Looking Good

One of my favorite childhood memories is triggered by a fried chicken dinner. It was a dish that my parents both loved but that my mother had no talent or interest in making. So every few weeks, we would pile into Daddy’s flamboyant, cherry-colored Cadillac and drive for what seemed like forever — it was actually about 30 minutes — to a joint called The Frog Pond.

Like its long-gone Kansas City counterparts — The Wishbone, The Green Parrot — this family-owned restaurant served family-style chicken dinners, back when innocent diners didn’t give a crap about carbohydrates, starches or trans fatty acids (“More mashed potatoes, honey?”). A salad — dripping with homemade dressing — was something you ate before dinner, not as dinner.

The Frog Pond croaked decades ago, but I can still remember the yeasty aroma and pillowy softness of the freshly baked biscuits; the crunchy surface of the pan-fried chicken; the velvety, peppery gravy dripping down a mound of fluffy whipped potatoes.

I thought about those happy times again recently when I remembered that several months ago, when I was driving to Leavenworth to eat lunch at one of the area’s last remaining Nu-Way hamburger joints (Mouthing Off, December 25, 2003), I had caught a glimpse of an alluring sign as I whizzed along Highway 7: Fried Chicken Dinners. It was posted outside what looked like an old roadhouse to the right of the highway. My friends Bob and Ned were in the car with me, and they snapped to attention when I yelled at them, “Turn around and get the name of that restaurant!”

Bob caught a glimpse of the sign before we crested over a hill. He scribbled the name on my pad: The Overlook.

“The Overlook?” Ned snorted. “It doesn’t look over anything except this crummy highway and the pastures of Lansing, Kansas.”

OK, so the citified Ned didn’t necessarily appreciate the American pastoral landscape. But I did. After all, if we’d kept going, this particular highway would have led us past the storied prison and all the way to historic Fort Leavenworth! Besides, less than a mile from the Overlook is a “gentleman’s club” called Whispers (which stays open quite late but only serves lunch), and any neighborhood that attracts “gentlemen” can’t be too much of a backwater, can it?

Several weeks later, though, on the night that Bob, our friend Patsy and I ventured back onto K-7, we were hungry for a much different sort of breast. We wanted fried fowl and hoped that the Overlook would do this classic dish right. Patsy had a positive feeling about the place the minute we drove into the parking lot.

“Look at those two incredibly fat women coming out of the restaurant,” she said. “That’s got to be a good sign.”

We could smell the perfume of bubbling cooking oil — the Overlook’s bird is deep-fried — from all the way out in the parking lot. We couldn’t get to the front door soon enough.

Other restaurants and bars have staked their claims in this building over the years, but the 3-year-old Overlook is the first to serve fried chicken, chops and steaks. It’s not a glamorous place, but it’s certainly comfortable. Just inside the door is a dimly lighted, narrow lounge area where bowls of shelled peanuts sit on the bar; hanging from the ceiling is one of those beer fixtures with a miniature horse-drawn beer wagon artfully rotating in a clear plastic bubble. The main dining room is as spacious as a barn, with a soaring roofline and whirling ceiling fans.

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Tables are cloaked in maroon vinyl, and the napkins are paper. The dark-green walls are adorned with various beer signs and a giant banner of Joe Montana’s face. Billie Holiday was crooning over the sound system as we squeezed into a spacious booth and starting poring over the menu, a throwback to the days when no decent menu listed “lighter fare.” We were delighted to discover dishes that were “guaranteed to please,” “fried to perfection” or — thank God almighty — included “all the fixings.”

That night’s waitress, Candace, had been working at the Overlook for 18 months, which made her a long-term veteran. And she knew every dish on the menu like an old friend. Asked for an appetizer recommendation, she immediately suggested the oversized mushroom caps, lovingly described on the menu as “extra large” and fried in the restaurant’s own soda batter. Bring ’em on, baby.

In this case, extra-large was an understatement. When Candace brought out the basket, I thought it was filled with cinnamon rolls! These freaky fungi were covered in a feather-light batter shell that was so good that I nearly scalded my tongue shoving them in my mouth.

Iceberg salads, which were included with our dinners, would have been standard-issue affairs if the house-made dressings weren’t so good, especially the disarmingly sweet (and violet-colored) “Italian.” Sadly, though, the baseball-sized Parker House rolls arrived with the main course instead of with the salads — it would have been nice to sop up the leftover dressing with one of those wonderfully fluffy rolls.

Bob ordered a complete, all-white chicken dinner so that I could snag the two wings — he’s a breast man — and still order a different dinner for myself. I picked the weekend special, a slab of slow-roasted prime rib (the less-hefty “Queen Cut,” naturally), which turned out to be surprisingly juicy and tender. Patsy ordered the deep-fried shrimp dinner, and the butterflied crustaceans were, like everything else that comes out of the Overlook’s kitchen, enormous. These came with a heap of french fries and a mound of fresh green beans cooked with ham and onions.

“I don’t know if I can finish everything,” Patsy said, though she made a good dent in her dinner before having the rest packed up. I made easy work of my beef as well as the beans and a pile of creamy mashed potatoes slathered with a pale-yellow chicken gravy. Bob and I agreed that the pan-fried chicken wasn’t up to Stroud’s consistency, but it was pretty damned good.

In fact, Bob ordered it again on our next visit. “I can’t help it. I love it,” he said. That night we’d brought along Martha, who hadn’t been planning to order chicken until she saw a platter of the gold-encrusted poultry served to another table. “I have to have chicken, too,” she said.

I decided to pig out on what the menu described as “cherry-glazed” ham steak, a smoky-flavored and thick slice of chairbroiled pork lightly splashed with a watery sauce that had the essence, if not the flavor, of cherries. Not one of this restaurant’s best dishes, but more than acceptable considering how inexpensive it was.

“This is the kind of food you imagine that people used to eat on a farm,” Martha said between bites.

We obviously hadn’t come from the farm, though we’d put away so much food that we might as well have just come in from digging a well. That included dessert! Even though the Overlook’s kitchen didn’t bake its own peach cobbler, the fruit was beautifully seasoned, and the dish was topped with a flaky pastry crust. But the Overlook did make the strawberry shortcake. Served in a giant coffee cup, plump strawberries and masses of whipped cream covered two slices of fine homemade pound cake.

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It wasn’t just the road trip that would make our meals at the Overlook memorable. The food not only evoked memories. It created a few, too.