#29 INDIANA - A Good Stert To The Day

The really curious thing about Hobart, Indiana is how the city name is pronounced. One would expect a pronunciation that mimicked the capital of Tasmania or my alma mater in Upstate New York - Ho-BART. Instead the natives pronounce it Ho-BERT. It's the only word with "art" in it that I know of using the "ert" pronunciation. Odd.

Cafe 339

Hobart, Indiana

Cafe 339 is named for the address where it is located - 339 Main Street. There seems to be a little lack of creativity in naming downtown Hobart restaurants. There is also a 54 Main Bistro located at, you guessed it, 54 Main Street.


AMBIENCE: It wasn't too difficult to snag a parking spot right in front of Cafe 339 at 8 on a Friday morning.  The smallish cafe felt very diner-esque on the inside, from its stools at a counter, to its booths, to its middle aged waitresses, to its Greek-American owners. It was fairly busy when we got there, with a healthy mix of locals: people on the way to work, mothers with kids in tow, and old ferts like myself. The environment was  lively yet civilized. Motown tracks from Pandora played in the background. Tables, floors, and the bathroom were super clean. Nice ertwork hung on the walls; mostly paintings by local ertists.

 4 1/2 out of 5 stars

FOOD:   I asked for the Breakfast Panini which was grilled Italian bread filled with spinach, tomatoes, bacon, provolone, and three eggs. I have no idea how they filled two pieces of bread with all those ingredients but it turned out scrumptious. The potatoes were grilled exactly as I liked them with just a little touch of grease and some char. The order took care of 90% of my appetite. The Healthy One helped me take care of the other 10%.

        
The Healthy One ordered the spinach and feta omelette, always a smart choice at a diner with a Greek heritage. It came with potatoes and a couple of pancakes. 

The omelet was very favorably received. Unlike myself, she didn't especially like the potatoes. Perhaps it was that little bit of grease. I cleaned them up without any problem. As for the pancakes, she said I had to give them a try. They were marvelous. Perhaps, the best we had on our entire tour so far. The batter was light and had just the amount of sweetness. It had to be homemade.

5 out of 5 stars

COFFEE: 

The menu said they served Kona coffee. At $1.45, with refills, that would be a great deal. My experience with drinking Kona on my visits to Hawaii had been delectable. This cup didn't taste anything like the Kona coffee I remembered. My guess is that it was watered down to cater to Midwestern tastes (see my Ohio report). If I was asked whether my cup of coffee was Kona or Eight O'Clock I would have said Eight O'Clock. In my mind, if you brew coffee with even high quality beans, a lot of water and a small amount of grounds defeats the purpose. I say, when it comes to the quantity of beans, "go big or stay home".

2 out of 5 stars

SERVICE:   Cafe 339 was very well staffed. There were enough servers to quickly take orders and refill coffee cups for the bustling crowd. The food came out after only about a 10 minute wait. Our waitress was professional and cheerful. It was readily apparent that she was a seasoned pro at making sure her customers had a good experience. The friendly owner bounced around the room ensuring that everything was going smoothly. I paid my bill to him at the counter. He asked if everything was alright. Coffee aside, it was.


5 out of 5 stars

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A FEW WORDS ABOUT HOBART:

Hobart is located in very Northwest Indiana, a mere 40 miles from downtown Chicago. The city is predominately residential and has a population of 28,248. I imagine some people commute to Chicago for work. Others may be steelworkers. Believe it not, steel is still made in the United States and Indiana leads the country in steel production with most of that steel made in plants not to far from Hobart. I don't know what else to write about the city. We only got a brief misty and foggy morning view of the area before we deperted for Chicago.

BURN THOSE BREAKFAST CALORIES OFF:

After breakfast we drove into the heart of Chicago for a quick eight hour visit. We did plenty of walking along the shore of Lake Michigan, took the requisite pictures in front of "The Bean" (a.k.a. Cloud Gate), and afterwards participated in an interesting architectural walking tour. 

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          October 6, 2017

NEXT UP: Wisconsin

#28 MICHIGAN - Surrender

"I think it's important to surrender to situations that take you out of your comfort zone."

                                             - Haley Bennett (American actress)

Crow's Nest

Kalamazoo, Michigan


AMBIENCE: I had a preconceived notion that the Crow's Nest would have an eye-catching nautical theme. I was wrong. The Crow's Nest is so named for being on the second store of a two story building.

My understanding is that there is some kind of business relationship between the Crow's Nest and the 24 hour coffeehouse on the first floor called the Fourth Coast Cafe. They do share a common front door. You don't have to hoist yourself up a mast to get to the Crow's Nest, just be able to navigate these stairs.

