Walnut Room at Macy's Chicago - 2010

We went down to Marshall Field's Macy's this morning and had a surprisingly pleasant experience.  My family has been going for at least the past two decades and probably more, but since the transition to Macy's, the experience hasn't quite been the same.  To be fair, I have a feeling that at the end of the Marshall Field's run there probably was some of the poor experience(s), but I don't quite want to remember it that way - and it is more convenient to pin it on big-bad-Macy's.

Well....this morning, we had what I think might have been one of the finest experiences in some time.  We decided to go quite early - meet at 8:30 AM - and the store wasn't open at that hour.  Because of that, we had a "personal escort" from the curb to the Walnut Room.  Pretty nice!

Then...they had a GREAT tree!

You can't tell from the photo, but they have these vertical LED bars that "drip" light down them.  Quite the effect.  Because we were a party of 16, we didn't sit ANYWHERE near the tree, but we snuck up and snapped a few pictures right alongside the massive tree.

The food was fine - it was a breakfast buffet - and the staff was pretty good in fact.  I'm not going to concede that Macy's has improved the experience, but they've at least worked out some of the kinks.

I fondly remember the Walnut Room experience from my childhood as an almost dreamlike experience.  In fact, the whole Marshall Field's experience is still pretty dreamlike.  Both Nat and I remarked about how weird it must have been to walk into that place for the first time as a shopper back in the day.

Because of these personal memories, I'm hopeful that the Babe will have similar ones, too.  Based on today's experience, Macy's is well on their way to ensuring that those memories happen.