Hog Haven serves up the best pork chops and ribs in the area, hands down. The pork chops are known in the area as being among the thickest in town. With nearly an inch and a quarter of thickness, you better place an order ahead of time and let these pork chops cook while your appetite grows! A pork chop that thick typically takes about 30 minutes to make.

Hog Haven has two locations that are close to World Hyundai. Hog Haven in Dyer and Hog Haven in Steger serve up pork chops to the greater south Chicago area. Look for Hog Haven at your local summer festivals, including the annual Schererville Corn Roast and many other great summer events!

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Candlelite restaurant is a family friendly restaurant with a wide range foods, including Chicago’s best thin crust pizza, burgers, wraps, sandwiches, a long list of appetizers, and their specialty cookie skillet dessert. With a full Chicago sports bar and sports like atmosphere, this is a great place to catch a sports game. You’ll find sports memorabilia around the joint ranging from Blackhawks mirrors to other really cool items! The bar is nice, clean and comfortable and has a huge selection of domestic beer, imports, and local microbrews!

The staff at Candlelite has been great. Friendly service is standard and the owner, Pete, is hands on around the restaurant. The General Manager, Pat, also serves up beer and food and is sure to give you a welcoming experience. Candlelite is a great place to host your Chicago corporate event! Let Candlelite host your business party and all of your guests will love you forever!

While you’re visiting Candlelite, don’t forget to take a picture under their historic sign and upload it to their Facebook wall! These guys are very internet savvy and have a website on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Foursquare, and more! Follow Candlelite for great deals, coupons and information on upcoming events!

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For those of you who are always trying to track down the next great restaurant, especially Italian, you “southsiders” won’t have to travel far.

Roccos Little Italy in Tinley Park may not be new to all of you, but if you have not eaten there it is a must try location.

I have probably eaten just about every entree on the menu and most of everything else too, and I can say that I have never had a bad meal. Nor bad service. Under the watchful eye of the family who owns the restaurant, the service will never disappoint. I don’t think the food will either.

My favorite appetizers are the breadcrumb smothered baked clams, the stuffed artichoke (and it is truly stuffed with breadcrumbs and garlic, swimming in a pool of butter and oil), and the plump baked shrimp. For your main course I would suggest any veal dish and the chicken picatta (or chicken limone as I call it). It comes on a bed of capellini with capers in a white wine butter sauce. If you have been craving lasagna your time has come. Stacked high and firm on the plate, mom never served this so good. Get a meatball or two to top this off. And for a real pasta challenge I would recommend the Gorgonzola raviolis. These are raviolis smothered in a Gorgonzola cheese sauce that may require you to take an extra cholesterol or blood pressure pill when you are finished. If you have to “go”, and we all do, this may be one of my choices on how it happens to me (with a Belvedere up and blue cheese olives of course). If it sounds like too much to eat, order as an appetizer so you can try something else on the menu.

Visit them at www.roccoslittleitaly.net

Feel free to tell them Scott sent you…I may already be there though.

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Inside, the place is beautiful. It wreaks of class, the bar is nice, and it looks very ‘downtown Chicago-esk’. I ordered the full slab of barbecue ribs and my girlfriend ordered the Fillet Mignon. When the ribs arrived, the barbecue sauce tasted great, but the meat was flavorless. The Fillet Mignon was overcooked and flavorless as well. I’ve cooked better pieces of meat on my grill outside! It was obvious that we didn’t enjoy the food after only taking a couple of bites of each, and the waitress did take off one of the entrees from the bill and gave us a free slice of cheesecake to compensate for our displeasure with the meat. The cheesecake was fantastic, by far the best of the food we received.

Overall, while I didn’t hate the place, I would give it one more try…perhaps an Italian dish? But the meat will be out of the question.

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Cooper’s Hawk has been open just over five years and offers a large variety of wines and spirits, a full wine tasting bar, and a full restaurant offering great meals at reasonable prices! The lemon pepper chicken comes prepared just right with just the right amount of moisture and seasoning. Enjoy a party for you and your loved ones in their wine room! Sit at a beautiful table surrounded by huge stainless steel wine vats and take in the wine making experience.