Once upstairs you enter a beautiful, nicely lit, and cozy dining room. The room only has about 12 tables. The wood floor, brick walls, and art work on the walls exude a clubby feel; the type of place where a jazz trio would feel at home. I checked the adornments on the walls. There was not one seafaring objet de'art that I could find.

We were seated next to the front window, providing a crow's nest view of the sunrise over the Vine neighborhood of Kalamazoo.

Land Ho! I think I see some terra firma!

5 out of 5 stars

FOOD:   Aha! The menu did have three nautically named dishes: the Captain's Ration Omelette, the Queen Anne's Revenge (Blackbeard's ship), and the dish I ordered, the Master-at-Arms scramble. The Master-at-Arms was described as a mix of sausage, onion, bell pepper, garlic, cheddar cheese, sausage gravy, potato, and choice of toast (I chose rye).

        

The Master-at-Arms was as gargantuan as it was delicious. Pictured is not a shallow bowl. That scramble runs 2 or 3 inches deep. I first finished off the rye toast as I contemplated the task before me. I dug in and the taste was amazing. The sausage was perfectly spiced, the eggs perfectly cooked, the bell peppers tasted like they were picked the day before. The potatoes were cooked to perfection. The sausage gravy and cheddar cheese supplied the decadent experience you would expect. I started strong. It was so good.

Just over half way through, the meal started to feel like ballast in my bilge. I estimated that there was at least a half pound of sausage in the dish not including what was in the gravy and maybe 3 or 4 eggs. When our waitress came by to check up on us, I asked how many eggs? She said only two. No way! Were they ostrich eggs?

The taste buds were saying go,go,go. The stomach was saying no,no,no. I started to eat really slow, stirring what was left of the scramble hoping that would make it shrink. I was starting to sweat a little. The waitress came by again and I jokingly (well, semi-seriously) asked her if the management had trained her in CPR. She said no but that there was a index card pinned to the wall of the kitchen with instructions. It was time to quit. I threw in the white napkin.

Up until that morning, I had completely finished every breakfast I had ordered in the previous 27 state breakfast visits. I was an all-star member of the clean plate club. Not this morning. My comfort food zone had become uncomfortable. I had been defeated. I had surrendered.      

The Healthy One who was back to her old ways, ordered yogurt and granola. The granola was made downstairs in the Fourth Coast Bakery. The organic Greek yogurt was topped with fresh blueberries. She also got a small cup of fruit and two ample pieces of banana nut bread with the order.

The yogurt tasted foreign to her. Certainly not like the smooth and creamy Chobani-like stuff she consumes by the gallons. She said it had both the consistency and taste of cream cheese. She was not very fond of it. I did a little research about this and discovered that if you take your conventional yogurt and let most of the whey drip away you get a yogurt that tastes and looks like cream cheese. I assume some people prefer their yogurt with less whey and would declare the Crow's Nest's version delicious. No whey is not the way the Healthy One likes it. It is only right that I not deduct any stars for the food because the Healthy One weighed in with a personal taste preference.

The banana bread, which came from the downstairs bakery, was taken with us to be eaten later in the day after I had recovered from the Sergeant-at-Arms. Consumed at 2 PM, it was delicious.

5 out of 5 stars

COFFEE: 

The coffee was pretty good, not your typical Midwestern hot coffee-flavored tap water. I bet the coffee shop one deck down from the restaurant had a lot to do with that.

4 out of 5 stars

SERVICE:  Our server was wonderful. A real Kalamazoo pipperoo (only my mom may understand this word). She was pleasantly engaging and made sure we had a good experience. A ray of sunshine before the actual sun rose.

5 out of 5 stars

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A FEW WORDS ABOUT KALAMAZOO:

Kalamazoo is a mid-sized city in southern Michigan with a population of just under 76,000. It is home to Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College. Once a big paper-making town, Kalamazoo like many Midwestern cities suffered enormous job losses beginning in the 1990s.  The city also lost the headquarters of pharmaceutical maker UpJohn after a corporate buyout in 2000 and a large GM stamping plant closed its doors. The only export of real value seemed to be when the Yankees drafted Derek Jeter out of Kalamazoo Central High School in 1992.

