I dont need to think a moment on this one. Hands down its a local bar/rest now in its 3rd generation of ownership. The best fish in the world and a baked potato to die for. I firmly believe baking the perfect potato is an art not mastered by many.
What i love about the place is the owners wife is a seasonal decorating freak. Halloween there a riot. She spares no expense and goes joyously overboard.
As far as showing up as is? Heck yes!!! Because the lady is also a plant freak. My idea of heaven!

I live in a sort of rural-becoming-surburban area, not enough population yet for "serious" restaurants, so the best places are the homecooking, working-man's cafe type places:

Bea's Coffee Bar is open for breakfast (but I've never been able to get there in time), & it's very good for lunches.

It's in an old building (the only kind there is in downtown Ferris), all its tables are for 4, the waitresses all wear jeans & they all, regardless of their age or your age, call you "Hon".

It's assumed that you want coffee with your breakfast & iced tea with lunch.
the lunch special is 1 meat & 3 sides with your choice of rolls or cornbread.
The salad comes with your choice of dressing, which is brought to the table in a bottle.

Dessert is homemade pie.

Every male in the place is wearing a plaid shirt & battered jeans (often the older ones have plaid shirts & overalls), with the occasional police or fire department uniform.

Friday is all-you-can-eat fish night, with catfish deep-fried in cornmeal batter.
Whole families eat there on Friday nights, pushing together enough tables so that everyone can sit together.
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Junior's Barbeque is an institution
(It's been here longer than I have.)

It's in a cinderblock building with a red-&-white striped metal awning, an upgrade from the original canvas that was torn off in a tornado about 14 years ago.

Inside, corrugated tin trims the walls & serving areas, & autographed pictures of people like Janie Fricke & Chuck Norris hang on the walls along with prints of covered wagons on the prairie & a few antique farm implements.

Service is cafeteria-style.

You can get wonderful beef, chicken, or sausage sandwiches, or you can order it on a lunch or dinner plate.

Sometimes, when I have a fat-salt-grease craving, or when my sinuses are clogged up, I get their hot link sandwich.
Sides include mashed potatoes, green beans, pinto beans, cole slaw, & their famous baked potatoes, which you can have plain or with shredded cheddar, slathered with "butter" (it comes in a huge tub & they apply it to your potato with a spatula), sour cream, and/or chives.

They'll even stuff your baked potato with barbeque.

About 2 years ago (we think Junior's doctor may have said something to him about his diet), they added chef salad to their menu, & it's very good.

Dessert is Junior's famous banana pudding.

Condiments include pickles, green onions, relish, mild banana peppers & hot jalapeno peppers.

Junior's is a family operation, everybody knows everybody's name, & they always fix my tea when they see me come in the door.

Bankers, builders, insurance people, & Realtors' groups eat there.

Attire ranges from what you see at Bea's to business clothes (Red Oak being a bigger, fancier town of something over 5000 population.)

It's a good place for lunch or for dinner, with a group, with a friend, or with a book.
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For tables with tablecloths & wine with dinner, there's Amaya's Mexican Restaurant.

It has tile floors, bright colors, & a patio.

It smells like heaven or Cancun, I can't decide which.

if there's a difference.

Their fajitas are the best, & the guacamole is wonderful.

The full meals are often way too much for me, so I like to get the guacamole & the queso sauce & eat them with tortilla chips.

It's by far the biggest place of the 3, & it's always full.

There's a private dining/meeting room for large groups.

Lunches there are usually groups, & dinner is Amayas busy time; everybody goes there, dates, families, everybody.

Attire depends on the time of day:
the lunch crowd is again plaid shirts & battered jeans, but evening diners usually "dress" to some degree.
If you see someone wearing jeans, those jeans are usually starched, & feet are clad in nice boots.
Women & girls may have on long dresses & sandals & jewelry in the summer (best time for people-watching), & nice trouser outfits or skirts/sweaters/boots.

It's always full, always noisy, always feels like a party.

I once sat in the dark in their dining room there with a date, sipping wine & waiting for the power to come back on or for the rain to ease up or for the wind to slacken enough so that the owner could get the door open.

(Did I mention that we occasionally have storms & high winds here?)

I remember thinking that heck, it could be worse, I could be at home in the dark, no date, no wine, no comforting presence of a whole pack of human beings.

& no Mexican food...

Most of the places around here are either chains or some kind of semi-fast food like barbecue or Mexican. however, we do have a local winery that is loaded with atmosphere & serves really good food and about two years ago two guys from New York opened a really good, albeit high end Italian restaurant that we positively love.

