I opted for a buffalo chicken horseshoe.  It was served with a side of bleu cheese dressing.   The fries are always good at Sammy’s and the cheese sauce was a tangy yellow sauce.  It was a good horseshoe but I was actually disappointed in the buffalo chicken.  While it had a good flavor, instead of the standard homemade breaded chicken breast, they served 2 seemingly premade frozen chicken strips. 

The horseshoe was good and I’m certainly going to try another one sometime soon but I’d call this trip a mixed bag.

I went with a classic, a ham ponyshoe.  It was thin slices of fried ham server on a piece of toast.  The fries were crinkle cut and average.  The sauce was a white cheese sauce which leaned towards a cheese gravy similar to Westwoods but actually a little better.

Two friends had ribeye pony’s which they topped with A1

and a hamburger horseshoe was devoured as well. 

All in all if you have cash and can find it Delaney’s was a good place to get a shoe.

The fried pork tenderloin shoe is really their specialty but I opted for a Buffalo chicken instead.

A funny thing about running this website is that my friends and I have eaten so many shoes since we started that we are really starting to get picky.  The cheese sauce at Sportsman’s was average.  It really tasted a lot like yellow american cheese and milk.  It was creamy and well executed but nothing special.  The portion size was very generous with the horseshoe including two breaded chicken breasts.  There were a lot of very good crisp steak fries as well.

You really just get a  good yellow american flavor from their sauce.  Ritz’s does everything right, all the parts are fresh and piping hot to your table.  I really think that the french fries at Ritz’s are extraordinarily good, perhaps the freshest in town.  You can tell your shoe hasn’t sat under a heat lamp long because they are as crispy under the cheese as the might be if they were just server on the side. 

A friend who was along ordered an egg horseshoe. 

In place of meat, his shoe had an egg over-easy.  While Ritz’s has a pretty big breakfast horseshoe menu, he had his with cheese and fries.  He said it was pretty good but I didn’t try it.

The Dublin Pub has a large horseshoe menu and offers the choice of a white cheese sauce similar to D’Arcy’s or a yellow cheese sauce. 

Dublin Pub Horseshoe Menu

 Their shoes come on Texas toast and feature crinkle fries.  Their two-cheese approach can lead to some interesting shoes.  I dined here recently and had a hamburger horseshoe with half-white cheese and half-yellow cheese.  You can see the yellow cheese on the right side of the picture and the white on the left.

This is a hamburger horseshoe from the Dublin Pub in Springfield, Illinois featuring half white cheese sauce and half yellow cheese sauce.

Fortunately for this blog, two of my friends who were along also had hamburger shoes, one had all yellow

Here is a Yellow Cheese Hamburger Horseshoe from the Dublin Pub in Springfield, Illinois.

and one had all white.

A Hamburger Horseshoe with White Cheese from the Dublin Pub in Springfield, Illinois

You may have noticed that I didn’t specify the type of horseshoe I had.  That’s because there are no choices.  They have a single horseshoe on the menu.  It is not a typical horseshoe in any way however.  Instead of toast, they use a hamburger bun.  Directly on top of the bun are the steak fries.  The cheese sauce is poured on top of the fries and the Maid-Rite loose meat is spread on top of it all.  Just like the Maid-Rite itself, the horseshoe is one of a kind.

The horseshoe itself was good but not great.  Honestly, I think if you are going to the Maid-Rite you’d be better off sticking with their special – 2 maid-rite sandwiches, fries and a frosty home-made rootbeer.

D’Arcy’s specialty is the buffalo chicken horseshoe which is server with a cup of bleu cheese dressing and a cup of buffalo sauce on the side for dipping or pouring over your horseshoe.

D’Arcy’s Pint Website

West Woods is a hunting themed grill so they call their shoes “Snow shoes”.  West Woods has a pretty huge menu and their horsehoe menu is very extensive. 

West Woods "Snowshoe Menu"

It is a customizer’s dream, not only can you choose what meat you want, you can also choose your potato product as well.  You can choose fries, tots, homemade chips or even deep fried round potatoes.  But wait there is more…you can also deviate from their standard white cheese sauce and choose a bleu cheese sauce or a spicy sauce.  I’ve yet to try anything other than the standard sauce here so far though but will try in the future to review their other sauces.  As far as their standard sauce, it is a white cheese variety and is very thick in consistency.  It actually reminds me of breakfast gravy in texture.  As far as flavor, its a really subdued cheese flavor and I am struggling to describe it.  It’s not great, it’s not bad, just sort of average as cheese sauces go.  It isn’t your run of the mill yellow sauce though so it is a nice change.

The West Woods Website

The cheese sauce was mild with little extra spice.  I would say it was had a creamy american flavor, maybe with a velveeta.   The hamburger was medium as I had ordered and very tasty.  The Barrel Head uses really wide steak fries on their shoes which are not messy to eat and work well with hamburger shoes especially if you add ketchup and mustard.  All in all, Barrel Head shoes are a tasty and well executed version of a standard shoe. 

Here is a shot I took with my iPhone fresh from the kitchen:

A Hamburger ponyshoe fresh from the kitchen at the Barrel Head

Some people eat their horseshoes plain and some use condiments.  I almost always use ketchup and mustard on hamburger shoes:

I really like ketchup and mustard on hamburger shoes

A customer prepares to dig in to a horseshoe at the Barrel Head Pub