Meridian Falls Bar & Grille: Soon to Be a Happenin' Place-- Maybe

Meridian Falls Bar & Grille, on Old Meridian Street a block or so south of Epler Avenue, is in a beautiful building just down the street from the Old Meridian Pub, which is about the best thing I can say about the place at this point, but it had only been open about two weeks or so when we went there.  The building used to be the offices and design center of a company that did major home remodeling, and it still retains the lush carpet and boardroom-style woodwork.  The bar itself is in a room with stone walls, a vaulted ceiling with a large skylight, and four small chandeliers.  A large patio-style sliding door opens out onto a humongous multi-level deck area with three different gazebos (one of which has a leather pit-group seating area), and there is even a little man-made waterfall at the bottom-- WOW! They are advertising live entertainment every weekend, and it looked like one of the gazebos is going to be used as the bandstand. I was told that for now there was a limited food menu but we couldn't see one because at that hour the owner was still printing them out.  Their special that day was supposed to be a hamburger with a fried egg on it.

And that is the end of the good part.  The food, drinks, and service are so far much less than impressive.  Regular beer and drink prices are 'way on the high side for my plebeian tastes:  Well drinks are $4, call drinks are $7, domestic beers $3.25, and crafts & imports $3.75.  The night we went there, the special was domestic drafts for $2.50 and wells for $3, but apparently nobody told the cash register, as our bill did not reflect the advertised savings, but by that time we were wanting out of there so badly we didn't complain.  I'd heard that the POlice had been called to remove someone the night they opened, and when I asked about it one of the employees (who took time out from arguing with the bartender about something) told me it was a disturbance between the owner and one of his "sweat equity" partners, a renovation contractor.  All the staff (and all the clientele, while we were there) had a kind of redneck rough & tumble appearance that seemed to indicate that MFB&G is gonna be one of those combat nightlife places I would have loved to visit when I was 19 years old, but which try my geezer patience these days.  We left and went down the street to Old Meridan Pub, where on that same night well drinks were $2.  Oh!  I forgot to mention, too, that the sliding door being left open several times led to a small swarm of flies in the area of the bar, most of which (except for a couple of  'em that were caught in a long cobweb hanging from the skylight) wanted to land on The Little Woman, probably because she's so sweet!  :-)

UPADATE 11/25/2012:  I've heard that the place closed down, but haven't been by to see.  One of the rumors was that a local neighborhood group persuaded ABC or Excise or someone to close them, but again, I don't know anything definite....  Boohoo(?)

UPDATE 08/29/2013:  The place is now called Private Reserve, a private club.  The sign out front said they sell annual and short-term memberships, whatever that means.

Motor Inn Truck Stop: A scene from the movie: They Drive By Night!

If you read the post about Dave's Place, you know we went to see my brother-in-law near Delphos in Northwest Ohio a couple weeks ago.  It's a funny kind of region to me, because there are no really big towns nearby, but there is an extensive network of small-to-medium-sized metropoli all about a half-hour's drive from each other, so you end up going to Celina to buy hardware and then to Van Wert to eat, then to Lima to go to the movies and so on, although for extensive shopping trips you might go all the way to that bodacious burg of Ft. Wayne, Indiana.  

Similarly, there is only one Interstate Highway anywhere near the area, I-69 through Ft. Wayne.  In this area the old US Highways are still the predominate routes to travel, with many of them being modern limited-access highways just like the Interstate except for the fancy red, white, and blue signs (and Federal financial support?).  Just as the US routes are still King, independent truck stops are apparently still numerous in the region, of which the Motor Inn Truck Stop, on US 127 at US 33 outside of Mendon, OH, is a prime example,. an ancient but well-maintained small concrete-block building in the middle of a vast ocean of asphalt with a giant canopy for truck and car refueling. The gas-station/convenience store side is old and kind of spartan, reminiscent of the small-town bus stations of my childhood in the 1960's (my Dad was a Greyhound driver, so I saw a lot of 'em).  The dining room, however, is quite modern, and the food draws many local residents as well as truckers and travelers. The service was decent even during the busy after-church rush on Sunday: We had to wait  ten minutes before a table opened up, but when one did they bussed it and had it ready for us in seconds.  The menu was good down-home food that was somewhat different from the menus at the big company truck stops:  I ordered Fried Rabbit, which was the first time I'd ever had that, and yes, Virginia, it does taste sort of like chicken!  The meat all tasted like white meat, though, and it was somewhat more dense than chicken but every bit as tasty.  The green beans were very good, with just enough bacon (and bacon grease?) to make it interesting.  When I started dipping bites of rabbit into the left-over gravy from my wife's plate (her biscuits and gravy were decent but it was white milk gravy instead of the southern-style sausage gravy I crave), the waitress, busy as she was,  brought me a small bowl of gravy of my own without even asking!  It's little touches like that which make me really appreciate Midwestern hospitality.  Ya, you betcha I do!  See www.motorinntruckstop.com  for pitchers....

