Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [191]
Each place is set with a clean overturned coffee cup and a water glass. The waitress flips your cup right-side up and pours coffee and refills throughout breakfast; pour your own water from a pitcher on each table. The cuisine is haute highway: big food, served in abundance. Plate-wide buttermilk pancakes, chicken-fried steak with a patty of oily hash browns, sausage gravy on big, crumbly biscuits are some of the morning specials. The Texaco Deluxe is an omelet with ham, bacon, or sausage plus cheese, tomato, onions, and green peppers. The morning item we especially like is the caramel sweet roll, which is thick and goopy.
The lunch menu features breaded pork tenderloin, bowls of chili, and hamburgers that include one-third-pounders and a ten-ounce king-of-the-road Texaco Burger. We never did get to try the sour cream raisin pie, but the chocolate pie was grand. It was exciting to watch the waitress cut a piece, using a moistened warm knife to slide down through a full eight inches of whipped topping, then balance a taller-than-wide slice on a plate.
This is a great spot to hobnob with over-the-road pros. An unusual souvenir from our visit is a booklet we picked up in the adjoining truckers’ store entitled Beef Spotter: A Guide to Midwest Feed Lots. And we love the truck-stop humor evidenced at the penny bowl by the cash register. Above it, a handwritten sign reads, “Need a penny…take a penny. Need 2 pennies…get a job!”
Gering Bakery
1446 10th St.
308–436–5500
Gering, NE
BL | $
A small sign in the window of the Gering Bakery advertises cabbage burgers. Considering that we were in Nebraska, home of the Runza and the bierock—bread pockets stuffed with ground beef, cabbage, and spice—the sign caused us to come to a sudden halt and investigate. Runzas and bierocks are nineteenth-century immigrant fare, but in the mid-1950s, the name Runza was trademarked and is now the lead item at the eponymous restaurant chain. Runza’s runzas are okay, but the monotony of the identical restaurants makes us depressed.
Gering Bakery, on the other hand, is the real deal. Sure enough, the advertised cabbage burger is a non-corporate Runza, and a delicious one at that. Available in bulk to take home or one at a time and heated up by the kind lady behind the counter, they are fully enclosed pillows of tender bread inside of which is a spill of juicy beef and peppery bits of cabbage and onion. Delicious comfort food.
Our hearts won over by the cabbage burger, we had to sample some of the good-looking sweet pastries on the bakery shelves. We liked the crisp-edged old-fashioned cake donuts and fell instantly in love with something called a peanut butter pretzel. That’s a twisted piece of pastry dough generously frosted with sweet peanut butter icing.
Most business is take-out, but Gering Bakery offers a few window tables as well as help-yourself coffee and a cooler full of soda for those who want to dine here.
Joe Tess’ Place
5424 S. 24th St.
402–731–7278
Omaha, NE
LD | $
Roadfood warriors Bruce Bilmes and Sue Boyle discovered Joe Tess’ Place, which bills itself as “Home of the Famous Fish Sandwich.” It is a restaurant, tavern, and fresh seafood market on the south side of Omaha that serves a fish little-known on dining tables outside the region: carp. Like the herring that swim upriver in North Carolina, carp are fish-flavored fish that get deep-fried long enough that their fine bones become part of the soft, juicy flesh underneath the crunchy batter crust. The fried pieces of carp are available on rye in the famous sandwich or doubled up in the double fish sandwich. (The connoisseur’s condiment