The Fish Stand: I wanted to love it, but....

The Little Woman and I stopped for lunch at The Fish Stand in Seymour, Indiana while on the way to Louisville for the weekend. It's a dumpy little place in an old building, but that's part of its charm, really. The smell of deep frying assaults (or serenades) your nostrils as you approach, although the little dining room was relatively free of that aroma.  It has 6 tables, I think, and 4 or 5 stools at a counter toward the back.  The staff is friendly and they appeared to be doing a big Friday lunch business, with several folks lined up for carry-out orders.  The place sells just about every kind of deep-fried seafood you can imagine, including Clam Chowder Bites(?) as well as a fried Pork Tenderloin sandwich and Fried Green Beans. 

TLW is not much of a fish lover but bravely agreed to try the Small Pollock meal, while I had the Friday special Shrimp Dinner.  Both came with fries, hush puppies, and coleslaw, and I also had an order of Crab Cakes.  The food came out quickly and was cheerfully delivered to our table.  We asked if they had lemon for our iced tea, and the lady brought a grocery store-sized bottle of ReaLemon juice and politely asked if that would be okay.  The tea was pretty good with it, really, just like at home.

The shrimp were okay but were like you get at a cafeteria or other place that doesn't serve much seafood-- butterflied and with a heavy, hard breading that sort of masks the flavor of the shrimp. TLW's pollock had a weird, kind of chalky taste which she attributed to undercooking that made the coating taste like batter instead of breading.  Maybe due to being swamped with lunch orders they rushed things a bit, maybe? I dunno, but we were on the road and didn't have time to complain. The coleslaw was not to my taste, either, but that's one of those foods like potato salad or mac 'n cheese that are a matter of personal taste.  It was made with mayonnaise and was thickly creamy without the slightest hint of sweetness, but YOU might like it that way, right?  It certainly seemed fresh, anyway.
On the positive side, the crab cakes were not lump crab but Bader meat (hope I spelled that right), but heck, what do ya expect for $2?   They were delicious, too, nicely seasoned, as were the crinkle-cut, perfectly cooked fries.  The hush puppies, of all things, were maybe the best I've had-- sweet cornbread with lots of onion and seasoned nicely.  All in all, it wasn't a bad meal, it just wasn't the deep-fried gold I was hoping for... The price, to me, was very cheap compared to what we get charged in the Big Ol' Burg of Indy, so there was that, too.  I'm a $$ kinda guy, so the $ meal kinda made up for some of it's shortcomings.

Lastly, and because this is a blog of experiences and not strictly restaurant reviews, I will tell ya that TLW was throwing up all the next day and 2 more days while I who am "Vomit-free Since '93" had problems with the OTHER end of the digestive tract a day later for 2 days.  We certainly can't blame The Fish Stand since we ate at a restaurant (Eddie Merlot's) in Louisville that night and the bartender gave us chunks of pineapple that had been soaked in vodka for 23 days to make their own pineapple liqueur, so who knows what was the cause of our discomfort.

Larrison's Diner: Old-School Cool

As you can tell, we've eaten at a lot of small-town restaurants with widely varying experiences, and it's not just the food that makes a place memorable.  There's that one really odd place, for example, in Markle (or was it Markleville?) that smelled like a musty old library because they actually sold old books and antique kitsch items as well as food.  It may be the name, like Come 'N Git It! in Martinsville, or it may be the wide variety of food (also Come 'N Git It!)  

With Larrison's Diner, located on the far, far, south side of Indy in Seymour, Indiana, it's hard to articulate exactly why I like it so much. The food's decent for sure, but the menu is just the basic breakfast, burgers, and sandwiches.  Their space in a couple of old storefronts in a building downtown is clean and simple but nothing fancy, with a row of booths, a row of 2-person tables, a lunch counter with stools and a menu board up on the wall, and two small dining rooms in the back.  I think it's that it is somehow just so, so COMFORTABLE overall.  The food ain't bad, either!

The Country Diner: True to Its Name.

The Country Diner is on SR 11 in Walesboro, IN, between Seymour and Columbus.  That is, I think it's in Walesboro, 'cause that's the last "Entering" town sign we saw on our way northbound before arriving there on our way back on January 3rd from a New Year's Day trip to Louisville.  (Hey, if Word don't call it a run-on sentence, it ain't one!)  It's a little yellow-tan concrete block building kind of in the middle of nowhere. We'd been hungry ever since leaving the Derby City, but every one of the little independent places I'd looked for on the way were either closed for good or didn't open until later in the day (I was especially peeved that Youa-Carry-Outa in Sellersburg wasn't open for lunch. What better lunch could you have than Chinese food prepared by redneck white people?)  

The Country Diner was thus a welcome little tropical island in the middle of miles of frozen countryside suffering record low (-15) temps, at least we thought it would be. After parking our truck in the lot with all the other trucks and SUV's (not a single car to be seen), however, we discovered the concrete block walls were not well insulated, as everyone in there huddled at their tables still wearing their heavy coats. I sighed a bit, thinking I would see my breath hang in the air; I didn't, but I still felt cold.  "Coffee, STAT!"  I cried, but the 19 to 21 year-old Norma Jean Baker lookalike waitress only smiled blankly.  When the coffee did come, though, it was quite good.  We suddenly discovered that in sitting down at the one open table in the place (which was the longest one in the room) we were poaching on the local Liars' Bench, because a really old guy came in and sat right down with us, looking at me as if we were Native American warriors and he expected the cavalry to arrive at any moment.  Luckily another small table in the corner opened up, and the waitress smiled with relief when we offered to move. Soon afterwards the cavalry did arrive, in the form of 5 more geezers in Carhartts and gimme caps who proceeded to the Liars' Table and began making all kinds of noise, but it was kind of entertaining to see 6 near-cadavers so animated.

The menu was your basic diner grub:  sandwiches, soup of the day, chili, burgers, and tenderloins with fries or tater tots.  She had a grilled tenderloin and I had a bacon cheeseburger, and though maybe they were nothing special they were quite good, especially since we'd been hungry all morning.  The tenderloin was rather thick, not pounded out paper thin like most places, which made it more like a pork chop sandwich.  The bacon burger was 'way decent, with bacon cooked just beyond limp and meaty so that it was just crispy enough to be good on a sandwich.  The thing that struck me most about the food was it was all so danged fresh-- soft buns, fresh crispy lettuce, just-ripe tomatoes and onions.  Add some grease and salt and you would've had the equivalent of a Five Guys burger....  Oh, yeah, the fries were the big crinkle-cut kind, like twice the size of White Castle fries, so they were THE BEST FRIES I've had in a long time. The only bad thing about the place (besides the frigid temp) was that they don't accept credit cards... but they will take checks!  For you younger folk, a check is a piece of paper issued by the bank-- Oh, never mind!  Anyway, I'm telling ya we'll be going back there sometime, y'all!

UPDATE, 02/25/2014:  The check we wrote to the place took 2 and 1/2 weeks to clear our bank in Indy!  I dunno if they wait till they get a bunch of checks before they go to the bank, or the overland stage from Seymour to Induhnaplus failed to stop there in Daleville or what, but I think that's the longest delayed check I've ever gotten from inside the Hoosier State!  It was worth it to have as a souvenir of a fun time, though....