Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [171]
So we cannot tell you about Hathaway’s waffles. But we can say it is an endearingly civilized urban dining experience reminiscent of downtown coffee shops half a century ago. Seating is at one of three U-shaped counters or at a steel-banded dinette table against the wall. Waitresses patrol the low-ceilinged room in white-collared mauve uniforms, refilling coffee cups as required. Meals are handsome and inexpensive. After breakfast, lunch items range from grilled cheese to half-pound cheeseburgers, triple-decker club sandwiches, salad plates, and a hot-plate special of the day (fried chicken Monday, hot roast beef Tuesday, spaghetti Wednesday, meat loaf Thursday, and battered fried cod with macaroni and cheese Friday). Hathaway’s has a full soda fountain menu of sundaes and banana splits, plus traditional malts and yogurt shakes. These latter include a banana whisk, a pink cloud (made with strawberries), and a crème sickle (orange juice and milk). The menu touts yogurt shakes as “Healthful Pick Me Uppers,” for when one needs that sweet supercharge in the middle of the shopping day.
Henry’s
6275 Route 40
614–879–9321
West Jefferson, OH
LD | $
No traveler in a hurry wants to be on Highway 40, the side road parallel to I-70, but anyone with an appetite for home cooking needs to make the detour. Here, set back from the south side of the road, is what looks to be a defunct gas station. The pumps are long gone, but the on-premises restaurant is alive and well and a delightful slice of Roadfood heaven.
The meals are country-style fare: baked ham, hot roast pork sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy, creamed chipped beef on cornbread. But it’s not the hot meals that put this unlikely knotty pine–paneled roadside café on the map. It is pie. Here are some of the best pies in Ohio, in the Midwest, anywhere. Every day, baker Shelly Kelly has a list of six or eight she has made: peach, banana, chocolate, peanut butter, cherry, coconut, etc. The butterscotch pie is thick and dense, full flavored the way only real (not from a mix) butterscotch can be, and it comes topped with a creamy meringue. Custard pie is modestly thin, a sunny yellow wedge dusted with nutmeg. It is balmy, lightweight, melt-in-the-mouth tender. The flavor of the rhubarb pie is as brilliant as bright summer sun, intensely fruity, sweet but not cloying, and balanced by a crust that flakes into luscious shards.
On the way out, for the road, we took a small oval zucchini loaf Shelly Kelly had pulled from the oven just hours before. It was glorious. No doubt about it: she is a baker with a magic touch.
Liberty Gathering Place
111 N. Detroit St.
937–465–3081
West Liberty, OH
BLD | $
While waiting for the Pine Club (Ohio) to open for supper one day, we drove north of Dayton into the farmland around Urbana and West Liberty. We marveled at the Crystal Sea and the Devil’s Tea Table (formed from stalactites and helactites) in the Ohio Caverns; we toured Mac-A-Cheek and Mac-O-Chee, two late-nineteenth-century Gothic-style castles filled with sublime woodwork and surrounded by waves of cornfields; and we came upon a stupendously good lunch at the Liberty Gathering Place.
“We have girls who come in at four in the morning to make the coleslaw and macaroni salad,” the Gathering Place waitress boasted when we asked if the side dishes were good. “Good” turned out to be not a good enough word to describe them, for the little bowl of macaroni salad set before us was inspired: blue-ribbon, church-supper, Independence Day–picnic fabulous! It was creamy with a pickle zip, dotted with hunks of hard-cooked egg and a few crunchy shreds of carrot, the noodles themselves cooked just beyond al dente but not too soft.
Noodle rapture proved to be a paradigm for the dining experience at what appears