Three Monkeys Pub
The Three Monkeys Problem
A Crown Point bar with real soul — and a kitchen still figuring itself out.
There are bars that exist because a real estate developer needed a tenant, and there are bars that exist because a neighborhood needed a place to exhale. Three Monkeys Pub is the latter. Walk in and you feel it immediately. The Cubs pennants hang with genuine conviction. The regulars look like regulars because they are regulars. And the server who greets you has the easy authority of someone who has been doing this long enough to actually know things — what's good, what to skip, when to quietly talk you off a ledge. That kind of institutional knowledge is worth more than any algorithm will ever tell you.
The menu is ambitious, and I mean that as both a compliment and a warning. Korean BBQ Pork Belly shares real estate with Reuben Rolls. Ahi Tuna Poke Nachos sit a few lines above chicken wings and a Godzilla Roll. This is a kitchen with aspirations, and there's nothing wrong with that. Aspiration is how you grow. But aspiration without execution is just a laminated menu nobody asked for.
The Bacon Jam Potato Skins arrived first, and the idea is sound — bacon jam, properly made, is a small miracle of sweet, salty, smoky alchemy that can elevate almost anything it touches. What came to the table was something else entirely. The bacon, if it was ever present in any meaningful quantity, had been swallowed whole by a tidal wave of sweetness so aggressive I found myself double-checking the menu to confirm I hadn't accidentally ordered dessert. The jam had gone rogue. It stopped being a supporting player and cast itself as the entire production. The result belonged at a brunch spot in a bed and breakfast somewhere, not at a bar on a Tuesday night.
The Bang Bang Shrimp — crispy jumbo shrimp, creamy spicy peanut sauce, sesame seeds, scallions — arrived looking exactly like its description and tasted exactly like its description. It was shrimp in sauce. It was neither offensive nor revelatory. It occupied its place on the table with all the personality of a tax form. In a lineup this eclectic, "adequately executed" is not the bar you want to be clearing.
And then, the Bacon Jam Burger. Half pound of Black Angus beef, house made bacon jam, smoked Gouda, fried onion straws, garlic aioli. On paper, this is a great burger. On paper, a lot of things are great. What came out of that kitchen had been introduced to heat with a commitment bordering on philosophical — charred through with a thoroughness that suggested either a distracted cook or a deeply held belief that medium-rare is a myth invented by coastal elites. The bacon, reappearing from its earlier cameo on the potato skins, had undergone a full transformation. It had become something structural. Load-bearing. It possessed the tensile properties of a work boot left in a hot car in July. The jam — faithful, desperate, tireless — did what it always does. It tried to cover for everybody. It could not.
And yet. The tater tots were magnificent. Crispy, hot, aggressively themselves — the kind of simple thing done exactly right that reminds you what a kitchen is capable of when it stops overthinking. Order the tots. Order more than you think you need. Order them as an entrée and feel no shame about it.
Here is what I'll say about Three Monkeys: the bones are real. The room has genuine soul — the kind that cannot be manufactured or focus-grouped into existence. The owners care, and you can feel it everywhere except, on this particular night, the grill. The misses weren't close calls. They were fundamental. But the menu shows enough range — the Wagyu Burger, the Korean Pork Belly, the Triple Decker Corned Beef — that I believe the hits are in there somewhere, waiting for the kitchen to catch up to the room's ambitions.
Come for the atmosphere. Come for the server who actually steers you right. Come because you want to drink somewhere that means something to the people inside it.
Just let someone else order the burger first.
21 W 112th Ave, Crown Point, IN 46307