61 Chop House Grille and Liquid Lounge

Great Burgers. Very impressed with this place. I travel a lot and SE Iowa is definitely lacking in quality establishments.  Kudos to the staff and owners for an excellent job. It's always nice to find a diamond in the rough!

I visited while passing through the area.  The  building is pretty easy to miss from the outside but the inside is comfortable and attractive.  

I had the award winning burger and really liked it.  It was memorable and the cheese sauce worked well with the high quality angus beef.  The only let down was that my well done burger was quite pink inside.

The one item I found curious was the "accordion" style french fries.  As someone else said, why make such an outstanding burger and resort to french fries from the freezer?  They weren't seasoned at all, which might have redeemed them a bit.  What a shame... the fries reminded me of the ones I got at an ice cream stand

The contrast between the burger and fries cost them one star in my opinion.

Would I go back?  Am I a fan?  Yep!  Great stuff!  Order a different side though... I'd skip the fries.

61 Chop House
The decor is nice but somehow the tables and booths don't match the rest of the theme, if that make any sense at all. But what the heck it's about the food and the service. We'll start with the service unfortunately the service we received was well below average. The initial contact was good but it was a slow steady decline after that. Our waitress managed to hit on both of my service pet peeves, my water sat empty forever and I had to wait an eternity for our check when we were done. Speaking of the check we found out later that she ran the tip through our debit card as a separate transaction.  Hopefully she just had an off night and the other servers are better. Because overall the food was pretty good, I did have one head scratcher however. The place is owned and run by a "certified executive chef" and they serve frozen French fries that I do not understand. The menu made it very clear that the Barn Burger  is what the 61 Chop house is known for so that is what I ordered. It was billed as one of the top ten burgers in Iowa for 2011. It was very good, the secret barn sauce and the onion straws were a nice touch, was it the top ten in the state? Possibly. The other diner's at our table had a tenderloin and the prime rib which were both reported as very good. By the looks of the place and the website it looks like the 61 Chop House is very active in the community which is nice to see. Looks like in January they are revamping their menu, I'll go back and try it again. Perhaps we will have a different waitress or by then she will have improved. I tried really hard to not let our service experience effect the food and overall score suffer. Service really does set the tone for a great dining experience.


Price range: (everyday, a night out, a special occasion only) everyday
Overall rankings all based 1 to 5
Atmosphere:  3
Service:         2
Food:            4
Value:           3
Overall          3.5

213 South Wapello Road Mediapolis, IA 52637
(319) 394-9222