An olive oil store at Woodfield seems like the old Saturday Night Live sketch of the mall Scotch tape store, but considering how quickly it relieved me of $45, it may be a goldmine in the making— though probably not as much of one as the indoor Legoland that drew me there.

Legoland first: we loved the outdoor Legoland in San Diego, two years later the kids talk about it, but I had serious doubts about stuffing it in a mall building and charging not that much less. Great for suburban kid birthday parties, maybe, but at $50 or so for the three of us, just barely worth it. The 3-D interactive movie was a lot of fun, the build-and-test-Lego-vehicles area was a hit though wheels were very hard to come by. The “factory” was a dud, a dragon ride was not bad, the little Lego Chicago was fun enough— Baudrillard would have loved the idea of seeing Lego buildings inside a mall that is itself a faked village of “buildings” (actually one big one with phony storefronts). There’s a cafeteria, and yes I could have been the first person to review its offerings, but I gave them a pass. Would I spend this much money to entertain the kids for two hours again? Maybe once a year. God knows any visit to Barnes & Noble seems to cost me as much these days.

On to the Olive Oil store. Inside there’s a table and rows around the wall of metal containers, like samovars, dispense olive oils and fruit vinegars. Some of the oils are icky concoctions (a blood orange-flavored olive oil was a nasty combination of flavor and feel) but there are some pretty good ones along the back wall and I was really impressed by the organic one at the end, and bought a bottle. The flavored vinegars are, for all I know, another blasphemy by the standards of Italian vinegar purists, but the kids really got into tasting them— I think they liked the challenge of tasting puckeringly-tart liquids— and we wound up leaving with strawberry and black cherry flavored ones. Hey, whatever it takes to get the kids to eat salad— and, eventually, to have a taste for real balsamic vinegar.

The Olive Oil Place
601 N. Martingale Rd. #145 (Streets of Woodfield mall)
Schaumburg, IL
773-969-3700