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After asking readers to help me find some foods scarce in these parts, the calls and e-mails came quickly, and most were telling me about one place – Bennigan’s Grill and Tavern.
This chain restaurant located in the Ramada Plaza hotel in Warsaw had a lot of folks speaking up for its authentic Monte Cristo sandwich. So, it didn’t take long for me to jump in the car and head to Butters Stotch’s favorite birthday locale to see whether it was what I was looking for.
I liked this sandwich from the beginning when I saw it was only $4.99 as a part of the restaurant’s Cash Crunch Lunch menu, which is available daily from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. And when it arrived, it sure looked like the real deal.
Wheat bread was filled with turkey, ham, Swiss and American cheese and then completely coated in batter and deep fried. It was a behemoth and the heavy breading, which tasted a lot like fish batter, made it hardly a light lunch. It also smelled strongly of the fryer, kind of the way your car does for hours after you’ve hit the drive-through at Long John Silver’s. It was dusted lightly with powdered sugar and served with a decent seed-filled raspberry preserve on the side.
I also finally tried Cheddar’s Monte Cristo, and was surprised at how different it was. It had the same fillings and came with an identical raspberry preserve, but the bread seemed like a thin layer of what I thought was pastry dough instead of regular bread. The sandwich was not as heavily battered, and I actually enjoyed it more from a flavor standpoint except for one major flaw: It was cold in the middle.
When I asked about the bread, a general manager said it was, indeed, bread – Texas toast to be specific – but the sandwiches are made ahead of time and wrapped tightly in plastic. When one is ordered, it is unwrapped, dipped in a batter almost like funnel cake batter and deep fried. The wrapping process is what compressed the bread and made it so thin and doughy, the same way a slice gets when you ball it up in your hand.
So taking everything into consideration, Bennigan’s gets the nod as having the most authentic Monte Cristo in these parts. It may have been heavy on the breading, but at least it was hot all the way through and the bread actually had some body and the right texture.
No restaurants were found that served these potato and cheese filled dumplings, but John Wallace of Bluffton, a longtime reader who has corresponded with me regularly over the years, suggested I try the Kasia’s pierogi he buys from the deli at Scott’s Food Store.
These dumplings from the Kasia’s Polish Delicatessen in Chicago come in containers of 12 for $4.99. They are boiled at the deli department, then sautéed in a little butter before being put out for sale.
They can be microwaved, but the sauté done in the grocery does not brown the dumplings, so I opted to brown mine until crisp in a pan with more melted butter. They were thicker and the dough tasted much fresher than some of the frozen varieties I have sampled, but it was the filling that really made them good. The soft farmer’s cheese Kasia’s uses blends wonderfully with the potatoes to form a pristine white filling that is creamy and delicious.
No, I didn’t find them on a menu, but I did find a place where they are so popular they sell out of them every time they make them – the Lagro American Legion.
Greg Beeks of the Lagro chapter said it has held a "nut fry" every year, usually in February, and last year sold out of the 450 pounds of fried pork and beef testicles in about three hours. The event is open to the public and has grown annually.
"It packs the house," Beeks said. "We might have to build on for it."
This year, the legion is going to order 600 pounds of testicles, which, Beeks said, are quite labor intensive to prepare as exterior membranes and interior veins have to be removed. The oysters are then chopped into one-inch nuggets, dredged in a batter mix and deep fried. They are served with coleslaw and butter bread just like a fish fry.
No sooner had I mentioned wanting to find this fatty fowl liver than the hate mail started coming.
Foie gras is a controversial delicacy given the forced feeding of the geese and ducks it is produced from, but its popularity among gourmands and TV chefs cannot be questioned.
Joseph Decuis in Roanoke offers a foie gras appetizer that sous-chef Andrew Smith says is ordered by anywhere from two to five diners each week. The duck foie gras is pan-seared and accented with honey-glazed rhubarb and parsnips. The dish costs $26.
Smith said the restaurant has not come under any heat for serving the dish, and there is also a duck hearts appetizer on the menu.
Sea urchin and baked Alaska were the only two items I was searching for that did not garner a response. Well, there was no help on the sweetbreads, either, but it did bring back some memories for reader Mark Bowman of Wabash whose grandmother "cooked sweetbreads a couple of times a month when I was growing up. It was amazing with homemade bread and butter pickles."
When it came to the Mideastern items I was after, reader Mark Meyer admitted he, too, has not seen anyone serving falafel, but he has had good luck with some of the mixes sold at the Lake Avenue Market at Lake Avenue and Anthony Boulevard, which has a large amount of pitas, yogurts and spices that he cannot find anywhere else.
As far as finding falafel or kibbeh in a restaurant, you have to go down to Muncie to try the chain restaurant Pita Pit, which serves pitas filled with falafel, hummus and baba ghanoush, or do what I did last week and head to The Beirut in Toledo, a Lebanese landmark that serves a wide variety, from hummus and grape leaves to kafta and kibbeh.
