Arlen’s Chicken

I truly love Arlen’s. I just wish that there were more menu items, that the milkshakes were cheaper ($ 6 is A LOT for a milkshake), that DMK still brought the specialty milkshake flavors-​of-​the-​month to Arlen’s, that Arlen’s still served alcohol like DMK did, and that Arlen’s was open late (like until 2 or 3am) on Friday and Saturday nights. I know I’m not the only NU student who feels this way too — they would be HOPPING late at night on the weekends if it was well promoted to the student population.
Also, I miss DMK. But I love Arlen’s. Can we have both?!

I’ve been there 4 times now and each time is better than the last. The long wait times for the food has improved and the portions have gotten better. They recently added wings and they are plump & tasty. I miss DMK Burger so badly and I would love love love if Arlen’s would consider doing French Fries… I would do anything for an order of their Wisconsin Cheddar & Scallions Fries or the Parmesan-​Truffle Fries! They could do a test run to see how well they do «French Fries Friday’s»? Just a suggestion! The nice gal who works the front counter is the Star of this place, I think her name is Kim.

Where do I begin…
Well, I’ll list my grievances against Arlen in no particular order:
— They put the spoon in my milkshake upside down. How tf am I suppose to eat a milkshake with a creamy spoon?
— As the only ones in the restaurant at 8:00 on a Sunday, it somehow took 20+ minutes to receive my takeout order. Unless my wings started out their even on a living chicken, this is a bit lengthy a wait for me.
— So how were those wings? Not «tossed in sauce» like I asked for.
— They were also tiny, with many being no larger than the size of my thumb. Think buffalo joe’s wings @ whole foods prices…

I wanted so badly to love Arlen’s, but it fell short of my expectations. The lady behind the counter was very friendly and let us sample the chicken! I ordered the fried chicken nuggets with tater tots. I also had a vanilla milkshake, which the server so nicely split (two large portions) for my friend and I. The chicken was good, but not great; the nuggets were too large, and the flavor was overly salty. The tots were tasty, but how can you mess up fried potatoes? The milkshake was the real MVP of the meal. Since it’s a new business, I understand they are still working out the kinks, so I might try again in a few months.

Came here 2 months ago. Service was good, but the chicken pieces were tiny and pretty pricey. They were really good, but not worth it.
Fast forward to today, and the chicken nuggets are HUGE, with more pieces for the same price. The quality hasn’t changed. Came here with 4 friends and ordered 60 pieces (40 $) for all of us… wayyyy too much.
(The free sweet tea is bomb as well)

Price: I have eaten here a few times now, and I can definitely say that the portions for the price have improved on each visit. You now get a great deal of food for your money (10 nuggets with tots is more than enough for one person), so I am glad to see that the owners have listened to previous reviews regarding this complaint on here.
Food: The dark meat nuggets are good, but are a little salty for my taste. The sauces are okay, but they all taste very similar– extremely sweet with varying degrees of spiciness. The egg biscuits and DMK shakes are excellent. They also recently added wings to the menu, although I have not tried these yet.
Experience: The staff is very friendly, but the wait times have been long on my last couple of visits even though there were very few other customers present. Love the décor in the restaurant.
Overall: I’m very glad to support restaurants near me on Noyes Street, and I am happy to see that DMK has continued to improve the restaurant based on customer feedback. The next things I would like to see are extended late-​night hours (NU students would love you) and more variety in sauces (i.e. buffalo, barbecue, really anything that isn’t so sweet).

This place is outrageously slow, and the service is poor. With a family at home, I try to save time by calling ahead for pick up, and usually only have a small window to sneak away and grab our meal. The food is tasty, so I keep hoping my experience will be better and trying again… Only to again be disappointed and end up wasting a very precious half hour waiting for food.

After reading many of the early reviews, I think some of the aspects of the restaurant that others voiced their displeasure with have been addressed (e.g., portion size/​value, wait time). We arrived around noon on a Saturday and there was only 1 other small group there. I ordered chicken on a biscuit (without sauce, as suggested by the cashier, so that I could test the sauces available on the tables), my husband ordered a 10-​piece chicken nugget with biscuits (described by the cashier as broken up, fried pieces of biscuit), and we shared a side of coleslaw. We both helped ourselves to the complimentary sweet tea and water (both filled adequately and freshly, I presumed, since there was still plenty of ice in them). Our order was ready within about 10 minutes.
My chicken on a biscuit came with 3 decently large pieces of chicken and 2 pickles on a buttery biscuit. I tried each of the sauces with the exception of the «oh so hot», but preferred the «just a little honey» sauce. The biscuit broke into many pieces with my first bite, making it very difficult to eat. I ended up awkwardly eating it deconstructed. My husband’s chicken nuggets came in a surprisingly large box with the biscuits. While the chicken was not at all bad, the crispy biscuits were a bit ridiculous. I felt like they were just being used to fill up the box as they were not very tasty and were basically like fried butter. They were the texture of croutons but were completely saturated with oil. I can’t imagine anyone actually consuming more than 1 or 2 pieces of them. My husband tried every sauce, and preferred the «oh so hot» sauce. The coleslaw was nothing special and actually had a little bit of heat where I would have preferred something more neutral to contrast the spiciness of the available sauces.
Overall, the atmosphere was pleasant and the décor was inviting. The bathroom was very clean, but was painted in chalkboard paint where patrons were encouraged to write on the walls by the placement of chalk on a ledge under the mirror. Seeing some disparaging remarks and criticisms of the restaurant written on the walls was a bit off putting. We had been frequent patrons when DMK Burger occupied the space and were surprised to see the new concept when it seemed DMK Burger had been very successful there.

