We're BACK, BABY! -- The Bracken Store & Ice House

It was pointed out to me that I haven't posted anything here for quite a while. I've been writing little capsule reviews on Trip Advisor, Facebook, and Google Maps, but those aren't really worth the effort because they fade into history quite quickly, so screw 'em!

Anyway, The Little Woman and I stumbled on The Bracken Store & Ice House (apparently known to locals simply as "The Bracken") just before heading to the airport to leave San Antonio, or we would have visited more than once while we were there, we liked it so much (sorry to take all the suspense out of it for ya,  I'm not on House Hunters, y'know).  Our hosts there had spoken quite highly of the place, but we hadn't been looking for it, just taking a ride to see a little bit of the area before leaving, but then VOILA! there it was, a tumble-down little building that looks like one on the set of every Western movie you've ever seen.  Bracken is a dusty little town on the northeast edge of the San Antonio area that grew up around the railroad, and indeed there was a BNSF locomotive idling across the street.  I half-expected the train crew to be inside the business, but if they were they must have been hiding in the back room because there were just 2 older gentlemen and the beertender in sight inside.

Inside is a clean, cozy, and nicely air-conditioned space (a fantastic find on a 100-degree day) with a large bar with taps for 5 or 6 kinds of draft beer, behind which was a huge array of beverage coolers that contained almost every brand of bottle beer you could ever want, and wine, too! (No booze, though.)  The beertender was a handsome woman whose good looks belied her real age, and she gave us fast and friendly service.  There were maybe 4 TVs and one pool table with a comfy row of old theatre seats for the players, sharing space with an ancient pinball-like baseball machine that takes quarters.  Out back there is large rear patio that is partly covered, where they have live music 3 or 4 nightss a week. On those nights there is a food truck there, too, which I'm told sells some killer grub. Sundays they also have Chicken Sh*t Bingo, a cage with the floor marked off into squares and a live chicken that picks the squares by, well, see the title of the game.  All in all this place is freakin' GEM that we would be in often if we lived nearby, and if you get tired of it you can walk over to the Hangin' Tree Saloon next door and play shuffleboard, or go bowling at the alleys across the street where the old dance hall used to be.  !Vamanos!

Milktooth: Hard to Not Like

We hit Milktooth, 534 Virginia Avenue for a late breakfast on a Saturday.  It is NOT in a strip mall (PRAISE THE LORD!) but in what used to be an auto repair garage.  It is very nicely decorated inside, and they have a few outdoor tables, too.  The place has a kind of hipster/yuppie kind of vibe, and being the more plebeian working-class guy I consider myself to be, I didn't want to like it.  The parking lot is kind of small (there is street parking out on Virginia) but luckily we were able to navigate past all the Subaru Crosstreks and Mercedes G420s and find a space for our Dodge.  And that is almost the last negative thing I can say about the place:  Despite being busy, they seated us promptly, waited on us promptly, and brought our food much sooner than "promptly".  I had the Red Coarse-ground Appalachian Grits with Bacon ($9) and TLW had a Pecan Sticky Bun ($7). I had coffee, of which they had several blends available ($3 to $5).  Everything was very, very good... what there was of it.  My bowl of grits was smaller than any cereal bowl we have at home, although it was garnished with a fair amount of green onions (or were they chives?) and the bits of applewood bacon were thick cut and delicious.  The Pecan Sticky Bun was smaller than your average Cinnabon but was almost as thick and had a nice amount of pecans.  It was baked perfectly, was very tasty, and was almost worth the $7.  The coffee was excellent, too.  All in all it was very tasty, so I guess I can recommend you eat there... and if you're still hungry when you leave, you can always go down the block to The Peppy Grill for a heaping mess of greasy spoon diner food.... Thus sayeth the Old Fat Guy!

The NY Slice: DON'T Fagedaboutit!

The NY Slice, 5564 Madison Avenue just south of Epler, began its existence as a food truck in 2011, of which there are now two.  There is a (fairly) new owner, and since local health regulations require food trucks to have a fixed base kitchen of operations, it appears he has decided the kitchen might as well be a restaurant unto itself, and YAHOO, am I glad he did, because I seem to almost never be near a food truck when one's open.  The store's website says the owner is a CIA-trained (Culinary Institute of America, I think, not Central Intelligence Agency, although the site doesn't really specify which.  Hmm....) chef who previously operated Eh! Formaggio, a small short-lived pizza parlor on the northwest side of Indy that I really liked but only got to visit once before it closed.