What I miss are the good neighborhood places that had white tablecloths & good food at a reasonable price that were abundant when we lived in Dallas & St. Louis.

Not quite within 10 minutes drive but across the river in my former hometown there are several locally owned good restaurants..most have been in business for 20 years or more. Italian, barbecue, deli/bar with great sandwiches, soups. Two family fish/seafood houses. One great German place. One Chinese place, and one Japanese place with the patrons sitting around the grill. Several little places with Vietnamese, Thai, Indian cooking...I'm getting hungry! I think with the large Army base nearby there's more support for good restaurants...folks have lived all over the world and are used to different cuisines. These are all fairly small places...not too busy on a weeknight to have a relaxed meal. We usually avoid weekends.

And casual dress is fine...often folks stop by after work but leave their coat and tie in the car. Women almost always are dressed a little more than you might find them at home...jewelry and makeup, for instance, but casual still...more flats, fewer heels. josh

10 minutes drive? wearing whatever?

Hmm. Probably the Chinese/Japanese restaurant. Good food, very relaxed. Blazing log fire.

It all depends on what the definition of a "fortune" is. We're in the Carmel-Monterey area, so a bill of under $30 for two people, without anything alcoholic, is very reasonable. This a restaurant-crazy place, and everything from haute cousine to diner food is within 10 minutes of our home. And this CA's central coast, so no dress-up is expected, but it's good if a woman brushes her hair, powders her nose and wears a nice top with her jeans. We dine out once a week, on the weekend, mid-afternoon, when restaurants are quiet and lunch-dinner is one meal for us. Very occasionally we go for dinner on a week night.

Our fave place is Stravaganza, in Carmel, which serves a fusion of Mediterranean-California cuisine, for reasonable prices, on a huge menu. My favorite dish is Salmon Chardonnay - big chunks of salmon, mushrooms, artichokes (no chokes for awhile, after the recent freeze) on linguini in a chardonnay sauce. I don't drink wine, but DH often has a beer with one of their elegant sandwiches, and the cost is around $35.

But my all-time best place, the place I would go if I could only have one more meal in a restaurant, is Clint Eastwood's Mission Ranch, in Carmel. Forget the Hog's Breath Inn, he doesn't own it anymore, and it's always full of tourists chowing down on big burgers, surrounded by his pictures. Mission Ranch is unique. It's part of the Mission Ranch complex, an old Victorian-style collection of cabins and guest houses. The entire complex was run-down and went up for sale to developers who had plans to tear everything down and build condos. Clint bought it out from under them for five million and restored it to perfection. The restaurant looks a shack from the outside. Inside it's very casual and simple, with a grand piano and almost always someone playing very soft cool jazz (sometimes Mr. Eastwood himself). They make a splendid grilled salmon and very tasty roast chicken. Service is perfect, unobtrusive, and the coffee is great. No elegance required, people come in jeans and tees and tennies (as I said, it's CA).

But the big deal is the setting. It sits amidst gardens at the edge of a large green field, with marshes in the distance, all overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It is a view to die for. We take all our guests there. Everyone sits and watches the soaring seagulls and pelicans and occasional hawks, stares at the blue water and says "I can't believe I'm here". One of the loveliest places in the world, and Clint's movie millions saved it for the rest of us!

Hmm... my long-time favorite was in a house by the side of the road; home-made food and the best NC-style pulled barbeque in the metro area. Unfortunately the road was widened and the cook retired - not sure if those events were related. Now, the favorite is a very small Chinese-Vietnamese restaurant. Linens, fresh flowers, superb service, and ALL the food is fresh-made and tasty. If you stop by while wearing mulchy jeans, you'll be seated in an alcove with plastic benches instead of in the main room that has nicely upholstered chairs -- everything else is the same. If it's between busytimes, Great-uncle will come out of the kitchen to have a cup of tea and one of the waiters will also join to act as a translator, to talk of weather and gardening and whether this year's Thai pepper plants will produce a sufficiently hot-spicy pepper.

Baker's (AKA The Milkbar) is about 2 miles from me. Has the BEST chicken and dumplings; dumplings are home made, and they ask if you want a leg quarter or a breast quarter of chicken. I think they call the chicken pieces halves even though you really only get 1/4th of the bird.

Nino's Pizza, in Elkton, has the best eat in or take out pizza and Italian yummies for a 'new' place less than 20 years old.

The Tap Room for crabs and beer, 'crab fries', and seafood chowder. Don't wear anything you don't want to get dirty- including jewelry. Flatware is served only with pasta dishes or if you are wimpy and ask for it.