A great neighborhood spot! The cashier was nice to begin with and when we might have over-​ordered, she suggested better portions so we didn’t over spend and it was the perfect recommendation. She also recommended we order our wings without sauce and do it our selves with the bottles on the tables. Definitely the way to do it. The honey was light and sweet, I don’t personally like sriracha but I didn’t mind they’re version of it, the mango habanero had a really nice blend of sweetness and spice, but the hot sauce was my favorite. Not your traditional buffalo style, but had a really full flavor and a nice heat to it. I do recommend the espresso milkshake if you dig coffee, it’s the best milkshake I’ve had in Evanston. Will definitely make this my new go-​to for wings, I prefer it over Buffalo Joes hands down.

Wings: Tasty crunchy coating, with great flavor in the wings (most definitely
Brined chicken wings), served hot in cute but useful to go box. Where it starts getting real is the assorted sauces. Honey sauce is nice and light, the siracha honey sauce was nice medium heat and good flavor, but the next level up surprised me. Equipped with a thick chocolate shake I dared to try the «so hot sauce» and was so happy. Yes there was heat, but flavor to match. Sort of a spicier, fruitier version of the siracha honey sauce. I am not a fool so I did not test my luck and even try the habenaro sauce but left it alone on my table. Thankfully they just leave an entire roll of paper towels right on your table. So 4 bottles are there on your table so as the cook suggested, I left my wings unsauced and did it myself at my table. No beer yet, but the sweet tea and water pitcher are nice, and the shake texture is perfection.
I miss my hatch-​chili burger fix (nobody did it better than DMK), but this adds a nice variety to the chicken legacy in Evanston of (round the corner) Chicken Shack, and the unique perfection (why tiny dry wings can be so crave-​able defies logic) Buffalo Joes.

I LOVE Arlen’s. Loved their cute packaging (little Chinese take-​out box!) and the chicken and all the sides were delicious (get the cheesy biscuits). Not to mention the staff is very sweet and accommodating.
And their peanut butter milkshake… wow.

Well, DMK owners should stop by this place, because it needs some serious help. At noon, and the only customer in the restaurant, I waited over 25 minutes for a 6 piece chicken nugget meal. Whole fried chickens can cook faster than that!
Chicken breading was flavorful, but as others experienced, a bit greasy and unsure if it is white or dark meat. Biscuit was broken up pieces of hard biscuits. I love fried chicken and I threw half of the meal out.
Staff was friendly and tried to be helpful, but they need some direction and management.
Would be a good concept if they could iron out major kinks. Won’t be back, unless I hear things have changed.

I don’t have a single positive thing to say about this restaurant. The wait has been 45 minutes so far, and 2 of us still don’t have any food. The orders that arrived were each missing at least one item. They forgot my tater tots, and I had to wait up at the front for an additional 5 minutes while they tracked them down. They didn’t even offer to bring them to my table. I felt like I was in a waking nightmare from the minute I walked in the door. I should have listened to everyone who warned me about this place, but I took the gamble that it wouldn’t be as bad as its reputation suggests. It’s worse. There is virtually no service to speak of. The chicken is perhaps slightly better than KFC, but many times the price. It somehow manages to be both dry and slimy. I’m confident that we could have eaten anywhere else in Evanston and had a better experience. I feel cheated. I am now finally arriving home, and we missed almost the entire first half of a football game that hadn’t started when we left (and we live down the street). I’m shocked. Their menu has only 4 components: chicken, biscuits, tater tots, and cole slaw, so you would think that they could have those things ready to go for customers, but apparently not. The sauces are an almost comical array of bizarre and trendy-​sounding concoctions, none of which are worth trying. Bring your own ketchup, or better yet just avoid this place altogether.

Disappointing for sure. 3 chicken and biscuits for 18 dollars and some change. Terrible proportions and the biscuit was uhhh, not good at all. So dry I’m parched!
Can not believe DMK is associated with this. You should be ashamed for serving this not to mention ripping people off. Bring back DMK burger!!!

