Roadfood Digest

I was sad when I got to the Detroit airport for a trip back east because I had spent all my time eating around Ann Arbor (not that there's anything wrong with that), leaving me no chance to enjoy a  Coney at Lafayette and/or American, the side-by-side weenie shops that have defined heartland Coney goodness for decades. Lucky me, my flight departed from the A Concourse, not far from gate 24, where National Coney Island has an outpost that starts serving the Detroit signature dog at 5am. Ah, bliss: a "Coney Special," which is a snappy little frank topped with chili, mustard, and onions, plus more spicy ground beef, all in a supersoft steamed bun. I had mine gilded with melted cheese. As is true of all classic Coneys, no single ingredient is great, but this is a whole package that completely transcends the ignominy of each of its parts.

Christopher Hirst writes about his pursuit of the perfect hamburger for London’s The Independent.  Along the way he throws in a good deal of history and research.  Some of the keys to a good burger: lots of fat, and added water.  Did you know that a third of Americans will have eaten ground beef in the previous 24 hours?  And that, in Great Britain, Burger King serves something called The Burger, which consists of Japanese Wagyu beef with white truffle, onion tempura prepared in Cristal, and Pata Negra ham?  It will run you £95.  Now that’s a Whopper!

Pictured above is a hubcap burger from Cotham’s Mercantile in Scott, Arkansas, from Michael Stern’s Roadfood.com review.

Kim Severson of The New York Times practically traces a Roadfood.com route through central New York, visiting a slew of Roadfood favorites (although Roadfood is never mentioned), including Jim’s BBQ in Candor (Roadfood.com review; see photo below), Dinosaur in Syracuse (Roadfood.com review), Sharkey’s in Binghamton (Roadfood.com review), Doug’s Fish Fry in Skaneateles (Roadfood.com review of the Cortland location), the Ithaca Farmers Market (Roadfood.com review; see photo above), and the Cornell Dairy Bar (Roadfood.com review)!  She might have added more than the very few seemingly token eateries that Roadfood hasn’t already written about, to help make it look at least a little more legit… nonetheless, it’s a fun read.

When we recently polled the readers of Roadfood.com about their favorite clam dish, fried clams was the decisive winner over second place clam chowder.  Out of the 1152 people who voted, only five chose clam hash, no doubt because few people have ever had the good fortune to sample it.  As far as we know, the only restaurant that serves clam hash is Pat’s Kountry Kitchen (Roadfood.com review) in Old Saybrook, CT, where it is the house specialty.  If you ever find yourself in the vicinity of Pat’s at breakfast time, we urge you to get a plate, and ask for it cooked crisp.  Assuming you enjoy clams, you won’t regret it!

If you happen to be visiting Akron, Ohio, one of the culinary highlights -- beyond Al's Corner Restaurant, the New Era Cafe, and Barberton chicken -- is the Kenmore Market Place, a butcher shop on an industrial loading dock where the inventory includes the Serbian sausage called cevapi and whole heads of brined sour cabbage for making holubsti – beef-stuffed cabbage rolls. (1472 Kenmore Blvd., 330-848-9202)

Revisiting Ann Arbor for the first time in many years, I was finishing off a Quint at Krazy Jim's Blimpy Burger when a tablemate reminded me that the de rigueur dessert for true-Blue Michiganders is ice cream at Washtenaw Dairy (602 S. Ashley St.). The outdoor benches were well occupied after dinner hour, and the line inside provided plenty of time to pick a flavor and configuration. I was a classicist and chose a hot fudge sundae made with custardy French vanilla ice cream and topped with chopped peanuts. Alas, there was no whipped cream and, curiously, no Maraschino cherries; but this simple dish loaded with Sanders hot fudge was an ideal end to a summer's day of eating around town.

Sausage and peppers heroes are big in New York.  Really big.  Not just in New York City, but all over the state, and especially at the New York State Fair.  When Rick Lazio was running for the senate, he professed a lack of enthusiasm for sausage and peppers sandwiches at the state fair.  As soon as word got out, his opponent Hillary Clinton rushed up to the fair to eat sausage and peppers heroes.  Some people think this was key to his losing the election.  Whether that’s true or not is certainly debatable, but nonetheless no statewide candidate since has dared pass up the opportunity to be photographed enthusiastically stuffing sausage and peppers into her or his maw.

The 162nd (!) Great New York State Fair (that’s what they call it) takes place in Syracuse beginning Thursday, August 21st, and running through Labor Day, September 1st.  Besides the obligatory Italian sausage, other fair favorites include that local upstate delicacy Cornell chicken, which is marinated in an eggy and herbed vinaigrette and then cooked over a fire (so named because a Cornell University professor devised the recipe).  A common side dish is salt potatoes, which are small potatoes boiled in heavily salted water and served in a pool of melted butter.  You can also find the Binghamton specialty called spiedies, which are skewered, marinated, highly seasoned meat chunks cooked over charcoal.  Dinosaur Barbecue always has a stand, and it’s a fair favorite.  There’s New York State wine available at the fair too.More...

Burgers just squeaked past eggs and hot open-faced sandwiches as the most popular thing to eat in a diner, in our recent Roadfood.com poll.  It’s easy to forget, for those of us that live in diner country, that many regions of the US are diner-deprived, as many Roadfood Forums posters lamented.  We’ll be happy to trade some of our diners to these folks for a few of their town cafes!

Here's some of the best tortilla soup I've had -- at Tacubaya, which is a stylish Mexican restaurant in a little shopping enclave on 4th Street in Berkeley, California. When I say stylish, I don't mean fancy. You stand at the register and place your order looking at an overhead menu; and prices are moderate, a couple of notches up from taco-truck cuisine. And while Tacubaya may be a tad too polite for street-food devotees, I dare anyone to find tortilla soup this good, spiked with chile and crowded with chicken shreds, fried tortilla strips, slivers of avocado, and melty cheese. I also was wowed by this mole negro pork tamale:

If you’ve never been to New Mexico during the chile harvest, when fresh chiles are fire-roasted in countless fields and parking lots, blanketing the landscape with their sweet perfume, then you are missing one of the essential and most pleasurable of Roadfood experiences!  And as John Larson writes in The Mountain Mail of West-Central New Mexico, the season is almost upon us.  Green chiles should be ready within a week or two, red chiles a few weeks after that.  Read the story here.