Jan

Sable, I had dinner at Mission Ranch in the late 80's. id Eastwood own it then? It was a wonderful place & if I'm remembering right, the restaurant was in an old farmhouse & had a great piano bar & they had rigged up the old barn as an old-fashioned dance hall.

You're living in foodie central.

I suspect we have more eateries than anyplace on earth per capita right in our community. I don't know how they possibly can exist given our population, but they do. Prolly because they are all chains, and they can afford to not make money for awhile. It sometimes makes me wonder if I am the only person who cooks in the county?

We blinked and the independant restaurants here just evaporated, likely because they lost so much of the market share. Those who are left have started to cater to the new age tastes, and I'm sorry if I want my steak cajun I can burn it to a cinder myself, thank you.

Given the assortment of chains, I can find one or two really good dishes in each one, but none of them are places I could go to often unless I keep eating the same dish. So, no there aren't any now I'd go to repeatedly or really enjoy eating at. Not anymore.

We do have a few new Chinese restaurants. Now those I could get excited about, but my husband does not eat Chinese food, so they are solitary trips for me when he isn't around.

Andie - "foodie central", lol. We think we're f.c., but that would actually be San Francisco, followed by Seattle. We 'only' have about 150 nice restaurants to choose from.

The brouhaha over the fate of Mission Ranch blew up in 1986 or 87, right after we moved here. By 87-88 C.E. owned the place and the restaurant was back in full swing. You are right - the piano bar is wonderful. I forgot to mention that the big green field used to contain a herd (flock?) of sheep. The owner had some border collies and diners at M.R. could watch the dogs as they herded. The whole place is quaint, not cutesy or overdone, just old and charming and well-tended, and with the best Sunday brunch in this part of the state.

Talk about sparsely populated, we don't even have many chains except of course, McDonald, Pizza Hut, well thats it. If we want to drive 40 miles there is a good Japanese restauant and was a wonderful Brazilian restaurant until a death in the family caused them go to back to Brazil. There are several quite good steak houses as you might expect but don't order anything else..I think every rancher I know of wants their steak well done and when you say rare they always ask "are you sure?"

Oh yeah, I forgot there is an Italian restaurant in a town about 10 miles from here that is run by a family from Iran. A little different.

Gosh, ten minutes drive gets us to Chinatown and the Mexican restaurants of Pilsen, maybe even to the south end of the Chicago Loop or Healthy Food Lithuanian Restaurant in Bridgeport ("healthy" as in "You look skinny, have some sour cream with your cheese blintz!"), but we don't eat out much in the city. When we do, it's likely to be at one of two places that are within a 10-minute walk.

Leona's is a Chicago-area chain that started on the North Side. It emphasizes pasta, pizza and hamburgers. On a good day, their onion rings are outstanding. I think maybe the best thing about the place is their booths -- dark wood, high-backed, available for two or four. It was a good place to stop when we'd come back to the city Sunday night famished after a weekend at the farm. Collapse in a booth, order a Sam Adams and tell the server not to do the cutesy icing thing with the mug and order something to make up for the calorie deficit.

The other place is Cedars, formerly Cedars of Lebanon, but now a bit more fusion-oriented, tastes gathered from the eastern Mediterranean to almost-Indian. The strong points are still the hummus, dotted with olive oil and smudged with sumac, the baba ganoush and the kebabs. It's best to go with a large group and just say "feed us." Then you get platters of appetizers, kebabs, basmati rice, sticky-sweet pastries of various types. No license, but they're next to a wine store and they'll provide corkage. You'll find a lot of people drawn by the vegetarian menu and many Muslim families as well as the general melange of folks you'd expect to find in a university neighborhood.

Ribs 'n' Bibs now allows you to perch at a narrow counter in the store itself or sit outside at tables in the summertime, but for some reason barbeque in Chicago is basically a take-out or delivery affair, and that's the only way I've eaten it. Reggie, the main rib man, and his sister Barbara know my voice over the phone.

Sable, I sort of count Monterrey/Carmel as part of the general bay area food extravaganza. you could eat yourself to death in SF & you haven't ever had dim sum until you've had it at one of the little hole in the wall places down some alley in Chinatown.

And Neil, are you still trying to educate the unwashed with presents of jars of barbecue sauce from Ribs 'n' Bibs? I remember that Marie & I were proud recipients at one of the Chicago gettogethers.

