I love regional food. I love that each city has it’s own trademark. There are some things I miss now that I live in Michigan. I get cravings Giordanno’s stuffed pizza every now and then. There are places that claim to be “Chicago Style” pizzerias, but none of them are. A deep dish pizza is not Chicago Style. It’s the stuffed deep dish that makes it Chicago style.
While living in Central Illinois, I was introduced to the Horseshoe sandwich. Man, do I really miss these. A typical horseshoe took two pieces of toasted Texas toast laid out on a plate. On top of that would be two hamburger patties. On top of that, would be french fries and the whole thing was smothered in a cheddar cheese sauce. There are variations on the concept. Really, you can use any meat. Most menus offer ham, turkey, pork, or chicken in place of the hamburger. They also usually offer smaller sandwiches called Pony Shoes. Recently, Charlie Parker’s was featured on the Food Network show Diner’s, Drive-Ins and Dives where they showed off a Breakfast shoe. They replaced the traditional ingredients with sausage patties, hash browns and gravy.
I really miss yelling at people when they put ketchup on a Chicago Style Hotdog…..big no-no. I haven’t been able to find a real Italian Beef sandwich around here either. You never realize just how regional food can be until you move.
So with all that said, I keep seeing “Coney Island” restaurants around here. Of course, that piqued my interest and I had to figure out what was going on. Another blogger really caught my attetnion with this post.
It’s been quite some time since I’d had the competing Detroit-style coney with its chili sauce. This sauce is wetter than that of the Flint-style sauce and seems to be quite a bit milder. However, no one else in the house had ever had the Detroit-style coney, a situation I felt needed to be rectified. So when I realized GFS Marketplace stores are now offering a package of the Detroit-style sauce, I decided my family needed to see what it was like.
Wait! There are different styles of Coney Dogs? This is something that’s unique to Detroit? I’m not a real big hot dog guy, but just the fact that this is something unique to this area is enough to make me suck it up for one dog just so I can say I did. Road trip to Detroit!
So what else does Mid-Michigan have to offer as far as unique food goes? Anything else I shoud be looking forward to?
We both got pop’s while we looked over the huge menu. They do breakfast all day and offer some unique items like veal parmigana while making sure not to stray too far from what makes truck stop food great. I ordered the Pepper Jack Cheeseburger. The burger is a 1/3 lb frozen patty topped with a slice of pepper jack cheese served with coleslaw on the side and crinkle cut fries. I don’t expect a whole lot when it comes to these types of places and I got exactly what I expected. The meal was not great by any standard, but it was comforting and brought back memories of late night drunkeness in college. There’s just something about a greasy diner burger and salt that’s comforting to me.
cream is 
sorta flavorless. It was a good concept for a burger, but overdone a little. I asked for the burger medium and it came out more well done.
I picked my girlfriend up at work and we took a quick dinner break at the PAD. We walked in and waited for a waitress at the front counter. The waitress came out and asked smoking or non-smoking. We chose non-smoking which is a pretty small dining room in the front of the restaurant. There’s a wall that seperates that space from the smoking section, but windows still allow the smoke to sneak through. The non-smoking side of the dining room is actually pretty big. I headed back that way to the restrooms and there were quite a few people back there enjoying their meals in the thick, smoky air. Most of the patrons back there seemed to know each other as converstions extended beyond their own tables.
The Penn Ave. Diner passed the test as a greasy spoon diner. They didn’t really do anything that made them standout, but most people don’t go to a place like this for something super special. The bill seemed to be a little high to me coming in at $15 before tip. I’m sure it was the extra we had to pay for a fry cook to open a bag of fries and drop them in the oil. It was a quick meal though as we were in and out in about 20 minutes. The PAD has a unique design and food that satisfies, but doesn’t wow.
We took a seat near the bar and the waitress came over with paper menus to take our drink order. Since it was early, we both went with Pepsi’s. The menu is pretty interesting with salads, sandwiches, and personal french bread pizzas. I went fairly safe and got the Beefeater sandwich. The kaiser roll was filled with sliced roast beef, cheddar cheese, lettuce, tomato, and bistro sauce. I left the lettuce and tomato off and went straight for the meat. The meat itself was nothing special. It actually kind of tasted like they went to the deli and got some roast beef. The bistro sauce was interesting and I couldn’t really place what it actually was, but it was good and added some flavor to a sandwich that really wasn’t much more than cold meat sandwich. The sandwich came with chips and a pickle spear.
Mid-Michigan Dining 
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