is that part of the groupon? No, it’s additional. Ok, then no thank you.
We stuck to our groupon offering and received the basic broth with a lot of protein options and veggies and dipping sauces. I quite enjoyed the variety though I wasn’t so good about timing the cooking so that my steak was much more well done than I would have liked. Include a timer with the meal, I think! The service was friendly, but overly attentive, as was the management who kept walking around and asking us how we were. This is better than no attention at all, but we are in the middle of a conversation which has now been interrupted 47 times. It was a bit much.
The dessert, which was not part of the groupon, was probably our favorite part of the meal. We stuck to the original, which was basically chocolate with some crunchy peanut butter mixed in– please try this at home, and enjoyed the variety of dippers that came along with it.
All in all, our meal was decent, and the experience was generally an unregrettable one, for my first and likely only time. Although this kind of thing could be good for a date– like in the other more romantic atmosphere fondue places in the city. This basement experience, not so much romantic. Plus, there was a loud drunken bachelorette party in the middle of the restaurant, which we could hear very clearly in the back. They really need to have a party room. And the music was on repeat so that we heard the same Dean Martin songs over and over. For a long cook it yourself type of meal, they should have a longer playlist.

I didn’t review this place? Dang. I shall begin.
What I like?
Well, first off, I only came for dessert, which luckily is an option. (We had already eaten dinner somewhere else)
We had the ying yang chocolate dessert. It had white chocolate and dark chocolate. Nice little delicacies to dip into your fondue bowl came with like strawberries, pound cake, marshmallows, and rice treats.
The waiter was a nice guy: very helpful.
Atmosphere was nice and pretty quiet. It was hidden in the building it was in. I’m glad we found our way in.
What I dislike?
Our visit was brief, so we didn’t experience much.
We did seem a bit rushed by the waiter, though. It wasn’t even a full house.
*We will be coming back to try their foods sometime.

superbe cadre, serveurs adorables, des grandes tables rondes si vous êtes nombreux, surtout tester la fondue chocolat au bayley’s, un régal !