Dave's Place in Delphos, OH

Dave's Place, on Sterling Road near Delphos, is (yay!) not in a strip mall.  It's not near a major highway.  It's not really a restaurant-- it's my brother-in-law's house.  But it's a great place to be!  Dave and his wife Sandy have all the family over once a year, and the place is great for guests.  They have a 150' x 30' swimming pond (as we passed through the countryside we saw a number of these) with a sandy bottom, a shallow wading area, and a deep part for diving.  There are two big decks and a giant float on which to laze and drift while leisurely guzzling your beer, which is great when ya have great nephew Uriah to act as cabana boy/beer man so you don't have to leave the float except to pee, and not even then for some of us!  (Just kiddin', Dave!)  The whole place is surrounded by corn fields-- there're two neighboring houses about a quarter mile away, but otherwise there aren't any neighbors to be disturbed by your music, or your partygoers, or your gunshots (so Dave should remember that if he ever gets the notion to come home drinkin' with lovin' on his mind....)  Dave is a restaurateur by profession, so naturally he knows how to cook and put out a spread, and OH! the apple pies were DA BOMB!

Blue Agave - Traditional Mexican

Blue Agave, located (say it with me) in a strip mall at 8049 S. Madison Avenue, has opened in the space that for several years housed Los Picachos bar/restaurant/pool room.  BA is primarily a restaurant now, with the old pool room now a party/banquet area.  We stopped in for a light dinner and drinks, and we were unaware at that time that the previous night a party in the banquet room had been raided by IMPD and the Excise Police, who issued citations to 24 underage drinkers.  Hey, nobody's perfect, right? 

I had high hopes for the place since almost everyone in there appeared to be Latino, my logic being that people of the same ethnicity as the food served would seek out places where that food is the best. I mean, if I was an American in Paris and got homesick and wanted a good burger, I'd go to the best American-style restaurant I could find, wouldn'ja think?  Yeah, me too!  Anyway, we both had margaritas, and split a queso dip and a plate of nachos.  The margaritas were big, cheap, and tasty, but we didn't really taste all that much tequila in them. :-(  I had mixed feelings about the chips, as they had apparently combined a couple batches together-- some of them were crisp with a decent corn taste and others were either stale or had been over-fried so much they were kind of chewy.  Ah, but the salsa!  It was fresh, spicy, and had a lot of flavorful ingredients, cilantro chief among them (if you're going to a Mexican restaurant and don't like cilantro, you better stop off at Micky D's and bring a Quarter Pounder with you).  It was some of the best salsa I've ever had, and I've had quite a lot, beer probably being the only other substance I've ingested more often. 

The queso was billed on the menu as "Grandma's Secret Recipe" and I now must find this Grandma woman and give her a big ol' lip smack on the cheek.  It was the white queso you're used to but with a bunch of little tasty bits added (Little Woman said she thought most of them were minced tomatillas).  Whatever they were, they made the queso DEEEELICIOUS!  The queso and the salsa were proof positive that you can take matchbook covers and coat them with something delicious and make them edible....  The nachos came out, and they were a little different than what us gringos are used to.  The combo nachos ($7.95, I think) included seasoned and grilled chunks of chicken, flank steak, and ground beef piled high on top of a single-thickness bed of those less-than-stellar chips, then covered with lettuce, sour cream, and a smattering of melted white cheese, a meaty mountain quite unlike the gooey foothills of mostly chips & cheese that we're used to getting.  We actually had to eat down the meat & lettuce with forks a ways to get to the chips, which by the time we reached them had been soaked in the juices from the meat, cheese, and lettuce so that they'd lost most of their molecular integrity and had to be eaten with a fork, but they actually tasted better that way!  All three meats were really tasty and well-prepared.  Just as we were about to leave, the proprietor brought out a free slice of cake for me in honor of Father's Day, he said, and it was great, too, topped with about an inch of whipped-cream icing.  Soooo, Blue Agave was a mixed bag, but the good parts were so good that we'll have to go back and try some of their other stuff.  iSalud! 

