I had gone to bed at a decent hour last night after playing the seven thirty slot at a festival - I'll tell you about it when you're older - and I woke up at five thirty in the morning thinking I had to go to work today. Reassuring myself that today was in fact Saturday, I slept all the way in until seven thirty then got up and waited for the bike shop to open so I could get a new free wheel for my bike because the old one was skipping and I didn't want it blowing out on me twelve fifteen miles from home and then have to call Kath like, "Hey, beb? Beb? Can you come get me? Yeah, I'm really sorry, beb, my free wheel fucking failed and I - What? Oh, I'm in Furry Beaver Falls, just past Bear Daddy Lake" or whatever other bullshit name they have for things in Minnesota.
If I haven't mentioned it before (Psst! I have!), I'm from Ohio, where we name things after only one of four things: Native people things, French people things, Revolutionary generals who got a bunch of people killed, and geographic anomolies. Toledo, Maumee, Perrysburg, Snake Mountain...
OK, maybe not Snake Mountain but we definitely have a snake-mound-thing somewhere.
But Minnesota? Apples and Bears and Eagles and Maples and Centers and Groves and Plains and Valleys.
That's all beside the point.
Anyway, I get my bike fixed up, ready to rock and roll, Kath wants to try a chicken joint that coincidentally opened across from the bike shop but I got home and she was still asleep so I nudged her and told her I was going for a ride and she was like "muh muh wuh" and off I went, not knowing where I wanted to go, listening to the last episode of my Yellowjackets podcast and then listening to the last episode of The Dollop's three-parter on Pete Rose and I found myself headed west into Bryn Mawr and then up the Theo Wirth to the Forty Fifth Parallel Marker where I usually head north or west but today I decided to head east and I was checking the map to keep my bearings (unlike my old free wheel) every couple of minutes and I saw these two places pop up on the map, our titular Olympic Cafe Plus and Mini Pac Grill, both in Jordan (the neighborhood, not the town that Big Black wrote the song about that my bullshit crazy ex posted to Facebook during a meltdown after I finally stopped talking to her after the eighth or ninth time she dumped me) (bitch, you know who you are, I know who you are, all my friends know who you are, and the file clerk who processed my restraining order against you knows who you are, you're trash with your botched gastric bypass and your Onlyfans)...
... making this our first ever Jordan entry!
So I check the menus and I think Mini Pac was pushing combo meals on their menu because everything was sixteen or seventeen bucks but Olympic was letting go of cheesesteaks for seven beans.
So Olympic it was!
I biked up there at Broadway and Penn and walked in and it was pretty quiet and the music on was...
Before we go any further, let me just say that this week has been a week full of hilarious misunderstandings and tragic perfect understandings regarding bigotry. I'm not going to tell you what happened any more than somebody within our circle used the M word in a social setting.
First of all, feel free to have fun guessing what the M word is because, second of all, I'm not saying it because it's one of those words that I think has only a question mark by it but even having only the question mark by it is enough to say, "OK, we're not saying that one anymore."
Back to the music in the shop... How can I put this? I'd like to think I'm not a bigot, I just do not have an eastern ear. So I would describe this music as (I believe accurately) Middle Eastern (and this part probably inaccurately) morning prayers. I do not know what it is called. I'm pretty sure that not knowing something doesn't make me a bigot.
I get in there and it's a tiny place with four? maybe five two-tops and there's the music and I order the small cheesesteak and they got the twenty four ounce Faygo Firework flavor so I get that and it comes out to ten dollars and twelve cents and the guy tells me to give him ten fifteen minutes.
He got that to me in five.
The meat was well-seasoned and the peppers and onions appropriately sautéed and it was overflowing out of the sandwich and still steaming hot. My only criticism was that my cheesesteak could have used a lot more cheese. I mean it's called a cheesesteak. Cheese is the first word. This should be easily fifty percent cheese. The only thing separating this from most Minneapolis cheesesteaks is that the meat and peppers and onions were applied to the bun with a bulldozer. But can I argue with a seven dollar "small" cheesesteak? Especially one that takes only five minutes from ring-up to service? Do you even remember our very first entry? The one that was actually a Facebook review? Then I copied and pasted it into Tumblr? Then I moved it over here to the Blogger platform? Yeah, that's the hot mommy of cheesesteaks here in Mipple City, trying to bring a little taste of Philadelphia...
It was either this pic or another joke about throwing batteries.
... to the midwest and you can go back and read that and feel the anguish all over again, the anguish of how the hell they could not, for the life of them, remember Cheez Whiz. Fucksake. Really, go back and read that one.
Olympic, you know, the people we're supposed to be talking about, use (no, this isn't a bigot thing) white American cheese. I just wish there was more of it, that's my only complaint and it's a pretty small complaint when you look at the photo above - no, the one at the top - and you see the portion you're being served. They also got hot dogs and Polish sausages and they even have the Jim Shoe which I couldn't remember what that was right at the moment but I looked it up and I think I'm going back tomorrow to get it.
And I'm sure there will be some Chicagoan, somewhere, who will insist that this can't be a real Jim Shoe because it's not made in Chicago, just as I know there are Philadelphians who will insist that I've never had a real cheesesteak because I've never been to Philadelphia. I get it. Your whole personality is defined by being the most tiring as possible person to others around you.
ANYWAY! Ten bucks and five minutes (your wait time may vary) for a substantial sandwich and giant sody pop from a neighborhood joint with a menu that provides plenty of reasons to go back!? This is a no-brainer, my guy. Go give them your money. You'll be happy.
Comments
Post a Comment