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Sunday, September 11, 2005
what I ate last: Diner food On diners On the road trip, we ate at a lot of diners. A lot of hashbrowns and eggs for breakfast, a lot of hamburgers for lunch. Following are some highly biased reviews of some of the principal food chains you may encounter along the interstates of America, and some of the other establishments that you may find yourself turning to if you, like us, follow the fairly well-trodden road-trip routes... Chains Waffle House. My favorite of all the chain diners. Others don't always agree. But for hashbrowns (tip: order them extra-crispy) and eggs, and coffee - at 4am drunk (think the Tom Waits song 'Eggs and Sausage') or at 10am hungover, or in the middle of the afternoon when the place is empty, Waffle House rules. The fantastic retro black-and-yellow decor, the open-plan allowing you to see the short-order cooks and allowing your waitress to not have to come round to the other side of the counter, just leaning over to pour your coffee or set your plates, the red padded banquettes, the tiles, the jukebox...I [heart} Waffle House. I was shocked to find that Waffle Houses don't exist in the North, or the West Coast. So if you too are a fan of WH, be aware that for a lot of your road trip you will have to turn to the following instead...Also, check out the Waffle House Shrine and the blog of a Waffle House grill cook/. Awesome. Perkins. This is a chain we found throughout the Mid-West/Plains areas. Pretty good. Decent value. Has pretensions to being a 'real' restaurant (you have to wait to be seated, they have carpets). Is pretty similar to Denny's (see below) but a little more 'upmarket' - has the same enormous pile of pancakes that comes with a breakfast combo. Their fries were surprisingly good - visibly related to potatoes - and we had a Perkins dinner that was also pretty tasty, for chain restaurant fare. Denny's. Reliable, if soulless. I say that because I have an aversion to their graphic design. Decent breakfast combos in huge portions. Wendy's. Onto the hamburgers. I don't know why people rate Wendy's. Their hamburgers are always super-dried out, as a result of being so thin, and they are kinda too expensive and small. Not my burger of choice, that's for sure. Sonic. Like Waffle House, I have a weakness for Sonic that is nothing to do with their food and all to do with their retro design identity, the fact that they are 'America's Drive-In' and the novelty, to a Brit, of sitting in your car and that being called a restaurant. Also influenced by the beautiful photo Cynthia took of Lucy leaning out of the car window at her first visit to Sonic. I feel like Sonic is Southern, too. Didn't see many up north. Hardees. I actually think Hardees is OK for a hamburger. They are fairly thick and juicy and do the job pretty well. Krystal. Never, ever, ever eat a Krystalburger. Not only do they sound like a horrendous fusion of Nazism, methamphetamine and fast food, these small, square, burgers look as artificial as they are - which is a bad thing. I prefer my mystery meat and sweet bun to at least pretend to look like food. McDonalds and Burger King. I don't visit these, for ethical reasons. Yes, I know, my ethics is totally flawed if I got to Sonic/Hardees, but still, allow me this one little concession... Non chain restaurants The Red Baron, Alpine, Wyoming. This place was kinda miserable, but wonderful. It was a grey drizzly day. They have a great logo and the teenage waitresses had great branded hoodies. They do a weird thing called a pastramiburger, which is a cheeseburger with pastrami on top. I like drive-ins, just cos, and I like smalltowns with teenagers with smalltown attitude: this place had both, so despite it being sort-of awful, I liked it a lot. You might come across this place if you drove south from Jackson Hole.   Mom's Cafe, Salina, Utah. Wonderful, real small-town diner. Famous, judging by the pictures on the wall signed by all sorts of minor celebs. Waitresses have great uniforms. We had full-on breakfast here, before tackling the 100 mile stretch of no services between here and Green River (see below). They did goood hashbrowns. A little pricey, but that's what you get for a locally famous breakfast spot. Moab Diner, Moab, Utah. Good black-and-white decor. Way more 'diner' than all the other pseudo-new age joints in Moab, which I thought was a horrible town. Food was actually not as good as I thought it would be - their 'special' chicken sandwich was pretty much like grilled chicken. But we were grateful for diner food and not overpriced karmic salads, and they did salad as well, which pleased one of my companions who isn't quite as hooked on greasy American food as I am. If you are also stuck in Moab, just keep going till the end of town and you'll find it. Ben's Diner, Green River, Utah. See picture below. Good Mexican-American diner food - huevos rancheros, etc. What this translates to in practice is white waitresses and Mexican cooks. Pretty damn tasty, if you ask me, and I love the signage and retro decor. If you are on I-70 going to Canyonlands/the Arches, drop by here - it's the first town (or last town, depending if you are coming/going) after the 100 mile stretch of no services after Salina.  Bette's Oceanview Diner. I'm not sure that I should include this as it's not really a 'diner'. I.e. it's a trendy hipster hangout, with all the retro fixtures and a kitch-upmarket menu. Specials include their pancakes, and fritatta, which just about sums it up. But they did do scrapple, and it was the first time I had this, so I guess it gets included. It's in West Berkeley, its expensive, it's really nice in a guilty bourgeois way.  Judging by this list, Utah definitely won out on diners. Weird. But of course, I haven't included the Alabama joints that I know and love - barbecue shacks, catfish joints, gas station diners....and writing all this has made me crave a hamburger! Mmm...where to now, on a Sunday afternoon... 4 comments permalink  
