After a long day of poking at a lot of weird and wonderful things it was time to find something to eat to gain my strength for the long drive home. We returned to the car after leaving the always bizarre Evens & Oddities and started looking things up on the phone.

However we’d had a LONG day and the thought of finding yet another parallel parking spot was starting to overwelm me. So I pitched eating at the super shady looking place we were already parked in front of. It looked worn down, seriously worn down, the sort of thing you see in the background of apocalypse films. Inside was even worse. It looked as if someone really had put a lot of time, energy, and money into making this place a success… thirty years ago.

A glass counter up front was covered, two convenience store ice cream freezers gathered several inches of dust behind the tables, a regular fridge was parked in the middle of the dining area and looked just as old. The bathroom was literally in a supply closet and had a sign reading, “No feet on the seat please!” In all my years of toilet usage I’ve never been tempted to stand or squat on the seat….

With that all being said I’m a big fan of finding “hidden gems,” places that scream, “We could be in Detroit” but taste like heaven.

We’d had two VERY long days of driving and exploring and I’d reached a point of exhaustion that had turned my brain into pudding. Looking at the vast choices of sauces/styles on their menu I chose the three piece chicken and asked my travel companion to pick a sauce for me as I was overwelmed by the choices. He picked a teriyaki BBQ sauce combination for me and ordered “pteredactyl wings” for himself which were spicy wings of some sort. We shared cheese fries and he also inhaled some sort of sandwhich I didn’t get a chance to identify.

When it was time to get our meal there seemed to be great confusion that we were staying there to eat and not getting take out. Indeed I think we may have been the first to do so in a number of years. As such we were served in take out boxes.

My meal came with a salad. A salad that came in a small dessert carton and consisted of 6 pieces of very wet iceberg lettuce, a single piece of bell pepper, and the very end piece of a cucumber. Later I’d find two juiliens of carrot and one of celery in the take away box. Was this the other half of the salad or the “vegetable” served with dinner? Who knows.

I moved onto the macaroni salad which I didn’t know came with this. It was… mostly dry macaroni noodles with the tiniest hint of mayonnaise and dill. Was this the price of not wanting to parallel park again?

Across the table my companion had swallowed his sandwhich whole and was currently tearing through the wings like a starving street urchin. At least his dinner was good. I turned to my chicken which made up for everything else. The four pieces were huge, like a whole goddamn chicken, and fucking delicious. I stabbed it with my fork and ate it by biting chunks off. My companion then told me I had a knife hidden under my box but I didn’t care. Too late for that now, I was committing. Nom nom nom. I stopped only to shove stolen cheese fries into my gullet from across the table. I had fries too but they weren’t drowning in nacho cheese and the cheese fry side order was a meal in itself anyway.

So yeah… that was that. I felt much better after food and luckily we weren’t serial killed. Always a plus.