2025 Midwest Roadfood Trip (Part Three)

After a couple days of great eating at some very classic roadfood establishments in Wisconsin, it was time to head back in the direction of home Friday morning. Our eventual destination that day was Toledo, Ohio, but we took a detour in northern Indiana to return to Goshen, where we enjoyed a great lunch at the Olympia Candy Kitchen earlier in the week that I posted about in part one of this report. 

In addition to the Olympia, Goshen is home to a second old-school soda fountain, the South Side Soda Shop. I didn’t think we’d get a chance to check this one out, as they suffered a fire that forced a temporarily closure earlier in the spring. But to my great joy, they reopened within a couple weeks of when we left for our trip. 

South Side’s building has been around since 1910 and was initially a grocery store, converting to a soda fountain in the 40s. It’s had its current name since the 80s when it was taken over by Nick and Charity Boyd. Nick is from Philly and is not shy about advertising that on the soda shop’s walls or in his choice of hats. He was wearing a Phillies cap when we arrived and expressed his appreciation for the Eagles hat I had on.

In addition to a nice selection of sandwiches and ice cream treats, South Side is known for its tremendous array of pies. There was one in particular I wanted to try, but there was lunch to eat first. My wife and I both gave the menu a good look before she ordered a veggie sandwich on pita bread, while I gave a quick thought to all of the heavy food I planned on eating over the next day or two and decided to go light. My choice was peanut butter and jelly on toast, a childhood favorite that I’ve never grown out of. We also shared fries. 

To wash my lunch down, I ordered a chocolate Coke, a drink I used to enjoy at Howard Johnson’s when I was very young. I don’t think I’ve had one since those early days and it really hit the spot. 

While I wouldn’t call the sandwiches and fries we ate memorable, they got the job done in holding us over until our pie course. 

Until this point in the trip, my biggest food-related disappointment was Nick’s Kitchen in Huntington, Indiana, being out of sugar-cream pie – the state pie of Indiana – when we stopped there for lunch Monday. While the South Side Soda Shop doesn’t offer sugar-cream pie, it does have a flavor on its list called Old-Fashioned Creme pie. It sounded like it could be close enough to sugar-cream for me to give it a shot, so I ordered a slice.

And boy, was I glad I did. This turned out to be the best dessert I had during a trip that was full of good pie and ice cream. 

The Midwest has a number of variations of pies that feature cream or milk, eggs, sugar and not much else. Old-Fashioned Creme may not have been identical to sugar-cream, but it was certainly in the same family. My wife thought she detected brown sugar as one of the ingredients when she tasted it. 

Whatever the ingredients were and however you want to label it, this was one of the best slices of pie I’ve ever eaten. It had a spectacularly good, yet simple flavor – the result of just those few basic ingredients perfectly proportioned. My wife also raved about the crust, and she’s got a lot of crust-making expertise in her own right.

After finishing the pie and making our way out of Goshen, we headed further east until reaching Toledo, Ohio, where we checked into our hotel then headed out for our next eagerly-anticipated meal. 

Dinner that evening would be at another long-standing roadfood establishment that I had wanted to try for many years – Schmucker’s in Toledo. 

Schmucker’s, which opened in 1948 and is still run by the same family, is basically a diner with a classic look and another long list of pie flavors. We were joined there for dinner by my wife’s cousin Bart, who lives in that region.

As you can see, it’s easy to imagine that the restaurant hasn’t changed much since it opened in ‘48. 

While looking over the menu, my mind was primarily on what kind of pie I’d have for dessert, but I managed to choose a chili-dog to hold me over until then. My wife opted for grilled cheese, while Bart ordered a club sandwich. 

I requested my chili-dog without the cheese that normally comes on it and with chopped onions and mustard – Coney Island style. It came with chips or fries and I went for the latter. They weren’t among the best I had on the trip, but the chili-dog was on the money, with a nice char and well-proportioned toppings.

Both of my dining companions seemed satisfied with their sandwiches as well.

Then it was time to make the evening’s most important decision – which flavors of pie to order. My wife and I would be sharing a pair of slices. I had been craving banana-cream pie during the trip, but hadn’t had a slice of it yet. Knowing this might be my last chance to rectify that, I ordered it. My wife opted for butterscotch, in part because she knows how fond I am of it. That’s one of the reasons I love her so much.  

We weren’t certain of what the layer on top of both the banana and butterscotch pies was and had to ask our server. She informed us that it is a whipped non-dairy topping made in house. I liked it, but probably not quite as much as meringue or real whipped cream. 

The banana-cream filling was excellent – neither too light nor heavy and full of banana slices. I also enjoyed the butterscotch topping, but my wife thought it was a bit too grainy from a textural standpoint and didn’t go nuts over the flavor either. 

We left Toledo and headed further east Saturday morning, with our final destination for that day being Pittsburgh, the home of two close friends who we were overdue to visit. 

Deciding where to stop for lunch in Ohio that day was one of the more difficult decisions I had to make when putting together our dining itinerary. I gave serious consideration to another old soda-fountain-luncheonette in Canton and changed my mind several times before deciding two of such places for one trip were enough and instead opting for fried chicken for a change of pace. 

And not just any fried chicken.

Barberton, Ohio, which is next to Akron, has long been known as the home of a style of fried chicken brought to that region by Serbian immigrants long ago. There are several restaurants in and around Barberton that have been serving it for many years. I gave a lot of consideration to a couple of them but chose Belgrade Gardens, which has been in business since 1933. 

