Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [147]
The meal people come to eat is a ritualized banquet that begins with pleasant enough but unmemorable pickled beets and cottage cheese and salad with sweet and sour vinaigrette then upshifts to unforgettably good chicken. Fish, shrimp, and steak are options, but this chicken is skillet-fried and wonderful, served with pan gravy. To go with it there are bowls of mashed potatoes, green beans, and corn niblets, as well as hot breads with apple butter. All these trustworthy selections are replenished for as long as anyone at the table wants to keep eating them, but it’s only the chicken that makes you want to eat ’til you bust.
Dessert is ingenuous and fun: make your own sundae. Sauces of butterscotch, crème de menthe, and chocolate are provided to dollop as desired on your ice cream. The default ice cream flavor is vanilla, but true Hoosiers opt for the state favorite, peppermint.
Jamie’s Soda Fountain
307 N. Main St.
765–459–5888
Kokomo, IN
Jamie’s is a genuine, old-fashioned Main Street soda fountain where there are enough syrups on hand to offer a near-infinite variety of drawn-to-order drinks. Chocolate Coke? How about a diet chocolate Coke? Or a cherry ginger ale or a vanilla root beer or a diet vanilla-strawberry phosphate? Of course there are green rivers and black cows and black-and-white sodas and pink lemonades. Plus shakes, malts, sundaes, and floats. The swankiest shakes are made with hot fudge and/or black raspberry flavoring.
Beyond a festival of confectionery beverages and desserts, Jamie’s food menu is a catalog of lunch-counter fare. The fried ham sandwich is excellent. Hoosier tenderloins are available breaded and fried or grilled. There are hamburgers, cheeseburgers, bacon cheeseburgers, and burger baskets (including fries). If you wish to exercise knife-and-fork, you can have chicken and noodles or gravy-blanketed hot beef Manhattan. For breakfast, which is served all day, the choices range from bacon and eggs and wraps and sandwiches to biscuits and gravy.
Good French fries are available on the side, as are hot potato chips and deep-fried macaroni and cheese.
Jonathan Byrd’s Cafeteria
I-65 and Main St. (Exit 99)
317–881–8888
Greenwood, IN
LD | $
Jonathan Byrd’s boasts that it is America’s biggest cafeteria, a claim with which we would not argue. The serving line is eighty-eight feet long with a minimum of twenty entrees at any one time (serving continuously from 10:45 A.M. to 8:45 P.M. daily) as well as countless vegetable side dishes, Jell-Os, salads, desserts, bread and rolls. In need of comfort food when we stopped by, we dined on turkey potpie and a bowl of chicken and noodles, the latter an especially salubrious bowl of thick, soft pasta and shreds of chicken in just enough broth to keep it all moist.
Among the memorable side dishes were macaroni and cheese with a good portion of crusty, chewy top-cheese mixed in with the creamy noodles from below, a buttermilk drop biscuit that was a textural joy, and bread pudding laced with slices of cooked-soft apple and plenty of sweet caramel sauce.
Jonathan Byrd, the founder and proprietor, is a man on a mission from God. “I was impressed by how many significant biblical events involved people eating together,” he wrote for a story in Guideposts (reprints of which are available in the vestibule). As a matter of principle, he serves no liquor in the cafeteria, not even in its banquet rooms, and the Jonathan Byrd function rooms regularly play host to gospel concerts.
JWI Confectionery
207 W. Main St.
812–265–6171
Madison, IN
L | $
A beautiful restoration, complete with nostalgic photos of long-gone high-school days on the wall, makes a visit to this old soda parlor an irresistible taste of history as well as a worthwhile detour for Roadfood of the sweetest kind. The building