Pilot Pete’s

I’ll say this for the owners of Pilot Pete’s, located at the Schaumburg Municipal Airport: they did their branding homework. Though not actually a unit of a far-flung restaurant chain, the place certain felt like it. It had the neutral tables and booths, thematic décor, fair-to-middling food and reasonably good service you’d expect in a formula restaurant. It cost about as much as a mid-level chain eatery, too.

Sometime ago, Lilly got a certificate from the local chapter of the PTA for learning the Greek alphabet or something, and it was good for a free kid’s meal at Pilot Pete’s or one of the other two restaurants with different names owned by the same owners. I was intrigued by the fact that Pete’s is part of the airport, which isn’t too far from where we live (small aircraft pass within sight of our deck on their approach to the airport, and on some summer weekends we enjoy quite a parade of little planes).

The theme was aviation, of course. Photos of planes and their pilots, small paintings of the same, and a number of models of them too—early military planes or general aviation, with one or two jets thrown in. Then there was the full-sized airplane hanging, Spirit of St. Louis style, from the ceiling. We sat in a booth not far from that plane, and while Lilly had a view of the picture windows that looked out onto the runway--dark and still when we were there--I spent my meal facing it.

So I got a good look at the plane. Single-winged, but the propeller was behind the cockpit, which wasn’t really an enclosed area, but more of a mounted chair. The fuselage was a metal frame in the shape of a fuselage, without covering, except for the tail. There were no distinctive markings. It was an odd-looking thing, and yet to my untutored eye, it looked like a real plane that could fly. I imagined it might be a trainer from the 1920s or ’30s, but I didn’t know. I asked the waiter, and he didn’t know, either. “I just bring the food,” he said.

And so he did. Lilly had a cheese pizza that was intensely cheesy. I had meatloaf, mashed potatoes and vegetables. Quality: not bad. The potatoes were very good, the meatloaf pretty good. Quantity: my slab of meatloaf was like a calving from the Ross Ice Shelf. Some of it sits even now in my refrigerator.