The downtown area began to collapse, public school enrollment plummeted, the jobless rate soared and middle income families fled to the suburbs. Then a group of people came up with the brilliant idea that education was the key to economic rebirth. It was called the Kalamazoo Promise. The "promise" is that every graduating senior in Kalamazoo Public Schools, who had entered the school district in at least ninth grade, would have their tuition paid for at a select group of Michigan colleges and universities, regardless of need. The program began in 2005 and since then enrollment in Kalamazoo public schools has risen a dramatic 25%. The racial and income mix in neighborhoods have stabilized; no more white flight. Families are staying in the urban center and getting involved in community decisions. Not only that, jobs are returning to Kalamazoo. A better educated workforce is attracting firms from outside the region.

We walked around the downtown area on our way to dinner. Building construction was in progress along many streets. The number of restaurants, shops, and brew pubs filled with people on a Wednesday night was impressive. Blue Oyster Cult was even playing at a downtown theater! (It was a very interesting looking crowd we saw standing outside the theater during intermission).

So far the Kalamazoo Promise has paid out $90 million in tuition fees to 4,700 high school graduates. All the money is privately donated by individuals who insist on remaining anonymous.

BURN THOSE BREAKFAST CALORIES OFF:

The night before breakfast, we did quite a bit of walking through downtown Kalamazoo. After breakfast we drove to the Indiana Dunes State Park on the shores of Lake Michigan.where we did 4 1/2 hours of hiking. This was no walk on the beach. The dunes reach heights of 200 feet above the lake. It was a gorgeous, sunny day. Clearly seeing the Chicago skyline 35 miles in the distance from the top of a dune was a thrill. 

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October 5, 2017

NEXT UP: Indiana

#27 OHIO - Midwest Coffee Rant

"Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all"

                                             - David Lynch (American film director)

So begins the first of 14 state reports from the Midwest region of the Breakfast Across America tour. We started this trip on a Monday in early October from our home in Maryland and 20 days and 3,700 miles later returned on a Friday tired but very pleased about places we saw, people we met, and food we ate.

Grumpy's Cafe

Cleveland, Ohio

Grumpy's Cafe sits on a busy street in the pleasant Tremont section of Cleveland. The picture is a little dark because the sun was just rising over the horizon. The Healthy One is standing there in the doorway thinking "hurry up and take the damn picture, I'm hungry"which is apropos to the restaurant's name. 

The original Grumpy's was located a few blocks away. The name came from the demeanor of the owner after he fell into the basement while renovating the building. The restaurant was sold in 2002 and then was destroyed by fire in 2004. The restaurant was reopened in its current location in 2007 and the owner kept the name Grumpy's although after a devastating fire you would have thought the name would have changed to The Totally Pissed Off Cafe.  

AMBIENCE: The cafe has beautiful bay windows across an attractive facade. The inside of Grumpy's is also quite appealing, painted in bright colors and with photographs of Cleveland scenes shot by local professionals hanging on the wall. The restaurant is one of those places with a high industrial ceiling that magnifies noise. Don't try giving election secrets to Russian operatives here; it's very easy to hear the conversation of others. Nothing really interesting was being discussed around us - a man's daughter was applying to Arizona State and a lady was very moved by Jimmy Kimmel's health care monologue. Great oldies music played in the background which couldn't help but alleviate the grumpiness of any customer. 

Our table for two was wobbly. I didn't realize this until The Healthy One started to cut into her breakfast and the coffee jumped out of my cup as if we were driving over a speed bump. We pointed out our flooded table top to our server who said there should have been some sort of device attached to the table to keep it steady but it was missing. She came back with lots of napkins but no device. From then on we cut very slowly.    

4 out of 5 stars

FOOD:   I ordered the Apple Oatmeal Pancakes with cinnamon butter and Cajun home fries. I also ordered a side of corn beef hash because I had read a review that raved about it.        

The corn beef hash was very tasty and I also appreciated the home fries being "kicked up" a bit by the Cajun spice. The pancakes were ponderous discs, very heavy tasting and dry. It must have been all the oatmeal in them. They were not really to my liking. I prefer a fluffier grilled batter. The cinnamon flavored butter didn't much improve things. Maple syrup may have helped but I was told Grumpy's doesn't serve the "pure" kind.  No thanks. Log Cabin, Aunt Jemima, Kirkland, et. al. are maple FLAVORED syrups that hold no appeal for me.

The Healthy One has established a tradition of starting a regional breakfast tour with a not-so-healthy breakfast: bacon and eggs.  She ordered the "Grumpy's Special" which consisted of two eggs, bacon, Cajun home fries, and toast and thought it was very good.