Old McDonald Cafe: Basic Eats From A Bygone Era

One good thing about Old McDonald Cafe is that it is not, repeat NOT, in a strip mall!  It's in an old storefront on Exchange Street in "downtown" Acton, across the street from the Dinner Bell Market.  It's a pretty simple place, evocative of a lot of small-town cafes I've been in across the USA-- concrete floor, basic booths and tables, kitchen counter with table, griddle, and fryers along one wall, separated from the dining room only by a cash register counter and refrigerated display cooler like a meat market or deli would have.  OMC harkens back to the day when Acton was a little bit of civilization surrounded by farm fields.  Actually, Acton hasn't really changed that much from those days, although now it's mostly surrounded by suburban housing developments.  The closest food competition is in Wanamaker, which is only about 10 minutes away by car, but if you live out that way and have one of those days when you don't want to cook and don't want to drive any farther from home than is absolutely necessary, you wind up at OMC.  Pretty much everyone I know who lives in Franklin Township has been there more than once, for just that reason, if not just to look at the displays of the founder's WWII memorabilia on the walls.  I'm told the founder is 86 years old and still owns the place but doesn't come in much, so you'll probably never see him there unless you go there a LOT.

The food there is not stellar, but it is pretty good, and simple, and fairly cheap.  I've never had a bad meal there, but never had a really outstanding one, either.  It's just good basic home-style food, with one exception:  The last time we went, there was a sign in the window that said "GIANT TENDERLOINS ARE BACK!", and they weren't lyin'....   We had one, and it was HULKIN' HUGE, more than one person (even Karl the Hutt) could eat, and it was only like 6 bucks.  It was your basic tenderloin sandwich only it's obviously been hit with an overdose of gamma rays.   So eat hearty, my friends, but don't  make the tenderloin angry-- you wouldn't like it when it's angry!   

South of Chicago Pizza-- It's "Da Bears" of Indy Italian

South of Chicago Pizza, on Virginia Avenue at Noble Street, has been open for awhile now, dunno why I haven't been there.  I'd heard their sammiches were almost more of a draw than the Chicago-style pizza, and after lunch today I can see why one might say that, although perhaps that's an overstatement.  The place is just like the little neighborhood pizza joints we had where I grew up long ago, which wasn't Chicago but it was a city with very distinctive neighborhoods.  The joint is housed in two little old storefronts with a doorway connecting them-- carry out is on one side (although it has tables there) and the dining room is on the other.  I went for a carry out lunch because I'd heard the pizza pies take awhile to fix, so I ordered an Italian Beef sandwich to be adventurous and a Ham & Cheese to be on the safe side of the Little Woman's palate.  They were both FANDAMNTASTIC, and at $6.49 each were quite the bargain as they were both like 8" long (B's PoBoys take note) and stuffed with MEAT.  The Italian Beef was marinated and seasoned differently than anything I've had before, and it was incredible how much flavor was packed into it, not to mention the spicy au jus they give you to dip it in. They even managed to pack a lot of flavor into the more mundane Ham & Cheese; like, some kind of Italian cheese, or dusting the mayo with Parmesan, maybe?  Anyway, they were both delicious. The bread didn't have the delicate crispiness of B's Poboys', but that may be because they have to support a much bigger load of MEAT than B's.   

