Dot’s is the Wilmington, Vermont, town café—so much a part of everyday life that regular customers enter before dawn to brew and pour their own coffee. It is housed in an 1832 building that was a post office and a retail store before it became a restaurant early in the 20th century. Its past is visible on the wall in the form of nostalgic photos of waitresses in starched white uniforms, circa 1938, but history and nostalgia tend to fade into the background when you are sitting in front of a big bowl of Dot’s mighty chili gooped with local Cheddar, a craggy-crusted bacon cheeseburger, or a handsome hot-turkey sandwich with lumpy mashed potatoes.
Alongside a striped barber pole and shaded by a rainbow neon marquee that says “Welcome to Good Food,” Kumback Lunch is so proud of being the oldest café in Oklahoma, with the same name and location since 1926, that historical highlights are celebrated in clippings and pictures posted everywhere. For all its famous and infamous visitors, including gangster Pretty Boy Floyd, who once demanded a steak at gunpoint, it earns a spot on the Roadfood honor roll for simple fare made with heartland savoir faire: high-rise meringue pies, warm cinnamon rolls every morning, and fork-tender chicken-fried steak.
A virtual time machine, Matt’s Place, of Butte, Montana, looks like it might not have changed at all since it opened in 1930. The state’s oldest drive-in has a short curved counter and a bright red, waist-high Coke cooler from which you fetch your own bottle from icy waters. Hamburgers sizzle in the back kitchen, milkshake mixers whir, and soda jerks dispense seltzer and syrup to brew effervescent potions. If you are not in the mood for a pork-chop sandwich (a local passion) or an ordinary hamburger, Matt’s offers a wild array of custom burgers, including one topped with fried eggs and a nut burger spread with mayonnaise and a fistful of chopped peanuts.
McClard’s has been perfecting the art of barbecue since 1928, when a customer at what was then the family trailer park in Hot Springs, Arkansas, offered a recipe for sauce in lieu of payment of his bill. The sauce is a righteous partner for chopped pork, but the single greatest dish in the house—and one of the best plates of barbecue anywhere in the U.S.A.—is the ribs and fries combo: a rack of meaty bones with sauce-glazed crust and succulent insides completely covered with a serving of beautiful french fries. Eating such a meal is a chaotic task that demands nimble fingers and countless napkins. The process of picking up a few twigs of potato every time you heft a rib soon becomes an art unto itself, and the opulence of the meat close to the bone is simply beyond description.
Opened in 1925 as a produce stand at the family farm on the outskirts of Louisville, Mike Linnig’s became a beer garden and drive-in that hosted square dances, boxing matches, and baseball games and was famous for its fish sandwiches and apple cider. It closed in 1942, when the Linnig boys went to war, but reopened when they returned; today it’s an Ohio River destination dining spot famous for huge portions of catfish and frogs’ legs and that signature big fish sandwich. It still has a beer-garden feel, especially if you sit outdoors at one of the picnic tables or in a screened cabin.
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