Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [243]
Serving sizes are temperate, so you will have room for Idleberry pie—a resonating purple blend of blue-, black-, and boysenberries—or baked custard pudding, which is simply the tenderest food imaginable. “I’m sorry,” says our waitress, Cariann, when she places a jiggly bowl of it before us. “The pudding might still be a little warm. They just took it from the oven.” An apology is hardly necessary: balmy, smooth, golden-sweet, this is food fit for the god of comfort.
Maddox Drive-In
1900 S. Hwy. 89
801–723–8845
Brigham City, UT
LD | $
The Maddox Drive-In, attached to the Maddox Steak House, serves lots of hamburgers, but specializes in another drive-in delight, the chicken basket: fried chicken and French fries piled into a woven plastic basket. The beverage of choice is known as “fresh lime,” which tastes something like Sprite doctored with lime juice and extra sugar. The long, covered tramway where you park at Maddox is festooned with enthusiastic signs apparently meant to stimulate appetites: “We serve only grain-fed beef…. We invite you to visit our entire operation.” What we rememberbest about this mid-century showpiece is the huge, spinning sign high above the restaurant, where futuristic letters boast of Maddox Fine Food.
The steak house next door boasts “Over 4,000 head of choice beef used annually.” There used to be a feedlot right in back, allowing customers to look out the window at future steaks on the hoof as they dined. Today the cows are gone, but pound-plus T-bones remain the order of the day, accompanied by a basket of crunchy cornpones and glasses of pure drinking water drawn from Maddox’s own well. Beef alternatives include skinless fried chicken, chicken-fried bison, and turkey steak.
Mom’s Café
10 E. Main St.
435–529–3921
Salina, UT
BLD | $
At the crossroads in the old cowboy town of Salina, Mom’s Café isn’t really all that motherly, but it’s been a great Roadfood stop since long before we hit the road many years ago. In fact, this square brick edifice has been a gathering place for travelers and ranchers for more than seventy years now, and it bears the well-weathered look and seeming permanence of the rock mesas that surround the town.
Mom’s offers a full menu, including excellent liver and onions at supper, but we like breakfast best, for that is when the scones are fresh and hot. The scone is a Utah specialty, and always on the menu in this true Utah café. It is similar to New Mexican sopaipillas and to the Indian fry breads served at roadside stands throughout the Southwest, but generally big enough and weighty enough to be a nice little meal all by itself.
As the sun rises, Mom’s fills up with breakfasters for whom the close quarters are an invitation to socialize with one another. Our dining companions one morning included ranch hands with rodeo-trophy belt buckles, Paiute Indians wearing spectacular porcupine-quill hatbands, and a pair of German-speaking tourists with backpacks on their way to hike around Bryce Canyon. The waitress used hand gestures to explain to the foreigners the difference between “over easy” and “sunny-side-up” the cowboys showed the newcomers how to dip their biscuits in the thick, white gravy; and a Native-American coffeehound demonstrated that a squeeze bottle of honey-butter on the table was put there so they could frost their scones.
The German couple bombarded with all the good advice looked a little confused. But finally they beamed with joy when their chicken-fried steak arrived. This was food they recognized!—the ranch kitchen cook’s version of a wiener schnitzel—made perfectly at Mom’s, the pounded-tender slab of meat encased in a luscious meltaway crust. At eight in the morning, the two well-fed travelers finally topped things off with wide slices of blueberry sour cream pie, then