Cooper’s Hawk is located at 15690 South Harlem Avenue in Orland Park, IL. Reservations are accepted, but not required. – (708) 633-0200

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I have been doing digital photography for almost six years and have used a decent number of cameras in that time. Initially as a beginner, I started with the Canon Digital Rebel XT which is profoundly different from any other consumer digital camera out on the market. At the time, it was one of the highest megapixel resolutions of any of the DSLR cameras with it’s 8.2MB capacity. This was a great camera to use for a beginner like me. It cost more money than I was use to paying for a camera, but it came with all of the manual options that I had always wanted. After that, I used a Canon Digital Rebel XTi, which had an improved resolution capacity and just a few new features. My next purchase was the Canon Digital Rebel XSi which had a 12.2 MB capacity. The Canon XSi has many new functions, including a Live View mode. Of all the cameras I have used and owned, none of them have even come close to comparing to the new Canon 5D Mark II.

The Canon 5D Mark II is equipped with a full sensor, unlike the Canon Digital Rebel XT and the Canon Digital Rebel XSi which are only equipped with a 1/4 sized sensor. The improved sharpness, color, and overall resolution make this camera a stand out compared to nearly all of Canon’s other models. I now use this camera as the main camera when I take all of my nice photography photos, including wedding photos.

On Saturday, May 1st, I had my first Northwest Indiana wedding photography gig of the year and was excited to use my new camera for it. I’ve included a couple of the wedding photos below, taken in a low light environment. Let me know what you think!

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Meyer’s Castle is an example of Jacobethan Revival Architecture and was built between 1929 and 1931 by Joseph E. Meyer. The castle is currently surrounded by two huge banquet canopies where wedding receptions and private events are hosted. Meyer’s Castle is home to an Argentine steakhouse restaurant called Rodizio’s and they are well known for their tasty meat! Walking around the Meyer’s Castle grounds will offer a number of different surprises! Emus and peacocks wander the properly freely. The property sits on over 10 acres of gardens on what use to be the former Lake Michigan shoreline, now presently known as the Glenwood shoreline. Meyer’s Castle sits atop one of the original sand dunes of Northwest Indiana!

The food here is EXQUISITE! The meat is fantastic and all of the main dishes are reasonably priced. The tapas bar has plenty of tasty selections to choose from, but their main food attraction is the meat that they bring out on long metal skewers. The service was nice and the ambiance of sitting in an old castle was pretty amazing.

Enjoy a dinner or drink at Meyer’s Castle on a Thursday evening and enjoy Reggae music from 8:30pm – 3:00am. Meyer’s Castle offers a full bar service and plenty of room for dancing!

Meyer’s Castle is definitely a hidden gem in the Chicago area. The location is a great place to have a wedding and the website is loaded with photos of the property.

Meyer’s Castle is located at 1370 Joliet St (US 30) in Dyer, IN and is only 35 minutes from downtown Chicago. For more information or to make a reservation, visit Meyer’s Castle online at www.meyerscastle.com.

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Commercial photography and videography mixed with social media make for a potent poison to other small companies. Websites like YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, and others have jumped on the bandwagon by offering SEO services involving videos and photos for businesses. However, it is usually up to the business itself to do the research to see what works. Here at World Hyundai, we use many social networking sites. Since fall 2009, World Hyundai has been improving its online presence with photos and videos. World Hyundai now has nearly 1,000 fans on Facebook and World Hyundai’s YouTube channel now has over 400,000 views coming from people around the country (and also internationally).

How do you know if something works?

There is always the obvious…someone came across a video or a photo that you posted and they told you directly, either through an email, word of mouth, or some other way. The other way to know that it works isn’t as concrete, but the general fact that the company is getting more exposure, more leads, and more web traffic (particularly when no other marketing campaigns are occurring) is a clear indication that it is working.