At some point they expanded the size of the restaurant – it now has multiple dining rooms – and modernized its interior. But the chicken recipe remains the same. 

Belgrade Gardens’ menu has also expanded over the years. The presence of a fried chicken and shrimp combination platter on it was one of the reasons I decided to visit them rather than one of their competitors. 

Each platter comes with a choice of three sides from among a list of them. One of the options is called “hot sauce,” but it’s nothing like it sounds. Rather it’s a mixture of spicy stewed tomatoes and white rice. I was curious and requested it along with green beans and apple sauce. Most of the regular customers order their chicken with fries, but I had reached the point of French fry saturation on this trip and decided to go in a less greasy direction. 

My wife had already passed her grease limit and ordered a grilled chicken sandwich with gravy-topped mashed potatoes and coleslaw. 

To my not so pleasant surprise, in addition to the three sides I ordered, my fried chicken and shrimp also came topped with a pile of fries. I mentioned it to the server and she said the cooks tend to get fry-happy and throw them on top of every platter regardless of whether they’re ordered. I was stuck with them, although I only ate a few. 

The fried chicken on the same plate as the fries looked very good, and so it was. The crust was wonderfully crispy and amply seasoned without being overly thick, while the thigh meat within was juicy and flavorful. 

The fried shrimp that came with it was just okay – certainly not in the same class as those I had at the Stagecoach Inn while in Wisconsin. If I had another chance to order, knowing what I now know, I’d have gotten a third piece of chicken and skipped the shrimp. 

The sides were all satisfactory, with my “hot sauce” being the standout. It was every bit as good as advertised. 

My wife was satisfied with her chicken sandwich, which I neglected to photograph, and sides, mentioning that she especially liked the vinegary and mayo-free coleslaw. 

After finishing our meal, we drove on to Pittsburgh and our hotel for that evening. At this point in our trip, we still had two more meals planned – dinner at The Burgh’s oldest Chinese restaurant and a late breakfast with more pie or cake the following day at a Western Pennsylvania diner on the Lincoln Highway that I had been wanting to try for a while.  

Unfortunately, neither of these meals came to fruition. The impact of doing not much other than driving and eating heavy meals for the previous week was growing and was the main reason dinner in Pittsburgh didn’t go as planned. My intention was to order a PuPu platter at The Chinatown Inn, which is downtown. I thought it would make for a nice grand finale in addition to a good cover photo for this portion of my trip report. 

But PuPu platters tend to be extremely greasy, and after my deep fried lunch at Belgrade Gardens and everything else I’d eaten in recent days, I just couldn’t face a high-grease dinner. As I alluded to previously, my wife had already passed her saturation point for such meals.

So I suggested to our close friends, Andy and Stacy, who live in Pittsburgh, that we go with my plan B for the evening. That was dinner at a more modern Chinese restaurant that is closer to their home and that I had been curious about for a long time – How Lee in the city’s Squirrel Hill section. 

We dined there with Andy, Stacy and their two college-age children. While the company was great, unfortunately, the food was disappointing, with the duck we ordered being especially bad. It was so rugged and difficult to chew that Andy joked about it having been made the previous week. 

I deleted the photos of this meal, feeling that between the poor quality of the food and the lack of old-school charm to the restaurant’s interior, they just didn’t go with the rest of the trip report. 

However, I will share a photo of my dessert that evening, which was from Mango Mango, a dessert shop chain that specializes in mango flavored sweets. There was one down the street from where we ate dinner, so we walked over there afterward. 

My mango sundae featured mango ice cream with mango syrup and chunks of mango. That may sound like mango overload, but it’s my favorite fruit and I didn’t mind a bit. This was a very tasty treat. 

Our meal stop Sunday while driving home from Pittsburgh also didn’t come off as planned. We use a now old-fashioned GPS device in our car, and it had served us well throughout the trip. But when I entered the address of the Coal Miner’s Diner, our planned brunch stop, it gave me two options. I chose the one that seemed most likely to be correct but apparently made the wrong choice. When we got to where the GPS was telling us the diner should be, there was nothing in that spot. 

We must have driven past it previously, because we didn’t see it from that point on. It’s probable that on a clear day, we’d have spotted the diner. But on this Sunday, there was heavy rain and some pretty bad fog for stretches. It was difficult at times to focus on anything but making sure I stayed on the road and in my lane. 

We kept going, thinking we’d eventually come upon a decent looking place to eat on US-30. But it never happened and we eventually settled for a restaurant that wouldn’t have normally interested me when we got to the first small town in a while and both had to use a restroom. 

They didn’t have the breakfast I was craving or anything that interested me for dessert. My burger was decent, but nothing special and there were yet more fries alongside it.

Again, I decided not to include photos of this meal in the trip report, as there was nothing particularly pleasing about either the food or restaurant decor.

That being the case, the fried chicken meal at Belgrade Gardens Saturday afternoon turned out to be this trip’s grand dining finale.

As always, thanks so much for reading. Hopefully it won’t be as long between trip reports moving forward.

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I feel the need to give my body a bit of a break for a while in terms of what I eat, so unless something unexpected comes up, my next post will likely be out some time in July and will feature my 60th birthday dinner with family at the oldest remaining restaurant in Philly’s Chinatown.