Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [192]
There is a full bar’s worth of beverages to drink, plus the western working man’s version of a bloody Mary, known as red beer: beer and tomato juice. Bruce and Sue noted “any restaurant that serves upside-down cake gets bonus points from us.” Beside pineapple upside-down cake larded with pecans, the dessert menu includes a swell cream cheese bundt cake.
Ambience is all-fish, all the time and everywhere. The bar is shaped like a boat and walls are decked with taxidermized fish of every size and shape as well as pictures, posters, and nautical memorabilia celebrating underwater life.
Johnny’s Cafe
4702 S. 27th St.
402–731–4774
Omaha, NE
LD | $$
Johnny’s has been Omaha’s steak house since 1922. At the edge of the stockyards, it was once a café for cowboys and cow shippers. Now it is a grand-scale restaurant with well-upholstered chairs, broadloom carpets, and modernistic chandeliers. We love the baronial ambience, especially because it is balanced by service that is as folksy as in any small-town café, courtesy of waitresses unafraid to scold you if you don’t finish your T-bone but then want dessert.
Beef is king in this dining room. Steaks, chops, ribs, liver, even, on occasion, tongue or oxtail are the things to order. You can splurge at dinner and eat the finest filets mignons or chateaubriands for miles around, and pay accordingly, or at lunch, for well under ten dollars, you can have yourself a superb downsized slab of prime rib.
Dessert is corny and ingratiating, including crème de menthe sundaes and clear blocks of Chuckles-colored Jell-O. Turtle pie is a weighty affair—a frozen block of the same ingredients used in candy turtles, with the addition of ice cream: chocolate, nuts, and caramel. Johnny’s serves it still fairly well frozen, so you will have all sorts of merry fun trying to fork off a piece. Once defrosted, it is gooey and sweet as candy, but even richer.
Rosita’s
1205 E. Overland
308–632–2429
Scottsbluff, NE
LD | $
In this friendly sit-down café with festive south-of-the-border décor, every dish is made to order, even the corn chips—particularly the corn chips. Amazing chips they are, nearly as three-dimensional as a sopaipilla, fried so they puff up and become airy triangles with fragile skin. An order arrives almost too hot to handle; they come plain or as the foundation for the house specialty called panchos—a circle of chips topped with frijoles, melted cheese, guacamole, and jalapeños. Panchos are like nachos, but the chips’ refined texture and their perfect poise between breakable and bendable give panchos character far more satisfying than any bar grub.
The same quick-fry technique makes Rosita’s taco shells an ideal crispy-chewy wrap for beef or chicken with plenty of garnishes. Flat tostadas are made the same way, and even taco salad includes the fine, fluffy chips.
Proprietor Rosemary Florez-Lerma credits her mother-in-law with the recipes that make Rosita’s food stand out in an area with an abundance of Mexican restaurants (legacy of field workers who came to pick beets). The cinnabar-red, garlic-charged salsa that starts every meal and chunky pico de gallo that dresses up any dish with a stunning spicy punch are especially memorable. We are also fond of Rosita’s garlicky menudo, thick with puffs of posole and strips of tripe, sparkling with fresh-squeezed lemon juice. Menudo is known as a great hangover cure, but even if your head isn’t aching, we guarantee it will make you feel better.
(Rosita’s has a second location in Scottsbluff, at 710 W. 27th St.)
South Dakota
Bob’s
1312 W. 12th St.
605–336–7260
Sioux Falls,