The store is on one end of a tiny, incredibly ancient strip mall with no name, but the place is very clean and neat, with a tiny "dining room" that holds about 6 tiny two-person tables.  You order at a tiny counter from a menu posted on the wall.  In true food truck fashion the pizza menu is rather simple, although it does also have a selection of sandwiches, calzones, and salads.  A basic slice is $3.29 plus 59 cents per additional topping, and it definitely ain't tiny.

Not sure when I'd be allowed to visit again (The Little Woman and I are supposed to be losing weight), I opted for a whole pizza: They have only 16" and 20" pies, the former starting at $15.79 with $1.59 for each additional topping.  We love what most places call a Supreme, so by the time I was done reciting our desired 9 toppings it cost $29 and change.  Oooh, but it was WORTH it!  The aroma that filled the car was indescribably mouth-watering, and when the box was opened it was a fragrant thing of beauty. I've never actually been to NYC to experience the real NY style of pie, but there was an elderly gent with an actual New York accent who came in while I was waiting, and he told the counter girl theirs was the best Brooklyn-style pizza he'd ever had outside The City.  The crust is thin and toasty on the outside without being hard, perfect for folding your slices in half, New York style, if you want.  The pie is not as cheesy as Eh!'s was, but the sauce makes up for it, incredibly fragrant and filled with Italian flavor and not vaguely sweet like the more traditional pies at Vito Provolone's, my go-to favorite up till now. I could go on and on about how good it is, but you've probably already stopped reading by this point, so just GO AND EAT AND BE DELIGHTED!  www.thenyslice.com  

Gold Coffee and Pancake House: A Solid Performance

Gold Coffee and Pancake House, 80-something S. Emerson in the strip mall across the street from the new super-Kroger at Emerson & County Line Road, is a nice little breakfast and lunch-only place but nothing special, decor-wise:  dark wood booths and tables, pictures of breakfast dishes on the wall, etc.  The food, however, is where GC&P shines.  Our favorite pancakes are Denny's newest buttermilk ones, but these are as good if not just a little better. They were a little more done, browned at the edges, and yet they had a light and fluffy middle.  They were just sweet enough to be interesting, too. I could go on at length about the hash browns (but will try not to!), since I seem to be obsessed with the obscure peripherals of a meal, like drinks and sides.  A nicely brewed iced tea, for instance, is a wonderful thing, and hash browns prepared to my liking, like these, are a rare delicacy.  Most places (including Waffle House, dangit) give you what looks like a small pile of wet noodles; they hardly brown them at all, probably to save time, I guess.  But Gold's were nicely browned as if they'd spread them out on the griddle and flipped 'em a couple of times so that there was some crispy goodness in every bite.  The scrambled eggs were perfectly moist and tasty, too.  The service was fast and friendly, and the prices were very reasonable, so for breakfast or lunch I would gladly ditch the Metro Diner.  C'est Magnifique! 

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!

Passtime Fish House: The (incredibly) Good (food), the Bad (reputation), and the Ugly (exterior)

Passtime Fish House is on the REALLY far South side of Indy: It's in Jeffersontown, KY (a suburb of Louisville) at Watterson Trail and Locust Road across from Skyview Park.  I've described other places as so small or nondescript that you wouldn't notice them if you weren't looking for them, but you can BE looking for Passtime and not find it-- there's a sign where to turn in, but the place isn't visible from Watterson Trail, and that's probably a good thing because after seeing the outside, many folks  might not want to see the inside.  It's one of those fabled places you often see in movies or on TV but which in reality are quite rare-- a tumbledown shack which conceals a wonderful interior filled with salty waitresses who serve delicious food to lovable regular customers. The first label that you see when you look Passtime up on TripAdvisor is "Hole in the Wall".

It's a little hard to describe and still do it justice: bare, weathered wood exterior walls covered with plywood in some places, metal beer signs nailed to them (maybe to help keep the walls up as much as advertise the beer), and a tin roof.  The parking lot is severely sloped and very roughly paved; it looks like gravel somehow fused together rather than asphalt.  There is a covered (not screened) outdoor deck area that looks rustic but fairly new. It is equipped with picnic-like tables and seems comfortable.  That's good, because on a hot summer day you may have to sit out there due to the inside not being air-conditioned.  That's right, NO AIR CONDITIONING in a functioning 21st Century restaurant!  When The Little Woman and I disembarked from our meat-locker cold vehicle interior into the Kentucky Fried Sunshine and humidity on an 88 degree day, I took one look at the place and figured we'd take our order to go.  