Custom build your Facebook Page

There are many third party applications out there that allow you to tweak your personal profile Facebook page as well as your Facebook Fan Page. Many marketing companies offer to create a customized Facebook Fan Page for businesses. If your business fulfills a smaller niche, then this may be the perfect way to advertise. With a smaller company and a niche product, there is less competition from other companies, giving you an open area to quickly get your businesses’ webpage on page one in Google’s search results. The hard part is to find a social media marketing company that is able to do what they would consider ‘a small project’. But there are companies out there.

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The reason why I chose such a large popular food chain was the fact that while all Subway stores are suppose to taste the same, each one is managed differently, and that is what sets one Subway apart from another. I have been eating Subway for over twenty years. I started eating it heavily when I got my first job in the mid-1990s. When I first started eating Subway as a child, I always got the meatball sandwich. At that time, I was in love with anything Italian. As I grew into a teenager, my tastes changed and so did my sandwich. My sandwich of choice was now the #2 Cold Cut Trio. I would get it with lettuce, tomato, onion, mayo and parmesan cheese. This was before toasting was an option. This sandwich reigned as champion for over ten solid years before I decided to make another switch. In 2008, I switched to the Chicken Bacon Ranch (toasted) with Pepper Jack cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, light mayo, light ranch, and parmesan cheese. Today, I have a variety of three different sandwiches that I prefer – The Chicken Bacon Ranch, the Turkey Breast, and the Turkey and Black Forest Ham.

While my sandwich choices didn’t change much over the years, the way I ate them has. I now get all of my sandwiches toasted and I now get pepper jack cheese instead of American (pepper jack wasn’t available until a few years ago). The biggest thing that has changed is not how I eat my sandwich, but what I drink with it. In staying health conscious, I have now chosen to drink water with all of my Subway sandwiches, just as I have with many of my other meals. It’s not a money thing, but purely a healthy choice that I have chosen to make. In doing that, most Subway stores that I have been to are very accommodating and offer complimentary water cups for those who choose water over soda. However, the rules behind ‘the water cup’ vary from store to store, as I found out the hard way…

WORST SUBWAY – 122 Town Center Rd # 103, Matteson, IL 60443

I chose the Subway on Cicero in Matteson as the worst Subway that I have visited in the south suburbs. The food has been satisfactory when I have gone, however, their policy on passing out cups for water is outrageous. All Subway stores offer complimentary see-through water cups, however, this particular location feels that when they run out of those cups, you have to pay for a full price soda in order to receive a regular Subway cup to fill with water. Despite the fact that the store didn’t order enough cups, or the fact that as the cups began to dwindle they didn’t get more cups from another store (which managers at other Subway franchises said they do quite often when out of supplies), regardless of any of that, you have to pay for your cup. This store actually expects you to pay for their mistake. This has happened on numerous occasions, prompting me to finally write about it. Now, I can understand keeping down costs and the fact that each of their regular Subway cups probably costs about between $0.10 and $0.20 cents, but if you are going to charge for a cup, why not charge $0.25 instead of full price? I have learned that this is not a Subway policy, but a policy created by this particular store’s management.

BEST SUBWAY – 7212 191st Street, Tinley Park, IL? 60487

I picked the Subway in Tinley Park in from of the Super Target on Harlem Ave as the best Subway in the south suburbs. During every visit, the staff has always been very pleasant and accommodating. The food has been consistently good each time, and being that this store is in a new building, the inside always appears new and clean. One thing I always look at when I go into a Subway restaurant is the quality of their tomatoes. If they are nice and red, that is a good sign that their other ingredients will be fresh as well. Also, this Subway location has no problem with giving me a regular Subway cup if they run out of their regular water cups.

So there you have it. Everyone goes to different restaurants for different reasons. Sometimes it’s the least distance traveled, and sometimes it’s something completely different. I would recommend to all of you who enjoy Subway like I do to make the drive to the Tinley Park location in front of Super Target to experience the difference.

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