Worst Steak Ever
I had the worst steak of my life this week at the Arrow Café on US 30 in Lowden, Iowa.
We’d had lunch with friends in Colorado a couple of days earlier and the discussion touched on road food. Along the Interstates, everything is franchises and chains. You know what you’re going to get every time. It used to be that, to get good food along the nation’s highways, you ate where the truckers ate. That’s the way we like to remember it, anyway.
I like to stay off the Interstates unless I’m in a hurry. Scenery is closer, traffic is lighter, and the roads are more interesting. Food is sometimes an adventure.
We’d had steak dinners in a bar and grill in the small town of Burwell in almost the center of Nebraska. Good meat, cooked as we’d ordered, and the bill came to less than fifteen bucks for both.
We pulled in at the Arrow Café in Lowden the next evening and ordered essentially the same dinners: rib eye steaks, one medium and one rare, choice of potato unless you chose baked (we settled for mashed), and salad for me and soup for my wife.
The coffee wasn’t very good, but it almost never is in the Heartland, so we weren’t disappointed.
The “steaks” when they came were tough, tasteless, and identically cooked. Each had a trace of pink, but they appeared to have been boiled, or perhaps microwaved and then kept in hot water until served.
I asked the waitress what would happen if someone ordered a steak well done, as I showed her a cross section of mine. Would it come out shoe leather?
She was a young and didn‘t know how to respond to the customer’s lack of enthusiasm.
Neither of us could struggle through more than a few bites.
The tab was well under twenty bucks, not bad at all for two steak dinners, providing they’re edible. When I went to the cash register to pay the check, I set a napkin down on the counter with the heap of fat and meat for Sprout, a far bigger scrap feast than the dog is accustomed to. When I paid the check, the young man—I think he may have been the cook—automatically asked how everything was.
I told him that it was the worst steak I’d ever had, hands down, and I described them to him as I have to you. I said I thought they were boiled. He said they weren’t. I won’t call him a liar, but I’d sure like to see the cooking operation.
The credit card slip didn’t have a place to add the tip. The young man seemed surprised. “You want to leave a tip?”
“Sure,” I said. “It wasn’t the waitress’s fault.”
We’d had lunch with friends in Colorado a couple of days earlier and the discussion touched on road food. Along the Interstates, everything is franchises and chains. You know what you’re going to get every time. It used to be that, to get good food along the nation’s highways, you ate where the truckers ate. That’s the way we like to remember it, anyway.
I like to stay off the Interstates unless I’m in a hurry. Scenery is closer, traffic is lighter, and the roads are more interesting. Food is sometimes an adventure.
We’d had steak dinners in a bar and grill in the small town of Burwell in almost the center of Nebraska. Good meat, cooked as we’d ordered, and the bill came to less than fifteen bucks for both.
We pulled in at the Arrow Café in Lowden the next evening and ordered essentially the same dinners: rib eye steaks, one medium and one rare, choice of potato unless you chose baked (we settled for mashed), and salad for me and soup for my wife.
The coffee wasn’t very good, but it almost never is in the Heartland, so we weren’t disappointed.
The “steaks” when they came were tough, tasteless, and identically cooked. Each had a trace of pink, but they appeared to have been boiled, or perhaps microwaved and then kept in hot water until served.
I asked the waitress what would happen if someone ordered a steak well done, as I showed her a cross section of mine. Would it come out shoe leather?
She was a young and didn‘t know how to respond to the customer’s lack of enthusiasm.
Neither of us could struggle through more than a few bites.
The tab was well under twenty bucks, not bad at all for two steak dinners, providing they’re edible. When I went to the cash register to pay the check, I set a napkin down on the counter with the heap of fat and meat for Sprout, a far bigger scrap feast than the dog is accustomed to. When I paid the check, the young man—I think he may have been the cook—automatically asked how everything was.
I told him that it was the worst steak I’d ever had, hands down, and I described them to him as I have to you. I said I thought they were boiled. He said they weren’t. I won’t call him a liar, but I’d sure like to see the cooking operation.
The credit card slip didn’t have a place to add the tip. The young man seemed surprised. “You want to leave a tip?”
“Sure,” I said. “It wasn’t the waitress’s fault.”
posted by Eric Rush | 12:02 PM
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1 comments
