B, as in Bourgeois

Colton's Steak House & Grill
5 Eagle Mountain Boulevard
Batesville, Arkansas

This place was reluctantly recommended to us by our motel clerk as being "not too bad." It was, I'm afraid, only slightly oversold.

Them Texas flags ain't foolin' nobody

Colton's is a Little Rock-based franchise chain with a few dozen locations in five states. It seems to be the brainchild of a solid B student in the junior college's Restaurant Science program: everything about it is culled from one successful chain or another, from the buckets of peanuts on your table to the layout of booths and tables in the dining rooms. The atmosphere is fin de siècle trendy fused with aw-shucks hillbilly. If it weren't for the concrete floors, hard walls, and complete lack of sound-deadening materials, we would not have been treated to the cacaphony of the five squealing teeny-bopper co-eds in the corner booth, the audio from at least three televisions tuned to different channels, the canned-music soundtrack, and some unruly screaming baby in the other dining room. But credit where credit is due: when I complained about the noise to the waitress, she handled it with aplomb, and offered to turn off the television closest to us.

Alec Baldwin, who doesn't eat
in Independence County, Arkansas
(photo by David Shankbone)

Batesville, Arkansas, is in a dry county. Being sophisticated big-city types, we have forgotten what a hardship this creates for the casual restaurant diner, unable to drown the din in a nice relaxing highball. I'm sure that Congressman Wiener had just come from a meal in a dry county when it struck him as an intelligent thing to do, to snap a pic of his crotch with his smartphone and send it off to some little hotsie he was hoping to impress. Alec Baldwin, who suggested, too late to do the Congressman any good, that a martini might be a better way to unwind, obviously has not been to dinner in a dry county lately.

So we had to drink water. Local tap water is crystal clear and only slightly flavoured with treatment chemicals. I could get used to it, though it does make me really appreciate the Edwards Aquifer. Since we had the bucket of peanuts, we passed on an appetizer and went straight to salad, which was pro forma packaged. Not bad, but nothing to attract any real attention. Mostly just a salve to the guilt of not ordering the side of steamed veggies or green beans.

Our entrées were New York strip with loaded baked potato (an extra charge for the loading seemed kind of nickel-and-dime-ish) at $19, and a ribeye and shrimp combo for $20. The New York strip, ordered medium, came out somewhere between rare and medium rare. Other than that, it was a good piece of meat: maybe not USDA Prime, but acceptable, except for the price. The potato was large enough to be respected but not large enough to be impressive. That is both good and bad, depending on whether you feel you should be impressed by a baked potato. 

What do those ratings mean?

The ribeye was a fatty piece of meat. My dog would have been very happy if I'd served this meat at home, because he has a thing for big chunks of beef fat. I used to, myself, but have outgrown that particular vice, and so was unhappy at having it placed in front of me. It was, at least, properly cooked to medium rare, as ordered. 

The shrimp, five of them, were medium sized, battered in corn meal and fried artlessly. They were just shrimp, served with a mediocre cocktail sauce in a little plastic tub. Their main function is to remind the diner that Arkansas is a long way from the Gulf, and there are no shrimp in the Mississippi River. They are as good as one would get at, say, Red Lobster or some similar chain. They do not justify their cost.

Nearly Perfect

Little House Restaurant & Ice Cream Parlor
309 South Walnut Street
Bernie, Missouri

7 days a week, 6am to 9pm

I'm not entirely unaccustomed to stumbling on good home cooking when I travel. Since I stay off the freeways as much as I can, going from one small town to the next, I get to see just about every restaurant there is, because they're all, or nearly all, on the main road through town. And the type of unpretentious cooking they do is often close to perfect by local standards. I've found great little cafes in almost every state of the union, but every now and then I find one that's close to perfect by any standard, including my own version of arrogant culinary snobbery.

Little House is such a place. It sits modestly aside Highway 25 in rural southern Missouri, not even in the biggest town in a nearly-empty-seeming county in the Bootheel. We pulled in for lunch with no great expectations, and were surprised by just how good a place can be.

The dining room is extremely clean and neat. It seemed to have a new coat of bright yellow paint on the ceiling and green on the walls, which were decorated with contrasting shutters, a few tasteful arrangements of plastic flowers, and a few nicely-calligraphed down-home mantras. A couple of locals were planted in what must surely be their regular tables near the front of the small dining room; we took up station near the back. 

The young waitress was quick to bring us menus and drinks. The foods offered were ordinary: burgers, sandwiches, a few regular plate lunches and some daily specials. The hamburger, billed as being a quarter pound, was three dollars. My companion went for the double cheeseburger, at $4.25, plus potato wedges and a soda. I went for the hamburger steak plate lunch, which came with roll, mashed potatoes and green beans for $6. I also splurged with a Coke float for the ridiculously low price of $2.

The double cheeseburger had to be way, way more than a half-pound of good-quality beef, grilled to juicy perfection. It was, in the words of my friend, the kind of burger he would make at home on the grill on a good day. And he's a pretty good cook. The potato wedges were so far from greasy that he would have sworn they were baked; he may have been right. In any case, they were delicious, and nicely seasoned. 

For my part, the green beans were unremarkable, barely seasoned and cafeterial, but not too overcooked to be good. The mashed potatoes were entirely traditional, the gravy on them was delicious and neither too thick nor too thin, as it often gets when left sitting around in the kitchen too long. (Since we were there after the normal lunch hours, it wouldn't have been surprising to find it had thickened or, consequently, been recently thinned.) The hamburger steak was cooked medium, which is a little more than I would have asked for, had I been given a choice, but it was still juicy and well-seasoned. It, too, was about a half pound, much more than I expected for the price, which is the key fact about Little House. 

What does that mean?

I've often given high marks for food, for ambience, and for service, but this is the first time, I think, that I've ever been so pleased with a restaurant's prices. Maybe that's a consequence of being long out of my home territory, where low prices are the rule more than the exception. But I have to think that these prices are about as low as any I've seen for good-quality food in any place I've ever been in America. And from someone who's been to a whole lot more of America than most people (and who has thoughtfully eaten at least as much as most people), that should count for something.