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Title: Eating America Highlight: Regional food lives, even in the land of strip malls Abstract: A sampling of regional specialty restaurants in Connecticut. With list: Where they ate. With box: Spotting the hot spots. Article Text: `Be sure to order the large cheeseburger," said Michael. "It comes with four slices of cheese. The regular only comes with three--it's not nearly as symmetrical." It wasn't long before our waiter, a bright-faced teen sporting a bow tie and a paper hat, delivered the burger in question: a meat patty topped with orange cheese that had been fried and folded back on itself, neatly wrinkled like a corrugated tin roof. I washed it down with a Grape-Nuts ice cream shake, following Jane's observation that "New England is the home of Grape-Nuts ice cream. " Now, a confession: This was our third cheeseburger and fifth meal of the day. When Jane and Michael Stern first hit the road in 1971 in search of the nation's best coffee shops, clam shacks, and pie emporiums, they believed they were doing nothing less than "documenting a dying culture." And it's true that 30 years, 29 cars, and 3 million miles later, the couple have seen some of their beloved eateries shuttered. (In that same period of time, the number of McDonald's restaurants in the United States more than tripled, to nearly 13,000.) But much remains: Egg foo yong sandwiches in St. Louis, Fritos pie in Santa Fe, N.M., and ooey-gooey cake in Gardiner, Maine. All are celebrated in the Sterns' new book, Blue Plate Specials & Blue Ribbon Chefs: The Heart and Soul of America's Great Roadside Restaurants. The authors are out to prove that America is not just one big strip mall filled with sub shops and quickie lattes. Instead, it is a melange of regional specialties and mom and pop stops with offerings the Sterns say are at least as varied and tasty as anything one could find in France. "There is no formal canon of American cookery that everyone must learn," says Jane. "It's devil may care, like putting cornflakes in casseroles." Donning my loosest pants, I recently joined the Sterns on a 10-hour, 250-mile, and roughly 228 billion-calorie loop around their Connecticut home in a bid to taste the kind of authentic American cooking that takes people back to their childhood--real or imagined. Over the course of seven meals (plus dessert), I came to see that there's something to be said for the predictability of fast food. McNuggets will taste the same, whether in Manhattan or Memphis. Straying from that reassuring sameness requires work. Yet what makes the mom and pops memorable is the very ingredient that made your grandmother's biscuits stand taller than anyone else's: It is food with a personal touch served up by people who supersize the fries as a matter of course. These places don't always beckon from the road. The 50-year-old Laurel Diner in Southbury, Conn., with its milquetoast exterior and adjacent service station, hardly seems worth a glance. But whereas most hash houses sling the gluey stuff that comes out of a can, the corned beef hash at this six-table eatery is made every day from scratch. "It has character," Michael says of the coarsely shredded meat flecked with onion cooked to a fine crisp around the edges. Five bucks gets you a plate of hash with two eggs, home fries, triangles of buttered toast, and coffee in about the time it takes to get an oil change next door. While quick-service restaurants have their roots in the post-Civil War era, they owe their real popularity to the automobile age. They "came about as good old capitalism, afforded by the road," says Mary Konsoulis, curator of urban planning and design at the National Building Museum. Then, as now, a place to park was key. By the 1930s, says John Jakle, coauthor of Fast Food: Roadside Restaurants in the Automobile Age, businesses set up next to one another in shopping centers with parking lots, marking the birth of the first strip malls. Meanwhile, factories moved from the center to the outskirts of town in the 1920s, people moved to the suburbs after World War II, and a wave of office parks sprang up in the 1960s and '70s. The food followed. "Restaurants serve folks where they are," says Richard Longstreth, a professor of American civilization at George Washington University. Faster food. Except for a few regional chains, most eateries tended to be one of a kind until 1955, when Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald's, using a formula that enabled quick duplication from coast to coast. Like the independent restaurants, such franchises aimed to attract as many people as possible. And where better to attract customers than close to strip malls, where potential consumers flock? But even in the strip malls there are gems to be discovered. Take Uncle Willie's barbecue joint, which can be found between a novelty shop and a tanning salon in Waterbury. Co-owner Bill Lombardi traversed the country for six years, tasting