what I ate last: Apologies for the lack of posts -again. The truth is, I was planning a good post on food while camping, as well as a post on diners, both based on my recent roadtrip, but at the end of the trip I got caught up with all the Katrina news and food seemed, well, a little bit of a self-indulgent thing to be writing about. But seize the day, really, and why not talk about food? so here's the first of two travel-related posts. On the art of the campfire grill I just recently drove, with two friends, coast to coast. We did a fair bit of camping, but we were determinedly minimalist with our arrangements - no gas-fired grills for us. Added to that the fact that one of our number has been gradually recovering from a non-meat-eating state to a carnivorous diet, and had never eaten a steak before...the scene was set for a number of epic, and comic, campfire grill experiences. The first one was pretty well-organised. At the Badlands National Park, the store outside the gates had a very limited range of food to offer us, but we found frozen pork chops, sweetcorn, potatoes and bread (as well as salt and pepper - at this stage we didn't even have those condiments) and we had some apples and cherry tomatoes in the cooler as well. Our light-the-bag charcoal did the trick, the chops defrosted quickly on the hood of the jeep, we grilled apple slices to go with the pork and wrapped the potatoes in foil to baked among the coals (not done in time for dinner, but great for breakfast the next morning). All very civilised, sitting with nightlights at the National Parks' rather well-designed little picnic-table-plus-shade shelter, we had the grilled corn for a starter, pork and apple sandwiches, grilled tomatoes, and chocolate to finish... Next episode - the Wal-Mart in Cody, Wyoming, just outside Yellowstone, furnished us with a surprisingly good-looking piece of beef with which we intended to introduce the steak-novice to the joys of rare, grilled beef. Alongside which we purchased some salad, zucchini, more bread and potatoes, ham and tomatoes, and the all-important mustard, with which we concocted good ham sarnies for lunch to make a change from the never-ending hamburger routine. But our planned beef feast was foiled by the weather. No sooner had we built a rather magnificent campfire and put our foil-wrapped potatoes in the coals to cook, than the heavens opened and we had to retreat to the car to drink beer and try to wait it out - a futile effort as it proceeded to rain almost constantly for the next twelve hours. We gave up, and baked potatoes with fizzy beer does not make for the most satisfying of suppers when you are freezing in the middle of the forest. The next effort at cooking the beef, the following day by the Great Salt Lake in Utah, was scarcely more promising. A beautiful location, but horrendously windy, and our fire refused to light in any meaningful way. The park warden drove by in her little buggy and informed us that we had been 'having a picnic' for an hour and a half - and we hadn't even started to cook anything on the grill yet. Finally we got some sliced zucchini on, and then the beef. As the heat was so low, we left the meat in one big hunk to semi-roast rather than sliced as individual steaks - and then sliced it into strips afterwards to eat, dipped in grainy mustard. We managed to keep it rare on the inside and deliciously crusted on the outside. Happiness... Then came birthday barbecuing in Canyonlands, Utah. The grocery store in Moab showed that we had entered a different world - they sold things like fish. It all worked out pretty damn well, with the fire lighting successfully and the food getting into gourmet (rather than slavering carnivore) territory - grilled trout with dill, potatoes, zucchini, salad, and Lindt chocolate for afters. Mmmm....And you even get a photo.  After this return to success on the fire-making and the food front, we started to get a bit more pro. Hell, we even bought a knife to cut food with, rather than using our penknives. Next camping was in Yosemite, where again, they food store was Californian in reach. We went for grilled spicy sausages (the smoked ones, so we didn't have to worry about them being underdone in the dark), baked sweet potatoes, grilled and skinned red peppers, spinach salad, and bread. All of which was doubly good because we had left-overs - which meant we got sausage, red pepper and sweet potato sandwiches for lunch the next day - a truly gorgeous combo if you ever have the urge. From then on it was up-and-away, despite one thwarted camping plan for near El Paso (the heavens descending again). It must have been the curse of trying to cook beef again, but it did mean a lovely lunchtime grilling session the next day, where an innovation included slicing potatoes very finely and laying them between pieces of foil to saute/steam - a way quicker way of getting potatoes, and tasty to boot. We also grilled out on the beach in California - pork chops and apple again, this time also with sweet potatoes and salad, and marshmallow smores....ahhhh, finally! We had been missing the marshmallow experience. And the final grilling of the trip came on the Gulf coast at the far eastern corner of Texas. It went perfectly. We had grilled pork, the new-innovative potatoes, grilled asparagus and zucchini, and two bottles of amazing wine from kind friends at Ridge. Amazing, what you can cook with just oil, salt and pepper, and mustard. And everything tastes so very good, cooked so simply over a charcoal grill. 2 comments permalink
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