Neil, we used to go to the original Leona's, but they streamlined their menu and stopped with the crabmeat-spinach pizzas I liked so much.

We don't really choose restaurants so much as choose dishes we return to again and again. Ten minutes gets us to lots of good places both on Chicago's far north side and in our own little city, including the great Indian restaurants of Devon Ave. We occasionally go to a hamburger joint, Moody's, that's popular for its summer outdoor seating but has indoor tables that are so delightfully dark in winter that the fireplaces can't even light them up. For Chinese we favor Joy Yee's (spicy Korean shrimp & oyster soup is my usual pick), but we take out more often than we eat in. If we confine ourselves to whatever is within five blocks/10 minutes on foot, we have nine restaurants to choose from, not including chain stuff like Subway and Starbucks. We have places we like for gyros, pumpkin curry soup, chili and sushi, and I'm still mourning the move of the Afghani place, if for no other reason than they were willing to sell anchovy pizza by the slice. Summer gets us out more--there's a good Thai restaurant about eight blocks away that has great rooftop tables, and occasionally I really like to go out and split a "fatboy and a dozen" special--raw oysters and a big, cheap beer.

All this talk about Chicago is making me very homesick for my hometown. We'll be there, for the first time in 32 years, in May. So, is there a better Greek place than the Parthenon in and around the Loop? Any good coffee shops (please, not Starbucks) on or near Michigan Blvd?

One and a half suggestions for Greek food.

I've eaten at Santorini in Greek Town, on Adams just west of Halstead. Their grilled octapus appetizer than can be a life-chaning experience, and they serve excellent lamb chops, good wine, plus all the usuals, such as saginaki.

(For non-Chicagoans, saganaki is a thick slice of cheese on a metal plate, grilled under a broiler then flamed with ouzo (as everyone shouts "Opa!") and the flames doused with freshly-squeezed lemon. It was invented at the Parthenon or the Hellas Cafe in Greektown in Chicago, just as Shrimp de Jonghe was the invention of a Chicago restauranteur of Belgian origin.)

Another place highly spoken of but that I haven't visited is the Greek Islands, practically next door to Santorini, corner of Adams and Halstead. Easy to find more info through web searches.

Here is a link that might be useful: Santorini

Sable, The Parthenon was on Halstead Street, not far from teh University of Illinois-Chicago. I don't know if it's still there, but it was really good.

And Neil, I think that Chicago restaurants are about the only places left that actually serve Shrimp de Jonghe. I haven't seen that on a restaurant menu anyplace in years, but it is really good. Ditto for Chicken Vesuvius (or is it Vesuvio?) which is wonderful but doesn't seem to exist anywhere outside of Chicago.

having a head cold and doing basically not much of anything,I Googed shrimp de jonghe and they do serve it in other restaruants. BUT..most seem to be in and around Chicago. What is it,anyway? Is it really good?

There has been nothing good closer than thirty min. since I quit cooking about fifteen years ago. LOL We do have a hambuger stand in town.

In essence, Shrimp de Jonghe is shrimp baked in a garlic/butter sauce with bread crumbs. The original de Jonghe's was long gone by the time I got to Chicago.

It is good, but it made its mark back in the day when even the tiniest amount of garlic in a dish was considered quite raffish.

The link is to a discussion of the dish on a forum of Chicago foodies. It gives several "original" recipes and variations.

Chicken Vesuvio is chicken and potatoes and garlic, browned on top of the stove, then baked in an oven with some white wine and usually lemon juice and peas as final additions. Named after a vanished Vesuvio restuarant? Named for the steam that rises when the wine is added to the hot pan? Named for the red pepper flakes often used as seasoning? Invented in Chicago, or just named there? The discussion rages.

Here is a link that might be useful: Discussion of Shrimp de Jonghe

The shrimp dish sounds good.

Neil - By following your link I found the forum for Chicago restaurants. Thank you so much! I'll forage there amidst the foodies for more info on dining out.

Andie - the Parthenon is still there - DS and DIL ate there about two years ago on a visit. And it was always one of my favorite places.

Well our favorite Italian restaurant closed last year, been regulars almost every Friday nite for close to 30 years. Celebrated most of the important things in our lives there. DH went to school with the owner's grandson,and business was handed down for generations, he had his first drink there and just became a favorite of ours. Great food, staff etc and always helps when you are personal friends with the owners. They still have three other restaurants but this was the original and you can never replace that. Was in the city and area is riddled with crime so can't say i can blame them for taking the offer. But damn I miss it. Back in the 60's they even had a mobster gunned down in the streets after leaving there.