barbecue and learning how to smoke-cook ribs and brisket 18 hours at a stretch over a wood-fired pit, before he opened his doors in 1995. His pulled pork, Michael says, "tastes like velvet." Painstaking attention to detail was evident elsewhere, too. At Super Duper Weenie, a glorified hot dog stand in Fairfield, co-owner Gary Zemola, once the chef at a nearby upscale Italian restaurant, decided to apply the same standards of quality and purity to a food "everyone could afford," he says. "You're not just going out for a hot dog; you're going out for the hot dog." He's right. What comes off the grill isn't your basic ballpark frank. The natural casing on the dog "gives them a pop when you bite into it," Zemola says. The rolls are fresh. But most important, the condiments are homemade. Take the relish: "I don't mean I buy a case of pickles," Zemola says. "I buy a case of cucumbers. I peel them; I seed them." But such labor-intensive preparation may mean customers can't always get what they want when they want it. When we called ahead to Jerry's Pizza in Middletown at 11 a.m. to order a white Sicilian pizza--a square crust topped with a paste of garlic, anchovies, parsley, and olive oil--owner Jerry Schiano warned that it wouldn't be ready for pickup until 1 p.m. "OK, 12:30," he offered. Made individually, each pizza takes an hour and a half for the dough to rise properly. If he rushes it, Schiano explains, "it will be hard as wood." No shame. There were other setbacks, too. It was with great anticipation that we walked past the decades-old, big white-tile ovens, took a booth, and placed our order for a white clam pizza at Pepe's Pizzeria Napoletana in New Haven. The thin-crust pie, available only when the kitchen can get good Rhode Island littlenecks, receives the Sterns' highest accolade: "If the warden gave us one last meal . . . we would ask to have it served in a booth at Pepe's," they once wrote. "We would inhale the aroma of the coal fire, of garlic and clams sizzling in hot oil . . . [and] die happy." Our waitress delivered the devastating news without shame: "We have no clams," she said. "They could at least have put a sign on the door," grumbled Michael as we climbed back in the car. White clam pizza, believed to have started at Pepe's and widely copied around New Haven, proves the Sterns' point that food, like politics, is local. "You've got this enormous continent, so there is no one American food," says Jane. "It's a crazy quilt." Crazy, indeed: Consider the steamed cheeseburger, a food so truly regional that it is found in only about a dozen restaurants within a 25-mile radius of Middletown, in central Connecticut. It was invented in the 1920s, when steamed food was thought to be healthier than fried. Sitting at the counter at Ted's Restaurant in Meriden, I had a perfect view of the process. The ground beef is not shaped into patties but cooked individually in miniature pans placed inside a steam cabinet shaped like a breadbox. Chunks of cheddar are cooked in separate pans, then the cook flips the meat on a bun and adds the "molten" cheese. It's not pretty. But I had to take a bite. And to my surprise, the beef was succulent, the cheese deliciously oozy. It was perfection on a bun. Elisabeth Rozin, author of The Primal Cheeseburger, says: "If you don't think the best burger is from your hometown, there's something wrong with you." She must never have sat at the counter at Ted's. Indeed, the very act of sitting there is part of the experience. You have to be there in order to appreciate the transformation the lumpy, gray meat undergoes. Take-out just won't do: This is not food that can be enjoyed outside its natural habitat. By the time we got to O'Rourke's, a classic silver diner in Middletown, I was full. That was too bad, because a mug of chili, another steamed cheeseburger (here, called a "steamer"), a barbecued pork sandwich, sweet-potato fries, homemade bread, and poppy seed poundcake arrived at our table all at once--Stern-style--and I had to taste everything. But it was also here that I realized that these places aren't just about the food. "It's a community within a community," says chef and owner Brian O'Rourke. While we were there, I met J. Seeley, 54 and a 30-year regular, who can usually be found in the booth closest to the kitchen, "the chef's table," as he calls it. A Wesleyan University photography professor, he showed O'Rourke how to make guacamole long ago. Now, he has a guacamole omelet named for him. Once, the diner staff honored Seeley on his birthday by aping his habit of wearing mismatched socks. But the day I met him, Seeley had just lost his wife to a long illness. O'Rourke's was where he had come to grieve. "The diner became my support group," Seeley says. "They fed me." WHERE THEY ATE JERRY'S PIZZA LAUREL DINER LENNY'S O'ROURKE'S PEPE'S PIZZERIA NAPOLETANA PHILLIPS DINER SHADY GLEN SUPER DUPER WEENIE TED'S TIMOTHY'S UNCLE WILLIE'S SPOTTING THE HOT SPOTS PROBABLY WORTH A STOP PASS THESE PLACES BY |