This past summer my boyfriend and I set out on a cross-country road
trip from Boston to L.A, a drive whose route would transverse America,
and take us to countless places we’d never been before. With only a
few changes of clothes, two sleeping bags and a cooler, we left the
East Coast energetic and idealistic about the trip. The things most
looked forward to: upstate New York in August, the peak of wild flower
season, wheat fields in Iowa and the Rockies once out west, stretched
out ahead of us for weeks on end. I can honestly say that we did see
these things, all of them. Unfortunately, I wasn’t paying much
attention… far too busy reading the Sterns.
My cover of the Sterns’ 2005 edition of “Roadfood” features a close-up of an oozing triple-decker grilled cheese sandwich, the evidence of whose butter-fried preparation proclaims itself from each crispy edge of toast and glistening golden burnt bit. The bread appears to be highly refined, and the cheese orangey processed. In other words: the cover-sandwich looks criminally delicious, the kind you’d find in a favorite diner, or perhaps in one of the 600 odd restaurants, spanning 48 states, that the Sterns describes within. Snappily written reviews of places chosen for their honest cooking, lack of pretense and use of ingredients rated high to higher on the bad-for-you index, make for an addictive read. It’s also a really fun book for sickos to pour over when the trail mix runs out, and the only work of non-fiction I packed on my person when leaving for The Big Move out west.
Because the first leg of our trip took us camping around the Great Lakes into Canada, we had time to do some research. Our penciled-in highway route for the Plains’ states began to take detours, and “Roadfood” threatened to take precedence over the map. Treating the book like a gastronomical almanac, we circled and starred the reviews that appealed us in what now seems to me a kind of cross-country hysteria. We became obsessed, while eating chicken broth and canned beans in the wilds of Ontario, with reading aloud from it to one another.
The names of restaurants – Superdawg, Dude’s Drive in, Little Chef, and Sweatman’s – took on an outsized cultural significance. Phrases like “juice heavy prime rib that delivers maximum beefy savor” and “gravy flecked with incendiary bits of green chili pepper” were uttered with as much gravity as “now we’ve finally seen Niagara Falls”. Once I found out that “chocolate layers gobbed with an obscene amount of caramel frosting” could be found in Minnesota, we dropped the Dakotas from our itinerary. Who needs Mt. Rushmore when you’ve got a three-pound slice of turtle cake?
We had imagined eating our way through the entire book, although in the end we only tried a few places: Al’s, Café Latte (whose aforementioned Turtle cake made my mouth buzz with sugar), Pasqual’s and the Durango Diner. Each one was well worth the dubious roadside directions and numerous wrong turns it took to find them, and the Sterns’ recommendations of what to order couldn’t have been more dead on.
At Al’s in Minneapolis we had the blueberry buttermilk pancakes, so light as to be reminiscent of angel-food, and marveled at the ability of the short-order cook to remember an entire counter’s worth of orders without writing them down. Pasqual’s papa’s fritas in Santa Fe, an elegantly layered egg, poblano and potato affair, had us back tracking from Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch, 65 miles away, for a second go at the menu. And the Durango diner’s Chile Rellenos, battered thick as a corn dog, instantly sent me into a calorie coma so deep that I actually exercised a semblance of patience with the other tourists at Mesa Verde. Which may be, in the end, the highest praise and function of really good Roadfood.
Al's Breakfast, 413 14th Ave SE, Minneapolis, MN 55414, (612) 331-9991
Cafe Latte, 850 Grand Ave # 1, St. Paul, MN 55105, (651) 224-5687
Cafe Pascual's, 121 Don Gaspar Ave, Santa Fe, NM 87501, (505) 983-9340
Durango Diner, 957 Main Ave., Durango, CO 81301, (970) 247-9889
After 12 years away from her home turf of Southern California, Agatha French returned to Los Angeles from Boston this fall. She, and Ryan, are very much looking forward to the year round fruit.