After we'd stumbled across the moonscape parking lot to the inside, however, we found that the darkened interior was tolerably cooler, what with the doors thrown open and a number of floor fans going.  The beating wings of the occasional house fly also contributed to beneficial air movement as well.  A lot of reviews said the waitresses were slow, inattentive, and grumpy, but we were greeted immediately and told to sit wherever we wanted, were waited on promptly and served in a surprisingly short time by an informally clad easy-on-the-eyes waitress. We sat in a comfortable booth which was one of a line of them along one wall.  There is a nice bar on the other side with the usual flat screen TVs and neon beer signs that adorn any decent bar & grill.  Everything was very nice and reasonably clean.  The only thing inside that resembled the rough exterior was the concrete floor which was not level anywhere. sloping in different directions depending on what part of the building you were in.  It would likely make drunken perambulation doubly difficult.

I hope you've read (or skimmed) this far, because here is the really good part: the FOOD! The very worst of the reviews I read nevertheless admitted the food was fantastic.  Their specialty is a Fried Cod sandwich, which TLW had with fries.  I ordered the Passtime Platter, which is a fried cod filet, fried shrimp, and fried oysters, and I added an order of Onion Straws.  You can also get frog legs for $2 more but WHY? The filet was HUGE, but the shrimp were HUGE, in contrast with the oysters which were HUGE, and everything was lightly battered and fried perfectly, which is to say not too much.  The filet was at least an inch thick, the fish moist, tender, and un-fishy. The giant butterflied shrimp and the oysters were tender and seemed extremely fresh. The coating (it was too light and thin to be called breading) had an incredibly flavorful mix of spices, although it was just a tiny little bit salty.  The fries seemed home made and were very tasty. My heaping plate of Onion Straws were the only less than stellar item, having been only lightly fried just like everything else, which in this case made them just a little soggy although they still tasted great: a little time in an oven might have crisped them up some. If you don't like seafood, they do have a HALF-POUND burger that is supposedly very good but takes a while to cook. Finally, Passtime has a wide selection of available beers:   I had a draft Shiner Bock that was ice cold, a welcome relief on a hot Friday afternoon.

I'm going to engage in a bit of sacrilege here....   The most beloved and well-known fish house in the Derby City is, arguably, Mike Linnig's 'way out west on Cane Run Road (although some of the Linnig family actually live nearby in J-town).  I love Mike's fish and its festive park-like ambiance, but-- please don't shoot me-- I love Passtime's fish even more, just sayin'. ...And that's all I'm saying 'cause I have to go before the lightning strikes me.  Order up!

9 Lives Cat Cafe: A Cafe for Cats? No... and Yes

I won't go so far as to say 9 Lives Cat Cafe at the corner of Shelby and Orange Streets is unique, but it is a very unusual place. From the name I wasn't sure exactly what sort of establishment it was, until a brave colleague went there and came back with intelligence that it might be a sort of coffee shop, which for me is a great thing, since almost none of the numerous houses of food and drink in Fountain Square open before Lunch. Apparently most hipsters are not morning people. My Pathfinder said it also involved cats, which is the reason for the enigmatic name.  "How does it involve cats?" I asked, to which the reply was "Go and see!"

Okay, suspense over: The space is one long, narrow store front, one side of which is a fairly standard coffee shop that also serves pastries and light fare.  The other side is what looks like a long living room, with couches, easy chairs to sit in as well as various towers, shelves, and scratching posts for the bunch of cats that inhabit that room.  The cats are up for adoption, and if you're in the market for one, you can be admitted to the room to interact with the feline princes and princesses, if any of them deign to notice you, and allow yourself to be adopted by one of them.  There is a long row of windows in the wall that separates the two sides, with a counter and stools on the coffee side so you can sit and watch the cats do what they do while you sip your coffee.  It really is quite mesmerizing, and very relaxing as well.  As oddball as it seems, I think they're onto something there.

I couldn't stay long so I ordered my large coffee and an eclair to go, and it was FIVE dollars and some change!  My shock and horror abated somewhat, however, when the eclair arrived. It was HUGE, enough for like 3 people (though of course I ate it all), filled with French cream and very tasty.  I was just about to leave but had to pause and watch a big tuxedo cat climb a set of shelves along the opposite wall which were arranged like steps.  He reached the top and looked down.... Was he/she going to pounce on one of the humans below?  Slip off and fall to an ignominious impact with the couch?  I just had to see....