Driver Lifestyles
Best Eats on the Road: Where to Go, What to Eat?
There's no shortage of available sources for expediters to find food. There are, of course, the really obvious places--truck stops and fast food immediately comes to mind--and you'll be able to find these types of restaurants with relative ease. What about the more obscure joints you might have to search out? in this piece, we'll be looking at the resources you can use to find decent eats on the road and we'll also take a look at a few of your favorite places.
If it's your cup of tea, so to speak, the act of searching out a not-so-obvious restaurant can be great fun, and it's situations like this where you might have to enjoy engaging in a sort of hunt for exactly what you're craving. The Internet offers no shortage of options for looking up the restaurants in any given geographical area, but many of the spots you'll come across aren't necessarily easily accessible from highways, or the parking situations might not be expediter-friendly, etc. In other words, you'll often have to be so choosy with these sites' search engines that you'll end up returning very few results in your preliminary hunt.
This isn't to say that there aren't other options out there to assist in your search, and www.roadfood.com can definitely help get you to eateries close to the highway. You can search by location or ingredient (which'll help with getting you what you're in the mood for), or poke around their forums for other tidbits you might not be able to find on their main site. All told, it's a very solid source in terms of information and readability, from which you should be able to get some good results.
Another possible source of restaurant information you might find useful is http://www.urbanspoon.com, at which customers rate and review restaurants. To my knowledge, Urbanspoon is primarily based around the restaurants in metropolitan areas, so you might keep this in mind as you search the site (which is fairly easily navigable and aesthetically pleasing, I should note).
Just offering a website that will aid your search, though, isn't enough here, so I turned to the Expediters Online forum to ask folks with a little more direct experience on road food to name their favorite places. I've taken those responses and compiled them into a list you can use as a way to try out food you maybe wouldn't have otherwise thought to try. Here goes:
General chains
White Castle or Krystal's
In & Out burger out west
Fatburger
The Old Spaghetti Factory
Five Guys Burgers & Fries
Huddle House
El Chico Mexican Cafe
Golden Corral
Hometown Buffet & their other restaurants
Chinese Buffets
Famous Dave's
Portillos (Multiple locations, mostly Chicagoland area)
Midwest
Halo Burger-multiple locations in Flint, MI
Sparky's Diner-Traverse City, MI
Jean Kay's-Marquette, MI
Tony Packo's-Toledo, OH
Star Diner-Toledo, OH
Granite City-Fallen Timbers Mall in Maumee, OH
Phils Inn-Port Clinton Ohio
Superdawg-Chicago, IL
17th St. Bar and Grill-E. St. Louis, Alton IL
Lil' Nashville T's-Nashville IL
Moonshine Store-Moonshine, IL
Cabin Fever Steak & Grill-LaSalle, IL
El Matador-Decatur, IL
Lambert's-Sikeston, MO
Sultan of Smoke BBQ-Joplin, MO
Minsky's Pizza and Sports Bar-Kansas City, MO
Backyard BBQ,-Kokomo, IN
Petro-Racine/Sturtevant, WI
Bombay Bicycle Club-Omaha, NE
Coney Dogs-Ft. Wayne, IN
Skyline Chili-multiple locations in Cincinnati area
South
Mike Linnig's-Louisville, KY
Mark's Feed Store BBQ-Louisville, KY
Jucy Lucy's-Louisville, KY
Derailed Diner-Robertsdale, AL
Maurice's-Columbia SC
Gabe's-Rayne, LA
Lazy Bones BBQ-Rising Fawn,GA
Hyman's Seafood, Charleston SC.
Paul's Smokehouse in Titusville, FL
West & Southwest
Omelette Express-Santa Rosa CA
The Hard 8 BBQ-Stephensville TX
Soulmans BBQ-Royse City TX
Molly Murphy's House of Fine Repute-Tulsa, OK.
Elephant Run-Tulsa, OK
Texas Land & Cattle-several locations in Texas.
Whole Hog Cafe numerous locations in Arkansas, and a few in other states.
Schoepfs-Belton,TX
Willie's Place-Carl's Corner,TX
Northeast
Crazy Horse Steak House-Hagerstown, MD
Bob's Clam Hut-Kittery, ME
Of course, this isn't necessarily an exhaustive list of every good restaurant in the United States, but it is representative of food that expediters might enjoy. There's a pretty broad range of restaurants here in terms of types of food, and quite a selection of Barbecue houses to choose from, particularly in the South, as well as Texas (which may be considered the South, or perhaps the Southwest) and Missouri. There are also a number of hamburger joints and steakhouses to choose from, and a pretty solid list of chain restaurants that have locations you should be able to find just about anywhere.
Thanks to Benzoid, Poorboy, LDB, Fastman_1, 1CHINGON, Jack Berry, MSinger, Freightdog, Chefdennis, AMonger, ebsprintin, Charles D, MissKat, usafk9, teamdjw, Greg334, and JJoerger for providing me the information necessary to put this list together.