4 out of 5 stars

COFFEE: Frankly, I was blindsided by the quality of the coffee I drank on the Midwestern tour. Call me a snob but it was weak. It was flavorless. It was unsatisfying. It was pitiful. Apparently, Midwest coffee has quite a reputation as just an insipid hot beverage. I discovered many articles on the internet lamenting the state of coffee across the Midwest. After our trip I was describing my experience with Midwest coffee to a friend and he told me that on his Midwest bicycle tours, he always brought a jar of instant coffee crystals into the cafes to stir in and strengthen the house coffee.

We had good to very good to soul satisfying coffee in the Northeast, the South, and the Southwest. What's up with the Midwest? Why did the coffee in breakfast after breakfast establishment taste like reheated Folgers? I have my theories.

Price Point. Good coffee costs money. Many of the towns where we had breakfast were economically deprived. Proprietors may be afraid to upgrade the coffee with accompanying prices for fear they will lose customers.

Tradition.  Hard to believe, but in a few of the cafes we ate at we were the youngest customers in the place. These elder coffee drinkers grew up with Folgers, Maxwell House, Chock full o'Nuts and other mass produced coffees and are just fine with that, thank-you very much.

Caffeinated Personalty. In my opinion the Midwestern reputation of having a friendly and welcoming populace is well deserved. We did a lot of walking on our trip and inevitably everyone we passed (except one guy in Missouri) greeted us with a smile and hello. Maybe Midwesterners don't want to put an edge on their genial personalities by drinking strong, flavorful and highly caffeinated coffee.

Weather.  It gets cold in the Midwest. Weak coffee can be just as hot as strong coffee. Possibly, people like the fact that you can drink weak coffee all day, stay warm, and not get the shakes from too much caffeine.

The coffee we had at Grumpy's was pretty weak. It was Midwest coffee. So why did I drink 3 cups of the stuff? See the quote at the beginning of this report.

  

I'm guessing St. Leo is not the patron saint of coffee.

2 1/2 out of 5 stars

SERVICE:  Our server was a human dynamo, visiting our table on numerous occasions but only staying for about 1 1/2 seconds to take our orders, make sure we were doing okay, refilling cups, and taking away dishes. I got tired watching her. I don't know where she got the energy at such an early hour of the morning but my guess is that it wasn't from the coffee.

4 out of 5 stars

A FEW WORDS ABOUT CLEVELAND:

Cleveland, in all probability, is the largest city we will or will have had breakfast on our tour. It use to be a lot larger. Today the estimated population is 385,809 and that ranks 51st among all U.S. cities. In 1950, Cleveland had a population of 914,808 and ranked 7th. The population has declined 19% since 2000. Only Detroit had a larger decline at 28.8%. New Orleans also had a population decline of 19% since 2000, entirely due to a natural disaster. Cleveland has been suffering an economic disaster. The national decline in the steel and auto industries was a big reason for job and population loss. According to the Cleveland Branch of the Federal Reserve, large publicly financed projects of the 1990s, such as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, failed to provide promised economic growth. Additionally, the public schools have been designated as in "emergency status" and the city is attracting fewer college graduates than surrounding regions.  Hopefully, the city has hit bottom. We noticed many construction cranes near the world famous Cleveland Clinic and University Hospitals as well as Case Western University, which may foretell viable private sector economic growth.

 The Tremont neighborhood where we stayed and had breakfast at Grumpy's is one area of the city that is attracting investment for revitalization. Tremont is about 3 miles south of downtown Cleveland. It is residential heavy but has a large number of restaurants and bars and a number of artist studios. It also has 26 churches located within one square mile. St. Theodosius Russian Orthodox church commands the Tremont skyline with its 13 onion domes. 

The wedding scene from the movie "The Deer Hunter" was filmed in the church. Another famous movie location site in Tremont is the house used in the movie "A Christmas Story" which is now a museum which features props, costumes, and memorabilia from the 1983 film which pops up on TV every Christmas season. We passed on the opportunity to visit.

What we didn't pass on was a visit to the landmark West Side Market which looks like a train station from the outside but inside has over a hundred food vendors. Eleven of those vendors are bakeries. The day we were there, October 4, happened to be the day Swedes celebrate Cinnamon Bun Day. In honor of the day, I scoured each of the 11 bakeries for the perfect cinnamon bun and came up with this beauty.

 




















The healthy one also purchased a pastry at another bakery but it was gone before I could take a picture. By the way, we also found City Roast Coffee in the market and they actually sold a decent cup of coffee.


BURN THOSE BREAKFAST CALORIES OFF:

On day one we took a hike in the serene Cuyahoga National Park just outside of Cleveland. Day two found us walking into and around downtown Cleveland including a stop at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Departure day included plenty of walking and gawking at the Cleveland Museum of Art. 

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October 3, 2017

NEXT UP: Michigan