My friend and I met up at Arlen’s Chicken for lunch on a Sunday, and for the majority of our time there we were the only customers in this small, ~20 seater restaurant with an amusing and simple interior. We shared a 12 piece chicken bucket and 2 orders of coleslaw. The fried chicken, which was popcorn chicken, and coleslaw were fine, nothing special. I liked the 3 available sauces, however I didn’t care for the fried biscuits that came with the bucket. The portion of chicken was very small considering how much it cost ($ 12), and on top of that there was no information given about the type of meat (dark or white). It turns out a mixture of dark and white meat is used for the fried chicken, which I’m fine with, but I know many people prefer one over the other, and you have no choice in this regard.
Overall, I suggest getting fried chicken somewhere else.

I really hope DMK gets it together here, because our meal was awful. I went here with a well known restaurateur and we were both so put off. He was excited to try the place, as we are both fans of DMK. The chicken «bites» are laughable and are so incredibly small. What is not small is the price that you will pay for them. Each nugget that is about a dollar and it came with fried biscuit pieces that had clearly been cooked hours before. They offer free water and sweet tea, but only if the staff has refilled the jars (which they had not). Overall I spent $ 25 between the two of us and walked away hungry and confused. This is a bad concept that needs to be re-​worked.

Definitely a lot of potential. I bought a chicken biscuit for my wife and a six piece chicken for myself. My wife (who is a Southerner and has been eating chicken biscuits all her life) said the sauce on the biscuit was amazing, wasn’t sure if the biscuit was made from scratch or not, and thought the chicken was completely overpowered by the rest of the ingredients, so wasn’t sure about the chicken. She liked the tater tots. For what it’s worth, she said «Not as good as Bojangles», but you’d have to be from the South to understand what that means.
I liked my six piece chicken, though for some reason I mentally thought six pieces of chicken would be, like, thighs and breasts. No, they’re more like chicken nuggets. I thought mine were really well spiced, but was a bit surprised at how small the pieces were. I got the fried biscuit pieces, and I thought they were unevenly fried; there were some astoundingly good pieces with soft centers, and some other ones which were uniformly as hard as a rock.
I thought the price of the chicken biscuit was pretty reasonable, but felt like for the price, there wasn’t a whole lot of chicken in the six piece chicken.

The DMK milks shakes are delicious… of course. The fried biscuit is a great idea and also delicious.
That said. You shouldn’t leave a chicken place raving about the milkshakes. There’s not much to say about the chicken, really. It’s popcorn chicken that’s mostly crunch, and not all that much better than KFC popcorn chicken. You certainly get a lot more for a lot less at KFC. I’m honestly not sure what these folks are thinking. If you open a chicken place… give us awesome chicken… or at least give us a lot of mediocre chicken for a good price.
There are so many great chicken places in the area that are far more affordable and I just don’t see us returning… unless we pick up some shakes.

Arlen, man! Give me more chicken! Not as in, I want some more of your chicken because it is so good, but because you give me so little of it in an order!
The chicken is good, but $ 12 for a 12-​piece bucket of popcorn chicken-​sized bits? Now that doesn’t sit so well with me. They try to pad the box with tater tots or fried biscuit pieces (which I had – they’re essentially wontons) but there just isn’t enough food in there. I got sriracha honey on the side but the honey separated from the rest of the sauce. Not very appetizing.
Want to try the biscuit. Can’t try the milkshake (lactose intolerant). The person taking my order was very friendly and I got my chicken in record time, but… I need more chicken!

Arlen’s Chicken is a new fried chicken place in Evanston, where DMK Burgers used to be. It’s owned by the same chef It’s a very small location, but looks nice inside. When you go inside, you get directly in line and there is a large blackboard menu. Basically, all you can get is fried chicken with some sides like tater tots ($ 1.75), biscuits ($ 1.75), and cole slaw ($ 1.25). You order, and can pick up some complimentary sweet tea (which lives up to its name), and then they will call your name when your food is ready. There are not a lot of tables, and you are not supposed to reserve tables, but the sign that says that cannot be seen from the door, so lots of people reserved tables without knowing. It’s part of their house rules, which also includes rules like no hibernating at tables and to wipe up your own messes.
Chicken: 6 for $ 5.95, 12 for $ 11.50, 18 for $ 16.50
— You can pick tater tots or crispy biscuits which will be tossed with your chicken. We got the crispy biscuits and they were alright– I will probably opt for the tater tots next time.
— I would recommend getting the sauce on the side– the chicken already has a lot of flavor! Out of all the flavors (just a little honey, sriracha honey, oh so hot), I liked the sriracha honey the best– just the right amount of sweet and spicy.
— The chicken pieces are very small– 18 was just right for 2 of us, and we just had leftover biscuits.
— You can also get chicken on a biscuit for $ 4.50 and an egg on a biscuit for $ 3.25
Shakes: $ 6 each– chocolate, espresso, vanilla bean, peanut butter and toasted marshmallow.
We got the toasted marshmallow and it tasted like camping! It is very thick so is almost impossible to drink out of the straw, but it comes with a spoon. This was very delicious and I would highly recommend it. There are chunks of marshmallows inside and two toasted marshmallows on top. This would make a great dessert!
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.