Call me a sap, but I miss some great late night pizza places. Or just pizza places in general. OK, it really comes down to food.
Jake's Pizza in Normal had so much goodness with it. The big deal was this really thick pan pizza that had lots of sauce on it and was delicious. Between that and the extra greasy, extra buttery bread sticks....hunger!
The bread sticks were a special and a meal to themselves. When the hunger for pizza came on, there was a great 2 slices deal with a soda for something like $5. To a hungry teenager, this was filling and within budget. It also happened to be right in the heart of the two blocks referred to as "downtown Normal" by the college campus. Great places like a game store, the post office that I had a PO Box at for years, and a movie rental place were all right there. This downtown scene also was home to two comic book stores which was impressive for a small town.
To the food, the memories are ingrained in my brain for that place and that pizza pie. I was lucky enough to have some friends work there and they called me up when the business was closing. Not enough traffic, which was weird to see. There must have been something else, because many pizza places popped up all around it afterwards. That would be something I would visit that town for in a runaway for the weekend type of excursion.
I miss making my own food at Steak n Shake. I used to be a manager way back in the day, and would get comp meals all the time. I would grill myself up a burger that was so greasy and so delicious that there would be grease dripping off my hands after I was done eating. It isn't a good burger if it doesn't leave a puddle of grease on your plate to soak up afterwards. I try to get it around here in Austin, but they squash the shit out of the burger while it is cooking making all the grease escape and get thrown in a grease trap instead of in my arteries.
There is an ice cream shop in Caseyville Illinois that serves the best home made sherbet ice cream. How good is it? I specifically brought a cooler in order to get a couple of tubs of it and take it back home with me the last time I visited there. I would visit that place as a kid and get an ice cream cone that was vanilla and sherbet twist that was a foot tall for a couple of bucks. On a hot summer day, nothing could cool me down better.
Wings, Etc. was, you guessed it, a wings shop. It was a chain that had a bunch of stores in the midwest. My friend was the manager there when it first opened and I visited a lot and got addicted to the wings. The place would burn down and then be re-built, and I visited quite often until it closed up shop due to poor owner decisions. There was a Sunday special that they ran for 10 wings and a 35 oz beer for $6. Couldn't pass that up, so I was there every Sunday. That is where I cut my teeth on feeling some hear in the sauce. My personal favorite was a tweener sauce that was midway between a straight up HOT sauce and a medium temp sauce. I can now create the sauce on my own, but nothing could really compare to throwing back a few on a Sunday, watching the Bears play, and playing on the video game machines at the bar. I made some good friends that way.
My friend Joe ended up running a self serve frozen yogurt place of his own called Chill Out in the downtown area. Unfortunately he closed up shop after a couple of years due to about 10 other froyo places popping up after he started his business. They were chain places and since chains are about the only thing that really sticks around in that town, that is what succeeded. There were so many different varieties that they offered, I seriously kept going back each week even though I had to watch my sugar intake.
I don't know why food connects with me so much, or why I was all hungry for some of these tasty treats. I did skip lunch today, maybe that might have put food on my brain. Food is another sense, so mixing the food with the memory makes it a little bit clearer in the old brain. I don't know if I will ever experience food like I did that food way back in the day, but I can at least have some fun in trying to re-create it myself. Or, in the rare occasion, visit the place again that brought all the memories there.
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