Tasty Inn

Would I be so terribly out of line to suggest that a local institution is actually inferior to a national fast-food chain? Tasty Inn is cute and all, what with the drive through window on the wrong side of the car and the smell of two day old unmopped grease in the interior, it's just that it has nothing to recommend it. Even their trademark, the Tastee chips, are nothing you couldn't get with Tostedos and onion dip. Beyond the chips the menu offers a chicken sandwich that tastes like grease, a fish sandwich that tastes like grease, a hot dog that tastes like grease, and a steak sandwich that tastes like grease.

The later took quite a bit of work. I like steak sandwiches. There's something about taking a medium-well steak, and putting it between bread that just works. Plus I'm a big condiment man, living in a part of the country where a taste for meat is equated with masculinity in a wholly rational and not at all homoerotic way. Putting A1 or what have you on a piece of steak is generally frowned upon; as real men are perfectly satisfied with the taste of pure beef flavor exploding in their mouths. So take a steak and make it a steak sandwich and suddenly it becomes socially acceptable to put a little sauce on it.

The hunk of meat I got at the Tastee Inn tasted vaguely beefish but could have been most anything. It had the look of generic fried flesh. It was not chicken fried steak, that has some flavor to it. No, I believe they simply take cuts of steak and throw them into a deep-fat fryer. Scandalous. The first bite of one of these sandwiches makes one feel like one has been up for three days turning favors in a truck stop bathroom.

A man next to me is checking his Myspace under the handle "Texas Vampire."