I walked through the dining room on the way out, and they have a new lunch buffet for $8.99 that saves time for us working folks on the clock (yeah, yeah, I take long lunches sometimes, so SUE ME!  Just don't tell my boss-- he's the one who told me about this place!)  It has a small salad bar and 3 or 4 large Chicago-style pizza pies on the buffet, kind of simple for $8.99 but then, on a good day, my colleague Karl the Hutt could do some damage to the pizza side of that spread, so the rest of us gotta pay to compensate for what they'll lose on him.  The pies looked and smelled every bit as good as Geno's East in Chicago, so I'll be baaaack for one of those.  They have a good selection of bottle beers, too, including some local Sun King brews.  (No sir, I wasn't drinking at work, I swear!)  The only drawback to the place is a temporary (?) one, in that there's not a lot of parking on the street due to the never-ending construction of the south leg of the Indy Cultural Trail, so if you're going to get carry-out you might call in advance so you can just duck in and pick up your food while your car is stopped in the alley alongside the building.... Mangia!

UPDATE- 08/09/2012:  The Little Woman and I went there for lunch, and food on the buffet was incredibly good....  There were 3 deep dish Chicago style pizzas under the heat lamps, and the place was rather busy so fresh pizzas kept coming.  I had one slice each of a pepperoni & sausage and a (I think) crumbled sausage pizza.  The third pizza appeared to have a bunch of toppings, including spinach and half-slices of tomato, but I didn't get to eat a slice because I was too freakin' STUFFED.  I'm not generally a big fan of Chicago-style's crust, but SoC's traditional crust is more than made up for by the incredible sauce--  heavily seasoned and full of Italian flavor.  My slices seemed also seemed to have more cheese than I remember getting in Chicago, and that's a GREAT thing.  The buffet also had a Linguine Alfredo that was the bomb-- the Alfredo sauce was lightly powdered with Parmesan cheese and slightly gooey because it also had a lot of actual cheese in it.  The salad was decent, too, with bowls of both Iceberg and Romaine lettuce (although I only saw Italian, Blue Cheese, and French dressings, no Caesar to go with the Romaine), pepperoncinis, cheese, onions, home-made bacon bits, banana peppers, and what appeared to be home-made croutons.  We ate lunch for under $20 and had to be rolled outa there.... Life is good!  My only regret is I have yet to be able to go at a time when I could drink one of the good beers.  CINCIN!

Flashbacks: A Badly Needed Oasis Re-Opens

Flashbacks, in a strip mall (ain't they all?) at Shelbyville Road and Southport Road, has been open for a couple months in the space where Brandon's was. The location is surrounded by residential subdivisions for several miles around, so it is quite an alcohol oasis amid the great suburban-sprawl wasteland that is most of Franklin Township.  The layout is basically the same as Brandon's but they've renovated it nicely, with a kind of faux-marble floor instead of just concrete, and all the exposed duct work has been painted glossy black, along with other touches which give the place a slightly more elegant look.  I met Mike, one of the owners, and he seems to be a nice, really sharp guy.  There is a lot of old Franklin Township High School Flashes memorabilia on the walls, which may be the source of the Flashbacks name, I suppose.  The decor is understated and not overwhelming so I felt really comfortable in the new place.   The drink prices are decent but not a bargain, and the food is your basic pub grub but very decent, too.  They have a good selection of draft beers, and an actual wine list(!)  I've heard the pizza is especially good there, but have yet to sample it. My bro-in-law (see his guest review of Vito Provolone's, below) absolutely loves the French Dip here.  Yet another reason to go back it is, young Skywalker.... 

UPDATE: 12/27/2012-- I went there for a family member's birthday celebration (there were 8 of us) and was totally disappointed, sorry to say.  The birthday boy loved this place, raved about its French Dip sandwich, said the meat was marinated so well and the generous cup of u jus was so tasty he would drink what was left after dipping his sandwich.  Well when his sandwich came this time, it was smaller than anyone remembered, was not as tasty, and the cup of au jus was tiny, not enough to even dip the sandwich.  My tenderloin was decent but nothing special....  When they brought the food, another person in our party, who had ordered the exact same thing I did, did not get her food until like 15 minutes after the rest of us.  On top of that, one of our party paid for her own meal with cash and yet her bill was added onto the host's check, charging us twice for the same meal. I dunno if that was intentional or just incompetent, as the wait staff seemed generally clueless.  I did not see any of the place's owners there, which was unusual, so maybe they suffered from a lack of supervision.  There was no excuse for the apparent downsizing of the French Dip, though.  I still enjoyed the relaxed ambiance there, so I'll give 'em a second chance, but only one.   ;-)