Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [99]
While we love the baby back ribs, kielbasa, chicken casserole, and ham loaf with pineapple glaze, we are even more smitten by vegetables. Indeed, this is a smorgasbord that vegetarians might pray to find in heaven. The selection is incredibly vast. Silk-tender butter beans, sweet hunks of carrot, scalloped potatoes, homemade noodles, five-cheese mac and cheese, and baked beans filled a plate with a variety of wonderful flavors that was a more than filling meal.
The buffet rule is that you pay one price ($7.95 for lunch) and help yourself to as much as you want. A sign at the beginning of the first table does warn, however, that a $1 surcharge will be added to the bill of anyone who wastes food. Our waitress was especially generous. As we walked in the door, early during lunch hour, we noted a couple of beautiful sticky buns in a pan left over from breakfast. When we asked her if we could have one, she brought it, no charge, and told us simply to consider it as part of our lunch buffet.
Accommodations are appropriately vast: big tables in several spacious dining rooms. Décor includes an awesome picture of prizefighter Jack Dempsey (who ate here in the 1940s) and a thousand of pictures of town history and local citizens. It is possible to dine non-buffet style: breakfast, lunch sandwiches, and a selection of hot meals listed on the menu under the heading, “Great Specials for Our Not-So-Hungry Friends.”
Ritzy Lunch
456 W. Pike St.
304–622–3600
Clarksburg, WV
LD | $
“A hot dog without chili is not a hot dog!” proclaims John Selario, known in Clarksburg as Hot Dog John. Mr. Selario’s parents opened Ritzy Lunch in 1933, and he shows us pictures of his father in front of the same storefront sometime in the 1940s when hot dogs are listed on the window for seven cents each, hamburgers a dime. “Ritzy Lunch has always been known for hot dogs,” he tells us. “Clarksburg itself is an important hot dog town, not so much because of the weenies but because of the way we make our chili. There are so many immigrants and sons and daughters of immigrants—Greeks and Italians, mostly—that when we spice up our chili, we know how to do it right!”
Hot Dog John will get no argument from us. His dogs are lovely little pups, buried deep inside a steamed-soft bun and topped with a zesty ground beef sauce that is gently peppered and earthy. If you want to add a sweet note, ask for a layer of coleslaw to go atop the chili—a very popular configuration in this cute little diner.
Although hot dogs are the specialité de la maison, you should also consider sampling an unusual kind of hamburger in one of Ritzy’s old wooden booths. Listed on the menu as a Giovanni, it is a patty of meat topped with melted cheese and roasted peppers served between two slices of butter-and-garlic-infused toast. Excellent!
Ritzy Lunch is an immensely happy place, a sort of nonalcoholic tavern where old friends and town characters hang out on the ancient counter stools to kibitz with each other and the waitresses and where, on any pleasant day, two or three wise-acres are likely to be found out on the sidewalk joshing with each other and making friends with newcomers.
Ruby and Ketchy’s
2232 Cheat Rd.
304–594–2004
Morgantown, WV
BLD | $
Ruby and Ketchy’s is a charming out-of-the-way diner in the Cheat Lake area east of Morgantown. It’s open for three meals a day, and its knotty-pine booths and counter are favorite places for locals to come for good eats and conversation. Opened in 1958 by Ruby Nicholson, who was soon joined by husband Ketchy, it’s still run by descendants of the beloved couple, and many of the recipes, including every-Tuesday meat loaf, vegetable soup, and chili, are Ruby’s.
Today’s menu is broad, including sandwiches, hot meals that range from crab cakes