Outlaw Beef Brisket

 On my recent "dent and bent" trip to Monroe, I was going to have lunch at "Cafe Claudeen" on the courthouse square. This has been one of my favorites spots for perhaps the last five years or so. Run by a mother-and-daughter team, the menu was a bit on the "fru-fru" side, catering heavily to the female crowd (quiches, lots of salads, etc.) but I always loved their approach to cooking. Everything made from scratch, using local ingredients whenever possible. Every entree came with a soft yeast roll (usually still warm from the oven), and they had killer desserts. I also loved the fact that their booths were salvaged from the old Badger Candy Kitchen, on Madison's Capitol Square. For those of you of a certain age that remember this little gem of an eatery, you can perhaps appreciate how cool I thought this was that a little piece of my childhood had been preserved here in Monroe.

So imagine my dismay to find Cafe Claudeen permanently closed, with a sign taped to the door thanking everyone for their patronage over the years. Damn, Another victim of the horrible odds that plague the restaurant business. I decided to do a little research on this, because I had heard somewhere that nine in 10 restaurants fail within the first year. Turns out this is false, mostly a myth perpetuated in movie and television scripts. (The Food Channel "reality" shows are some of the worst offenders, oddly enough, as you would think they would have "fact checkers" verifying this kind of stuff.) The real numbers may be more accurately reflected in a 10-year joint study by the University of Michigan and Cornell University:

Percentage of restaurants out of business after one year: 27%
Out of business after three years: 50%
Out of business after five years: 60%
Out of business after 10 years: 70%

Still, those are horrible odds, and I mostly bring this up to emphasize the fact that any restaurant I might mention in this blog may, in fact, be out of business by the time you get there! So do be sure and check before you visit. A simple phone call can avoid disappointment and wasted driving time.

Anyway, onto my problem of where to eat lunch. There are several good places in Monroe, a few of them right on the courthouse square, but I decided to try what was for me a new place, called "Pancho and Lefty's Outlaw Grill," just a couple of doors down from the former Cafe Claudeen.

At 12:45 p.m., the place was packed (usually a good sign), so I took the last seat at the bar. I don't typically like sitting at "the bar" in any given restaurant (for reasons I won't go into now), but I was hungry, and the hostess said it might be a 15-20 minute wait for a table.

There were many tasty sounding thing on the menu which was liberally sprinkled with Mexican fare (as you might expect with a name like "Pancho") but I opted for "The Deacon," sliced smoked beef brisket on a kaiser roll, topped with two strips of thick-sliced bacon, and real cheddar cheese, and finished with a dab of BBQ sauce. Several sides were offered; I went with regular fries, and had a Diet Coke to drink.

The generous portion of brisket was tender and moist, and the bacon added a wonderful kiss of extra flavor to the sandwich. And the cheese ... well ... everything (or most everything) is better with cheese, isn't it? (Provided that it's real, of course, and not that processed crap.) The bill came to $12 and change (including a 12-ounce can of Diet Coke for the bargain price of a buck, which is quickly becoming an extinct price point for restaurant sodas these days). With a $1.80 tip, the whole lunch came to just under $14. Well worth it, in my opinion.

So now I have a new favorite "binges" place to add to my list. I lost one (Cafe Claudeen), but gained one. That's staying even. In blackjack parlance, that's known as a "push" when your card count is even with the dealer's. Most blackjack dealers will tell you that a "push" is still a win. And so it is with good restaurants. We're constantly losing good ones. But fortunately for us, there are enough dreamers and outright fools willing to take their places and face the odds.

Bruce